JulianWeisser

LubaJulian, thank you so much for coming on the show.Link

JulianIt's great to be here. It's kind of a full circle-ish moment, because we've known each other now for quite some time. It's been many years at this point. I guess eight years.Link

LubaYeah. Eight years since ODF 1.Link

JulianThat's crazy.Link

LubaCrazy. And the 27th cohort just happened pretty recently.Link

JulianYeah, it's insane.Link

LubaAnd we'll talk about the 27th cohort. But I want to start with your previous quest, which was your music quest. So I read somewhere that you were working with Jazz Revelation Records to make an album that you wanted to be proud of a decade later.Link

JulianOkay, so you're really pulling out the deep cuts here.Link

LubaI mean, of course.Link

JulianSo I went to music school. And when I went to music school, I had no idea what was going on out in the Bay Area. I got there for music, actually. But I think that was actually where I fell in love with jazz music, in music school. I didn't really appreciate jazz music before I got there. In fact, I thought it was something that people did to just kind of show off. At the time, I thought that jazz music — like heavy metal music, where it was just so focused on solos and playing fast and playing esoteric things — I thought that was kind of just a way for people to... well, I would describe it as musical masturbation.Link

And as it turns out, it was only when I actually got into a studio and started to listen to people and really give it what I think it deserved that I started to love it. And I'll never forget one of the people, Daniel Rotem. He's an incredible tenor sax player. I learned a lot about music through him, and about how it came from his culture, and how he implemented folk music — because I was interested in folk music and roots music and Americana music, and he was from Israel. And he told me about the folk music and how that influenced his playing of saxophone. And that was sort of this jumping-off point for me to realize, wow, there was so much out there in the world that maybe I had a misperception of. And it really changed kind of the way I think about everything, you know.Link

LubaDid you meet him when you were already in college studying music?Link

JulianYeah, exactly. So I met him when I was working on this student record label, Jazz Revelation Records. And I guess the name is actually pretty fitting, because it really was a revelation for me. I didn't realize I liked jazz music until I actually started working on producing a record.Link

LubaWell, why did you start working on a jazz record if you didn't really like jazz at the time?Link

JulianWell, I thought it was an interesting way to meet people. I thought there was something to be said about how you actually get into a bigger community of people when you're in a new city. Everybody's in a new city. I moved from a small town in Connecticut to the city — Boston. How do I actually get into a place like that and learn about the people, sort of integrate myself? And I said, well, I should go and volunteer for something, and volunteer for something that's interesting. I'd done some stuff with recording and producing music, but for me, pushing myself outside of my comfort zone into a genre that I wasn't familiar with, and to people that I didn't know, I thought that would just be a good way of doing it. And it really was.Link

I got to learn so much in terms of where people came from and how the music influenced them. When you're growing up in a relatively small town, you might know all the people who play music. But when you actually meet people in a big city who are coming there to play music, they come from all walks of life, all parts of the world, and the things that influence them are so foreign, something that you would have never heard of before. So for me, that was kind of the reason I did it.Link

I think that some of this is stuff that I'm sort of coming up with now. It was probably, at the time, more like, this would be really cool to get to know a little bit about these people in this city, in this school, and that's a good avenue for it.Link

LubaSo how did a kid that grew up in a small town in Connecticut get so comfortable with the idea of meeting new people, pushing himself out of the comfort zone with a genre that he didn't think he liked that much?Link

JulianYeah. I mean, ultimately, I think that the way that I've gotten out of my comfort zone, to some extent, is to realize that I'm really interested in performance. And in terms of performance, it could be music, it could be theater, it could be acting, it could be improv. I did improv comedy when I was growing up, and I think for me, those things were all really interesting and fun. And I think the improv comedy thing was actually probably the thing that helped me the most in terms of breaking down my...Link

LubaHow old were you when you started in comedy?Link

JulianI was probably in middle school. Well, I guess I was probably in seventh or eighth grade. I essentially got started in improv comedy pretty young, and I think it was just a thing where I realized it would push me outside of my comfort zone. And why not, right? Just give myself an avenue to learn something new, experience something, be around other people. And I think it really did help me with thinking on my feet and that sort of thing. And it made me more comfortable. Instead of just playing music that was already pre-written, or reading lines that were already written, it just helped in a major way.Link

LubaYeah. I took my first improv comedy class in 2016 or '17, when I had just moved to San Francisco, because I think it was a pretty popular social thing to do. And then I just took that same first class about 6 or 8 months ago, and I'm about to do Improv 2 in New York, actually, with the idea that I'm going to get better at thinking on my feet. And especially with interviewing, I think it's a particularly good avenue to develop that skill. But I would say it's not a thing that I'm naturally that good at. So I'm pushing myself out of that comfort zone and trying to go do the thing that is maybe not as fun, but that's interesting.Link

JulianWas that like an Upright Citizens Brigade type thing, or what's the...Link

LubaNo, not UCB. It's called Magnet Theater. There's two popular ones in New York, UCB and Magnet. I'm going to Magnet because UCB was so booked out. It's an incredibly popular thing to do.Link

JulianI think it's one of the things that a lot of really famous actors and actresses have done, right? Especially comedic ones. SNL cast. I think a lot of The Office cast was from UCB.Link

LubaWow.Link

JulianYeah, I'm pretty sure the guy who plays Michael Scott on The Office. But yeah, it's really good.Link

I will say that, for me, something else that I really appreciated about that form of performance, or maybe just about performance in general, is that you're sort of an advocate for the audience. And I think that when you think of yourself as an advocate for other people, it can help you in terms of how you do things. So, for instance, when I interview people on my podcast, the Solo Founders podcast, I don't really do much pre-reading or pre-research at all. I try and listen to maybe a short clip of somebody talking. But ultimately that's just to get their cadence and their intonation, so I can understand what it's like to actually speak with them.Link

The main reason I try not to do much pre-work, though, is that I assume the audience hasn't done any pre-work, and I want the audience to know that I'm not trying to reference things that they might not already know about. And I think there's different techniques, right? Because you've done research, and you're talking about things that I would have never talked about with anybody else. So it creates an interesting dynamic. In my case, I'm trying to think about, what is the thing that this person said, and then what would the audience be really interested in hearing about after they just said the thing that they just said? And I think that I definitely got some of that from improv.Link

LubaThat's really cool. And you said that you were really interested in performance. What is it about performance that fascinates you?Link

JulianI think that there's something fun about putting on masks and playing characters. Over the last decade, I started going to the Shakespeare Festival in Colorado, and that's because I just happened to be living in Colorado before co-founding ODF. And I just discovered this festival. I'd never really been interested in Shakespeare prior to that, to be quite honest, because all of the performances I'd seen had been these free performances in the park. Not a great environment, in my opinion, to really take stuff in, where there's people chatting and everything all around. It's such subtle language, and at least for me, you have to really pay attention to the language.Link

