What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both of their companies and in their personal lives?
And what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
If you've been enjoying the show and you want an easy way to support it, you should leave
a review on Apple Podcasts.
If you're on a Mac, probably the easiest way to do that is just go to IndieHackers.com
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In today's episode, I sat down with my good friend Vincent Wu.
Vincent was first on the podcast a couple years back when he told us the story of how
he had bootstrapped a coder pad to millions of dollars in revenue.
Since then, I've had the chance to keep up with Vincent and watch his company continue
to grow until he eventually sold it for an eight-figure sum, and then he's been living
for eight or nine months after that sale.
So I figured it'd be great to bring Vincent under the show to talk about the entire journey
of being a bootstrapper, from coming up with the idea, to running and growing a company
through all the different phases of success, to selling your company and then trying to
figure out what to do with your life after that.
In addition, Vincent is always entertaining to talk to.
He's smart, he's sarcastic, and the two of us always seem to get into some sort of debate
whenever we talk.
So I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I enjoyed recording it.
So we're going to talk about what it's like to sell your business for...
What's the number that we're allowed to say?
Tens of millions of dollars?
Yeah, I'm allowed to say, legally speaking, that I've sold my business for tens of millions
of dollars.
And what are you going to do with your tens of millions of dollars now that you have it
and your bank account?
It's all yours.
It's not theoretical.
It's like someday it's here.
What am I...
Nothing.
I mean, I don't do anything with money, man.
What is money?
I bake bread.
I fund initiatives that I think are important to a small degree.
I haven't spent anywhere close to the majority of the money yet.
The short answer is I don't know.
Is this a surprising thing to happen to me in my life?
I started to suspect that something like this might happen eventually in the last few years.
But to have it actually happen is another thing entirely.
And the truth is I am dumbfounded by the sense of my own luck in this matter.
I don't know.
I haven't planned for this.
I don't know what I'll do.
I assume that I will lose all of it sooner or later.
It's been, what, nine, 10 months since you sold?
Yeah.
That sounds about right.
I think fall last year, maybe.
I think it says something about you that that much time can go by and it's still for you
as a weird, surprising thing that you've made this much money.
Most people I know who sold their companies that have had some sort of one fall, they're
super strategic about it.
They're like, how can I spend the next 12.9 months planning exactly what I'm going to
do with my fortune and invest it here and here?
And for you, it truly is just like, wow, look at all this money.
My only plan was actually to learn to become comfortable doing very little.
The process of having earned that sum of money is actually quite a bit of work.
And a lot of it, frankly, quite pointless work, I would say, work with no particular
meaning to it.
And being able to just do nothing for a while and to learn to sit well with the notion of
doing nothing, I think sounded very rewarding to me.
So that's what I've been doing.
I think pretty much with some exceptions, which we can talk about later, over the last
year or so, yeah, I've really done quite a bit less.
And I enjoy myself.
I bake bread.
I used to do ceramics before the world ended.
I run.
Very simple things, frankly.
Do you think your company brought you the same level of joy as the things that you're
doing now?
Different sort.
I mean, level is tough.
There is this sort of piece to running alone through the streets of San Francisco at 3
a.m.
It does bring a sense of happiness, but it's a different sort of happiness than the joy
of nurturing a small team through the growing stage of a company.
They're both rewarding.
They're rewarding very different ways.
I've been reading The Snowball, which is a Warren Buffett biography recently.
I'm listening to the audiobook.
It's like 37 hours long.
It's by far the longest thing I've ever listened to you.
At this point, it feels like Warren Buffett is my close personal friend.
But a lot of the book is obviously about how rich this guy is, and a lot of it is about
how frugal he is.
He's famously frugal.
He still lives in the same house that he bought 50, 60 years ago.
And I think a big part of the reason why he's frugal is because he is so confident in his
investing skills that when he looks at a dollar in his hand, it looks like $10 or $20 to him.
He can just vividly imagine how much more money he could turn that into.
And so he doesn't want to buy a million dollar house because for him, it costs $20 million.
That's crazy.
I don't believe that.
I feel like a lot of people have mythologized Warren Buffett to the extent where he's now
a figure more than he is an actual person with real spending habits.
I was actually talking to a friend of mine today who is running a small investment firm.
And he said, I think a lot of people think Warren Buffett has magic in him.
People do.
People who knock on his door and throw themselves before his feet and start bowing to him.
He said all sorts of crazy stuff happened.
And he's really just an investing nerd.
Dude, Warren Buffett has made a lot of money, but he's also the contemporary of many other
people who manage much larger funds who have made much more money, who probably aren't
quite so frugal.
So I would hesitate to associate too much in the way of moral causality to any particular
little meaningless spending habit that he has.
Like whether or not he buys a house where it's slightly more is meaningless in terms
of like Berkshire's overall returns.
That's just interesting to me because I think, you know, as different as he is from you,
at the end of the day, he just like didn't really spend his fortune and he just sort
of reasoned to himself.
He said, just spend his life doing what he likes doing, which is just making more money.
And then after he dies, his relatives can figure out like how to donate it philanthropically.
And with you, it's kind of like you've got all this money, yeah, it's like his kids
are in charge.
Has he pledged to the giving fund or whatever that he's supposed to end his life?
A lot of it is literally just giving it to Bill Gates to figure out how to give it away.
Giving it to Bill Gates.
I'm glad he did that at least.
I think it is normally the case actually that like most wealthy people end their lives with
the majority of their wealth still.
And I think this is both like, I mean, this is exactly the sort of thing that we complain
about in modern democratic society, and I think perhaps rightfully so.
Like I personally am in favor of raising the estate tax to something like 90% or 100, honestly,
if we could get away with it.
A hundred after a certain point, or it's like, do you really, does it really make society
better if people are just born?
Yeah, yes.
Like a marginal rate that like above a billion, it's 100, yeah, totally.
You know, I plan to end my life with none of my money, you know, like I don't, you can't
take it with you, you know?
So you have to figure out where it's going to go in this lifetime.
I think it was Andrew Carnegie or someone who was, who said that he who dies with the
majority of his riches dies embarrassed.
Carnegie?
I think so.
It was one of the mega robber barons.
Yeah.
It's true.
I mean, it's true that Carnegie did live in a time in which there was a weird sense of
nobelisa bleach among the very wealthy, even still that we have since lost in the present
day.
So I could imagine Carnegie saying something like that.
So let's talk about what you're doing with all this freedom.
It sounds like the biggest thing that, you know, the sale of your company is afforded
you is the freedom to spend your time however you want to.
Yeah, just like on Twitter, like every hour of every day.
Totally.
Okay, so you're on Twitter and I know you've done some journalism.
Yeah.
Do you want to hear about the Lambda school story?
Is that what you're asking?
Yeah.
Tell us about the Lambda school story.
You know, I got interested in Lambda school just as a concept because the people who run
it are so fucking crazy, you know, about, I don't know, it was a while ago now I'd say
maybe like when I got started like at least eight, nine months ago, kind of around the
same time I started thinking about selling the company actually.
So it was, yeah, it was weird.
Like while I was selling the company, I was actually contemporaneously working on an investigative
journalism piece about Lambda school, which kind of split my attention at the time, but
it worked out okay.
Yeah, I mean, I just sort of suspected that this company was being run poorly and began,
you know, because of various things that people had told me with insider knowledge and began
interviewing just like a bunch of people, a lot of former students or current students,
one prominent former employee and some other people I can't name and basically put together
a story that tried to marshal as much factual evidence as possible that at the very minimum
one should regard the leadership of Lambda school as having committed fraud and Lambda
school, well, I just zoomed all the way out Lambda school for people who don't know is
an online only coding education bootcamp that students enroll in for nine months that ostensibly
teaches them to code.
And I had Austin on the podcast way back in the day, maybe like when Lambda school was
about a year old and they were growing like crazy and it was honestly one of my favorite
interviews on this podcast, yeah, he was on Andy hackers and he talked all about, I mean,
they have obviously a very like inspirational evocative vision where they're changing the
way that people are changing the way that people get education and moving people from
lower income brackets into upper income brackets, basically for free, because essentially for
free, because essentially people who can't afford to go to college, could use Lambda
school to basically learn how to become a software engineer and I don't know, nine months
or however long it takes and then get, you know, the next year be getting paid $100,000
or $120,000 and they pay like, you know, Lambda school by paying a percentage of the salary
rather than having to pay upfront, which is like a prohibitive bar for a lot of people
to get education.
I'm sure that has happened.
Yeah.
So it's kind of a cool inspirational mission that at least people like me want to cheer
for and then you sort of exposed a lot of stuff that was like, you know, a little bit
less inspirational.
Yeah, no, I mean, I mean, I think I was interested precisely because I'm interested in the mission.
You know, like if I didn't care about the topic, I don't think I would have investigated.
I think it was, I think it's because of my early exposure to boot camps.
Like I was a very early mentor at one of the earliest cohorts of Deb boot camp and I knew
quite a few people that had gone through the different phases of the evolution of the boot
camp ecosystem that like what Lambda school was doing sort of flew in the face of what
I thought would be possible or feasible.
I think a lot of my initial skepticism was like, this is a company that's simultaneously
innovating on two fronts, ostensibly, right?
Like one, they're doing online only education.
Like that alone gave me such pause because what I had seen witnessed, like witnessed
personally in real life, even with dedicated instruction in real life, like face to face,
a struggling student can struggle for so long.
