 You guys were so early in the game. I mean, you started podcasting in what, like 2003 or something? Uh, yeah, it'd been about 2003-2004, yeah, somewhere around there. Okay, so 2003-2004, we started The Art of Charm in 2006. We just kept going. You took a little break, a decade long or so, but you had a few shows in there. Why did you start doing it back then? Because it seems like back then, people ask, oh, why'd you start in 2006? Did you see the, did you predict the rise of podcasting? The answer is no. Back then, there was no information, but back in 2003, there was even less than nothing. I mean, that was, you were doing something, the odds of somebody watching it were low. Yeah, I mean, it was one of those things where Apple had announced support for it, which was huge. Like, just the fact that they would support podcasting and allow you to syndicate that stuff. And then I remember that, well, we were doing traditional television. So we were working on, at Tech TV, and this is, we're talking about, you know, an organization of 500 plus people to run a station. And we realized that this model is going to go away, or at least the idea that you could just turn on a camera and have two guys sitting on a couch having a conversation was for zero to, you know, I mean, the cost of the cameras in our time. And we did that and people started to watch. I mean, we started to get and pick up and ended up being, you know, a couple hundred thousand people were watching by our kind of peak, which back then, those numbers were pretty impressive. That's still really good to do a stream video and have a couple hundred thousand people watch is huge. Yeah, and we had started bringing on sponsors back then. Squarespace was a, we were the first show that they actually advertised with, which was crazy. So Squarespace has been OG podcast, flooding the podcast market since 2003. A long time. Yeah, Anthony, the CEO over there, he was a super nice guy and just believed in us and started backing us. And then GoDaddy did and some of these other brands. And it, you know, it paid the bills and it made it so that we could just do more of this. Back then, the problem was that video, syndicating video was extremely expensive. Like bandwidth was really pricey. So we were spending $20,000 plus a month on video bandwidth, which is crazy. Wow. And that's not even like 1080p resolution video. So that was, we had cash fly we were using back then to like syndicate all of our bandwidth. And yeah, but we started a whole network around it called revision three. And so that was a whole podcast network. And we had like six or seven different shows on there. And it was fun. I remember a long time ago, Dignation had done a sponsorship with Axe or Axe had done a sponsorship for Dignation. That's right. And I created all the content for Axe's website that you guys were doing. It was all this like dating related content and all this like lifestyle related stuff. So that was my first introduction to you guys as I was like, so these guys are going to be paid for just talking about the fact that I spent like a month making this. I'm in the wrong business. Well, I appreciate you doing that. Yeah. Yeah. You guys did like a 30 second bump and I'm like, that's it. I spent so much time on this. And they're like, yeah, this cost us like a ton of money for them to promote. And I just went like, okay, I got to get on that side of this equation. Yeah. They came to us. They're like, will you use Axe body spray? And I'm like, do I have to like use it at home? Or can I just like spray it on the show? And so it was fun though. Smell-O-Vision cameras. And you guys did a lot of big live shows back then. Like you don't, podcasting nowadays, you don't see a lot of people doing live shows. It's starting to come back. But what was the biggest live show you did? We did one in London for future web apps. That was probably 4,500 people or something like that. Not bad. It was pretty decent little showing. Well, I want to go back to some of the, I want to bring some content to the listener. Because right now they're like, great, cool, got a primer on Kevin Rose. Thanks for wasting my time, Jordan. Let's talk. But I'm curious what got you started with the interest in technology. Because I know that you, is it true that you dropped out of college? Is that accurate to say? That's right. Okay. So you dropped out of college, but you're not the type of person that just goes, eh, this isn't for me. I'm going to bounce. You're an Eagle Scout, right? So that takes 10 years of suffering through a lot of things that most people don't want to do. I'm also an Eagle Scout. And I remember doing like, some of it's great. Most of it's great. Some of it is terrible. And some of it is just plain torture, especially the Eagle Project. What was your Eagle Project? I spread wood chips and repainted a fence at my elementary school. Nice. Oh, I repainted a school as well. Nice. There you go. There was a school in our neighborhood that was old and dilapidated. And we came in and just like, stripped all the paint off and repainted it. Yeah. That's a huge job. I mean, we're talking 100 man hours for an Eagle Project. These are not simple little one-off things you got to do. You got to manage the whole thing. You got to buy all these supplies. So those are a big deal. So you're not the kind of person who's like, eh, college sucks. I'm just going to stumble into something. You must have seen something that was more attractive than what you were doing in school. Yeah. I think that it was pretty straightforward. It was 1999-ish. And the whole internet.com boom was happening. So, you know, I was reading about all of these companies going public and all the crazy stuff going on in Silicon Valley. And I was like, why am I wasting my time in school? Like, I need to be up there. I need to be working in this industry. And so I just thought, well, I'll see what I can do and go on monster.com and apply for some jobs. And if I land anything, at least I'll be up there. And so I landed a job and moved up here and ended up working in tech and watching all that explode in my face. And my company that I was working at next office was selling office furniture online. Okay. For other startups to buy. Yeah, exactly. So they went out of business and that's how I ended up at Tech TV from there. It was really just realizing that when you're sitting there and you're studying computer science and you're just bored out of your mind because your instructors are teaching you really old antiquated. The cobalt. Yeah. Stuff like that. It's like, it was so clear to me that I could either just learn this on my own or go work in the industry and learn it along the way. So I chose to duck out and I figured I could always go back to school if I needed to. Yeah, you can. I wonder though, what would you tell somebody who's in school right now who's like, I'm going to drop out because cryptocurrency. You know, or something like that. How do you know if what you're doing is going to take you in a useful direction or if you're just being sort of a trend hopper and you're sacrificing long-term success for sort of short-term gratification? Yeah, you know, this is a really tough question because it really varies from person to person and idea to idea. And I feel like I meet a lot of entrepreneurs because part of what I do during my day job is to invest in technologists and people that are starting new companies. And one of the things that I think is really important is you have that kind of gut feeling of this is something that is going to be if I had to close my eyes five, ten years from now this is going to be an order of magnitude or larger project that I could get involved with today. And it has to be driving you so hard that you're willing to give up that other thing or you're willing to set that aside for a while. And so you really shouldn't be looking for validation from someone else. That's when