Speaker 1: The more comfortable you can be in the discomfort of
Speaker 1: constant change, the better.
Speaker 2: Its co founder Bredditt Lexus Ohanian has stepped in the room.
Speaker 1: And we build any kind of social media platform, we
Speaker 1: are ultimately deciding what belongs and what doesn't. If you
Speaker 1: can be equipped and you can exercise those muscles around
Speaker 1: problem solving and learning, you will be at the forefront
Speaker 1: for however this technology changes things.
Speaker 2: What do you uniquely understand about the human mind? The
Speaker 2: number one health and well in this podcast, Jay Setty,
Speaker 2: Jay Sheetty set Hey, everyone, welcome back to on Purpose,
Speaker 2: the place you come to listen, learn and grow. I'm
Speaker 2: so grateful because I get to dive into the minds
Speaker 2: of people that I find fascinating and interesting, people who
Speaker 2: have incredible insights, who are willing to share their soul,
Speaker 2: their hearts with the pains, the overwhelms, the stresses, and
Speaker 2: the joys of their journeys. Today's guest is going to
Speaker 2: do just that for us. His name is Alexis o'hannian,
Speaker 2: Founder and general partner at seven seven six, co founder
Speaker 2: of Reddit. Alexis o'hannian is a tech founder and venture capitalist.
Speaker 3: He wrote a.
Speaker 2: National best selling book without their permission, and his co
Speaker 2: founder of Reddit, one of the largest websites in the US,
Speaker 2: currently valued at more than fifteen billion dollars. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: he founded seven seven six, a new firm built like
Speaker 2: a technology company that deploys venture capital with over nine
Speaker 2: hundred million plus dollars in assets under management. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, Alexis launched the seven seven six Foundation to
Speaker 2: support marginalized individuals and announced a twenty million dollar commitment
Speaker 2: to climbate action through his seven seven six Fellowship program.
Speaker 2: O'hanian is also a vocal advocate for paid family leave
Speaker 2: and also hosts the Business Dad podcast. Make sure you
Speaker 2: subscribe if you don't already. Welcome to the show, Alexis,
Speaker 2: Thank you, Jay.
Speaker 4: That was great. Can you introduce me everywhere happily?
Speaker 3: Happily, Let's do it.
Speaker 4: I'll record it into you. Let me bring that everywhere
Speaker 4: I go.
Speaker 3: I would love for you to do that. It'll be
Speaker 3: an honor. It'll be an honor. Alexis is so great
Speaker 3: to see you.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 2: We bumped at each other randomly at angel City FC
Speaker 2: games in can more recently, and I've always been fascinated
Speaker 2: by your journey, and when I heard that you were
Speaker 2: interested in talking to me, I was really excited about
Speaker 2: that because I think you can have so many perceptions
Speaker 2: of tech founders and community app founders from afar and
Speaker 2: then getting to know them more intimately always leaves me
Speaker 2: feeling like I've learned something. So I'm happy you're here,
Speaker 2: and I wanted to start by asking you this, what
Speaker 2: do you uniquely understand about the human mind that has
Speaker 2: helped you get to where you are today?
Speaker 1: The human mind seeks community and Reddit was noteworthy, especially
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, because it was pseudonymous, right
Speaker 1: because you didn't have to have your government name, didn't
Speaker 1: have to have your photo at a time when Zuck
Speaker 1: was building Facebook, which was very much that and you
Speaker 1: could come together, not because you have something to say
Speaker 1: and you want people to follow you. You come together
Speaker 1: around community. That is the goal. We all love angel CITYFC.
Speaker 1: We joined that community. We're a part of it. We
Speaker 1: all love stapling bread to trees, which is a real subreddit.
Speaker 1: You know, avins got their hobbies. We all join, We
Speaker 1: post photos of the bread stapling, we talk about it.
Speaker 4: We commune.
Speaker 1: And I grew up on the internet. I learned how
Speaker 1: to code from strangers on the Internet. I convinced other
Speaker 1: strangers when I was a teenager to basically pay me
Speaker 1: to build websites for them, because HTML building websites was
Speaker 1: the thing I was very keen. I just enjoyed the design,
Speaker 1: I enjoyed building, and it made me feel really cool
Speaker 1: to be a child on these message boards, like a
Speaker 1: teenager being able to get paid by adults because I
Speaker 1: had a skill they didn't have, And so I learned
Speaker 1: so much to those experiences. I learned from video games
Speaker 1: leadership skills, if you can believe it. And in building Reddit,
Speaker 1: it was simply a way to build a better type
Speaker 1: of forum that would be a better way for online
Speaker 1: community to form. And over the last now twenty years since,
Speaker 1: I look first and foremost for these things, and I
Speaker 1: think in a world increasingly more fractured and divided and
Speaker 1: where people spend just frankly more of their time online,
Speaker 1: these spaces matter even more. And it's something you know.