So I got to that festival and I saw that these people would actually play multiple characters throughout the week. It wasn't that they were just one character in one play. The cast would actually play multiple characters. And for me, I thought that was really interesting, because it's like, okay, you do the thing you need to do for that job, right? For that performance. But that's not you.Link

So I think that very often people try to be the same thing for everyone, or for every audience, or for every context. And to me, I'm actually really interested in saying, how do I actually do things differently depending on who I'm talking to? The skeptical person or the cynical person might say, well, if you're not the same with everyone, then are you actually being true? And I think that a lot of people actually contain multitudes, right? They have a lot to offer. And I think that the context is what causes them to offer different parts of themselves. So I don't think it's about necessarily playing characters that you aren't, but it is about playing the part of you that you are right then and there.Link

The one other thing I will add is, I really like this idea for management style. I think it's from Keith originally, which is this idea that when somebody asks, "What's it like to have this person as a manager?", you actually want to have every person say something different. And the reason you want to have that is because everybody is different. So your management style should be geared towards each person, not some generic one-size-fits-all management.Link

LubaIt's almost like a good teacher would adjust their teaching style towards the student and really anticipate their needs.Link

JulianExactly. And both my parents were teachers, actually. They're both retired. But for me, I do think that there is a through line that I only realized after co-founding ODF, that there is this educational component to what we do. And I never thought about it. I never thought I was going to be starting an educational company or anything like that. But I do think that maybe there is some aspect of my parents and all that in what I do.Link

LubaThat's super interesting. So when you were going to college to study music, what did you think you wanted to become?Link

JulianOh, I had no idea. What I knew is that what I would become wasn't something that I would discover in my hometown. My hometown was about 30,000 people. Some people have grown up in much smaller places. And I think that if you grow up in a place like that, it's hard to even know what's out there in the world. So I just optimized for going to a major city and doing something that I knew I enjoyed, even if I didn't know that would be the thing that I would ultimately work on full time. I didn't have any distinct aspiration — "I want to become a music producer, and that's my life goal," or "I want to become a successful songwriter," or something like that. It was more that I just wanted to go to a major city and do something that I was interested in, that I enjoyed.Link

And to me, that was a big success, because going to Boston opened my world in so many different ways. And I think had I gone to some small music conservatory in some other part of the country that was far removed from everything else that was happening, it just wouldn't have been as good. So that's kind of how I think about that. And I recommend that to a lot of people, too. It's not necessarily about going to college — but I do think going to college is quite valuable. I think it's much more about, can you go to a place where you can learn what your interests are, and be around other people who might inspire you?Link

LubaSo you come to Boston. You were studying at Berklee. Did you find that group of people that you were inspired by?Link

JulianYeah. I mean, I didn't find it exclusively at music school, though. A lot of my friends are still in music. A lot of my friends who went to Berklee continued to do music afterwards, and they're doing really amazing things. But ultimately, I think of cities as this incredible place where you can interact with people who are doing things differently than you are.Link

I think that one of the knocks I have about San Francisco — the positive side of it is that everybody works in technology, or a lot of people work in technology. It's not actually true that everyone works in technology. But the negative side of it is that you don't actually get to experience a lot of what other cities have, which is much more diversity of industry and fields and people's aspirations and interests. So I do think that there is value in being in these other places to some extent, even if it's just to help you in becoming a person, right? I think that San Francisco is the place that I really love now, but I think that being in a city other than San Francisco was extremely influential to me, and probably had more of an impact on my life than I could probably put into words.Link

LubaI want to talk about Boston and what those influences were, but I wanted to come back to this idea of performance and wearing masks.Link

JulianYeah.Link

LubaBecause actually, off camera, we were talking about this term that you described. It starts with S. Something is one thing on the outside and then a different thing on the inside, which in my mind is kind of a parallel to also wearing masks. What kind of masks do you like wearing in your life?Link

JulianI don't know if it's that I like wearing masks. It's more that when I'm up on stage and I'm talking to a group of people, I know that I need to do something different than when I'm talking one-on-one to somebody, right? So it's more just rising to the occasion and bringing yourself to that. What you need to do to get a group of 100 people who are coming to an event to pay attention to you once you step up onto the stage and start talking into a mic, and to keep their attention, is very different than having a conversation.Link

I was just talking to a person who works in a partnerships function at a really big company, and they were really interested in solo founders. At least I thought they were, until I got on the call and they looked extremely bored. And it was the first call of the day. It was like 8:30 or 9 a.m. The guy looked like he hadn't had his coffee. He looked like he had a terrible sleep. He looked like maybe he was hungover, I don't know. He looked miserable. And this was before I started talking with him. So I was like, oh gosh. But I knew that what I said in that conversation, or how I acted with that person, would need to be very different than with somebody who's already excited and energized, or with a group of people.Link

So what I started with — and, you know, this is off the dome, it's not something that I had a plan for — I was like, how do I make this guy laugh? What could I do that will make him happy? Not trying to do some sort of emotional manipulation. I just really want this guy to be happy. And so I was trying a couple of things. It wasn't really landing. And then it was like, "Look, you had a co-founder before. I'm sure you had a great relationship with your co-founder, but oftentimes not everybody else is quite as lucky. A lot of people actually have really tough, challenging relationships with their co-founders." And then he cracked a smile and he said, "Actually, I had a terrible co-founder relationship. It was a complete disaster. It was such a bad decision to have a co-founder." But up until that point, he was not engaged really at all. And it's one of those things where you just have to meet the person or the audience where they are.Link

LubaMeet them, mm-hmm.Link

JulianBut I think it's less about a mask that I'm trying to put on, and it's more like, what part of myself, what part of the story...Link

LubaCan relate to.Link

JulianWhat can I do that would actually relate to this person at this time, or these people at this time?Link

LubaSimilar to your point about improv, and how you're working with the audience, or for the audience.Link

JulianYeah. And in a way, a conversation is like improv comedy in the sense that you're doing a "yes, and," right? A conversation is building on top of something. It's usually not a debate. And so from that perspective, if you're trying to have some sort of "yes, and" conversation, you have to have the person talking to some extent. And if they look miserable and they're not happy and they're not having fun, they're not going to be a really good improv partner. So I think that that's part of it.Link

And then getting an audience engaged — you know, if even a few people are talking in a group of people, it's distracting to everybody, right? So you need to have something that gets everybody engaged. Otherwise, the whole thing starts to fall apart. So what you do for that is very different than when you're trying to get one person who's sleepy or hungover to pay attention to you.Link

LubaSo you are a very magnetic and animated speaker — public speaker, speaker one-on-one. How did you get to be as good as you are?Link