Like the moment the breakthrough happens for a student to understand like, I don't know,
some random ass concept like recursion, it can be quite a long time.
It takes a lot of effort and pedagogical finesse from the instructor in order to bring them
through that realization.
So the idea that you could do this online just like willy nilly, I mean, I was like,
they must have an amazing way of conceiving of this whole problem or something.
And then two, they were innovating along the financialization lines of the school, which
I just thought like, well, you guys are doing a lot right now, where they don't charge any
students up front and ostensibly claim only a portion of their salary after the fact if
they get a job.
And I was like, wow, okay, I mean, that sounds really cool.
But like, how could this work, you know?
So there was a lot of like, how could this be working in the beginning?
And then that initial skepticism compounded with just all the weird stuff that the leadership
would say on Twitter that made me just like, just feel like something was going wrong somewhere.
The first thing that came out of my radar about you caring about Lambda School, which
is we were talking about Austin on Twitter.
And Austin is like a pretty unique Twitter.
He's like, I've never seen someone who's been so enthusiastically positive about their
own company and their own mission.
Like he literally had a tweet or it just said Lambda School and all cast with like 12 affirmation
marks after it.
And I was like, wow, this is cool.
This guy is just like, he's got so much energy.
And you're like, no, there's fraud, where there's fire or there's smoke, there's fire,
there's something going on here.
And it seemed to me that like, all you had to do is like the Twitter account of the founder
and like, that was enough for you to figure it out.
Well, I had a lot of domain knowledge too.
But you know, I think the truth is that Austin fits in very well in VC Twitter.
I think what makes his Twitter presence unusual is actually it's like a founder saying this
stuff.
But it's not uncommon, I think for like West Coast VCs on Twitter to express themselves
in this wholly self promotional way.
And I think part of the reason that Austin is that way is I think he's taken a lot of
cultural cues from this Malou, you know, and I think that that explains a lot of his aesthetics.
So what's the upshot of what happened?
You figured out something fishy is going on.
You decided that you wanted to while selling your company, do some investigative citizen
journalism and figure out whether or not Lambda School is up to no good.
You interviewed a bunch of people.
And what was the outcome?
The outcome is the piece got published and a lot of people got mad at different people
on the internet, you know, for like a week, and then, you know, life moves on people get
mad at you.
Oh, yeah, a little bit.
I mean, people got mad at each other's people got mad Lambda School, you know, it's like
a shit like you don't control the story once it's like, on the internet, you know what
I mean?
Like, I just put it out there.
I presented the facts as I had seen them.
And you know, I provided the interview transcript with Austin, like the recording that we did
with the interviews, I tried to be as transparent as possible.
And now it's just out there.
I've been given to understand from talking to, you know, people with knowledge that Lambda
School's corporate climate has changed a bit since the publishing of the piece, usually
they've started to hire out around roles regarding like, how to put it curriculum quality.
Yeah, that thing.
They you know, it seems like they're trying to take it more seriously, which is good.
I mean, like, at some level, I'm obligated to say that it would be good for the world
if they did well.
And it shouldn't bother me that like, Austin, like himself is successful, if the school
is truly successful, and that, you know, that I actually do hope that they figure out how
to make it.
I'm skeptical.
But you would truly actually be a good thing for the world if someone figured out how to
crack online only coding education for people with no prior exposure to coding, like that
is kind of the golden goose.
So you kind of had aspirations to do some journalism, you started investigating a story,
you took that story to fruition, you published it, it had effects, are you going to do more
journalism?
I don't know, man.
Like, if you got any tips, anyone at home has any tips, go ahead and email me.
My email address is me at vincentwoo.com.
If you know about some crimes, I'll take a look.
I can't promise anything.
You know, but it really comes down to like, do I, I'll happily do another news story when
the opportunity presents itself.
And I had a couple opportunities present themselves, but I don't think any of them crossed over
the boundary of newsworthiness.
So I didn't fully develop them, you know, I just kind of dropped the stories.
I think Lambda School was a story where there was a clear newsworthy component that gave
me the confidence to know that the work I put into it would be would reach, you know,
would reach people somewhere.
But for most stories that you come up with, you have to pitch an editor and like, I don't
work for a publication, so I have to, I'm like, pitching is a freelancer and that makes
the bar a bit higher, you know, like you have to, you have to really sell like why the story
is important.
You know, who else had a short stint as a journalist after reaching a pretty big financial
milestone with his business, Warren Buffett?
He-
Oh, come on, man.
What is this?
Did he pay for, did he pay for this?
Like, what's going on?
I'm just noticing that, you know, there's a lot of parallels between Vincent Wu and
the life of Warren Buffett and it might be because I've been immersed in this Warren
Buffett land for the last 37 hours.
What stories did he work on?
Did Buffett, did Buffett break any, like, spicy news in his day?
He did.
He broke a big scandal about an institution that was reporting to do good and it turned
out that it was actually not doing good and he won a Pulitzer Prize.
Go figure.
Yeah, I, you know, I respect that.
I sort of, it makes perfect sense to me, right?
Like, if you work your life in or around an industry, you get to know its ins and outs
pretty well and you can just tell from the performance characteristics, like, purportedly
of a thing, like, whether there might be something fishy going on.
Like, so many people knew about the Madoff scam, not because they saw Madoff take money
from one customer account and put it in another, but because his performance metrics were the
wrong shape, you know, they're just like, how did it, this doesn't seem possible.
Like, that guy either really knows something.
You can just tell.
Like the knowledge, the presupposing he's in possession of the knowledge that would
allow him to do what he's claiming to do.
Why would he be doing what he's doing?
Like running a small family office, right?
He would be doing something completely different if he was actually in possession of knowledge
of that nature.
So they could just tell, you know, and I bet Buffett had a similar feeling.
And I think I also, I think had a similar feeling, you know.
So he broke the story on this, this charity called Boys Town where they would take in
underprivileged boys or something and they, you know, give them a life and reform them
and provide for them.
And they were sending 20 million letters every holiday season to Americans all over the country
asking for donations.
And he just like kind of did the math and the same way that you're talking about Madoff
where he's like, based on like the campaign you're running, like you should be making
a lot more money than you're reporting.
And he just spent like a year trying to break the story, eventually got it published.
I think the paper he published it with, Juana Pulitzer, because of the story.
For this story?
Wait, are you telling me that Warren Buffett won a Pulitzer?
I think the paper that published the story that he worked on.
Right.
But the reporter usually gets.
Yeah.
Look it up.
Oh my God.
That's crazy.
It could be you, Vincent.
I don't think I'm that talented.
No.
That's incredible, actually.
Yeah.
One of my favorite movies is Spotlight.
Is that about like the Catholic Church scandal?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's about the Boston Globe's Spotlight Reporting Unit.
There are only so many movies about journalists doing a journalism thing that are actually
enlivening to watch as just like a random audience member, and I think Spotlight is
one of them.
Like, I try to watch like All the King's Men or whatever, it's just so boring.
But Spotlight is good, I really, the pacing, Mark Ruffalo, the magnitude of the damage
that was being done to society by the Catholic Church at the time, like all those come together.
It's a great story.
It's a tragic story, obviously, but also a very well-told story of journalistic courage
in the face of overwhelming institutional social pressure to believe a certain story
that was just not true, you know?
Right.
So someone who's worked both as an amateur journalist and obviously you started a successful
tech business, what's your take on the current sort of tech-first media industry fight that's
really been going on for five or 10 years now, but it's kind of blown up recently with
all sorts of years.
From my perspective, it's been going on for about that long.
I don't know if it's been as popular, but I think it kind of peaked around the 2016
election with the controversy around Facebook.
It's true that Trump brought a lot of this to a head.
I mean, ultimately, yeah, I agree that everything that is happening now is a result of an event
that got started four years ago, nominally because of Facebook, but more about, you know,
I was talking to Casey Newton the other day and I was just like, how did you come to being
like a beat reporter on Facebook or like, I noticed that you'd become much more critical
of the company.
Like, what happened?
Like, and he told me that, I think I'm totally fine to share this, that he had been sort
of a less critical reporter in a heyday when tech was just like more purely exciting and
everything that was happening regarding tech seemed to be kind of good or at least neutral.
So it just was fun, you know?
And it was only around the Trump election, he told me that, like, he began to start,
he began to examine tech through the lens of power and like what its actual effect on
society is liable to be.
And I think that's when his coverage started to shift.
And I really, I respected that he came to that decision.
You know, I think we're still fighting this weird skirmish around this today.
I think the whole conflict is really funny at some level.
One thing that I think is ridiculous about it is that, you know, in order for like Balaji
and the other prominent like VCs who think that like journalism is now morally bankrupt,
like in order to make their argument have oomph, they sort of have to build up journalism
as like a pillar of culture.
And they have to make their enemies seem sort of all powerful and ever present.
And this is really amusing to me because journalism's influence on culture is probably at like a
20 year low.
You know, like we've been bleeding, like I say we, I mean, putatively we, like journalism
has been bleeding money ever since the invention of the internet, you know, and like everyone
knows it.
So like, if that's the case and journalism is sort of less relevant than ever, like,
why are they so upset?
You know, like one imagines, like, if your model of the world truly is that a dying industry
is out to get you for no particular reason, like, why bother caring?
You know?
That's an answer to that question and it's a speculative answer, but journalism, well,
not journalism, but the media, traditional media, and I think social media represented
by tech are, I think, natural enemies, they're natural competitors.
And I think just for purely logical business related reasons, it would make sense for any
competitor to write disparaging things about their competitor, right?