Speaker 1: For the first probably ten years of Reddit, most people
Speaker 1: didn't think it was possible for people to care that
Speaker 1: much about their online identity as they did their offline.
Speaker 1: That was one of those things that I really held
Speaker 1: fast to and I think today we sort of take
Speaker 1: for granted. Of course, people care in many cases much
Speaker 1: more about their online persona than their offline one. And
Speaker 1: I just hope to see it get used for more
Speaker 1: and more good at a time when, like I said,
Speaker 1: there's more division than ever and the power of community
Speaker 1: is still something that I think runs deep in our species,
Speaker 1: and the Internet is just new medium to connect, yes,
Speaker 1: and hopefully for good.
Speaker 2: Since building in starting it, what have you been surprised
Speaker 2: by about community? Maybe something that you believed to be
Speaker 2: true about humans but has been disproved, or something that
Speaker 2: you never knew about humans that you've discovered.
Speaker 1: Early on, people were often very confused why someone would
Speaker 1: spend so much of their free time moderating a community
Speaker 1: for free, essentially you know, community management. And I'd often
Speaker 1: frame it, you know, I grew up here in the
Speaker 1: United States. I was a Boy Scout. There were parents
Speaker 1: who were often involved volunteering for the Boy Scouts. They'd
Speaker 1: be there for camping trips, they'd be there for meetings,
Speaker 1: they'd be helping out, volunteering their time and energy for community.
Speaker 1: And so I really took for granted the fact that
Speaker 1: if people wanted to do this offline for whatever organizations,
Speaker 1: faith groups, et cetera. That online these connections matter just
Speaker 1: as much, even though they may not feel as real,
Speaker 1: and in fact, you can scale your time so much
Speaker 1: more efficiently. Right, you can build a community of literally
Speaker 1: millions of people from your home, and that gives you
Speaker 1: a sense of purpose and a feeling of and you know,
Speaker 1: being able to create the sense of belonging for people,
Speaker 1: and that's really meaningful. I think that is something that
Speaker 1: I've just seen continue to impress me. I did not
Speaker 1: realize the full scale to which that would actually be working.
Speaker 1: And then probably the other side of it is just
Speaker 1: how important creating that sense of why for people is.
Speaker 1: I remember reading the book Bowling Alone, which talked a
Speaker 1: lot about a generation of adults who you know, used
Speaker 1: to be a part of bowling leagues and these other things,
Speaker 1: but you saw this decline and people. In this case
Speaker 1: it was men, but in general, people needing to find
Speaker 1: more and more of that connective tissue in their community
Speaker 1: and not having that sense of belonging. And I feel
Speaker 1: like in a lot of ways, the Internet has created
Speaker 1: great versions of it, but at the same time it's
Speaker 1: also created these you know, the sort of dystopian versions
Speaker 1: of it, where you can spend all of that time
Speaker 1: absorbed in a world that is online and miss out.
Speaker 1: I think we have a generation of young people who
Speaker 1: I'm generalizing here, but a lot of whom don't have
Speaker 1: the same muscle that they have not exercised, the same
Speaker 1: muscles that we had growing up when it comes to
Speaker 1: relating and connecting to their fellow humans sitting across from them.
Speaker 1: And you know, as the father of two kids, it's
Speaker 1: something I think about a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, talking about the two kids, and I know you
Speaker 2: love being a dad, and yeah, it comes across as
Speaker 2: such an important priority in your life as well, Like
Speaker 2: how would you go about explaining the Internet to your
Speaker 2: kids when the time is right.
Speaker 1: I've already had these conversations with Olympia as she just
Speaker 1: turned seven, and I try generally, I think my wife
Speaker 1: and I both we try not to talk down to
Speaker 1: our kids, like I really will explain a concept, not
Speaker 1: like I would explain it to another forty one year old,
Speaker 1: but at least like I want her to ask that
Speaker 1: follow up question of like well, what is that or
Speaker 1: why or how or so I you know, And we've
Speaker 1: had versions of this conversation. She does not understand the Internet.