JulianWell, thank you. I don't think I am, to some extent, but I think that's also because you always see your own flaws better than maybe other people do. I think that's just reps, right?Link

Somebody was talking to me about building ODF and what that experience was like. And maybe the people who are watching this don't really know what ODF is. ODF is a community for people who are exploring starting companies. Historically, a large part of that community was about helping people find co-founders, and it still is — people still go and find co-founders. But I think that the biggest thing right now that's preventing people from getting started isn't co-founders. It's just a unique insight into the world and the courage to go out and do it. You can find co-founders along the way if you want. You could also just go and hire people. And if you have customers, that makes it really easy.Link

So the reason that I feel like ODF was a very unique and formative experience for me is because I got something that no one else could get. My co-founders were trying to build the business part of On Deck — going out there and trying to launch all sorts of other programs for people other than founders, and thinking about revenue and things like that, building the business side of it. And I was focused exclusively on helping people who were in the program — the founders or the founders-to-be — get started.Link

And the really cool thing was I got so many reps. 27 cohorts now, and thousands and thousands of people who are exploring starting companies. I got so many reps of seeing the things that worked and the things that didn't — with co-founders, with exploring idea spaces, problem spaces, with MVPs and distribution and getting customers and fundraising. So I got all of this experience that I just wouldn't have gotten anywhere else. You literally can't pay for that experience anywhere, right? You couldn't get that by working at a VC fund, because VCs are always talking to founders usually when they already have all this stuff figured out to some extent — or at least they pretend to when they're talking to VCs. Maybe the closest analog is YC. But other than that, there really isn't anything else like it.Link

So I got this unique experience of learning all these things, but also I had to communicate with lots of people. And we were talking about how everybody needs a different form of communication. That's kind of true for talking to lots of people. I had to figure out, this thing I said worked really well with this one founder, and I need to communicate in a different way with this other founder, because what I said the first time didn't resonate at all. They didn't get it, or they didn't like it.Link

And I said "they didn't get it," but I think that the actual truth is that if you're the person who's communicating an idea, you're the one who's responsible for whether or not other people get the idea, right? I think it's Richard Feynman who had this idea that if you actually understood something, you could communicate it to pretty much anybody, from a four-year-old to an 84-year-old. And I think there's something to be said about that. And the idea that you also need to do something different in how you actually communicate it to those people.Link

LubaDo you usually reflect back post-conversation with someone, to see what you did well and what you didn't? Or is it completely intuitive in the moment?Link

JulianWell, I think it's probably possible now, with transcription and video and stuff. But I usually am learning that in real time, right? Because learning it in real time is the thing that ultimately causes me to understand whether or not something is resonating. You can tell by somebody's facial expression: do they get it? Do they not get it? And again, it's on you as the communicator whether or not the person gets it. If they don't get it, that's your fault.Link

So I've spent a lot of time with people not getting the things that I'm saying, and I have to spend a lot more time on it as time goes on, with the new concepts that we're working on with Solo Founders. So it's an ongoing journey. But I do think that a lot of it comes down to reps. You just have to get your reps in. Otherwise, it's just really hard.Link

I think that a lot of the stuff that I did, though — interviewing people on stage at ODF events, interviewing people for admissions into ODF — ultimately helped me with interviewing people for the podcast, even though it's a completely different thing. I'm not interviewing them for admission to a program. I'm still thinking about how do I ask questions in a way to get me to the place that I'm trying to get with each person.Link

LubaAs a person who likes listening to and analyzing how someone communicates, one thing you're doing really well is that you're really great at bringing back things that you want to talk about. You've mentioned ODF multiple times. You mentioned Solo Founders multiple times, you mentioned the podcast. And I'm like, damn, Julian is so good at bringing the story back to what he really wants to talk about and cares about. And that's definitely a skill that I don't know if you've learned, or...Link

JulianWell, you know, what we need is more housing in San Francisco. No, no, no. I'm joking, because politicians are actually really good at that.Link

LubaYes.Link

JulianThey do it in an almost annoying way. Hopefully I don't come across that annoyingly. But I think there's something about politicians — when a reporter asks them a question on live TV, they pivot the answer back to what they really wanted to talk about, as if the question was something else. What I try and do is pivot the question towards me responding in a way that actually has something behind it, versus it's just some random opinion that I have. So when you say I bring back ODF or I bring back Solo Founders, my hope is not that people are like, "Oh, Julian's randomly routing us back to Solo Founders." It's, "Oh, Julian is sharing something related to Solo Founders, based off of the thing we're talking about in the conversation."Link

LubaNo, that's a really great skill. I really like it. Let's talk about startups. How did you get startup-pilled to begin with? So you went to music school. Who did you meet? Where did you find out that you wanted to be in tech? What happened?Link

JulianYeah. So like I said, the main reason that I went to Boston was to experience the opportunities of being in a big city, and that was a really big success. Because as soon as I got there, or pretty soon after, I learned about this initiative that I don't think actually worked at the high level, but it worked really well for me. It was this forum that somebody had set up, connecting MIT, MassArt — which is the visual arts school — Berklee, the music school, and then I think one other, maybe Emerson or something like that.Link

The thing that was really interesting about it was, I think a lot of people there were just generally open-minded, because they're like, "What is this forum for? What do we actually do?" And you started to learn a lot about the other schools that you probably wouldn't have gotten to know otherwise, unless you just happened to meet somebody at a party. But generally speaking, the MIT parties, the MassArt parties, all of these parties were pretty much insular, right? It was just that school. But this forum really created this bridge, and it was for the people who were actually interested in crossing the bridge. So I ended up meeting some people who were at MIT.Link

LubaWait, so what was the purpose of this forum?Link

JulianIt was essentially to collaborate on projects. The idea was maybe somebody who was doing something with technology would need somebody in the visual arts. People joke about Steve Jobs and technology and the humanities, but I think there's something to it. I think it's really true that you really should have people who are interested in the humanities working in technology, and vice versa. And ultimately, this was an instantiation of actually trying to create that bridge.Link

And it worked. I met people at MIT, I met people at MassArt. I did some videos. I did some music for people's animation projects. It was just really cool. I originally started working with some people on projects where they were looking for sound engineering and promotional videos and things like that for their startup idea. But then I met them and I said, "Wow, you really need a lot of help with pretty much everything other than the building." So I started helping them. Most of these things never went anywhere, but it was enough for me to realize, gee, okay, you don't need to be the person who's actually coding the project to be contributing to the project.Link

LubaWhy did you want to help all these people? Just to learn from them?Link

JulianOh, I don't know, I've just always been interested in lots of things. I mean, look, I played in a rock band, but I also sang classical music, you know? I was in theater and improv comedy. All this stuff to me is just forms of self-expression. So while I never started a lemonade stand or anything like that, I think that businesses are a form of self-expression — at least the best ones, right? Or people who are building audiences and creating things online, like YouTube or podcasts. I think the ones that people resonate with are ones where people feel like this is something that they're doing that's sincere to who they are and what they care about.Link