I don't agree.
No, I mean, if that was the case, I think you would see more systemic action by both
sides.
I guess I can tell like the extent of the conflict has been limited to individuals having
shitfests on Twitter.
I think the vast majority of both tech and journalism doesn't give a shit about the other
party.
That's true.
I mean, there's a reason why I think it started before 2016, which is there was like, as you're
alluding to in your conversation with Casey, a period of time where most coverage of the
tech industry was very uncritical.
It was very fawning.
It was just like, look at these cool toys are changing the world, blah, blah, blah.
And then around 2010, 2011, there was, I think, it became more clear that tech posed a pretty
serious threat to journalism.
So you have like the iPhone and the App Store and Apple.
Tech is too broad a term though, you know, like tech includes like Uber and like Yelp.com.
Totally.
So okay, let's put it this way.
Big tech.
You know what I mean?
Big tech, like the companies that control the means of distribution, right?
Like Apple, which controls distribution on the iPhone, Google, which controls distribution
on search, Twitter, which is now like the place where stories break.
Tech media, yeah, like platforms.
Yeah, the media has sort of traditionally been the distribution channel and tech is
increasingly becoming...
I agree.
But if that's your motive and model, you would expect conflict to arise directly between
these platforms and journalism, which really hasn't been the case, with the notable exception
of Facebook, you know?
Like the conflict as it's currently being driven in culture presently, it's being driven
by weird venture capitalists, like of all people, to give a shit about this.
It's not the people actually running businesses.
I'll give you my sort of theory and you tell me what you think because you've had your
foot in both doors.
In fact, you might...
Sure.
...you might identify more as a journalist now than you do as a tech founder.
So essentially, if you are the media, you don't have that many weapons with which to
fight tech, right?
You have kind of only one weapon, which is your word.
You can write stories or you can hire journalists who have sympathetic views to what you want
to write about.
So you don't have to tell anyone, hey, write this hateful story about tech.
You just look at somebody who doesn't like tech and you hire them and now they're a journalist
and lo and behold, you get lots of negative stories.
So and on the flip side, tech's sort of, I guess, weapon in the fight is to control the
distribution.
If you're Steve Jobs, you tell the New York Times that you're going to take 30% of the
revenue.
You're not going to give them the email addresses or credit card information from any of their
subscribers anymore and you're suddenly an existential threat to them.
Or if you're Facebook, you tell media organizations that you're going to limit which of their
followers they can even reach and they have to pay you if they want to reach you.
Can we just terminate this line of inquiry?
This is not how the world works.
This is far too conspiratorial.
The amount of people that would need to coordinate to make this model of the world reality is
insane.
It's the exact opposite.
It doesn't require any conspiracy, right?
There doesn't need to be any sort of...
If Apple thinks of itself as in relation to the New York Times in particular...
It doesn't.
That's the whole point though.
It doesn't.
That's what I'm saying.
It doesn't need to.
I'm saying none of the people...
The idea that you would hire a reporter because they're critical of tech, there are so few
reporters that can only file tech stories.
They're so overworked.
The vast majority of reporters are just trying to survive through any means necessary by
filing their quota.
It's so hard to make a living as a journalist that you would be selected for this very specific,
almost petty attribute, belies a conspiratorial mind of thinking about what journalism as
a whole...
There is no Mr. Journalism.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, but the whole idea behind a conspiracy is you need a bunch of people in a room to
get together to literally conspire versus what I'm talking about.
Yeah.
What you're suggesting is a mode where it's like you sit down and decide we're going to
hire people who are unfriendly to tech.
Clearly, you know this isn't how it happened because the same people who are filing anti-tech
stories today were writing pro-tech stories five years ago.
Some of the same people.
They're the same people.
These positions are so hard to come by.
They're occupied by mostly the same humans.
Well, I think you're a pretty good example, for example.
You weren't a journalist 10 years ago.
Today, you are a journalist.
The story that you pitch is a decidedly anti-tech story.
It's a good story.
It's a story that should be published.
I don't want to get out here and say tech should be the sole industry that's exempt
from criticism.
I don't believe that at all.
But I think that essentially, any media organization is going to want to write about certain topics.
The idea that media organizations don't have an editorial team that decides what do we
want to write about and what do we care about and what do we think will be popular?
Certainly they do.
I guess what I'm saying is tech is a pretty minor concern of journalism.
I think tech just has a really inflated notion of how important it is to the rest of culture.
When I was pitching the Lambda School story, you understand?
My story was delayed for a month.
The story was done, basically done, a month prior to its publication.
What happened was Washington, D.C. kept emitting news.
I was pushed back week after week after week because everything in the world was more important
than what some random tech company had done wrong.
This is where I think the tech side of things is like jump the shark, where essentially
most of the VCs are talking about who complain.
Their chief complaint was, I don't like the way that I was criticized.
Yeah.
Which is kind of like, well, no one likes being criticized by the media.
The problem is they draw attention to themselves in complaining about the criticism.
If they wanted to move past the criticism, the easiest thing to do would be to ignore
it because outside of their strange reactions to it, it's not really that much of a story.
Wealthy people behaving badly open any newspaper any day of the week and there'll be a story
like it.
I think the opposite is also true.
For example, there's this recent spat over this app Clubhouse where some people were
talking about they're criticizing journalists.
And then the articles that appeared in, I don't know what publication, were basically
boiled down to how dare tech criticize the media.
And it's funny because it's literally the same thing happening in reverse.
I think you're reading that a bit.
I don't agree with the characterization, but I think, okay.
Yeah.
I think if you're a prominent, famous person and you go on the record criticizing almost
anyone in a public forum that gets reported, if they were complaining about Donald Trump,
or I guess more pointedly, the Democrats, I guess, because that would be more unusual,
that would be reported too and is frequently reported.
I don't think this is unusual.
This is just normal journalism.
Normal journalism is falling around noteworthy people and waiting for them to say something
noteworthy and then publishing it so that you can make your quota.
That's okay.
That's the system functioning.
In so much as it was a meta story that happened to concern journalism itself this time, what
ever?
Who cares?
Yeah.
I think that you're right.
I think there's also a lot of just incentive-caused bias.
If you just look at what people's incentives are, I don't think you need any elaborate
conspiracies.
I don't think you need any sort of people meeting in a dark room.
I think you think individuals are much more motivated by the economic incentives of their
industry than they are in practice.
I think that the individual software engineer at Google doesn't care about the media.
I think the individual journalist at the New York Times doesn't care about the tech industry.
I think the people who run those businesses, I think the people who invest in those businesses
do care a lot.
I think if you are the leadership at the New York Times, you care a lot about controlling
the distribution of the New York Times.
You care a lot about the existential threat of distribution platforms being owned by tech.
Sure.
I don't think that boils down into individuals.
I agree that over a long time, this bias may present itself in one way or another.
But I think for these individual spats that we are observing right now, they are so random
and so untied to actually any economic stakes.
If you look at what's...
This whole thing got kicked off because the woman who's in charge of that away luggage
company did some crazy stuff way back when.
That's the impetus for all of it.
This is not even an important company.
You know what I mean?
This has nothing to do with platforms.
It feels very tribal to me.
It feels like one tech founder gets criticized, and then a bunch of venture capitalists and
other tech founders come to their defense, or one media organization gets criticized,
and then a bunch of media organizations come to their defense.
I agree that the main emotive force behind this conflict is tribalism.
But I do not agree that there is actually much of a from-on-high reason for this conflict
to exist.
I think the only reason this conflict is existing is because tech is a descendant, and they're
going to generate more newsworthy stories than they would previously.
There are more tech companies.
They are more powerful.
They're beginning to represent a larger and larger slice of the modern work economy.
Of course, like we were publishing articles about people getting their hands chopped off
in factories during the industrial era, we're going to start writing about the abuses of
workplace culture in the tech era today.
That's necessary.
That's desirable, in fact, from the journalistic press.
Yeah, totally agree.
I think what's fascinating about your role in all of this is that you switched careers.
You're not a full-time journalist.
It's not like you've made a drawn-a-hard line in a fan.
I haven't switched careers.
I ended my career.
You ended your career.
I'm retired.
You retired.
I think in most industries, if someone is a success, as you undoubtedly were as a founder,
most successful carpenters, like stay carpenters, most successful software engineers, stay software
engineers.
Is that true?
Why aren't you starting another tech business?
Why aren't you going for round two and applying all your previous learnings and connections
to do something even bigger and better?
I'm working on some little stuff, but I made my company because I felt compelled to not
because I wanted to be a founder.
I think a lot of people actually are that way.
Do carpenters stay carpenters?
Maybe.
Why are we so sure even that that narrative is true?
I don't know the numbers myself.
People switch jobs.
Lots of people have changed jobs.
The premise of Lambda School fundamentally is that you can change careers.
I don't think it's actually that unusual to want to do different things in life.
I think it's unusual maybe to have the opportunity, but I don't think the motivation is that strange.
I know all sorts of software engineers or people who work at death jobs who say all
the time that they'd rather be doing almost anything else.
I sympathize with that, and I, too, wanted to do something else.
I just made the time for it.
If that's the unusual part, then so be it, but I don't think my desires are unusual.
Well, you spent so many years acquiring these skill sets.
You became an extraordinarily good software engineer.
You became really good at sales.
You had to learn how to hire and manage people and do all sorts of...
Even just selling your company, you had to learn a whole bunch of stuff.
And then if you switch careers, it's like a lot of that goes down the tube.