I get worried. When someone comes to me and they say, I kind of think I should do this. What do you think, looking for that external validation from someone before they go and start something? Those are the founders that I really don't want to back because they don't have that kind of internal connection to their project and idea that says they must do this. And I find that the best ideas often sound extremely crazy to almost everyone, myself included, the investors included but not to the founder. And so if you think about some of the big projects that we've seen, whether it be a cryptocurrency like a Bitcoin or a Tesla or whatever it may be if you go back to when they first started everyone thought they were just nuts. These ideas were just like they're never going to work. But that's the kind of founder and the kind of person that I want to be able to back is someone that is so bought in and so sold on their own idea. And granted, you can be drinking your own Kool-Aid and it could blow up. But at least you have that conviction to not only launch the project but stick with it over time because as a founder and someone that's starting something new it's not going to be just zero to the cover of Forbes magazine. That's not the way the path of an entrepreneur goes. Tell me about it. Still waiting on that cover, guys. Yeah, it's from launch to a bunch of loops and squiggly lines all the way up to success. And so if you are kind of somewhat bought in on your idea but you're not totally sold on what you want to go build in your vision when you start hitting those loops and those curves and those twists you're going to be like, this isn't working, I'm out, right? And you have to be able to forge forward and push through those big hurdles that you run into. And so I guess what I'm really trying to find when I'm looking for a founder is someone that has that switch that has gone off in their brain saying that this is what I'm going to go build no matter what. So that's what I look for. Does the idea have to be big? I got a video in my email inbox yesterday from a guy who's like, I left school, I'm 18 and here's a video about why I did it. And I'm like, I really don't want to watch this but I'm going to watch this because maybe this person has a really great idea or maybe I can be like, this is a terrible idea, you should not do this. I watched the video, it was a lot of rambling about how he's going to change the world and I was like kind of waiting for the idea, no idea at all. And I wrote back, this is a terrible move, you should go back to school, figure out what you want to do. I realize you have a lot of energy but there are ways to channel this inside something that's going to give you long-term success. I'm positive it fell on deaf ears. But when I get emails in my inbox from a lot of folks, they ask me, should I be in school right now or should I try to get a job working in the industry? I'm a fan of getting a job working in an industry. I'm also a fan of education if you don't know what else you might want to do because it's really easy to go work at Chipotle, no offense to somebody working at Chipotle, but it's really easy to go there and then just not do anything and wait for inspiration to strike you, right? There's nothing wrong with working at a place like that. If you're working towards something else or if that's where you decided you're happy and I think a lot of people who just don't want to be in school, they think, should I just do something else instead? And I don't know, what do you think about that? Looking back on somebody's 2020 hindsight, your leap from school was a good move but you at some level have to realize that most people who leave school or a certain percentage of people who leave school, they're not doing it for the right reasons. So the founders that you back are convicted about a specific idea, what if you're just convinced that school isn't for you? Where do you stand on something like that? What can someone do if they know school isn't for them but they don't have a killer start-up idea in a technology sphere? Well, it's hard when you don't know exactly what your idea is going to be. I would say that for me, I would want to do a little exercise with that person where you list out like your ideal career and then your backup career. So you have like kind of both out there and most likely you're not going to stick with that first initial ideal career. And then ask yourself, what are the requirements for those jobs? Does that actually require a formal education and a degree because I'm not going to go practice medicine unless I finish school? I think, thank you for that. I appreciate that. You really have to figure, for me, when I was looking at that kind of equation, I figured, well, it's computer science, right? And if I'm going to be working in tech and IT, and I thought, okay, well, number one is I want to be a network administrator and I know I want to go and help people configure their networks. And that is largely certification-driven. And so for me, I was like, okay, I can just go out and get these certifications and I'll be A-okay. I'll be able to make that $75 to $100,000 a year over time. That's great. So I checked that box. Now, if I was doing computer science, yes, I can teach myself that and then go and have actually a profession writing code. So those are two areas where I didn't need that formal education, or I could go and be self-taught. That doesn't apply to everyone. So I'd really come down to what are their interests and do they need to have that schooling? And I'm a big fan of going out and trying things, especially when you're young. You can always go back to school and failure teaches you so much. Like I've probably out of all the startups I've done, which has been probably a half dozen or more, like two of them have had successful exits, the rest have all failed. And so you always learn something. There's always, there's so much to learn there from those failures. Those failures, I think are kind of a badge of honor. I don't look at them as I used to get, you know, really depressed and think like, oh, failure is like, it's so embarrassing. And I think that you know, it's just failure is really just admitting that you've learned something at the end of the day. That's all it is, as you've said, when tried something, it didn't work out. And now I've learned something, and I'm going to take that forward into the next thing that I attempt. And oftentimes you don't obviously make the same mistake twice. So your companies, the way you manage people, all that improves over time. Were you surprised by any of your failures and as well by your successes? Or was it kind of like, okay, these looking back were clearly not going to work at all. But I guess I'm curious because when I look at anybody's idea and I find out it hasn't worked, usually I'm like why would this have ever worked? But then you look at someone's successful ideas and you go, why would this work at all? So it's equally mystifying for me when I look at businesses just as ideas. The ones that are winners are not necessarily clear. Look, if you zoom out far enough, of course we want an online bank. Of course PayPal was going to be a successful company. But then you think, we need online garage sales. No. But eBay is a huge success and that's basically what it is. So I guess what I wonder is when you look at your own track record are you thinking like, I cannot believe Dignation was huge. Or are you thinking I can't believe Oink didn't work? Yeah, I mean I think all those things. There's so many emotions to unpack wrapped up in each one of those ideas. For me, I try to have an internal thesis around an idea and back to that kind of close your eyes and imagine it five years from now and I want to be able to think to myself like Oink is a great example for almost, I'm probably one person listening to your podcast knows what Oink was. So Oink was essentially a