So for me, I was just interested in people who are working on anything that they cared about. And I thought there was something really cool about startups, in the sense that they could be used by a lot of people. Actually, I never thought about it this way before, but with a CD or a vinyl record, there were duplication costs for those things. But ultimately, once you digitize them, there weren't, right? Selling a song on Apple back in the day, or making it available for streaming on Spotify now, costs like nothing. So once you had the duplication costs go to zero, you could essentially have anybody, anywhere in the world, listen to a song.Link

And startups are kind of like that too, right? They're not like a small business where you have to be in a certain region of a certain part of a city to be able to go to a coffee shop. To experience a startup, or experience a song, you could be anywhere in the world, in theory. So that, to me, was something that was really cool about technology — that similar to music being something that could spread everywhere, so was software.Link

LubaI recently was having a conversation with Avichal Garg, who's a co-founder of Electric Capital, and he was also saying that startup founders are like artists, because they are trying to create their point of view in the world. It's a form of self-expression, where certain founders that are really successful had to be who they are to create the company that they're running, because it's an extension of them and their creativity and their ideas.Link

JulianI think that's true. And I would ask you, do you think that's true for all of the co-founders, or do you think that's mostly true for just the primary founder?Link

LubaI think it depends on your own personal values and desires. Because I'm sure that certain co-founders come together because they all have a similar point of view to express, and then they are synergistically expressing it together by complementing each other. Whereas some people want to be more in a support role, and they care about their craft, and maybe they don't care as much about how the thing is becoming an extension of their personality, because they trust the primary co-founder to do that.Link

JulianI think that's right. I think that the worst co-founder experiences are ones where there's a misalignment of expectation. And I think that the reality is, most co-founders do have a misalignment of expectation, or a misalignment of reality. Which is to say that in the best case with co-founders, either they have this thing where they all believe in the same thing — they're just super adamant adherents to some belief system, which is sort of the underlying thing that forms their business. That's really cool when that's the case. At other times, it's one person who's got a really, really strong point of view on the world, and the other person is just really happy to be working on the other person's thing. And usually it's the CTO who is the person who doesn't have the point of view, in that world, and the CEO who does. Not always, but often.Link

And that could work really well, as long as the CTO doesn't either have a crisis of confidence in the CEO, or they don't actually start to have their own points of view and want to try and drive them into the startup beyond their area of influence. I think that if you actually have one of those relationships — the positive side of the one person with the vision, or everybody who has this shared belief — I think that can be really successful.Link

I think that you and I have been around long enough that we've seen how infrequent those scenarios are. Usually it's something where the person ends up having this back-and-forth battle with, like, who's the actual CEO? Who's the person who drives the vision? We actually have really fundamental disagreements about what we should be working on, and who we should be working on it with, or what customers we should be serving, or even how we should think about growing and building the business. So those sorts of things really create a lot of issues.Link

And in my opinion, if you have one of those rare circumstances where you're super aligned, the co-founders are just this incredible match, then co-founders are great, and I'm a big fan of them, and I still am. Even though I'm a person who's focused on solo founders — I spent eight years helping people find co-founders. I think that the bar has just gotten so much higher for what a good co-founder should be. And I think that oftentimes the disaster that happens when the co-founder thing is wrong is just not worth it.Link

But back to what we were talking about with co-founders: I really think that if you have a strong point of view on the world — which you usually don't develop before making the company — it might make sense to just go and get started. And then maybe you find a co-founder along the way, because now you're more attractive as a company or as a person, because you've already started to make progress. People seek out momentum. Or you start to build the conviction that, hey, maybe I don't even need a co-founder. But I'm not anti-co-founder by any means.Link

LubaSo for someone listening who already has one or two co-founders that they're working with, what sorts of conversations should they have with each other and with themselves to figure out whether it's the right match?Link

JulianWell, I'll play off that exact scenario, and then I'll also give the scenario for people who haven't locked in with co-founders. I think that if you have any degree of uncertainty now, it's only going to become amplified over time. So you should address it sooner, before it becomes this further lingering thing.Link

And ultimately, when you talk to solo founders of successful companies, almost all of them had a period where they were actually exploring starting a company with somebody, and it just never ended up happening. It never materialized. Maybe it was months, or maybe it was half a year. But it's actually very common. So it's not like all of them just said, "I'm going solo from day zero and I'm not interested in co-founders." A lot of them really did look into it and consider it, and actually went pretty far with some people. So I just wanted to make that clear.Link

But if you're already into it with multiple co-founders, you just really want to make sure that everybody is aligned on what's going on. So I was just talking to a founder recently — a lot of founders hit me up because of the ODF thing and also because of Solo Founders, when they're having co-founder disputes. And they asked me, they said, "Hey, my co-founder won't leave. They don't want to build the business anymore, but they want to get a big payout." And I said, "Well, how long have you been working together?" A year and two months or something. And I said, "Well, how much do they want to get paid?" They said like 400K. And I was like, "Well, how much have you raised?" They're like, "$2 million."Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JulianIt's crazy. In some ways, it's like a robbery. And for one thing, there's actually no mechanism that this person had, in their case, to be able to get this person out of the company. And they effectively now need to take it to the investors and appeal to reason and to reputation, right? Because there's not actually anything that's going to prevent this person from just sticking around and refusing to leave. They don't have to be paid anymore. But it's just a messy situation.Link

And ultimately, a lot of companies have this happen. I'm sure you know people — maybe not the same situation, but it happens so frequently. And the reality is, it's avoidable, because usually you can tell. But I think a lot of people end up going for what I call co-founders of convenience, because they think that they need one. They think that investors maybe expect them to have one. They're worried about being lonely, all of that. But I think that, generally speaking, you just have to be really careful of that, because the downside is just so significant.Link

And just to be clear, some people are like, "Oh yeah, solo founders, they own 100% of their company." It's like, well, no, they don't. In fact, solo founders should be using their equity really strategically, because they should be giving more equity to their early employees than they would if they had co-founders. But if the big concern is about ownership percentages and whether or not people are going to actually earn their ownership — I've got news for you. Usually the companies don't actually get to a point where you're like, "Oh man, this company is doing phenomenally well. I'm really bummed I gave this person 50% of the company." Usually it's, "Oh man, the company is struggling really terribly. This person is not pulling their weight, and we're going to be worth nothing, and it's probably going to be because we don't get along," right? So that, in my opinion, is actually the biggest risk for companies. It's a champagne problem to have the company be worth billions of dollars and to have split it with co-founders who you feel dissatisfied with a few years in. But at least they got you to a place where the company is doing well.Link