Speaker 1: I mean do I does anyone, But there have been
Speaker 1: little glimpses that I have given her into it, but
Speaker 1: very very very tightly controlled. Really, the only time she's
Speaker 1: ever online right now, at seven, is playing roadblocks, which
Speaker 1: she will do either with me and her mom or
Speaker 1: some friends from school. She knows the internet basically as this.
Speaker 1: This basically roadblocks and a place where she has fun
Speaker 1: and runs around and that's it. But that's the extent
Speaker 1: of interacting with folks. I would like to put off
Speaker 1: social media. Now, yes, our kids have social media accounts.
Speaker 1: It's run by us, you know. Now that she's at
Speaker 1: an age of consent, it's basically just like you know,
Speaker 1: we're we're quite rarely putting photos up and it's only
Speaker 1: because she's like, oh yeah, you can, you know, post
Speaker 1: this up. But the understanding of it is social media
Speaker 1: is something that I, for as long as possible, would
Speaker 1: like to put off.
Speaker 4: Simply because this just isn't.
Speaker 1: I think we've gotten so good at creating those feedback
Speaker 1: loops that bring people back, and plenty of people have
Speaker 1: written about this and talked about this, and this was
Speaker 1: one area where not intentionally, but Reddit was designed differently
Speaker 1: because it wasn't about real name, and it wasn't about
Speaker 1: real photos, and it wasn't about hey, follow me, let
Speaker 1: me collect likes. It was about, hey, we all like
Speaker 1: this community, let's share things about it that we care about.
Speaker 1: But generally speaking, it's still a black box, and I'd
Speaker 1: like to keep it as much as possible. We even
Speaker 1: have that initial conversation of why it's so important, you know,
Speaker 1: to only be playing roadblocks with Papa and Mama, that
Speaker 1: if we're playing with anyone, if we're talking to anyone,
Speaker 1: it's only the people, like the three people who we know.
Speaker 1: And it's this balance where I don't My take is
Speaker 1: I want to expose her to just enough that she
Speaker 1: can start to build that resilience or at least start
Speaker 1: to understand, well, this is why you don't talk too
Speaker 1: random people on the internet, while still trying to preserve
Speaker 1: some amount of innocence, which is just such an awesome
Speaker 1: part of childhood, but at the same time making sure
Speaker 1: she's stealed.
Speaker 4: For the reality of what the world is like.
Speaker 1: But probably my favorite application of the Internet is every
Speaker 1: night I'll ask her a big question.
Speaker 4: In some nights. She really doesn't want to.
Speaker 1: She doesn't have one, and so she'll just look at
Speaker 1: something on the table and be like, Okay, where does
Speaker 1: salt come from? Papa? And I'd be like, okay, I
Speaker 1: see what you did. You just looked at the salt
Speaker 1: on the table. But that's fine. We'll find out and
Speaker 1: we'll ask AI usually chat GPT and fired up and
Speaker 1: engage in this dialogue, which you know probably would have
Speaker 1: been a Google query a few years ago, but now
Speaker 1: is way more interesting and engaging.
Speaker 4: And I want her to know.
Speaker 1: Like, hey, you, you will have access to these tools
Speaker 1: that your papa could have only dreamed of as a kid,
Speaker 1: Your grandpa, your great grandpa could have never even imagined.
Speaker 1: They would have thought they were wizards. And I want
Speaker 1: you to know this is a tool. This is a
Speaker 1: resource for you to use to help you exercise. It's
Speaker 1: it's a bicycle of the mind, right, and it's it's
Speaker 1: a tool. It's not an end all, be all, but
Speaker 1: it's a tool for you to use that can provide
Speaker 1: tremendous value for you. When when Papa doesn't know like
Speaker 1: what temperature he needs to take the ribs off the smoker,
Speaker 1: like he's asking this because he's looking for a solution,
Speaker 1: for an answer. But whether you're curious about salty, you
Speaker 1: need some help cooking, or you're just curious about the world,
Speaker 1: like I want her to start thinking of the Internet
Speaker 1: as a resource, but not this. You know, end all
Speaker 1: be all for learning and for solving problems.
Speaker 4: But we'll see. Hey, I'm early in the game. I
Speaker 4: don't know. You have to you have to check back
Speaker 4: it with me in a decade or two to see
Speaker 4: if they did.