way, if you've used Yelp or used Foursquare of any of these services back here gosh like 10 plus years ago, I launched an app that allowed you to go inside of a location. So any restaurant, any place, like an amusement park, whatever it may be and rate and rank the individual objects inside of that location. So if you showed up at a restaurant you would instantly know what the most popular, most like item was inside of that. If you went to a theme park you would know the best ride inside of that. So if you went to a dental office you'd know the highest ranked individual dentist inside of that dental office. You know, in my mind I was thinking like the issue and the problem to address was that we have kind of there's like this analysis paralysis when you walk into a place and you don't know what to choose or what's the best thing here especially when you're going into a new place for the first time. I wondered if people would help apply the wisdom of crowds and rank and rate those things inside of those establishments. And so, you know, it really didn't work. I mean it worked in that there was a very small dedicated hardcore group of people, myself included that really enjoyed doing that. But that's in the order of several, you know 10, 20,000 people. It wasn't hundreds of thousands or millions of people. So, you know you try an idea like that. You see if it has traction and then you have to be ready to kill it off and say this isn't working we've tried all the features that we wanted to try that we thought were going to work and let's kill it off and move on to something else and that's what we did. How good were you or was this a skill you had to learn at actually saying, okay divorce my emotions from this this isn't working and I can't sit here and blame other people for that because I feel like me not having had to wrap up a company my gut instinct my emotional instinct and I know I realize this isn't productive or mature or whatever but I would be like this can't be my fault I've got to figure out who in the marketing department screwed this up or where someone else went wrong or no we're going to keep doing it because I can't lose I would go through all of those phases Yeah, absolutely I think that it's really easy to try and place blame on other folks and other individuals, but ultimately as the creator of a project or founder of a project you're the one that's making these hires so it all flows back to the top so I would spend a ton of time especially going forward with new companies on really properly vetting people and finding the right people for those roles I think that early on in my career when we were trying to hire out and fill positions it was we called it just like throwing warm bodies at a problem get in resumes and be like okay you seem to check the boxes here and it will manage you enough so that you will perform and that's not really not the way you should go about it and so one of the things I learned when I joined Google was just how much time and effort went into their hiring process and how careful they were about allowing new people on the door but when they did, when you passed all those hurdles and we hired someone inside of Google they gave you the keys to the castle so they let you really run and break things and go and execute so there was a lot of trust once you had already gotten in the door but a lot of kind of skepticism leading up to that so the Google hiring process was so I mean it was a little too heavy handed and it was some of the questions and things that they would ask were just ridiculous but it was because they really wanted to properly vet folks and really hire the right people and for six, eight, twelve months at a time and really rather find the right person for a role than hire the wrong person Do you think you're better at spotting trends right now given your current position or do you think you're just better at spotting people who can accomplish things I would say that for me it's a little bit of it requires kind of 50-50 for me I have to fall in love with the idea obviously that's first and foremost is I'll hear an entrepreneur will send over they call it like a deck where it's their PDF with 12 different slides and they're showing what they want to go and build and you know if I'm hooked on that idea or that concept then I want to go meet the founders for coffee and then the second hurdle is sitting down with them and getting really excited about the team that they put together and believing that that's the team that can go and accomplish this big idea and then also really I think the other thing that's really important to mention is there are a lot of really good ideas that I consider and I'm excited for the founders to go and build but they're not venture backed ideas they're not these massive billion-dollar companies they're more lifestyle businesses which I think it's a really shame that the way that we kind of look at these because oftentimes at least in the Bay Area you think like it's almost like if a founder comes to you with an idea that isn't a venture backed idea but a smaller business they're looked down upon for not thinking big enough and really that's such a western way of thinking it just really bothers me it's a very silicon valley way of thinking yeah because there's so many great little businesses and I think that we as a society I really wish that we could celebrate the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of like someone getting really excited about something and not really how big that can eventually become like I'll give you a great example last time I was in Tokyo I went to this little coffee shop and this gentleman probably in his late 70s, early 80s wears a little tie and it probably seats like 10 people and you walk in and he ages these coffee beans so he takes coffee beans and he ages them like one I didn't even know you could do that he has vintages from going back to the 70s sounds like multi-coffee beans so you can age them, the bacteria creates this really healthy environment for them as long as you don't roast them you keep them green and they will age and then you fire them just before you're about to serve them and then you consume them and it creates a really amazing mellow beautiful coffee $80 coffee cup actually he just charges standard prices even for 70s vintage coffee yeah they're like the equivalent of $7 or $8 US for a cup of coffee like that that's a little bit on the higher side exactly but you go in there and you realize that this gentleman just has a love for that craft and for what he's doing and it's so proud you can see it in the way he wipes down the countertops and cleans the little crevice of every little thing that he touches the pride in that lifestyle business is just so endearing when you watch something like that and we just don't have that here in the states there's no appreciation we call them hobbies and we look down on people who try to make those their business when I see that happening from certain founders or entrepreneurs it's just like it's a shame for those people as well well hey look I agree I think creative pursuits are worthwhile and it's something I had to learn by doing it took me 10 years to realize this was a creative pursuit in the first place but I'll tell you you're definitely right about the venture capital snobbery if you will I was at a party a long time ago I told you about this one Jason I was at a party a long time ago Jason had just started working with me and I was talking about it and the guy goes oh well how do you support yourself and started talking about the business model of art of charm and things like that and he said yeah my company is venture backed and he was really trying to sort of like one up but like stomp me down right right and I remember a lot of people were really off put by that and I felt so belittled and I remember just thinking screw manners and I said so you took out a huge loan that's