LubaFor sure. So bringing it back to your journey: you were seeing startups as a form of self-expression. You wanted to help a bunch of startups out. How did you end up in San Francisco? Take me to why that happened.Link

JulianYeah. From Boston. So, long story short, I'll give you the quick stops. I started working on things on my own, because I realized, okay, I don't know how to code, but I could...Link

LubaSolo founder before Solo Founders.Link

JulianNo, no. I mean, I started working with other people, that sort of thing. But I went to hackathons and things like that in Boston. And I realized that, okay, if I can figure out how to communicate to people, if I can make things that get in front of people and get their attention, maybe I can actually build some software. And the answer is, I could, but I didn't really enjoy it. It wasn't the thing that I actually got the most fun from. Especially the debugging process of getting apps to actually function and not have the issues that would derail a user experience.Link

But I got to a point where I worked on a few things with a bunch of people. I started putting them online. And I think the coolest thing was — and I think this is why it's so important to put things out there into the world — the very first thing that I put online that was related to startups or software was this product called Bendigo. And essentially it was a very thin app built on top of the Dropbox API. And the premise was that if you were an artist, you could create a folder in Dropbox, and if you put music into that folder, it would then magically appear on this fan portal in a really beautiful way. So instead of just giving somebody a Dropbox, you give them a page, kind of like a Bandcamp page, or like a Linktree page. And if you had the login to it, because maybe you paid a subscription, you would actually be able to access this artist's behind-the-scenes footage, or demos.Link

LubaPatreon before Patreon.Link

JulianExactly. It was maybe a year or two before Patreon. So I put that out there. Again, I wasn't thinking this was going to necessarily be a venture-scale business or something, but I thought it was really cool. And it was solving something, or at least thinking about solving something, in the music industry.Link

But the really cool thing was, I posted it on Hacker News. I don't remember how I heard about Hacker News. I got no engagement at all, very little, except I got one email. And it was from a person who became a friend. His name is Aston. And he's like, "I love music. I'm a drummer, and I was employee number one at Dropbox."Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

Julian"I'd love to meet with you if you're in San Francisco," or maybe we got on a call. I forget the exact details of the email itself. But that was one of the first people that I met when I came out to San Francisco in tech. It was because I put this thing out into the world, and it just so happened that somebody who worked on the technology that I was using was interested in the same things that I was.Link

LubaAre you still in touch with him?Link

JulianYeah. Aston's awesome.Link

LubaWhat is he doing now?Link

JulianHe is far away from SF and tech right now. He's chilling. But he's worked on so many interesting things in music after Dropbox over the years. He's just a great person. Really a great musician as well.Link

And I think that was a cool thing to see — that you could put something out there into the world, have it actually not resonate with very many people, but it could resonate with the right people, right? So when we started Solo Founders — I'm doing the pivot thing here, and now I'm really conscious of it — we weren't trying to appeal to everybody, right? We were trying to put something out into the world that would resonate with some group of people. It didn't need to be a large group. We actually didn't even have space to accommodate that many people when we were getting started with it, because we only had room for about six. So ultimately, you don't have to worry about resonating widely. You just want to resonate deeply.Link

LubaSo is this what caused you to move to San Francisco?Link

JulianSo I moved to San Francisco after realizing how much I loved tech and startups. And I also came out here, and it's just a gorgeous place. I feel like a lot of people say really negative things about the city, and I really don't like that.Link

LubaAbout San Francisco.Link

JulianI mean, I think this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. And if somebody's watching this and they believe the headlines or the negativity, hopefully you'll watch some of these videos and see that it's generally a really beautiful place. It's one of the most incredible places I've ever been. I've been pretty fortunate to travel around the world a decent amount, and around America, and there's really no place like this.Link

LubaWhat do you like about San Francisco?Link

JulianI mean, I think the geography is incredible. I think it's just a very nice climate. I loved walking through Golden Gate Park. The first time I came here, it was just this mind-boggling experience. I started out at the Whole Foods area over in the Haight-Ashbury, and I walked all the way from there to the end of Golden Gate Park. If you've never been — it's a very long park. And you get to the end, and it's the ocean. And that was the first time that I'd ever been to the Pacific Ocean. Walking through Golden Gate Park and seeing these windmills at the end, and then it opens up and you're just at the ocean. It's just this phenomenal experience.Link

LubaIt feels like you've literally walked to the end of...Link

JulianThe end of the Earth, you know. They used to call it — I don't think they call it this anymore, but I heard about this...Link

LubaNo.Link

Julian...the edge of the Western world.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JulianYeah, they called it the edge of the Western world out there. And it's just really fantastic. And Golden Gate Park has so many things in there that you would have never... I'm not even going to give you spoilers. For people who are watching this, there's so many things you'll just stumble upon in Golden Gate Park that will blow your mind. All sorts of really cool things that most people who live here aren't even aware of. But if you just walk, and you don't try and stick to one particular path, and you just wander, you'll see so many amazing things.Link

LubaWait, what are some things? Tell me.Link

JulianI mean, the one that's somewhat obvious, on a major path, is there's bison in Golden Gate Park.Link

LubaOh, yes.Link

JulianYeah. And it blows people's minds when they see it. It blew my mind when I saw it.Link

LubaLike real bison?Link

JulianReal bison. Yeah.Link

LubaOh, I thought you were talking about a statue, because I think there's a statue.Link

JulianNo, no, they have an entire field full of them.Link

LubaWow.Link

JulianAnd they're pretty majestic creatures.Link

LubaThat's great.Link

JulianAnd it's just one of those things where you can see stuff like that, and all sorts of other things you just would have never predicted. It's just this incredible place.Link

And the thing I learned about Golden Gate Park after the fact is that it was all sand dunes originally. So literally everything you see there was put on the ground or put in the ground by a person. So if you think about San Francisco and technology, and I think art in general — you just put stuff out into the world, right? You can make something that really changes people's minds, changes people's hearts, resonates with them, changes the way that they work, changes the way that they think, changes the way that they interact with other people. And you can also change the way that their actual physical world is. And Waymo is a good example. But I would argue that, at least for me, Golden Gate Park has had just as big an impact on my life as Waymo has.Link

So the people who designed and built Golden Gate Park — which is always an ongoing process, too. It's not something that is ever done. Golden Gate Park is constantly reinventing itself. That sort of thing to me is a miracle in a way, right? You actually create this incredible environment for people to experiment and learn about things and experience things. And people can put on different events inside of there. People can have first dates. They can go and meet old friends. There's all sorts of things that can happen in this space that you create. And knowing that Golden Gate Park started out literally as sand dunes — it was the most barren place, and now it's this thriving, incredible place with every kind of tree imaginable. It's just wonderful. And I think it's a really inspiring lesson. And it kind of makes you think about what San Francisco is all about in the first place. Maybe even what life is about, right?Link