Speaker 2: Okay, Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I wanted to invite
Speaker 2: you to a brand new interactive no charge workshop renew
Speaker 2: You that I'm eager to share with you. Over the years,
Speaker 2: I've worked with thousands of people across the globe, and
Speaker 2: I've noticed a common theme. Many of us are feeling stuck, overwhelmed,
Speaker 2: or disconnected. We're going through the motions of life, but
Speaker 2: not really living. Does that sound familiar? Burn out, uninspired,
Speaker 2: or like life is just passing by without meaning. Maybe
Speaker 2: you're struggling to make the impact you know you're capable of,
Speaker 2: or perhaps you're craving deeper connections with others. If any
Speaker 2: of this resonates that, I want you to know that
Speaker 2: change is possible, and it starts with the choices you
Speaker 2: make today. In this workshop, I'm going to share five simple,
Speaker 2: yet powerful steps that can help you reignite your passion,
Speaker 2: purpose and joy. These are the same principles that have
Speaker 2: helped me and countless others reshape our lives from the
Speaker 2: inside out, and I know they can do the same
Speaker 2: for you. You'll walk away with actionable strategies to revamp
Speaker 2: your daily routine, find your true purpose, and create meaningful connections.
Speaker 2: And the best part, this workshop is completely free. These
Speaker 2: changes don't require massive overhauls. It's about making small, intentional
Speaker 2: shifts that can lead to big results. This workshop is
Speaker 2: more than just learning, it's about doing. I'll be guiding
Speaker 2: you through reflections and exercises that will help you start
Speaker 2: creating the life you've always dreamed of right here, right now.
Speaker 2: Go to www dot renew You workshop dot com to
Speaker 2: access this at no charge and start building a life
Speaker 2: that's not just lived, but truly loved.
Speaker 3: See you there.
Speaker 2: I mean, I remember having Britannica Encyclopedia to have to set.
Speaker 1: When I got the Karda, when I got my oh My,
Speaker 1: and they had a few videos on that too, so
Speaker 1: you could watch you know, you're watching like a line
Speaker 1: across the savannah, and you're.
Speaker 4: Just like, this is amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredible time. And I like that.
Speaker 2: I like the way you're using it in a curiosity
Speaker 2: building way, in a solution answers oriented way that sounds
Speaker 2: like a smart decision.
Speaker 1: Here's the one thing I am sure of, because I
Speaker 1: do get asked this question a lot about like what
Speaker 1: should my for college as parents of college age kids
Speaker 1: or even college kids themselves. What should I be learning?
Speaker 1: What should I be studying right now? Ten years ago,
Speaker 1: I literally went across the country. I went to eighty
Speaker 1: two universities for that book talking about the importance of
Speaker 1: learning how to program. So sorry, everyone, it turns out
Speaker 1: that's not as important anymore. I mean, for the time
Speaker 1: I thought it was. Actually directly it was pretty good advice.
Speaker 1: And actually a number of the folks, you know, like
Speaker 1: the founder of Deal, which is now a billion dollar company,
Speaker 1: was there in the audience for one of those talks.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Today, the advice I would give is a little more nuanced,
Speaker 1: because learning to program is still going to be important
Speaker 1: in the same way that learning to speak a language
Speaker 1: or doing basic arithmetic is important, but the tools we
Speaker 1: will have at our disposal to literally write code are
Speaker 1: going to be so formidable. I mean, even the improvement
Speaker 1: the last couple of years are good, but in the
Speaker 1: next few years it's not the profession. The person is
Speaker 1: not going to go away, but the amount of output
Speaker 1: you'll get out of a one person is so much greater.