I'm sure some of it's transferable over to other places, but do you feel like there's
some sense in which...
Being sunk cost fallacy, man, this literally is an example.
Who cares?
Well, it's not 100% sunk cost.
It could also be the case that your future gains, rewards, could be bigger if they come
from a place of mastery and experience.
Right.
It's telling.
It comes down to what do you think is worthwhile in life.
What are you doing things for?
You're right from this perspective that my goal is to just only maximize the amount of
money under my control.
Yeah, absolutely.
But why?
Why do anything?
I don't think I have the answers to that only to say that the question of desire is fundamental
to human nature.
We don't really know where desire comes from.
We can't really control it very easily.
We do know is all over the place.
I think just acknowledging that frees one to let go of this impulse.
It just seems like the most childish impulse to me.
Having made a bunch of money that desire to make even more like why, that I struggle to
understand.
From my perspective, that is a far more alien thing than wanting to switch what one does.
Frankly, relatively early in life, I'm only 30.
I've committed 30 years in the monastery to the contemplation of the face of God or anything.
Not wanting to keep making more and more money.
You finally said something that Warren Buffett wouldn't have said.
Yeah, I mean, Warren Buffett is clearly a much more dedicated acolyte of the church
of finance than myself.
Money to me is just a means to an end.
I think to him, it is somewhat of an end in and of itself.
You can tell that he takes joy in it.
Like good for him, I guess, but not for me.
Was there a point at which a switch flipped and you were no longer felt compelled to continue
running and growing your company and you felt like, you know what, I've been successful
enough here.
I've reached some number or some level where I don't care about this anymore.
Like about a year in.
And where was Coder Pat a year into it?
It made enough for me to pay for my apartment.
And that was it.
There was never another milestone.
Honestly and truthfully, it's hard to sell the business.
It's a buyer's market, you know?
And they sort of tell you this in the abstract, but the reality of it is it's hard to get
a deal that feels fair.
So it took a long time.
I said no to a lot of deals and the one I took is the first one that I felt was fair.
Like I got a fair price, a place where we're evenly splitting, both the risk and the upside
I felt.
Like that I was being compensated fairly for my investment.
And it's sort of arbitrary where one draws that line, like what is a fair price to sell?
And it's a total soft size, but nonetheless, I felt I did it because I felt it was fair
and I didn't do it previously because all the offices that came to me were absurd from
my perspective.
I want to talk about the transition period because I don't believe that you hit a point
where it paged your rent and the next day you were ready to sell.
Maybe that's true.
But I think it's fascinating to look at it under a microscope because so many people
are trying to start companies.
And they, quite frankly, would probably have a lot of trouble putting into words why they're
doing it.
Okay.
It might have been a few years in, but it was pretty early.
I kind of knew that I would be amenable to selling the business pretty early in the business.
When did you actively start trying to make that happen?
I never actively tried to make it happen.
They all sort of came to me.
I ended up working when the deal actually happened.
I ended up working with a broker, but I had worked with a broker before and we just didn't
get there.
But for the most part, I offloaded the legwork of selling because I'm not suited for that
sort of work.
I imagine the work of a broker, though I don't know directly, is really to know and to talk
to hundreds of potential buyers.
And I'm not fit for that type of thing.
It's far too speculative and disconnected from like...
I enjoy a sales conversation, I think, because I am delivering value to someone if the deal
happens.
And cases like this become more abstract.
They become about the financialization of the business and whether it's the good investment
in this totally abstract term, this divorce from real value being created by the business.
And it's just too nerdy.
It's just way too nerdy.
Let's dive into the nerdy nitty gritty of selling your business.
Okay, I'm allowed to say a certain amount.
So what are you curious about in particular?
We're going to talk about it.
We're going to go from the top.
Obviously, I sold my company too, but it was nothing like your process.
You sold to a private equity firm.
Yours is more of a legit sale.
Mine was more of like a just a random chance event that occurred.
And I've gotten a lot of phone calls since I sold indie hackers from other founders selling
their businesses.
And I think you're one of the few people smart enough not to call me because I have no idea
how to go through the process that you're going through.
It's true.
Also, I mean, I experienced this.
I tried to talk to people about what this process might be like.
And for the most part, I got incredibly unhelpful advice that I just ignored.
This is one of the reasons I wanted to come on the show is actually there is very little
in the way of discussion regarding how a bootstrapped company ought to sell a business of a certain
size.
Above a certain size, the type of buyers that remain in the market are not a thing that
get written about very much.
There is no guide on how to sell your tech company to private equity.
And often, there is a bit of a stigma attached to that notion as well, and perhaps rightfully
so.
I think on the high end of private equity deal size, private equity can be very dangerous
for society the way that certain companies have been effectively looted by private equity
is very concerning and there's not a lot we can do about it.
But I think it's also simultaneously true, and this is the tension that on the smaller
to medium size of businesses that have been bootstrapped by their founders, private equity
is probably one of the only remaining buyers in the room.
So if you want a liquidity event and your company is making, let's say, millions of
dollars in revenue per year, who's left?
You can try to get your company strategically acquired, but good luck.
If you're lucky enough for that, then congratulations, but for the most part, that's not the median
outcome.
It's much more likely that I think your company sells private equity.
So what does that look like?
Who are the people that you're talking to?
What are their incentives?
Not a lot is said about it.
Do you think that having sold CoderPad to private equity, the company is in good hands?
Do people go work there?
Are there customers?
Oh, it's very good hands.
Actually, yeah.
I mean, CoderPad is actively hiring.
So one thing that's cool about private equity is their purchase of a company is an express
belief that the company is going to continue to be profitable and grow significantly from
the time of purchase, right?
So whatever price I sold CoderPad for, my buyers think it's going to be worth more.
Their purchase is proof of that.
So CoderPad is hiring.
If you're interested in working for a company that's pushing the boundaries of what you
can do in the browser regarding code execution in a live, important career event like the
interview for a job for other programmers, consider applying.
The company is in good hands.
It's being run by Amanda Richardson, who I respect tremendously, and I still consult
from time to time for the business for free because I just find it enjoyable, actually.
So yeah, that is sort of what is cool about selling to private equity also is that in
order to make the deal happen, they have to believe that there is a way to continue to
run the company as a profitable standalone business, whereas a lot of what happens, you
see this all the time in VC-backed acquisitions, companies that are bought are very often shut
down a year later.
Yeah, they just disappear.
What's up with that?
Isn't that so strange?
Why did they buy the company to begin with?
What's up with that?
It's genuinely confusing, frankly.
I mean, it's just a mechanism to hire the people behind the company.
It's a very expensive hire.
I don't think it's worth it.
You pay like a couple million dollars per employee just to hire like insane.
There's no way those employees are that good.
My theory is what happens is people start these huge tech companies that grow super
fast.
In the early days, they're extremely picky about hiring.
And then as they see their companies ballooned to thousands of employees and the average
quality of the average hire goes down, they start feeling emotionally distraught that
they're not bringing in as good people.
And so then they become willing to spend millions of dollars to acquire whatever the latest
shiny thing is, even if they're going to shut it down, because they can tell themselves
the story that now we've hired top quality people.
Right.
But if the idea, if the motive behind that is a disconnect between the actual current
employee base and the employees that would be brought in via acquisition, there's no
model of reality where those people would stay any length of time, right?
Your goals would be to actually like inculate a sense of trust in your employees and community.
Not everybody's capable of long term thinking.
Well, I don't know.
I guess what I'm saying is I don't know if I believe that theory.
Like maybe.
I think it's still pretty mysterious to me.
I think people are just way more optimistic that these acquisitions will be strategic
and will mutually benefit both companies and products.
And then they always somehow forget that the reality is otherwise.
That sounds right.
I think they're just far too optimistic about acquisitions working out in that way.
So tell me about the process of actually selling CoderPad.
You said you didn't really initiate it.
You weren't like super actively making it happen.
Were buyers coming to you or were brokers coming to you?
Now and then, yeah.
So the way that I ended up at...
So I sold my company eventually through the Brokers FE International.
And the way it came to that is some random guy.
I think like a fuck.
I really ought to remember his name, but I think he was like an early Instagram employee
or something like that.
It was just a random tech guy that had made some money off of equity at a somewhat large
company.
And he was trying to buy his own tech company to operate profitably.
And the guy had something like a million dollars that he wanted to buy CoderPad.
I was like, look, dude, I don't think we're going to make a market here.
And he's like, no, no, no, no.
I'll get a bank loan.
I'll get a bunch of money together.
You can also just sell a portion of your company.
And I was like, dude, it's not going to work.
I appreciate it.
It's very flattering.
But I think we're both wasting our time here.
And then we stopped talking.
And then later he was like, hey, you should consider working with FE International.
I use them to buy a company that I'm running now and I'm very pleased with it.
And I was like, wow.
Okay.
I guess I'd heard about FE through Patio 11.
And the guy introduced me and then we got to talking.
I got the sense that they're professional enough to get the job done.
And I told them what my price was and they got there.
We talked to a variety of buyers and so forth and ended up with the buyers that we ended
up with.
How'd you come up with the price?
How?
I was going to see what I can say here.
Without revealing too much, I decided on what felt like a fair multiple of revenue at the
time.
So I got to some of the aforementioned people who've called me to try to figure out their
own acquisition.
And one of the things that always comes up is basically this process of negotiation.
How am I going to get the price that I want?
And it usually isn't, it usually sort of morphs from how am I going to get the price that
I want to?