what you're bragging about right now someone was laughing and I was so mad but I was like I just want to zing this guy right so what you took out a big loan so someone else owns your business now I remember just thinking what are you bragging about other people think your idea is good other people like this too they download it right so I they're putting their time into it so there is a snobbery there but at the end of the day what you're saying is other people believe in your idea so they gave you a big loan so it's really not and I know I'm talking to the wrong person about this or maybe the right one because this is your job but I think there is an over emphasis placed on the amount of money you can borrow and you see that even in the crypto world now with raising tens of millions of dollars for a project that can be run by five guys in a basement or five coders not all necessarily guys in a basement yeah I mean there's certainly a balance that you have to distract there like some of these companies are raising so much money for no apparent reason even I scratch my head at those things and stay away from them but there's other businesses that truly do need the money to really go and scale a lot of these big ideas are very capital intensive like you talk about you know creating a production facility at Tesla or you know scaling out what Peloton is doing or what Fitbit did these are some of the companies that we've kind of worked with in the past and they have a lot of infrastructure in place to make those a reality and so venture funding in those cases actually does make sense it makes it possible instead of impossible I totally understand that when you say that you look at founders to see if the person who's got the conviction for the idea and you look at the team to see if they can accomplish it what are you looking for because a lot of founders think oh I just need a really good idea which you sort of covered is not true for the team but how do you know if this is a team that can do it it can't just be about enthusiasm because everybody that walks into your office is probably enthusiastic everybody on Shark Tank looks pretty convinced but they're not necessarily capable what are you evaluating well I think that first and foremost is to make sure that the idea isn't a slight iteration of something that already exists today there's a lot of founders that come out there and say I have a better version of this I'm interest for that I'm Twitter for this and it's like Twitter for cats or whatever it may be like that sounds awesome you look for original thinking something that's truly a novel idea is kind of what I'm trying to find and then when you sit down and talk about their vision is it how fully fleshed out is that is it something where this is an idea that came up in the shower or have they really spent a lot of time looking at the landscape as it exists today who their potential competition is and then who they're surrounding themselves with like who is on their founding team what is their background if it's a technology based product and they're doing hardware do they have a hardware background so many founders that get into hardware think that I'm just going to create the next Apple Watch or whatever it may be really they might have an engineering background from school but they've never actually spent any time in China so just making sure that they're really thinking about all the different aspects of their business and and really evaluating that initial team so often times I'll meet I would say it's a team of two or three by the time that I meet them like a group has come together and so I like to sit down with each of those folks and really sess out who they are and what they're trying to build now when it comes down to the hardware side of things what do you think about Kickstarter and all of these guys is that like a really viable place where people can test out these ideas before they go to look for funding or what do you think about that yeah I mean I've certainly seen a lot of Kickstarter projects go off and then become venture backed businesses long term as they need to go out and scale again it's like if they are actually if it's something where they're manufacturing like I back this amazing like it's called like a heavy blanket on Kickstarter it's amazing it looks so comfortable like calms you down it weighs like 75 pounds or whatever it's like having a hug on you all the time it's you just wrap it around you and you just like you get all like snuggling in it what is it called the gravity blanket what a great name it really tells you exactly I saw that ad and I thought okay that looks great a heavy blanket right I don't know why we're all attracted to that I don't know something about like being swaddled as a little baby or something that it's got amazing it's got to be it sounds awesome it sounds sweaty to me yeah it sounds really sweaty but on a cold day it's raining outside you got a little cup of tea it could be amazing people who just really always need a hug so that was one of those things where obviously you don't need to do like really deep to diligence on their technical team to create a blanket so but you know if it is something where I worry about some of these really tech heavy projects and the founders that are putting them together because there's a big difference between going to engineering school creating a prototype and then actually taking that and having it manufactured I remember I was talking to some of the so I got to know the nest founders really well and talking about how important it is to actually have they call it like boots on the ground in China because you have to like when you're going to have something manufactured have hundreds of thousands or millions of pieces produced like you have to be there through the entire process in the QA process and everything all the way down to getting it packaged and shipped and if you don't like the quality and making sure that every little you know things can break things can fall through the cracks and you just you don't want to ship something that's going to catch on fire so so it's I worry about a lot of those not in terms of producing hundreds of units because that's pretty easy to do but when they start really scaling up making sure they have the right team in place yeah because supply chains are hard 99% of kick starters don't ship so it seems like if you're doing hardware going straight to VC seems like I would never take anybody that hasn't actually tried to do it at some point on Kickstarter because it's like A you can test your ideas to see if they work and B you can get that supply chain experience if you haven't had it because nobody ships on time right and the first iteration is always not what you think it's going to be like I've got a giro suitcase that was kick started with the charger built in it's got a charger but it's got the big giant wheels on it which is the big thing and it was started by a lawyer Ken Hertz and a couple guys and one of the big selling points was oh we've got this thing engineered down to the nth degree and it's self balancing and of course when it shows up they're like yeah we kind of had to make some design changes and if there's nothing in it it falls right over so you have to take those kind of things into consideration so it seems like if I was going to be investing in anybody or if I was somebody who had an idea go to Kickstarter first and get those bugs worked out learn your supply chain chops and then go out in the real world and try and get VC on your next run I like these projects that are doing a few hundred units they're promising out not in the tens of thousands it's hard when you have a really cool idea because if you can sell 50,000 units why not go and do it but at the end of the day it's like there's a big difference between shipping a couple hundred units in tens of thousands you see that a lot when people get overfunded