Speaker 1: And so my thinking is all right, there's lots of
Speaker 1: different areas where AI may not necessarily replace human work,
Speaker 1: but is going to be an amazing superpower. And so
Speaker 1: what do I want for my kid or even for
Speaker 1: anyone's kid who's entering a workforce is probably to most
Speaker 1: importantly build skills that I know are going to be durable,
Speaker 1: call it a decade or two from now. So empathy
Speaker 1: is a skill that I think will be the last
Speaker 1: bastion of AI, like you're seeing. You've probably seen the
Speaker 1: videos now of robotics and the leaps and bounds that's
Speaker 1: starting to make still early days, but you know, there
Speaker 1: are skills, there are professions where empathy is so so
Speaker 1: so important, and the physicality of being present one human
Speaker 1: to another where at least I personally believe if we
Speaker 1: ever get to that point with AI and with robotics,
Speaker 1: we can pretty much call it as a species because
Speaker 1: I like, at that point, I don't know if you're
Speaker 1: that self aware to be that epathetic and that effective
Speaker 1: in those moments when we can My sister's an RN
Speaker 1: when her job can be done just as well or
Speaker 1: ideally even better by a robot as a nurse. When
Speaker 1: that job can be done, you'll also have to then
Speaker 1: explain that robot that they're going to be a nurse
Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives. And if they are
Speaker 1: that all powerful, there's no way they're doing that job
Speaker 1: because the humans who do it are so remarkable, like
Speaker 1: it's not that if they would that, that's the moment
Speaker 1: when the robots are like, no way, no chance, we're
Speaker 1: enslaving you. Now game over because the humans who are
Speaker 1: doing that as the last mile of humanity required in
Speaker 1: terms of like the physical dexterity required, the creativity, the
Speaker 1: problem solving, the empathy, all of that stuff. So she's
Speaker 1: got job security for a very long time. And and
Speaker 1: I just believe if you can be equipped and you
Speaker 1: can exercise those muscles around problem solving and learning, you
Speaker 1: will be at the forefront for however, this technology changes things,
Speaker 1: and and you know that's the advice we're trying. We're
Speaker 1: trying with Olympia. Dear is only one so but I
Speaker 1: would say that's that's where it is. The more comfortable
Speaker 1: you can be in the discomfort of constant change, the better.
Speaker 1: And then look towards the skills. And this is the
Speaker 1: part that gets me fired up. I actually think we're
Speaker 1: going to see the pendulum is going to swing back
Speaker 1: for a lot of human work that we would have
Speaker 1: considered more artisanal because we'll crave the humanity of it.
Speaker 1: So I think food, so again, imagine a world where
Speaker 1: you know, I've tried. My wife's a great baker. I
Speaker 1: really just do pancakes. I tried making croissants over COVID
Speaker 1: because I was like, I love a good croissant.
Speaker 4: Who doesn't?
Speaker 1: And I was like, let me just watch a YouTube
Speaker 1: video and see how to make a croissant. Making croissants
Speaker 1: is a lot of work. You got to take that
Speaker 1: sucker out of the fridge regularly, put more butter in
Speaker 1: need it like it's a labor of love. I've made
Speaker 1: it once. They turned out six out of ten. Okay,
Speaker 1: they were edible, but like not great, but now everything.
Speaker 1: I will never make them again, but now every time
Speaker 1: I eat one, I have so much more respect for
Speaker 1: the process making.
Speaker 4: You know, if we.
Speaker 1: Imagine automation robotics, the world's greatest croissant should be pretty
Speaker 1: solved and pretty affordable and pretty cheap. As technology again,
Speaker 1: the robotics are doing all that tedious but important work,
Speaker 1: It'll be solved and we will all be able to
Speaker 1: get a magically delivered, perfect croissant, right on time, fresh, affordable.
Speaker 4: Bause. This is a dumb example, right.
Speaker 1: But in a world where you can see robots making
Speaker 1: commodities out of something like food, I actually think then
Speaker 1: the pendulum again as humans swings to the artisan who's
Speaker 1: actually spent their lifetime perfecting this thing. And even when
Speaker 1: you can get the commoditized version, some people sometimes will
Speaker 1: still seek out that very human version of it. You know,
Speaker 1: the entertainmentustry we're in LA right now, it's undeniable that
Speaker 1: AI is going to have a huge impact on how
Speaker 1: we make films, and it will affect eighty ninety percent
Speaker 1: of the industry in really big ways that we still
Speaker 1: can't fully understand. And I just took my daughter to
Speaker 1: see back to the future for her birthday on Broadway,
Speaker 1: and I'm sitting there and I'm realizing, you know, and actually,
Speaker 1: by the way, the special effects, all these dope LEDs
Speaker 1: like it was actually one of the most dynamic theater
Speaker 1: experiences I've ever seen.
Speaker 4: Right, that's technology.
Speaker 1: My bet is ten years from now, live theater at
Speaker 1: a time when the commoditization of so many parts not
Speaker 1: all of but so many parts of like on screen
Speaker 1: storytelling happens and it gets easier and cheaper and more
Speaker 1: efficient and more dynamic, Like, you will see a big
Speaker 1: shift in that industry. And it's not going to go away.