How am I going to make as much money as I possibly can during this negotiation?
Because the upside is always kind of uncapped.
Like you don't really know how much someone might be willing to pay you.
Once uncapped.
Yeah.
There's a cap for sure.
No one's going to pay a trillion dollars for your like ranking to-do list app.
But if you think you would sell it for a million dollars, and it turns out that someone agrees
to a million dollars, the sort of normal thing to do in that situation for most people I've
talked to anyway is see if they can negotiate higher.
If someone agreed to this price, why can't I get a higher price?
Yeah.
I think maybe you're getting the wrong impression.
It was work to get to the price I picked.
I can't say too much more than that.
But let's put it this way.
If offers abounded at the price that I had initially chosen, I would revise my choice.
You have gone upwards.
But I chose what was a fair price.
I mean fair in the sense that that was what the market eventually considered fair, which
is to say it was the tip of the market-making price, is where supply and demand just crossed.
But I think I correctly assessed what a fair price was because it took a while to get to
that number.
That's pretty impressive.
So you didn't like adjust the price during the conversations.
You determined the price and then talked to enough people until you found someone who
would match that price.
Correct.
I mean, and you could make the argument perhaps.
Perhaps I did leave value on the table, but I suspect if I did not, not a lot.
How many people would you estimate you actually had to have conversations with before you
found a good buyer?
I can't really get into this, but more than at least a few.
And what were those conversations like working with FE International, they're probably introducing
you to a lot of buyers.
Yeah.
So the nature of the relationship through FE would be shepherded around as the eclectic
founder and they would initiate the discussions.
They have a stable of people that they talk to who they know like to buy things.
When they judge the relationship to be perhaps serious enough, they would bring me in and
the buyers would have individual questions for me, as well as a sort of sense of laying
on hands.
And then give my opinion after the meeting and sort of move on.
For a lot of it, I was pretty actually clinical about it.
For a lot of buyers, I was like, I don't know if they're going to get there, but if they
get there, I'm fine with it.
That was mostly what I had to say.
I wasn't negotiating usually as the principal.
And that is, I think, one of the nice parts about working through the broker is you can
each point at each other and say, hey, it's their call.
Like when they need to make it my fault, they can say, hey, like Vincent says.
Or when I need to make it their fault, I'm like, hey, the brokers say.
And so for most of the lead up of the process, I was not negotiating principally.
Yeah, I just bought a car a week and a half ago.
And every car buying process is like a negotiation phase.
And of course, the salesperson who's talking to you can't really agree to your request.
They have to go back to talk to someone in the back room.
Yeah, there's no one in there.
He has all the power.
There's like a mirror.
Well, this guy, he actually walked and talked to someone, but they weren't talking about
anything related to the price of the car.
Yeah, they were talking about sports.
And then he would come back with some counter offer that was like, oh, it's just above what
you asked for.
You know what I love?
I love that this behavior is universal in all negotiations.
You're right, in sales, I did this all the time as a person who sold services to companies.
It works.
I don't know that it does.
It's almost like expected.
It's hard to tell a little bit, but everybody needs to go and consult with someone before
agreeing or whatever.
I think part of it is the desire not to let the counterparty know that you can be convinced
by argument.
If they say something that does convince you, even then you still want to be like, look,
I got to ask someone.
And then you come back and say yes, even if you agree.
It's just appearances.
It's a desire to say face, I think someone, and also a desire to reserve bargaining power
for yourself later.
Because if you show that you are in charge, then I think the nature of the conversation
can change to be more personal.
They can give more personal appeals to you.
Come on, don't you think that.
You want to be able to agree out of politeness in order to sympathize with the customer.
Don't you think that this price is a bit steep?
I want to be able to say, yeah, I understand.
But if I'm also the principal making the decision regarding price, I have to follow, yes, I
understand, and that's why I'm giving you a lower price.
But if I'm not the principal, then I can say, yes, I understand, but I'll see what I can
do.
And I think being able to divest yourself of responsibility there is very powerful.
Just feels easier to tell somebody no, when it looks like you tried and you had some other
recourse and it wasn't really your fault.
The funny thing is anyone who's participated in any of these negotiations now knows that
this is a fiction.
This is one of those societal fictions that we all agree to.
We all agree that if you get invited for dinner at someone's place and then you haven't been
before, you bring a bottle of wine, even though they probably don't want the bottle of wine
that much.
It's just one of those things.
We've just decided that this is how it is.
Maybe one day we'll undecide, but for now.
When you're selling to a private equity firm and you're having these conversations, is any
part of it actually in person at their office or is it all virtual through your broker?
When they became serious, when feasible, we'd meet people in real life.
A number of times, Thomas Smale, one of the co-owners of FE International, would drive
me down in an Uber to the South Bay.
It was like being taken to a family meeting by your dad.
He was like my dad.
He looks older than me.
I think he is a bit older than me.
He's a very dad-like figure.
He's also a previous guest on the podcast.
Totally.
He does the whole paternalistic thing quite well.
He would bring me to these meetings and I'd be ushered in.
I'd be like his child and we'd end up in these very swank offices.
Private equity and venture capital does share some DNA in common, which can be a bit problematic.
There is a definite aesthetic and racial homogeneity to this space.
Many of their offices feel very similar, just like all this very expensive wooden glass
paneling, some weird light fixtures, and a receptionist who will ask whether you want
coffee or tea and what sort of coffee and with how much milk and so forth.
It's just an experience I'm not very used to.
They all dress a certain way.
There's a lot of the classic finance outfit with the vest and all that.
We did a few of those and they were interesting, but not super memorable.
They all kind of jumbled together in my memory.
I think a lot of it is them trying to assess whether you'd be the kind of person who would
deceive them about the viability of the business.
I think they're trying to get a sense for whether the business will continue to grow.
The chief concern is that they might buy a business that was actually not that great.
One way to assess that, and I think venture capitalists and PE people in this space maybe
share this in common, is by assessing the founder's temperament, whether they believe
that that founder would have created a viable business.
Because they can only know so much from numbers.
I think part of that experience is appearing rightfully confident that you've built a good
business and answering their questions plainly and truthfully, frankly.
I just told the truth.
There was no dissembling on my part.
It's almost like you're the used car salesman and the scenario and they're trying to make
sure they don't buy a lemon.
No, no, no, no.
I am the used car.
You and the company together are the used car.
The owner is also you, but is kind of represented by you spiritually by the broker.
They're the buyer.
They're the buyer.
They're like kicking the tire, which is you, by asking you questions about how this business
came to be and how it's doing and so forth.
I haven't been to a ton of, I don't think I've ever been inside a PE firm, but I've been
inside a few venture capital firms, which doesn't happen often because Andy Hackers is really
about bootstrapped companies.
But every now and then someone wants to talk.
And I observe the same homogeneity where all the offices are pretty lavish.
They're strikingly lavish.
Yeah, strikingly lavish.
They put a lot of thought into that.
I spent a lot of money on it.
They almost always have an absurdly attractive receptionist for whatever reason.
It's just consistently, it seems to be the case.
This is consistent with my experience as well, but I didn't want to mention it.
Yeah.
Why do you think that is?
I don't want to get into it.
It's gross.
I mean, let's just...
It's like...
I don't want...
Yeah, you don't have to talk about it.
It's almost like cults where I don't think these people are parts of a cult, but where
a lot of cults will do things that succeed and I guess recruiting and retaining new cult
members.
But then a lot of cults have no idea why any of that stuff works.
And they just copy what they see the other cults doing?
Okay.
If I'm being made to remark on it, I would say, yeah, but what you're describing is kind
of like an extreme way of describing what culture is in general.
I think it's striking that culture and cult to share a root.
One guy that I talked to at a P.E. from kind of level with me is like, I think we do this
because we're expected to.
And at some level, I agree that that is part of why they do what they do.
I think finance, if it's unusual among industries, I think it's unusual because the nature of
its competition is more zero sum than in other industries.
And I think because of that, people are a little more risk averse socially, at least
because anyone could end up at any other firm at any other time.
So kind of fitting in with everybody's useful career attribute, whereas I think in tech,
like there's a bit more room to be unusual or eclectic, socially speaking, at least.
And I think part of the reason that all these firms look this way is probably because some
of the very successful instances of these firms decided to be lavish and the rest had
to follow in order to be seen as competitive with them.
Do you think it had any effect on you as the seller?
What do you mean?
Like, do you think you're more likely to sell to any particular firm because they seemed
more professional, their offices are more lavish, or is it just...
No, no, no, not at all.
I mean, as I said, I had a price in mind.
Let's talk about the alternative to negotiation.
Let's say you don't meet your price, you shop around, no one gets there, no one gets close,
but you're still Vincent running CoderPad, you're still in a position that you were apparently
a year or two after you started CoderPad where you're more or less having fun running it,
but you'd also be happy to sell.
What would you do in that situation?
I was in this situation for quite a long time.
Every time I attempted to sell the business and did not succeed, that was the situation
I was in.
And as I saw, I had a few options.
Option 1 is try to sell the business.
Option 2 is continue to operate the business, which is what I did nominally.
The third option I considered was attempt to install a new general business owner manager
in my place, give them a financial incentive to run the business well, and then retire
and draw down an owner's dividend effectively from the business.
So that's a possibility, but difficult.
Option 4, maybe try to promote someone from within the company to give them increasing
amounts of executive authority to the point where I can do less and less.
And option 5, maybe, I toyed with the idea of actually raising venture capital.