they just implode we can't make a million of these things we haven't figured out how to make 20 of them what problems cannot be solved with money in companies like that because I'm picturing people right now going I'm just going to hire supply chain people with the money that you give me Kevin what are you talking about? That's a good question I think that there are hardware incubators that are out there now that work very closely with a lot of these manufacturers in China and so I would have liked to see if they don't have experience at least pair it up with one of those companies so that they are getting the right kind of device and just really making the right connections there so I think it has gotten easier if you look at where we were five years ago and a lot of these hardware incubators didn't exist I found it really had to make those connections on their own and so they'd have to like either fly out to China and meet with various manufacturers and just kind of like hopefully place their trust in one of these and the problem is that the big like three to five manufacturers out there that do Apple products and all these other products they require a minimum number of units to even talk to you and those are in the hundreds of thousands and so it's difficult because as a founder you're not going to really work with that Wow, that's intimidating as well so you're looking at a team and I guess what I'm sort of curious about is what sort of team dynamics and what sort of people, aside from just their pedigree their chops whatever, what sort of team dynamics are you looking for? Because right now there's a lot of companies out there that have great teams or that think they have a team that's ready for prime time, what are you looking for at Google Ventures and your VC funds with these particular people? What's the people element that you really think these are people that are going to do something magical? Yeah, I think it's making sure that the team doesn't have any major holes right away so often times I'll meet these founders that are really the product managers so they have the idea they know what they want to build but they don't necessarily have the design chops or the technical co-founder to actually make that happen so making sure that at least the team that you're going to fund and going to back is in place or is very close to being in place before you actually back them so you know I'll meet an entrepreneur that says I have this great idea, this is the plan and these are the three people that are going to join me once I receive my funding so you go and meet with those folks as well and say we're going to put in a couple million dollars here yes, the plan is I'm going to leave my job and go join so it's just kind of like making sure that they don't have any blind spots and they've really thought through who they're going to need for this initial version because you typically try to fund someone to the first V1.0 of their products they can actually launch something or go have enough of a prototype so they can go out and raise another round of funding and so I'm kind of just making sure that they've thought that through properly it sounds like a lot of responsibility I don't know if I'd want that kind of responsibility for all that money to go and start your company? I'm doing it right now, I just mean for other people I don't know if I have a decent judge of character but I don't know about that, you hired me that's true, see it's already falling apart right in front of you to write a couple because you're going to write checks that are for companies that are not going to do well and you just kind of have to accept that a lot of the money you give away is you could light it on fire and it would be equally well spent that's right and I think that's fine that's the process that you go through is you back these founders and you want them to be empowered to take massive risk you're not backing them to be conservative and go off and build just a hobby especially in the venture capital game is how can I build something that's going to change the world and affect tens of millions of people if that's the case you kind of want them to go out swinging for the fences so when they do that they're going to, I hate using baseball analogy we're all athletes here it's fun but really they're just going to, a lot of them are going to fail but every once in a while you're going to have one that turns into the next Google or whatever it may be and those repay and make up the difference of course yeah the standard sort of VC model so what are you most excited about now being deep in tech trends all day and looking at things from the inside everybody's crazy about cryptocurrency and things like that what are you seeing that you're excited about besides the new roadster the new roadster does look awesome honestly what I'm excited about and what I put a lot of focus into has been less on the idea side don't get me wrong I am really excited about cryptocurrency and we could go deep on that not sure that your audience would really another show but my big focus over the last kind of year plus especially in working with founders has been trying to help founders find a decent work life balance and spend less time in the office and less time working on their companies but when they do spend time focused working on their their businesses to have that be more productive time and so really encouraging founders to get off their phones to have a real relationship with their significant others and really disconnect from technology and so that's kind of been my focus in creating a meditation app and I realize personally that having gone through all these businesses I just burnt myself out and I really got into a bad place and wasn't productive in doing so and so how can I help these oftentimes very young entrepreneurs like not go down that same path of late nights red bulls pizza and that like when it all costs and really just encourage them to be thoughtful about how they treat their employees and how they treat themselves in their own bodies How did you know you were getting burned out? Well I think that there's the standard I'm not sleeping as much I have anxiety about my business like that stuff creeps up on you I think that when you're in your 20s and early 30s it's really easy to power through a lot of that stuff and I just realized that I was my brain was starting to really get a lot more fragmented I would realize I would find myself like having a tab open on an email that I didn't hit send on like six hours ago or like you know you'd have like 100 tabs open and I was realizing that distraction was really causing me to spread myself so thin in a bunch of different directions and to get back into that mode or that mindset of doing that one task would take there's like a penalty you pay switching costs exactly and so the second you allow yourself to be bombarded with all these different notifications you'll find that you're bouncing back and forth between all these different things and you're not really that productive so how can we limit that how can we really force people to use less tabs to really kind of silo the things that they're working on so they can be more productive and then applying that to their businesses so that they're rewarding quality of life outside of work and not just the work that they're doing is there a way for us to spot burnout is it just because a lot of people go well I'm forgetful I'm always like that I mean how looking back at your own burnout what would you what was the indicator that this was a long time coming well I think that for me it was it's really slow it kind of builds over time so there was no like one morning where I woke up and I was like wow I'm just feeling burnt out it was kind of a little bit more anxiety and anxiousness around getting things done and I remember that when you're in a start up mode you think that you're never going fast