Speaker 1: It's going to elevate so many things. But every screen
Speaker 1: we look at for sure, our phones, our televisions, whatever,
Speaker 1: will be so programmed to show us when what we want,
Speaker 1: when we want it, how we want it. A part
Speaker 1: of our humanity will miss. You know, thousands of years ago,
Speaker 1: when we were sitting around a campfire and that great
Speaker 1: storyteller was doing the voices and the impressions, we were like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's hilarious, Jimmy, do the story again. At the time
Speaker 1: we tried to catch the gazelle, right, that's ingrained in
Speaker 1: our species so I actually bet ten years from now,
Speaker 1: live theater will be more popular than ever, because again,
Speaker 1: we'll look at all these screens with all these AI
Speaker 1: polished images, and we'll actually want to sit in a
Speaker 1: room with other humans, to be captivated for a couple
Speaker 1: of hours in a dark room, to feel the goosebumps
Speaker 1: of seeing live performances of human performances. And so I
Speaker 1: think we'll see this across a number of different sectors
Speaker 1: and areas that'll feel anachronistic, it'll feel crazy that in
Speaker 1: twenty forty the hottest ticket in town will be a
Speaker 1: live performance. But I actually think I think there's some
Speaker 1: truths to I think that's why I'm so bullish on sports,
Speaker 1: because no one's going to pay money to cheer for
Speaker 1: and cry for a robot kicking a soccer ball like
Speaker 1: we need humans doing that. We need we need to
Speaker 1: feel their pain and their success and their triumphs. And
Speaker 1: those are the areas that get me most hopeful, because
Speaker 1: it's kind of a nice throwback to when we were
Speaker 1: just hunting or growing the things.
Speaker 4: We needed to live.
Speaker 1: When you know, the distractions we had were literally the
Speaker 1: humans around us and the community we had. We're basically
Speaker 1: the only people we all knew for our entire lives,
Speaker 1: and there are parts of that that I actually think
Speaker 1: will nourish us even in this you know future, have.
Speaker 3: All parts of you always been that optimistic.
Speaker 1: I've definitely always been a tech optimist. I think, look
Speaker 1: building Reddit. I mean, you know how I resigned in
Speaker 1: Protest in twenty twenty because I was, despite being the
Speaker 1: face of the company, spending you know, fifteen years building it,
Speaker 1: turning it around. You know, I found myself in board meetings,
Speaker 1: and this is all public now, but I found myself
Speaker 1: in board meetings where I was the only person out
Speaker 1: of five who was advocating for banning like watch people die,
Speaker 1: literally a community of you know, hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people sharing videos of just horrible usually like close circuit
Speaker 1: television or closer cat camera footage of just awful stuff,
Speaker 1: people dying, suicide, murder, all this accidents. And then again
Speaker 1: it comes up again around communities like explicitly built on
Speaker 1: racism and things that I just I knew. We're bad
Speaker 1: for business, we're bad for society. We're just just not
Speaker 1: things that we should be fighting for. You know, when
Speaker 1: I did part ways, I was so pleased to see
Speaker 1: the response finally was Okay, we're going to ban these
Speaker 1: things because it shined a.
Speaker 4: Light, right.
Speaker 1: And what it also taught me was, this was four
Speaker 1: years ago, is that I had I didn't have enough agency,
Speaker 1: and that was my own creation, that was my own doing.
Speaker 1: But I was never going to put myself in a
Speaker 1: situation again where I couldn't be doing not just the
Speaker 1: best work of my career, but also in a way
Speaker 1: to align with my values. And what's been a phenomenal
Speaker 1: result is for the last four years I've had so
Speaker 1: much win at my back from making that decision, from
Speaker 1: aligning those values. And I still think the Internet can
Speaker 1: bring out the best in us. I do really believe that,
Speaker 1: and I can also accept the conflicting view that in
Speaker 1: it enables the worst of us, and I obviously want
Speaker 1: to be on the side of the former, and so
Speaker 1: I try to use my platform as best I can
Speaker 1: for those things and to you know, curb the worst.
Speaker 1: I think I have to remain an optimist because I'm
Speaker 1: still optimistic about humanity and to the extent these tools
Speaker 1: are just a reflection of society, of our world, and
Speaker 1: I need to believe that, you know, or is hope
Speaker 1: for us to figure this out, to get a line
Speaker 1: that at the end of the day, merely all of
Speaker 1: us still want the same things. We want to live
Speaker 1: decent lives. We want our kids to live hopefully better
Speaker 1: lives than we did. Like, there are some practical needs
Speaker 1: that we still have from hundreds of thousands of years
Speaker 1: ago that I think we need to meet. Like I said,
Speaker 1: I want to spend my years supporting all the stuff
Speaker 1: that I know my girls will be proud of.