I'm like, I don't know.
What if I tried to make a really big company that just ended up being way too much work?
What I mostly did was just continue to operate the business and try to give my employees
a bit more latitude.
I started to offload some of the things that I found more tedious to do as the owner of
the business and hired more professional services as well, more advanced accountants and lawyers
and so forth.
That helped quite a bit.
It's funny that you considered, at least it's on the table, to maybe raise VC.
I've heard...
Yeah, I talked to a couple of people.
But it's too much work.
I've heard a few people sort of espouse this philosophy that you shouldn't start a bootstrap
company because it's about as much work as trying to start a unicorn company.
But if you succeed, the rewards aren't as great.
What are your thoughts on that?
Couldn't be more wrong.
I mean, it could be more wrong, but it's pretty wrong.
Are they crazy?
Why would I have a counter like, what are they talking about?
Why would anyone say that?
Doesn't that sound crazy to you?
It does sound crazy to me.
I wonder what your take is on why it's crazy.
I mean, just because it's untrue.
What are the ways that it's unsure?
Every way imaginable.
Do you understand how hard it is to raise metric gavel?
Holy shit.
It's a month-long process at the end of which you have to do even more work.
And you're constantly racing against the clock because you're incentivized by the system
to never be profitable, which means you always have a timer.
You're always racing.
You have to scale beyond what is comfortable almost by definition.
Holy shit.
What a race against time.
I ran my company very leisurely.
We did better than many venture-backed companies, but we did it by walking slower.
You could ask my employees, but I mean, for the most part, they had a pretty leisurely
time.
I think if they have to answer, honestly, there's times where they worked hard.
But there are a lot of times where we just sat around the office and talked about ants.
When I met you, I think you're in the process of making a transition from super serious
Vincent to a lot more leisurely, work fewer hours.
I think you almost ran your business in almost like a tongue-in-cheek way, which I really
respect because it's still a hard thing to grow a company.
It's a hard thing to do to grow a company the amount that you did from the day that
I first met you.
I think it's in 2016.
It's a matter of luck more than anything, is what I would say.
Sorry, I interrupted you.
Go on.
That's another topic we should talk about.
In general, I just think it's impressive to be able to have fun doing something and to
take it easy and do it at a relaxed pace, and yet succeed at doing it.
This is the thing that a lot of talented, intelligent people don't succeed at doing.
A lot of people want to bootstrap a business and get a Timones revenue and try for a decade
to do that and never do.
I wonder if it's because the nature of wanting to start your own company selects for highly
ambitious people and highly ambitious people tend, I think, to be less comfortable taking
it easy.
I'm kind of a weird in-between.
I'm right on the edge of the kind of person who might start a business on the more leisurely
edge.
I don't think you could get much more leisurely than me and still want to start a business.
Yeah, I think it's a demographic issue more than anything.
I think a lot of people who do successfully run businesses could do it by taking it much
more easily.
I think a lot of them come to that point in old age or when they have children, for instance,
but initially, I understand.
You're right.
In the beginning of Codepad, I think I was much more serious about at least getting the
business planted.
What do you think specifically you weren't worrying about and you weren't working super
hard on that other people are perhaps, due to their personalities, too obsessed with
or too worried about?
Oh, man, I mean, metrics.
I think I made a very conscious early decision to not have metrics.
I had seen this at Everlane and at other companies before Everlane that the moment you start
measuring something, people are going to talk about it all the time.
And the talking about it causes there to be a bad thing when the numbers are a bad way
and it's a good thing when the numbers are a good way.
That's sort of like letting numbers control how you feel in a given day, which I don't
really like.
I had been through that and had not enjoyed it and decided that if I couldn't tell whether
the business was doing well or not with felt like a BI dashboard, I had no business running
a business to begin with.
I didn't think I needed to know.
I think that choice cascaded in a big way.
Once you let go of metrics, how do you measure whether you're doing a good job or not at
anything?
What is a proper timeframe to finish a task?
I think this is really where people drive themselves insane.
They set really aggressive timeframes to do things.
But if you don't know how much money you stand to lose or gain, like you have only this rough
notion in your mind, everything becomes fuzzier.
It could be like, oh, this could take a couple of weeks or maybe a month or two.
Once you let go of this notion of precision and measurement, I think it becomes a lot
easier to just float along and just do things daily.
We got about as much work as we were going to get out of ourselves if we had been a lot
meaner to ourselves anyway.
Yeah.
What about on the topic of luck?
Obviously, you're a talented guy, but we've talked about this before.
You've told me that you think the amount that you have gotten lucky exceeds the amount that
you have talent by far.
Yeah.
The reason Codepad worked is because the idea for Codepad was correct.
Everything else from there, anyone could have implemented a modestly talented programmer
of sufficient motivation could have done Codepad, given the proper formulation of the idea.
The proper formulation of the idea, I don't know where ideas come from.
I don't know where thoughts come from.
I'm not in charge of that.
People just have thoughts.
I was in a place in my life where I just happened to have been interviewing a lot and I thought
about the nature of interviews almost by a matter of curiosity.
I came to the idea for the business.
It could have very easily not had something else distracted me.
It was the right time and place to have had the idea for the business and then I had it.
I had no control over that.
When I say luck, that's what I really mean.
I had no control.
The part that mattered, I was not making a choice about.
The part that mattered by far was coming up with the correct idea.
The execution is whatever.
That's fascinating to me for so many reasons.
The first being that it's the polar opposite of the common trope that your idea doesn't
matter.
It's all about the execution.
You're saying your idea is what carried the bulk of your success on its back and execution
almost anyone could have done.
Yes.
Why do you think people say the opposite?
Why do you think people worship at the altar of execution so much?
The cynical answer is because it is more flattering.
If you have done something that is good, you wish to believe that you did it because you
were good.
Being lucky is not thought of, at least in Western society, as being good.
Hard-workingness is.
People wish to attribute the virtuous attribute to themselves rather than the arbitrary attribute.
In some instances, this is correct.
There have been companies where the principle virtue was execution.
But my feeling in startups, by the nature of startups, usually are about coming up with
a novel approach to do a thing that has either not been done or being done in a less than
good way.
Because so much of these things turn on novelty, you can't help but I feel like you must acknowledge
that the idea is principally important in this.
You can start with a bad idea and get to a good one, but it's still the idea.
I agree that in some cases an idea alone was not sufficient, but it was always necessary.
Airbnb famously had the idea long before it was accepted by society.
I think I'm also lucky in the sense that society accepted my idea fairly readily because it
was not so novel.
It was just novel enough.
When you have a truly radical idea, I guess perhaps execution starts to matter a bit more.
I look at it as almost a multiplication-based equation.
If either one of them is zero, if your execution is just trash, then your business isn't going
to work.
But the idea itself just has a much larger coefficient in front of it.
You just get a lot more leverage from having a really great idea than you do from being
an amazing operator or developer or designer or whatever it is.
I think the degree to which you get more leverage, though, definitely depends by principally industry,
I think.
Yeah.
Which I consider to be part of your idea.
It's kind of baked into your idea, but it's surprising to me because I've also noticed
this interviewing lots of founders and indie hackers.
A lot of first-time founders will sometimes just make it spectacularly well.
A lot of experienced founders sometimes won't.
The first-time founders, it seems like they're almost inexorably carried on the wave of a
few decisions that they may write in the early days, often without even thinking about those
decisions very critically or doing any sort of business school analysis on whether the
idea is going to work.
If they just happened to pick an idea that maybe was aligned with their passion or something
they heard about or something that they cared about and it just worked out really well for
them.
I think there's definitely something to that.
I think the correct idea generation is something that's hard to do intentionally.
It's like deciding to be inspired.
It's difficult.
Some people can sort of do it.
I think if you're very practiced at it and have done it multiple times before, professional
musicians can kind of engender ideas because the experience of having inspiration has become
more of a routine in their mind, but I think for business, it really is truly, for the
most part, it's just got to have a random idea and you can't force it.
It has to be something that you care about at some level.
Yeah.
The thing that's probably more under your control is recognizing some signs of an obviously
bad idea and being able to eliminate certain ideas that you might have otherwise worked
on for a year, but it's really hard to just out of the blue generate a great idea.
Hard is, again, hard is the language of difficulty.
I prefer to use the language of luck.
I'd almost choose words like blessed or divinely chosen, like the language of the Greeks.
They had a cognitive model that allowed for gods to step in and change human cognition.
I think while it's literally probably not true, the model of thinking about it I think
is more pleasing or models what actually happens, oddly enough, more accurately.
You're divinely inspired by the muse.
We don't have control over the origin of our thoughts to such an insane degree that it's
a wonder that people can have a consistent frame of view about the world at all.
It's a miracle that memory works because it's truly astounding.
I feel like we have an hour-long conversation on this topic and we probably will at some
point.
We have this fiction that you are your thoughts and they come from a place that reflects who
you are.
At some level, that's obviously true, but it's also obviously untrue that you can't
choose what thought to have next.
I mean, this is going to turn into a discussion about free will.
Oh, yeah.
Sorry.
We don't have to do this.
We don't have to do this.
We can do this over some of that bread that you're baking some day.
Sure.
Totally.
But I feel like we've gone for a long time.
We've explored what it's like to be a founder who sells your business and then takes on
other careers and reflects on what it was like to run a business.
You should give some color here, too.
You are also such a person.
Hey, the show's not about it.
This is not the Courtland Allen episode.
It's the Vincent Wu episode.
I know.