enough and so there's this constant waking up and like God I need to get this done and we need to ship this product and this needs to be out on Friday and there's never any satisfaction that can take place at that point because you're always on to the next thing and looking towards that next release or the next bug fix or whatever you need to get out there and so it was kind of like just re-framing my expectations for and realizing that this is more of a marathon and not so much that kind of like daily sprint and really taking the time to force myself to create these hard breaks in my day and so once I could do that I realized I was feeling a lot more at ease and a lot more comfortable so if I could force myself to do let's say a breathing exercise halfway through my day or force myself to only check email during these two periods during the day in the morning and then in the afternoon and have that on my calendar and never go into email at any other time um force myself to install an extension on my browser that only allows me to open four tabs you're one of those guys huh? I mean I was just you get down especially in being in tech news and all of a sudden I find myself you know ten tabs deep on tech news five tabs deep on CNN and other stuff that's going on with the world right now and it's just like nothing's happening but checking those things um so just being a lot more thoughtful about how I spliced those in to break up my day and then all of a sudden you realize that in taking those breaks the anxiety comes down and you can just have a little bit more time to be thoughtful about how you're thinking through your problem so you're not so rushed and life just gets a little bit easier at that point. The app is called Oak it's available now and it's on is it for your phone only or is this something that you've got on your I notice you're wearing two wearables so you clearly are into wearables on? Oh man we could go deep on this. Yeah, what's going on here? Mr. Disconnected? Yeah each wrist is occupied. That's right so the Apple Watch with the LTE the new Apple Watch is on my left wrist and that is primarily for well I use it for a bunch of different stuff like in terms of turning on my lights and my house on and off or unlocking my computer Apple pay things like that but the neat little hack that I have here is because it is connected to the internet well first of all the number one thing you can do with the Apple Watch is turn off all notifications because those are just distractions those are the worst type of distractions because they buzz your wrist and you look down and you get have a new text that comes in or whatever it may be and so I turn everything off there and number one your battery life just goes through the roof so they quote these things that like having like one day battery life you turn all that stuff off it's like two and a half years magical so the nice thing about this is I can leave my phone at home now so one of the main things that I'm sure probably everybody notices out there is you find yourself like heads down in your phone all the time I almost I mean I bump into people almost every day on the street because they're looking at their devices all the time and so this allows me to say enough with the phone I'm going to take a fast to a phone fast for a few hours and if I go out to dinner with my wife or I go to meet an entrepreneur for coffee I leave my phone back at home and in emergency should my wife have a problem she needs to get hold of me she can call and that will go through to my actual watch because there's LTE there but because there is no full function full featured apps on the watch I'm not using it like a phone I'm not using it to go and browse Instagram I'm not using it no tabs zero tabs zero browser right so that's what's so awesome about having this thing is it's funny as it may sound it's like even though this is a technology device it enables me to use less technology in my life it's funny you should mention that because I had gone on this tirade about how I'm never going to get things like an iPad which you just saw me use for the whole show in an Apple Watch and he sent me the watch and I went I don't even want to try it because I don't want more devices and he goes I'm sending it to you anyway just check it out you might like it you're exactly right ironically having this watch allows me to do far less BS because I don't have to have my phone with me all the time so when I go on a walk where I usually read audio books I can read the book and I can write things down in a little notebook instead of writing them down in my phone because what happens is I write them down in my phone and I go oh I have three texts oh Slack is going crazy and then I go crap I just missed the last 20 minutes of this audio book that I'm using to prep for the show because I was on Slack chatting and my whole system goes downhill now I've just got this thing I can dictate a text I can get directions I can do the basic things that I usually want to do when I'm out exactly and I don't have to have my phone with me it really is a funny counter-intuitive thing that having a device like the Apple Watch lets you use the phone less and I know a lot of people are just like you guys are so device dependent you have to have all those things but there is a reality that you've got a young baby at home you can't just be like I'm going to go away for the weekend with no point of contact it's just unrealistic at this point and if you own a business you probably also can't do that so I know there's somebody out there chuckling to themselves about how we're tethered to these electronic devices but it's our reality in this particular space and at this point in your life especially so the other device to finish up on the two devices on your wrist I have a Fitbit on the right wrist and it's not a watch it's the very thin one so I don't look like I'm wearing two watches but I actually use this because it actually just looks like you're wearing a women's watch and an Apple watch that's what I was going for so this one actually is the only device that will work and do heart rate in a high temperature sauna so I do these extreme high temperature saunas a few times a week and this is to ensure that my heart rate doesn't go over I do a lot of the body hacking stuff as well so this is to make sure that my heart rate doesn't go over 125 or so and then I know to get out of the sauna when it's that high now why are you wearing it when you're not in a sauna you don't even have all the analytics I'm super geeky when it comes to all the body hacking stuff I also, I don't have it in today but I typically wear a continuous glucose monitor that's injected in one what? Hang on you wear something that is shunted into you all day oh yeah I basically I have to stick this little syringe thing that injects a monitor into my belly fat and then it will show my glucose levels in real time on my Apple watch on the main display yeah so I can test out how different types of refined carbohydrates impact my glucose level and also how quickly I dispose of glucose which is important yeah it's like insulin resistance type of stuff yeah I don't have diabetes or anything like that but it is certainly like they've shown that in terms of like longevity and cancers and things like that you shouldn't have elevated glucose for long periods of time and so one of the things that I had issues with a while ago was disposal of glucose out of my blood something called the glucose tolerance test I'm massive into all the body factors yeah yeah that's interesting though I mean that's commitment to actually have something that is in your body all the time so is there a monitor in you right now? not right now but there will be in the next 24 hours it just stays in your belly fat for about a week until you have to change it a week to two weeks so just the battery dies or something? no it's all in how much so