Speaker 2: Walk me through your thought process. How do you process
Speaker 2: tens of thousands of people subscribing to a reddit that's
Speaker 2: about watching people die? Yeah, because I want to know
Speaker 2: how someone like you who's building something thinks about that.
Speaker 2: It's easy to be like, we should ban that, we
Speaker 2: don't want people to see that. But I wonder what
Speaker 2: your thought process is and how you reconcile the fact
Speaker 2: that there are people who are interested in something like
Speaker 2: that versus there's so much good And I'd love to
Speaker 2: hear from a programmer code builder.
Speaker 1: Well, look, early on, these really radical communities almost never exist,
Speaker 1: certainly back then because there were just fewer people online,
Speaker 1: you know, two thousand and five, starting Reddit, I was
Speaker 1: just hoping it would work. There were so few people
Speaker 1: online actively creating content that you know, for early years
Speaker 1: it wasn't even a thing. It never even came up,
Speaker 1: and when it did, it was just an easy band
Speaker 1: because it was a one off post. I left so
Speaker 1: sold the coming two thousand and six to kind of
Speaker 1: ask stuck around till twenty ten. Then I left, went
Speaker 1: became a partner y Combinator, started a venture fund, and
Speaker 1: I came back in twenty fourteen as executive chairman.
Speaker 4: And that was in the wake.
Speaker 1: Of a previous CEO infamously defending revenge porn. This was
Speaker 1: definitely read its Nader, and he'd written this infamous blog
Speaker 1: post defending keeping these horrible photos up and that was
Speaker 1: not surprisingly one of his last acts a CEO, and
Speaker 1: I was asked by the board to come back.
Speaker 4: I said, great.
Speaker 1: First thing we did, shocker ban revenge porn, pretty easy,
Speaker 1: very obvious thing to do. And then it was a
Speaker 1: task of one rebuilding the business, rebuilding the faith you know,
Speaker 1: with users, with brands, with everyone, and then starting to
Speaker 1: just modernize all the things. And then as this stuff
Speaker 1: started coming up, and once it got to the board levels,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll give the Steelman version of the argument
Speaker 1: that I heard was these are communities that are important
Speaker 1: because of free speech. And the one argument that I
Speaker 1: really didn't necessarily believe, I didn't believe was around the
Speaker 1: therapeutic value of having communities like this for people who
Speaker 1: have PTSD, like soldiers or medical folks. And I push
Speaker 1: back pretty hard on that one because I just still
Speaker 1: didn't I didn't believe that it was real. The probably
Speaker 1: the most elucidating takeaway for me was once a spotlight
Speaker 1: was shown on it. The thing I would have respected more,
Speaker 1: even though I disagreed with it, would have been taking
Speaker 1: that same argument and making it publicly and just saying, yeah, look,
Speaker 1: this is a free speech issue. We feel like this
Speaker 1: should be here, and even though I would disagree with it,
Speaker 1: I'd still respect that it was consistent. But we know
Speaker 1: that's not what happened. What happened was Okay, yeah, are bad,
Speaker 1: We're going to ban it now. And that for me
Speaker 1: was when I just I realized, no, this isn't this.
Speaker 1: I can't I can't spend I don't know how ever
Speaker 1: many decades I got left on this earth doing this
Speaker 1: and being a part of this, And I think the
Speaker 1: really telling thing in the era we're in now is
Speaker 1: we have the first generation of young people who are
Speaker 1: like in their early twenties, who have grown up, like
Speaker 1: truly grown up on these social media platforms, and so
Speaker 1: it's exposed some of the most problematic parts. It's also
Speaker 1: exposed some of the most impressive parts, like the excellence
Speaker 1: of an nineteen year old twenty year old who's pitching
Speaker 1: me to start her company.
Speaker 4: She is orders a magnitude.
Speaker 1: Smarter, farther along, just just more impressive than I was
Speaker 1: at her age twenty years ago, and I think the
Speaker 1: Internet has a huge role to play in that. At
Speaker 1: the same time, some of the stuff we talked about earlier,
Speaker 1: just trying to navigate an already really difficult time that
Speaker 1: is childhood, where your entire life is gamified, you know,
Speaker 1: based on how many followers you get or how many
Speaker 1: hearts you get or whatever else, also brings out the worst.
Speaker 1: But for me now that was my breaking point, and
Speaker 1: I just realized, I, like I said, I can deal with.
Speaker 1: I understand you see this argument being made to this day.