But in so much as your experience is relevant to the topic at hand, do you not talk about
these on the episodes?
Not much.
I mostly just talk about you and other people.
For the audience, this is the last episode of the Indie Hackers podcast and Courtland's
moving away from San Francisco.
I understand Courtland.
What's going on?
Yeah.
The second part of that segment is true.
I'm moving away.
I hope it's not the last episode of the podcast because that means something's going to happen
to me.
Where are you going?
I'm going on an indefinite road trip is what I'm doing right now.
It's mostly...
Why are you doing this?
The genesis of this is that I've been on a few longish three to four week trips in the
last year.
During every one of those, I just liked my life a lot better than I liked my life in
San Francisco.
Wow.
What turned?
I don't think anything turned, really.
I just think that if I put on my analysis hat, obviously traveling is fun, being exposed
to new and unique situations is great, and it's enlivening.
And I think having a time limit, whenever you travel somewhere, it's not like you're
just going to be there forever.
You're going to be there for two or three weeks and you've got a flight back home.
And I think just having that time limit forces you to get out and do more things than you
would at home.
So in San Francisco, it's like, I've got years here, it took me like 40 years of living here
before I ever went to Alcatraz.
If I was just visiting San Francisco, I would have just gone to Alcatraz, gone to the Redwoods,
hit up some of the coolest restaurants.
I just would have lived a much more active life.
Interesting.
And so I guess this trip is more of like an experiment and like, what if I am always on
a clock?
What if no matter where I am, I'm only going to be there for a few days?
When you use the word indefinite, I feel like you're making it clear that you're not on
a clock, right?
I mean, the trip itself is not on a clock, but the time I spend in each place I'm going
to go to will be.
I'm not going to go anywhere and be there for like forever.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Each place that you end up in will feel like a liminal state where you feel motivated somehow
to like really experience it.
It's a wonderful, it's a wonderful idea.
I hope that this is enlivening for you.
I hope so too.
I mean, worst case scenario, I hate it and I just come back and nobody died.
I mean, also this is part of the fruits of having sold your bootstrapped company.
Is it not?
Like this is a thing that might only be possible having had the good fortune that you've had.
You know, I think it's easy to tell yourself that you have to wait for something to happen
before you do the thing you want to do.
It's true.
But if I look back, I could have done this at any point in time in my life in the last
10 years.
There's absolutely nothing stopping me.
I definitely know people like that.
You can make your own pimped out camper van and you can really just live the life, man.
You don't really have to sell a company to do that.
That is correct.
You really don't.
And I think if you're an indie hacker, you've got a bootstrap business and it's internet
based, which I obviously did.
You don't need to work like 80 hours a week.
You don't need to work on a perfectly set schedule.
And you don't need to live an expensive life.
You don't need an office.
So I could have done this at any point in time.
I think the turning point for me was more so the fact that I just had these trips that
kind of opened my eyes to even having this idea in the first place.
Let me ask you something.
Actually, as the proprietor of indiehackers.com, let's say a founder came to you with what
seemed to you to be a pretty good idea for a business that they wanted to start.
And they wanted your advice on whether they should raise venture capital for this idea
or not.
Are you generally against this idea?
Actually, in my conversations with you, it's strikingly neutral on the topic.
So what do you really think?
I'm a bad cult leader.
I think a great cult leader would be unequivocally one-sided about things and have zero nuance.
I'm not anti-VC.
I think there's a time and a place.
Let's say this founder was in fact yourself.
What if it was me?
How would you approach this decision?
Essentially, you're asking me, what are the factors that you consider if you want to determine
should you raise money or not?
Yeah, it's exactly what I'm asking you.
If anyone should know, it's you.
Yeah.
Well, maybe it's easier to answer in light of different personas because people come
into this with different amounts of knowledge.
I think the biggest problem and one of the reasons I started Indiehackers in the first
place was that so many people don't understand a lot of the truths and realities about what
it's like to raise venture capital and the fact that an alternative path even exists
because the sort of tech press has only ever really publicized or glorified that path.
Right.
I'm asking you to evaluate the trade-offs.
What do you think?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the trade-offs for me would be, number one, do you want to constantly be in a state
of program we call default dead, where you are beholden to these people who have an expectation
that you hit some growth target and it's almost always going to be a stretch.
And if you don't hit that, your company is basically dead.
And maybe you can take some money off the table or maybe you can get lucky and find
a buyer.
But I think you're in a constant state of stress and that is caused by the differential
between where you want to get and where you are and knowing that you don't necessarily
have a safety net.
Oh, there's some benefit too.
I mean, okay, let's say the idea sort of requires like, you know, at least three people to work
on it for, let's say, at least like six months before the idea can be minimum viable.
And this would be perhaps, you know, you could maybe bootstrap it yourself, but you'd be
committing to spending like, I don't know.
I mean, the benefit is that you go much faster and you can get much bigger faster, right?
Would you take that deal is what I'm saying.
The situation for me that would convince me to take VC would be, number one, I already
sold a company and feel like financially set, which has already happened.
Number two, I have an idea that I believe in enough that I think is important enough,
not just for me, but like for whoever the customers would be, because potentially the
world that I do think I need to pour that much money into it and want it to be big.
And the absence of that idea, I would just choose to bootstrap a company.
Well, I mean, putting VC into it is not putting your own money.
I mean, it's actually other people, it's like less, it's risk averse in that sense, right?
But for me, it's not much about the risk, it's more about if I'm going to undergo all
the negatives of raising VC, am I at least doing it to produce something that I think
should exist?
Because I think I'm somewhat, somewhat arguing that I don't need to try to start another
company just to make more money.
There's no part of me that's like, I need to just keep making money forever and ever,
no matter what.
So if I'm going to work on something...
It's more like if you felt like an idea that had to be done, and it seemed like the best
way to cause that idea to be done was to raise venture companies.
Then I would do it.
Is it an example of an idea for a business that already exists that if you had come up
with it, you would feel like it had to be done?
I don't know.
I don't think there's any...
Honestly, I think Stripe is such a company.
If Stripe didn't exist, and I spent a lot of time talking to founders like I do today
and everyone was struggling to just implement payment for their company, and it was like,
you know what?
There's a way to make this simpler.
And I know that I can do it, and I can raise money for doing it, I think so.
That's a convenient answer given you're an employer.
Okay, fair enough.
Fair enough.
What about you?
What would you raise money for?
I'd raise money for any odd idea.
This is maybe weird about me and maybe counterintuitive, but I don't understand why more people don't
just screw over their VCs.
Let's just put it this way.
Imagine.
Imagine you just took a safe, right?
And then you never raised a price round of equity ever.
I mean, you're talking about a mutual acquaintance, Len, who went to Y Combinator and raised from
YC, and then deliberately decided she never wanted to raise another round and hasn't.
And I think that's actually...
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
It's surprisingly common.
I think there's an immense amount.
She wasn't happy doing that.
It's common?
Oh, well, I would feel happy to.
I mean, if I thought that I could raise...
I don't know.
Seed rounds are up to absurd amounts these days.
Who raised a million dollars seed round?
If I could get a million dollars on a convertible note that basically never had to be paid back
nor convert to equity, why wouldn't I?
Basic human ethics, like the idea of the sense of obligation to the people who you told that
you would be shooting for a particular goal.
I just would not tell them any such thing.
If you could raise a million dollars without ever communicating your future intentions.
Well, I wouldn't communicate it literally.
I'd be like, I think this is a really good idea and then it should exist.
I think you could do this.
The market for it is quite large, don't you think?
Also, I have a track record.
I think if you wanted to do this, you could do it.
I think if you really wanted to, you could.
I think in reality, a safe would still convert when you eventually sold the business anyway.
I think it would be difficult to actually get away with it entirely.
But I guess I mean in the lighter sense that even if you sold a price...
Let's say you sold 20% of your company for quite a lot of money or whatever.
You actually are under no real legal obligation to run your company any particular way.
They can't outvote you.
I know a lot of founders who run VC-funded companies and I would say a miserable emotional
state and 100% of their concern comes from just the built-in human sense of obligation
to another person.
This person put money in your company, they have faith in you.
And if you're letting them down, it just feels bad, especially for the conscientious types
of people who become founders.
They don't feel bad that they're letting down their employees.
They feel bad about all of the above.
And it would be their investor.
It's true.
I've seen this myself too.
I think it makes sense because it's like...
What's the name of it?
It's like if somebody gives you something, you feel almost obligated to give something
back.
And the investor being the person who gave you them...
You're paying your employees at least.
It sucks.
It really does feel bad to let down your employees, but your investor just gave you a bunch of
money.
So I think it's just hard for people to let someone down who wrote you a check for a million
dollars.
I agree that there seems to be something sort of parasocial there.
I think the relationship exploits a weird aspect of human psychology.
Because game theoretically, stepping all the way back, there's no reason actually really
that you ought to care much about the return for your investor once you have their money.
Like either they'll get a return or they don't, they knew the risks.
If you're a cold, hard robot, I think that's totally true.
Not a robot, but I think just a realist.
Your investor has invested similar amounts of money in a hundred people who look just
like you, in which they expect only one of you to return any significant amount of money.
So just knowing that calculus, I would personally, I think, feel like that I was not important
to them and that they should not be important to me because the asymmetry of the relationship
is so huge.
There's like a hundred of me for one of them.
Exactly.
Well, I think often investors are the people reminding founders of that fact.
Because a lot of founders have never raised before and they tie themselves into these
knots and get emotionally...