there's this little adhesive thing and as you take more showers it starts to peel off and then you have to swap it out but it's inside, it's under your skin yeah so it injects a little tiny thin wire into that you can't feel into the actual fat there and then that senses changes in your blood sugar and then reports it back to the device which transmits it back to the iPhone and then to the Apple watch where do you get this? so that one you have to get a prescription from your doctor so this is like an actual medical device not something you can order off Amazon it's called a DEXCOM glucose monitor can we link to that or is that something that you cannot buy online? doctor if you're curious about this stuff there's a whole actually Wired is calling me today to talk about it because there's a whole movement right now of people that do continuous glucose monitoring all the time wow that is bananas but it changes the way that you eat probably can't actually eat bananas anymore depending on how you digest certain things like a banana will impact my blood glucose a lot differently than it will yours so it's just like keeping your eye on what's going on knowing what you can and can't eat if you could keep that thing injected into you 24-7 for the rest of your life would you do it? I mean there's rumors that Apple is working on getting this data via LED so that's the hope is that we'll eventually be able to get at your glucose levels with a non-invasive so we'll see if they can develop it but yeah I would absolutely do it I think it's fascinating to see how certain things, I mean there's a whole like if you go to bed with elevated glucose levels you kind of lock in your glucose overnight which is not good, there's the inflammation a bunch of other things and so it's just like monitoring all that stuff and knowing when you're doing bad habits I think is important you obviously have kind of an extreme personality Eagle Scout, drop out of school, start a bunch of companies injecting a wire into your belly or your glucose constantly that obviously plays some role in your success as a founder just diving in and then going to like the nth degree in a certain area, do you think that's a requirement for a founder to have or do you think that is just a requirement or just a thing that some founders have? I think it is a requirement for people if you think of anyone that is really passionate about what they do they tend to go all in and really care about every little minute detail it's also important to be able to let that go and entrust other people to care about that for you just because you can't personally scale forever but you know when I'm launching a new app I instrument every little facet of that app so I can understand what people are doing with it where they're peeling off why they're coming back, when they're coming back because that's that's how you can really help prune and tune the things that you create to make them more useful for a wider audience and I think that when I meet a founder whether it's extreme aging of coffee beans or you know someone creating the next social app it's like you want to look for that that depth there and that curiosity about their one particular thing that they're into Do you think everybody has that? Oh absolutely I think everyone can find that and that's the beautiful thing about living and creating new projects is they don't have to be massive businesses I really love that about all aspects of life for me I'm getting into beekeeping now My wife is a beekeeper We need to have a bee chat There's a picture of us I think I've told this on the show I'm not sure We went to go get a hive from her friend and we duct taped it shut This is a hive full of bees that are now being moved We put them in the back of our car and I'm keeping the bee suit on because even though it's in the trunk of the car if anything happens we're going to have a car full of bees, angry bees but then I thought man I'm in a beekeeper suit we're both in a beekeeper suit they look like hazmat suits You're driving around with this hive? We're driving around if we see a cop we're going to get pulled over we're going to have to be like officer don't open the trunk it's not going to work so she says look there's a cop like three times in our whole time living here we're not going to see any police we saw like seven cops on the way home You didn't get pulled over? No but I'm thinking like oh look at the ground look at your phone and I realize it doesn't matter I'm wearing a hat that goes all the way around my head and a big white suit with like elbow and knee pad kind of things built into it and we're driving this car and we put this bee hive in my brother-in-law's backyard and then she set up a nest camp speaking of nest to view the entrance 24-7 it's my wife is obsessed with bees So I have a buddy that believes that the bee stings are actually good for you? Absolutely people with like arthritis go and get bee stings So he just goes no suit and he'll just let them like sting him and he just like considers it part of the process and so walks up to the hive seven or eight different bites peels them off, throws them down thanks them for their contribution to the universe Yeah cause they die after that he's super hippy like that but it's hardcore not even a helmet nothing just like just walks up that's a lot of bee stings to have that's a great photo Jason to show me the photo that's us throwing a bee hive in the trunk of the car that's awesome we're huge nerds if you haven't figured it we're in good company right now so you're getting into beekeeping cause you're finding new passions yeah you just find a passion and you go really deep on it I love doing that I think that's kind of like when you meet fellow geeks and entrepreneurs that are really into their businesses they tend to be these people that obsess over the details obsess over things and just really geek out on it and I'm sure that's the case with you with everything that you do and I think that's the trait that I look for and you think that if I'm thinking I want to start a business and do the job I'm doing right now I have to find a passion where I'm so obsessed with it that it goes really deep and encompassing or maybe it's not the right idea that's interesting cause I think a lot of folks think uh oh I don't have passion about anything so I'm in trouble and other people might say well you just have to be interested in enough to run a business and then you can do other things with your life but it sounds like you really believe that you're going to find some idea that you're so into well I mean that's if you have that spirit of wanting to be an entrepreneur I think that there's a lot of people I mean really I find that for me happiness is really are you growing in who you are and what you're doing and also does your reality meet like your planning or your head for who you are and what you want to be and so I have a great example a buddy of mine does customer service I go into the company but it's a big tech startup out here and you know doesn't make a ton of money but makes enough to get by and he basically goes home, plays his Xbox has a wonderful wife and that matches his expectations for what he wants out of life and he absolutely loves his job he never wants to be a founder or an entrepreneur but that's what he enjoys helping people and I think that like I've met so many people that are like that and that's great you don't necessarily have to be a founder or an entrepreneur start something new you can work for someone else and find something that you're passionate about and that can be like your contribution I think that's useful advice because I think right now there's a lot of pressure for people to everyone wants to be the lead singer nobody wants to be the backup backup guitarist guy who's like in the shadows keyboard player podcast producer but you have to find people that love doing that and for anything and