LubaYeah. Now I want to go to Golden Gate Park.Link

JulianWe need to do an interview at Golden Gate Park.Link

LubaYou should. Yeah. I haven't been in a while, but I agree with you that San Francisco has so much beauty in it, even just the landscape. Yesterday I interviewed someone in Tiburon, and I was like, wow, I didn't know Tiburon had such an insane view. There's the Golden Gate, there's San Francisco itself, you could almost see Alcatraz. It's crazy.Link

JulianI host a running club. And one thing that we do is we run the Golden Gate Bridge. And most people who are visiting from out of town, this is their first time ever being on the Golden Gate Bridge, and they cannot believe that it's a four-mile run round trip. It's really long, actually. And also they're blown away by how steep it is. It's actually got quite a curve to it, quite an arc.Link

And then another thing is we host a run out on Angel Island, which is this gorgeous island in the middle of the bay, and you can see everything from there. And again, I think that taking people to these places and showing them these places is so important, because it allows them to really fall in love with the city. I think there's a lot to love about the things that we work on in the city. But I think that we also want people to actually love the place that they live, not just the things that are happening there.Link

LubaSo I see a lot of parallels coming to On Deck, and the story of founding On Deck, with your love for community, your love for showing people around and creating an intentional space and experience, your love for startups and seeing people have a point of view and realize it in the world. How did you end up starting On Deck?Link

JulianYeah. I mean, it was pretty organic. I think there was probably some point where we realized that On Deck was not just a community, but was actually a business.Link

LubaAnd who was "we" at that time?Link

JulianSo this is my co-founders, David and Erik.Link

LubaHow did you end up getting connected?Link

JulianSo I met Erik through Product Hunt a long time ago. And then I met David through Erik. And I think that he probably met Erik through Product Hunt as well. We started out working on this — it was an idea that Erik had. He started the community. We started the business together. And the business was ODF and a bunch of other things that we built since then, ODF being the founders program.Link

But the whole concept of On Deck at the time was, how do we help more people start great companies? And that's really the through line of what I'm working on today with Solo Founders. But the whole idea of how do we help more people start great companies was, we should get them all in the same room when they're in the exploration phase.Link

LubaYeah. Well, I'll tell you about the idea from my perspective, because I was in the first On Deck. I heard about On Deck from a friend of mine who knew Erik, and I was still working at Airbnb. I kind of was thinking that, okay, soon enough, I'm going to be ready to take the leap. And On Deck was very anonymous at the time. It was like, oh, you'll join the program, the community is off the record. We're not going to tell anyone, we're not going to tell your employer that you're...Link

JulianStill doing that.Link

LubaOh, you still do that?Link

JulianOf course. Yeah.Link

LubaWow.Link

JulianWe're not emailing employers.Link

LubaOkay. But I feel like it was more anonymous back then, where people weren't really boasting the fact that they were in ODF.Link

JulianThat's true. I think that's true. I think that people at that point — well, one, I think that because ODF has a reputation now, people actually are excited about telling people, right? Versus then, nobody fucking knew what this was, right? It wasn't a thing that people had heard of. People didn't know that people had started great companies and met their co-founders through ODF.Link

LubaYeah, that's true. But it was awesome. It was a hundred people. It was in person. And to me — because it was about eight months before I left to take the leap of faith to become a founder — it was very instrumental to get the courage to actually leave my job and start thinking about ideas. Because I saw some people a couple of steps ahead of me who were already tinkering, who already left, and it gave me a clear path for what I need to do, and what types of things I need to figure out before doing that. And once I do that, how do I go about ideas? And the people were really awesome.Link

JulianThey are. Yeah. I mean, the whole premise of this was, how do we help more people get started? And I think that you hit the nail on the head. It wasn't necessarily about finding co-founders — that was a part of it. It was just giving people the ability to see other people making progress, and have other people, so they weren't lonely, right? And ultimately, we did think that one of the big things that was a constraint for people was finding co-founders. So we ended up doing a lot of that, helping people with co-founders. But at the same time, that's only one of the things that holds people back from getting started. I think some of it's just having the courage and not feeling like you're the only person.Link

Even in San Francisco — everybody's starting companies, ostensibly. But at the same time, if you work at a relatively large company — it doesn't need to be Google, but it could be Airbnb or something like that — you probably know some people who are starting companies, but not a ton. So you're like...Link

LubaThat has changed a lot, because I feel like everyone is starting now, I think.Link

JulianI think it's changed now. But I'm talking about back in the day. When you knew people at Airbnb, you knew some people who were starting companies, but a lot of people were working at the job, right? And they liked it, and they weren't planning on leaving.Link

So at that time, it was really about creating a space where you could see, oh, wow, okay, I'm not the only one who's leaving to start a company or thinking about it. There were a lot of people. And I remember how much we would celebrate when people would quit their jobs. I think in your group it was Jonas. He quit his job at Facebook, and that was just such a big moment, because I remember the whole Slack group chat lit up. Everybody was so happy, celebrating him leaving his job. And I think that's just such a special thing, and something that we don't see very often, where people actually celebrate somebody quitting something, versus celebrating somebody starting something. He didn't even announce that he was starting something, right? He just quit his job so he could go full time on exploring it.Link

So I think that, in my mind, one of the big things that was really special was it was a time when fewer people were leaving their jobs to start companies. I think now we actually have quite a few people who are leaving their jobs to start companies. So that's a little bit...Link

LubaThat's an expected thing.Link

JulianI think it's pretty expected. I do think, though, that right now a lot of people are still thinking that co-founders are an important thing, or thinking that they should start a company with their coworkers. I think that, generally speaking, one of the biggest failures that people make is they assume that a relationship they had in some capacity might actually be similar to the relationship that they would have in another. So, for instance, you think that working with somebody as a coworker will translate well to being co-founders. Or somebody that you knew in college — you'll make good co-founders. The answer is maybe, maybe not, right? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. But I think that too often people are hopeful, and I think they're hopeful because they think that they really need it.Link

LubaSo it's interesting, because you started On Deck with co-founders, and now you're a solo founder yourself. When you were starting On Deck, were you hopeful that this relationship would end up being, you know, once and forever? Or was that...Link

JulianIt's a good question. I would say that I don't really know if we knew, right? I don't know if we thought it through, if we really thought, are we going to work together long term? I think that we hoped we would, to some extent.Link

I also think that, as time goes on, I'm actually a really big fan of believing that co-founders aren't forever things, right? I think that co-founders have seasons. People have seasons in their lives, and it makes sense to maybe co-found with somebody — and we worked together for much longer than a year or two — but if it works really well for a year or two, and then it sort of runs its course, I think that you can actually end it really cleanly and in a positive way. But you have to be really mature with each other, and also be honest about it. And I think that, to our credit, we were really good at understanding when it made sense for one person to leave and go and do other things and all that.Link