It's true that VCs use this language all the time, right?
That they are there to serve the founder and that that's how the relationship should be
thought of.
Oh, no.
I mean, I can name specific instances where VCs have said, hey, you seem super stressed
out about this.
You should know that if the company goes to zero, I'll be okay, you need to chill out.
It's not even their money.
Yeah, it's their LP's.
They get paid either way.
They get paid even if your company goes to zero, they get 2% carry.
It's insane.
What is...
That job is crazy, man.
Like, oh my God.
Yeah, the financials for VCs is...
I mean, obviously, their incentivizes succeed.
But the fact that they can do so well if they just raise a huge fund and then it just completely
fails and they'll still make millions of dollars a year if they raise enough money is pretty
crazy.
I'm just surprised that more founders don't raise a 20% A round or equivalent seed round
or something and then just not spend it.
I would keep it as a war chest.
If I thought it was going to be a long time tool as profitable, I wouldn't try to raise
the clock to profitability at high, extremely slowly, and work very diligently to get there.
But anyone who's tried to scale a team very quickly knows what happens when you try to
throw money at this problem.
It doesn't work that great.
What happens is nine times out of 10 or 95 times out of 100, the company fails and the
other five times, it hopefully becomes a unicorn and the investors make their money.
No, I don't even mean the company sense.
I mean, in the human sense of hiring a bunch of new employees and trying to get them coordinated
around the novel mission is really hard.
The people best able to actually do this work for a long time is going to be the founders.
And I feel like the entirety, almost, of the round raise should go to just keeping them
alive.
Unless it's absolutely necessary to hire outsiders, because you give yourself so many more chances
that way.
There's a new, I guess, class of investor who's more interested in these slower growth
bootstrapped businesses.
There's Rob Walling at Tiny Seed and Tyler Trinkins at Earnest Capital.
And they're like investors who don't pressure you to spend all of your money as fast as
possible because they have more capital to deploy than you can put into your next round.
And I think that that will become increasingly common.
I think people are realizing that there are companies like CoderPad that actually can
be successes.
And I think they're devising instruments that allow them to invest in a way that makes sense.
And it's taken some time.
But 10 years from now, I don't think we live in a world where the only path is VC or not.
And maybe the way that it is right now is actually correct.
Because even reflecting on it, I don't know that there's a financial instrument that you
could offer CoderPad that it would have made sense for me to take.
Even if it was very easy to come to venture capital, at least in the early days, I don't
think I could have given a very favorable price to a VC.
I don't see why the deal would actually be done because I didn't need money.
If you actually do build a profitable bootstrap business, especially in the early, if you
come to it quickly, there really isn't a need for additional capital ever.
You can just eat your earnings.
If you make enough money early on to quit your job.
But I mean, there could be something in there where you could...
I think most of the proposals now depend on the investors being able to correctly predict
with a high degree of a high percentage of success which companies can return their capital
and then not needing as big of returns.
And so you could theoretically imagine someone invest in CoderPad, you quit your job immediately
instead of having to work for a year to be able to cover your rent, you get to profitability
faster, after a few years, you return all the money that was invested.
I guess what I'm saying is even in that situation, if I could convince an investor that return
on investment in that case was highly likely, that means I have already convinced myself.
Which means I should be willing to eat my own savings.
Which I, for the most part, was willing to.
So it doesn't seem like there'd have to be a huge amount of money for almost no price
at that time in order to get someone in my position to yes.
You would have to calculate that the cost of continuing to work at your job and eat
through your savings is less painful than the cost of giving up a percentage of your
business to an investor.
Yeah.
It's such a tough calculus to make on the part of the founder that I would default to
no deal.
Yeah.
Because the benefits are not obvious.
I mean, the cool thing is we get to see this experiment play out.
We get to see lots of people making this decision right now.
And you will like, I'll be able to have them all on the show and be like, how did it go?
Do you regret it?
Will you do it again?
Do you know anyone in the tiny C cohort?
Yeah.
There's a lot of companies in the tiny C cohort.
And some of them have actually been on Andy hackers, but I just don't think we're far
enough out really for people to be able to say, okay, this was the right decision, or
at least honest about it.
Are they receiving investment before they've reached market?
Some, but I think not the majority, I think the majority of them already have a product
already generating revenue and they're further along than you were in this hypothetical situation
we're discussing.
Wild.
Okay, cool.
Listen, Vincent, the Andy Hackers podcast tradition is people listening are fledgling
founders.
Many of them have not been divinely inspired to have a great idea.
What's your advice for somebody out there who's trying to figure out how they can follow
in your footsteps?
I prefer to avoid that framing because in the literal sense, I mean, I literally cloned
my idea and you could compete with the current company.
I don't recommend it though.
I mean, it's going to be tough.
Try to have a good idea, obviously a facetious answer.
Think clearly about what value you're providing to who and to whether there are enough of
those people and whether they're willing enough to part with your money.
Think about whether ideas like yours have been tried and whether they have failed or
not prior.
Because I mean, the truth is all of this advice is advice I did not follow personally.
The annoying part is I was certain.
I was always certain maybe because of hubris, maybe because I was correct, but it's hard
to convey the sense of certitude I experienced and maybe the advice ought to be then wait
until you experience certitude, but that doesn't seem right either because there definitely
should be room in the market for people to experiment with ideas they're not quite sure
about.
I don't know what to say, except to say there's clearly no sure thing, right?
That you can do everything right and still fail miserably seems obvious.
I didn't give any advice.
Disconcertingly, I would say accept failure earlier.
Be at peace with whatever outcome may happen before it happens because if you are not,
you will not be free to inspect reality.
You will avoid learning things that would indicate an outcome that you're not ready
to accept.
I think this is one of the principal mistakes I've made, I guess.
Like you said, you think maybe one of the things that people can do is learn to dismiss
bad ideas sooner.
I have seen quite a lot of founders pursue things that seem to me to be patently bad
ideas.
When I try to convince them of this, my opinion, let's say, I've found them terribly unreceptive.
At some level, I understand you don't really want to be that receptive to someone telling
you that what you're doing is wrong.
At the same level, I think you ought to be very receptive to that idea because the impact
of that fact, if it is true, is so huge for your world that you ought to be really sensitive
to evidence that it incates that that's the world that you live in.
I guess this is a really long-winded way of saying you should be really open-minded.
Be open-minded, accept the possibility of failure, and be actively looking for reasons
why your idea might not work so that you don't have to waste years of your life figuring
out the hard way what could have been done easily.
Ask yourself ahead of time what the contrapositive would be.
What evidence would there be in the world of me being wrong if I was wrong?
In coder pads, for instance, I can do this exercise in hindsight.
If I was wrong that coder pad would be a correct business to exist, what would I notice?
Well, I think one thing that I would notice is that it would be extremely hard to convince
people that would otherwise have every economic incentive, at least in my model, to want to
test programming candidates more thoroughly.
There definitely have been people who've brought businesses as ideas to me that are very similar
to coder pad.
It's like a coder pad for some other industry where my response would be, I actually don't
know or you haven't convinced me that the market you're targeting actually experiences
enough of an economic incentive to want to filter its candidates more appropriately.
It's like they've copied your product and they're trying to apply it to a different
problem, but there's no evidence that that problem is one that anybody cares about.
It's the market.
People don't get it.
It's the market more than it is even the idea or the timing.
I guess timing encompasses market or the other way around, but the market is so, so, so important.
Market excuses, poor ideas, poor execution, just total ignorance.
If you happen to look into the correct market and I guess by extension idea, you can flail
wildly and still get there.
Likewise, if the market is missing, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter how well you execute or how well you understand how to build the product.
There have to be people who want to transact with you in this economic regime.
I tried to push gently a lot of the time, I'm like, okay, I understand the product as
you propose, but are you sure that there are buyers?
What evidence would there be?
It's not enough to ask the question.
You have to ask the other question, which is like, what evidence would convince you
one way or another that there are or are not buyers?
In CoderPad's case, I think if my first 10 conversations with engineering managers in
positions to buy who are experiencing the problem that roughly my product exists, that
my product addresses, opted in clear terms not to buy, then I think I would have been
really confused and I think I would have experienced a strong desire to halt.
The reality was like I talked to like, I don't know, like the first 10 people like most bought.
I was like, oh, okay, clearly this works, right?
But I think that would have been a really early turning point for me because I think
it would be easy also to say to someone in that position, you should just push on like
talk to more people.
But like, I think if you say that to someone, I think you're obligated to tell them how
many more people, like how many more experiments, you know, what evidence would be sufficient.
And I think thinking about like what you would require to reach a decision one way or another
before you make the decision is really helpful way for having the problem.
It's like a whole like Bayesian trick or whatever.
Couldn't agree more.
Vincent Wu, thanks for coming back on the podcast.
Totally.
Thanks for listening to the last Indie Hackers podcast.
It's really cool to retire along with retiring this podcast and, you know, this is a great
season finale.
Like I feel really good about it.
I think we covered a lot.
Covered a lot.
Yeah.
Can you tell listeners where they can go to get in touch with you if they want to or maybe
follow some of the things that are up to you?
Just tweet at me.
I mean, just like search for Vincent Wu on Twitter, it's W-O-O.
My handle is full again, F-U-L-L-I-G-I-N.
I'm mostly just on Twitter now.
I just can email me also at me at vincentwoo.com.
But you should, I mean, just tweet at me, man.
All right.
Thanks, Vincent.
All right.
See you.
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