they're equally important and I think there's a lot of pressure for people right now especially young males maybe especially all want to start some sort of insert buzzword, tech buzzword cryptocurrency app they all want to do that instead of working anywhere else and I think for me looking back right now if I had to do it all over again I would want to be someone's assistant for a long time some high performers assistant because that's the best way to learn stuff learn high performing habits and things like that and I think the best way to learn tech is to be right up against it or learn that you don't want to do it or learn that you don't want to do it exactly and I think that it's dangerous for a lot of people to really want to jump in and start something just because they want the spoils instead of finding something that they can really geek out on that they actually enjoy yeah that honestly I think you nailed it there that there's a lot of folks that I've run into and it's a big red flag when I see it and that's when they are obsessed with the amount of money they're going to make over something so they're like I'm doing this because it's going to make me a lot of money Lambos does anyone want a lambo? nobody wants a lambo it's the cliche goal of trading bitcoin or something this is my lambo shot please don't buy a lambo yeah nobody buy a lambo but I think that that's just like the reality is even if you're just a little bit successful you're not going to be happy that's not going to really do it for you so if you turn out creating a business or a startup that makes a few hundred thousand dollars a year you're going to want to balance and leave it and bail on everything and you're not going to find any happiness there so the focus really should be about the love and passion for the idea first and if the money comes that's great but it really should be about are you happy and satisfied if this idea works but you don't make a lot of money I spent 22 years in tech thinking it was all about the money and I was waiting for that big payday and then I was working for Jordan I was the tech guy running all the tech running the servers and all that but at night we would get on the phone and geek the hell out about podcast and talk about microphones and all this stuff and turns out yeah I make a lot less money in podcasting but I am a thousand times happier and it's way more fun so you know yeah I traded the big payday for what I'm really passionate about now and took 20 years so I would prefer that people do it a lot faster yeah you know don't keep grabbing for that golden ring if you're miserable because I was miserable in tech in podcasting I'm happy as a pig in you know what it's funny is I have never told you this but I can having known you for a really long time I can certainly see it I can see the change I can see the difference because oh 100% dude when I see you send me photos of the different podcasts you edit you have those up on your wall and like you're proud of those because it's your work the great work that you're doing and it's just so cool to see you happy and passionate about something that you love which is awesome speaking of passion projects tell us about oak we got cut off because I wanted to make fun of your wearable habit but oak is for get tell us what it's about and what it's for yeah oak is kind of a this crazy mixture of me being into like all the body hacking stuff but also into meditation so what we did that's really kind of crazy different one we want to just like teach meditation and not have it be prescriptive there's a lot of great meditation apps out there yeah that's what I was going to say is there's a lot of these already oh no there's great I mean if you want to go and you have a fear of flying or anxiety or depression there's a bunch of them that are headspace and calm these are great apps that I've used for a long time oak is not that we are very traditional meditation techniques and our goal is to train people and then get them not to do guided meditations we want to set them free and just have them do a standard meditation timer so they can meditate on their own like you know you don't you don't really go and see monks sitting in the mountains using apps to meditate right they're trained up and then they I rarely go to the mountains for my meditation anymore so that was one of the things we want to do but the second thing we want to do I think is really interesting is rather than say we know what's best for people and create a guided meditation we wanted to use the wisdom of the crowds to create our guided meditation so we had thousands of people sign up for the beta and what they did is they were presented with these different surveys if they ended in meditation early or post meditation and they would give us feedback on all the different points of the meditation and so we did hundreds and hundreds of iterations to the meditation in terms of the sound and pacing of the meditation the words that we were using to describe certain things in the meditation and so we made all these edits and eventually came out once we got above a certain threshold of we had them rated between a one and ten of how much they enjoyed the meditation once we got above an eight which was you know hundreds of modifications later then we released the actual meditations out to the world so we yeah it's basically a guided meditation app where you can come in and do up to 30 minute guided meditations with male or female instructor and then once you're ready you can go meditate on your own with just a good timer the next thing that we're doing well I should say two more things one we have breathing exercises that are in there as well I use those those are interesting tell us about those yeah so I mean one of the things that's really powerful is these these types of breathing exercises that the pranayama kind of yogic breathing that we we put in there so if you don't have time to do a meditation you can just go in there and do a quick breathing exercise and we guide you through all that and then track like your streak so we can see how many consecutive that you've done in a week or in a month and so that's one piece of it but the real cool piece going forward and what we're working on now is tying in heart rate data and heart rate variability to your meditations and your breathing exercises so we want to be the kind of the quantified self version of meditation so that when you come in in this next release once we get it out there you'll be able to use your apple watch or your Fitbit or others and we'll show you how your heart rate variability is improving over time as you're using it to meditate so you can imagine like hooking in like all these different wearables out there and like seeing little graph of your data over time kind of like you would a Fitbit app or something like that with sleep data we want to do that with meditation and yeah it's just something that we decide to build and give away for free so it's a there's no paid upgrades or anything like that it's like an app for people to enjoy so it's called Oak it'll be linked up in the show notes you also have a podcast which you should talk about yeah it's called the Kevin Rose show and essentially I interview pretty much anyone that is a top performer I had like someone on there talking about bitcoin last week I had Tim Ferriss on the time before that and I try and really get at all these different types of body hacks or life hacks and how to improve your life so I'm really trying to find little tidbits and information that people can use in their own daily life it's a relatively new podcast we have 16 episodes out right now but yeah it's been a fun thing to have on some of these top performers and tease out what they're really passionate about what they're good at the Kevin Rose show easy to remember because it's your name that'll be linked up in the show notes as well perfect awesome thanks guys