But I think that's actually one of the biggest opportunities. I think that if people believe that they need to have the co-founders working together forever, and it's an absolute failure, and the only reason it could not happen is because something went wrong — I think that's probably a bad thing to have as a perception. And they've earned their equity at that point, also, vesting this far, right?Link

So in our case, I don't know if I actually thought, okay, these are people I'm going to be building with for the next 20 years. But they're people that I really enjoyed working with, and I think that they're doing great things at a16z. And in my world, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. And I realized that I felt like I had unfinished business with this company. We tried a lot of things. We'd done a lot of really interesting things with community. And for me, I had started investing in companies sort of in parallel to On Deck growing into something more than a founders community, because we did all these other things for all sorts of people. And I just realized that I really liked working with founders, and I really liked the closeness that I had with these people.Link

And I just really wanted to find a way to build something that was authentic to me. I think that in a lot of ways, On Deck the community was started by Erik, and On Deck the company was started by the three of us. But I also think that while we definitely added things, each of us, in some ways it was a thing where we were all adding our piece, so therefore it wasn't anyone's thing. And I wanted to try and do something that was really a reflection of who I was. And I think that Solo Founders has really been my opportunity to do that, because it was something I came up with, without co-founders. It's something that I've built an incredible team around, who are bringing their own ideas and visions to it. But the initial seed of it was an idea that I had that I wanted to see in the world. And I wanted to do it a certain way.Link

When it came to examining what would be next, I said, well, we've already demonstrated that ODF is a way to solve for the constraint on co-founders in creating new companies. But is that the same constraint that we're facing today? Is that actually the main problem in the world right now? It's kind of like if somebody built Dropbox, right? And Dropbox is ubiquitous in terms of being able to share files. And then somebody says, five years later, "Okay, I'm going to solve a problem: file sharing." It's like, well, maybe — or you have to think about what's the next problem in the world, right?Link

And for us, the next problem in the world was very much, okay, what's the next thing that's preventing people from starting great companies? And in my opinion, it was this belief that you actually needed to have co-founders. And the reason that I actually felt that way is because I started to see these anomalies — I call them oddballs — these people who were starting companies solo within ODF. And we talked to them before they joined the community. Celine Halioua from Loyal. Another person that I worked with over the years is John Andrew from Wander. There are these people who would start companies, and they were not looking for co-founders. And I was like, what is going on with that? That's unusual, right?Link

LubaWere they not looking for co-founders at all?Link

JulianNot at all. Not at all from the get-go. And in Celine's case, she had this incredible supporter, Laura Deming. She was the chief of staff to Laura at the Longevity Fund. So she had this person who was really in her corner.Link

LubaI have a conversation with her coming out in two days.Link

JulianNice. Laura?Link

LubaYeah, Laura.Link

JulianAmazing. That's great.Link

So I think there was something about this idea that you can build great companies solo, that was starting to percolate in my mind for a while. And I also was just getting sort of annoyed with the fact that this was something that was holding people back from getting started. And we started to see, with all these products coming out that made it easier to build things, that maybe this co-founder thing wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Or maybe it was at one time, but it just wasn't as important now, right?Link

There used to be this — you might not even remember this, but I can just remember this. I was just old enough to remember.Link

LubaWhat?Link

JulianI was really young. People used to have phones that were specifically for their car.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JulianI think I was maybe three years old. I remember this. People would have a phone that had — you remember on TV shows, you see there's a cord...Link

LubaThe big antenna. Oh, yes.Link

JulianYeah. It's literally a phone that was in a car. And it's like, well, once you have the cell phone, you don't need the phone in the car, right? So once you have AI, and once you have this technology, do you need a co-founder? I would say the co-founder is probably closer to the car phone, and the solo founder is closer to the cell phone.Link

But again, the only caveat I would give is that I do think that if you can actually find an amazing co-founder, it's truly a situation that is worth strongly considering. But most people end up with bad co-founders, co-founders of convenience. And I think that's actually the thing that's really bad. So as long as you can avoid that, and you have a really great co-founder, it could be good.Link

LubaBut yeah. If Solo Founders is an art project, tell me how it is representing you. How is it an extension of you?Link

JulianWell, look, I think that, to an extent, I like working with people. I love working with people. I also like having an idea and being the person who's driving that idea. And I also think about it from the music perspective. It's like if somebody writes a song, right? But there's a band that's involved in playing the song. There are so many people who are contributing ideas to the song. It's not like the person who wrote the song came up with the drum part, right? Or came up with the bass part. So I think there's something really nice about this idea, if you actually think about it from that perspective. There's lots of space to fill in the sound with other people, with other people's ideas, with other people's talents. But at the same time, the core of the song was created by, in often cases, one person. So that's kind of how I think about it. I really like being the songwriter, but I love playing with other people.Link

LubaWhat genre would you put Solo Founders in, if it was a song?Link

JulianHuh. Well, I think that some of the best things can actually work in all sorts of formats. So ideally, Solo Founders is something where we can bring in lots of different people with lots of different skills, lots of different styles and textures, and they can contribute to that in a really meaningful way.Link

If you think about jazz music, it's actually a really interesting parallel here, which is that if you type a popular jazz standard into Spotify, you can hear 100 different versions of the same song. And it's so dependent not just on the person who's leading the band, but everybody who's playing in that band. So, for instance, if you type in a song like "Stella by Starlight" or something, and you look at the Bill Evans Trio playing it, it's going to sound quite different depending on who's playing bass and drums on the various recordings of it. Or if it's being played with a quintet, and it's got some really hot horns on it.Link

So I think the one thing that's really interesting is that if you can create something that allows people to bring their energy or their talents to it, you actually have a great song that has lots of room for improvisation and for expression from all of the people.Link

And I acknowledge that this is because I'm not quite as sophisticated in this area, but one thing that I don't love quite as much is with orchestral music — it is so strictly written in terms of how the music can be played. I don't think it necessarily allows a ton of self-expression from each individual who's playing it. I know that people in classical music will disagree with me, so I'm not here to quibble with them. I just feel like, compared to that, jazz music has a lot more range in terms of what each person can bring to it. And for me, that's something that I find really, really inspiring and fun about playing with other people, when it comes to building startups.Link

LubaSo when you're making a parallel with jazz, are you referring to each person on the Solo Founders team having an opportunity to self-express, or are you also referring to the founders in the cohort?Link

JulianSo both, actually. In terms of building a business, I really like the idea of giving people the ability to really improvise and play their own instrument the way that they want to play it, in a way that fits in within the whole cohesive group.Link

The other thing, though, is when it comes to people who are actually working on their own ideas and their own companies, it's similar, in that I think that solo founding has a very different opportunity set when it comes to making decisions. When you co-found, I think that there are a lot of decisions that are kind of decided for you, based on the fact that you've already split your company two or three ways. It really constrains your ability to think about how you hire people, when you hire people, how you think about fundraising, all of that, how you think about exits. All of those things are very driven by the fact that you have co-founders. The types of decisions that you can make change once you've decided that you're going to be a solo founder.Link

That ability to have — it's not just control, but actual areas to paint on the canvas in a different way. Because not having only 33% of your company, or only 50% of your company, means you have so much opportunity to do great things and creative things with your company that you couldn't have done otherwise. And I think too often people think about equity in terms of how much their equity is worth, versus it's somewhat of a finite pool that you could use to actually bring about what you want in a different way.Link

LubaWhen you were observing Celine from Loyal, for instance, up close, building her company, what are some things that you were really inspired by, seeing her run the company solo?Link

JulianWell, I mean, the thing that I'm most inspired by with Celine is — you talk about storytellers — I think she's probably one of the best storytellers that I've ever met. Because this is a person who I think started the company when she was like 22 or 24 or something like that. I'm terrible with numbers, but somewhere along those lines. She's a solo founder, right? She has some experience in the biotech world through being a chief of staff at the Longevity Fund. She went to school for something relevant. But relatively speaking, it's pretty early on in your career to be building something quite as ambitious as a dog longevity company that ultimately could be a human longevity company.Link

And I think the thing that I found so inspiring about her, and still do, is the way that she speaks so practically about extremely ambitious and seemingly difficult things. And by speaking about them in this way, it actually means that she is so much more likely to get people to believe that it's possible, right?Link

So I'll never forget, I was having her do user testing for this app I was building for the ODF community, and the app was not working on her phone or something. It was a really embarrassing moment. And I was talking to her. I said, "So what's been going on?" And she said, "Oh, you know, I'm just putting together this round for Loyal" — or it was called Cellular Longevity at the time. And the way she talked about extending dogs' lives, and this being an avenue to potentially extend the lives of maybe humans in the future — the way she said it, it was like, wow. If another person were talking about it, it would sound fantastical and pie in the sky and improbable, and maybe like bullshit or snake oil. But the way she said it, it sounded like it was practical. It was reasonable. It was likely to happen, and she was going to make it happen.Link

And it was some combination of her applying her personality to this business. But I think that's oftentimes what makes great companies — the person who's building them. You mentioned another guest on your podcast who talked about how it feels like a form of self-expression, or almost the only thing that they could be making. And I think there's really something to be said about that. I just really, really think that you're right. And I think that's exactly how I think about it when I think about her. She just talked about the future in such a compelling way, I just knew that it was going to happen. And she's done everything that she said and much more, in an absurdly short span of time.Link

LubaThat's incredible. I thought it was curious that you posted the "In Pursuit of Greatness" video on X. Why that video? What resonates with you in it? And for context, for anyone listening, it's a speech that Salomé did about the fact that he's just in pursuit of greatness. That's kind of the TL;DR.Link

JulianI think that very often people are insincere in one of two ways. I think they're either insincere about not wanting something — this is sometimes something that happens in the music industry. When I was in school for music, I knew a lot of musicians. I still know a lot of musicians. I feel like there's some subset of musicians who actually look at fame and success as something they want to try and pretend that they're not interested in.Link

And then on the other side of it, there are people who say that they want to be great. They say they want to do something. And I think that they just say that because they think that it's the thing to say. And I think that this is especially true for folks who are trying to do something in a status-driven industry. And startups have become really cool. So therefore, I think that a lot of people just want to be good at startups, not because they actually want to build something or make something special, but because they want to be thought of as high status.Link

So anyways, I thought that there was just something really sincere about the way that he said it, and it felt really authentic to me. And I hope that people don't look at that and think, "Oh, you need to be great in a certain area." I think it's more like, if you want to be great at something, make sure that it's actually the thing you want to be great at. Not something that your parents want you to be great at, not something that your friends want you to be great at — something that you actually really, truly resonate with. And that to me is the essence of it. This is a guy who's grinded it out a lot to try and make something really special, and try and make things that resonate with people and that resonate with himself and feel authentic to him. And I think that's something that we should all strive for in whatever our pursuits are.Link

LubaI was talking to Spenser Skates from Amplitude, and he was like, "Oh, you need to be honest with yourself about what you want and why you want it." And I think that's so true. We all need to do a little bit of introspection to figure out the what and the why, to then be in pursuit of that thing, to live a fulfilling life for ourselves.Link

JulianYeah, I agree with that.Link

LubaWhat do you feel like you're optimizing for in this chapter of your life and career?Link

JulianI'm optimizing for how many people I can positively impact, when it comes to them working on something that they feel is truly an expression of who they are.Link

LubaJulian, we're going to wrap up with a few quick lightning round questions.Link

JulianLet's do it.Link

LubaIf I were to shadow you for a day, what would be the thing that I'd be most surprised about?Link

JulianI love to start the morning jumping into the bay or into the ocean.Link

LubaOh, okay.Link

JulianSo I really like that, and I do it as often as possible. Well, now I'm trying to do it every day.Link

LubaDo you drive up to the bay?Link

JulianI usually bike. But yeah, or Uber or whatever. The other thing is, I try to read or see movies I like as often as possible.Link

LubaWhat's a book that you love that you reread?Link

JulianOh, that's a good question. Well, I do love books that change meaning as you get older. So I'm 36. I tend to read *A Christmas Carol* every year around Christmas. I've read *To Kill a Mockingbird* a handful of times. Probably the first time when I was five or something, and probably the most recent time maybe at 32. I think that's had a lot of impact on me, because *To Kill a Mockingbird* has characters that are all these different ages. I think the youngest character was about five years old. The brother is maybe in his teens. And then the father. And you have different relationships with all these different people as you grow. So I think that was a good one to me. I love it when you can come back to something and it means something different to you throughout your life.Link

LubaAnd what's your life philosophy in one sentence?Link

JulianI don't really like trying to contain myself to things like that, you know. Maybe that's a life philosophy. Yeah, I think that's it. You shouldn't try to put yourself in a box. I think it's more like, can you really condense life down to a single sentence? At least for me, I would find it really hard.Link

And I think that the main thing I really care about is going out there and learning as much as possible and helping people, and feeling like I have contributed something. But I don't know if that's a life philosophy. I also think that the more that I read, or the more that I see, or the more that I hear, the more that changes how I think about things and how I weigh things. So maybe it's just, don't stop. Just keep going. Actually, that would be it. If I had to do two words, it would be "keep going."Link

LubaI love it. Julian, thank you so much for your time.Link

JulianIt's been awesome. Thank you.Link