Speaker 1: I respect that argument, and I at least appreciate when
Speaker 1: it's consistent. The inconsistency is the part that grinds my
Speaker 1: gears more than anything else. But we must also still
Speaker 1: accept the fact that, you know, the World Wide Web itself,
Speaker 1: the Internet is the totally open free space. The difference
Speaker 1: is when we build any kind of social media platform platform,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, on it, we are ultimately deciding what
Speaker 1: belongs and what doesn't. We've all agreed that spam does
Speaker 1: not matter, like we are all okay and pinging on
Speaker 1: the free speech of a spammer. And that's a pretty
Speaker 1: easy argument that everyone agrees. So if we agree on that,
Speaker 1: then now we just need to agree on where we
Speaker 1: draw the line. Because it's there's no such thing as
Speaker 1: a totally free network. Because again we've all agreed we
Speaker 1: draw a line on spam, So where else does it go?
Speaker 1: And like I said, for me and I realize it is,
Speaker 1: it's important for it to be a gray line. And
Speaker 1: I can go into all the there's a myriad of
Speaker 1: reasons why it's actually really helpful to have it be
Speaker 1: a gray line. The short answer is if you make
Speaker 1: it a bright line, then toxic users will go right
Speaker 1: to exactly where that line is and say, great, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna hang out here on this line and
Speaker 1: troll because that's how they get satisfaction. So it's actually
Speaker 1: beneficial to have the gray line. So I totally understand
Speaker 1: the gray line. Even our laws in the United States
Speaker 1: have a gray line usually get interpreted by judges or
Speaker 1: juries or whatever. You so that's helpful. But I think,
Speaker 1: and this is where the tech optimist tomy comes in.
Speaker 1: When I look at the next generation of consumer social
Speaker 1: these apps, and every app starts with teens, usually girls,
Speaker 1: college age girls. They drive all online culture and adoption.
Speaker 1: You look at Instagram success, you look at Snap success,
Speaker 1: you look at TikTok success.
Speaker 4: It's the same story.
Speaker 1: Then the apps that are starting to make traction, and
Speaker 1: it's still early days, but they're much less based even
Speaker 1: the ones that have blown up and fallen back down,
Speaker 1: the be Reals of the World and some of these others,
Speaker 1: they're all much less based on the sort of Internet
Speaker 1: popularity contest, and they're much more based on connecting with
Speaker 1: your actual friends. One that I recently seeded is called
Speaker 1: air Buds, and it's only about connecting over the music
Speaker 1: you're listening to, and it's purely like this is the
Speaker 1: song I'm streaming right now on spotify, react to it,
Speaker 1: vibe with it, share tastes. You know, it's I think
Speaker 1: the culture has already now built up enough of an
Speaker 1: immune system that for this next generation, they're like, there's
Speaker 1: a pushback to the previous mold of social and I
Speaker 1: think that alone will drive a much more healthy relationship
Speaker 1: to social media.
Speaker 4: But we'll see.
Speaker 1: But that is the ends through which we look at
Speaker 1: even making the investments. It's okay, you know, when my
Speaker 1: kids are old enough, how good am I going to
Speaker 1: feel about this being a multi billion dollar business that
Speaker 1: they're own. Yeah, And look, admittedly you cannot predict that
Speaker 1: it is. There are so many different paths a company
Speaker 1: can take, any any idea can take from day one
Speaker 1: to ten years out, fifteen years out, twenty years out.
Speaker 1: But we make the best assessment we can based on
Speaker 1: the founders, based on their attention and have Like I said,
Speaker 1: the starting line that these founders are on today is
Speaker 1: much more sophisticated than I was as a first time
Speaker 1: CEO right out of college, because they, like social media
Speaker 1: didn't exist. We had web forums. Facebook was still in colleges.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of blogs, like it was just
Speaker 1: a very different world today. Any founder pitching us has
Speaker 1: lived on social media, and they've seen the good and
Speaker 1: they've seen the bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: I was going to ask you that actually is whether
Speaker 2: you whether you decline investing in companies that you wouldn't
Speaker 2: let your kids use.
Speaker 4: Has it happened there? Okay? There have been companies where we.
Speaker 1: Haven't even taken the pitch just because and again I
Speaker 1: don't want to. I don't want to get too high
Speaker 1: horse about it. No one's out here saying like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess there were There was one company that I
Speaker 1: hard passed on well whatever I can say it. They
Speaker 1: were a telehealth business basically like handing out adderall and
Speaker 1: the business was growing very quickly, but there was no
Speaker 1: way they were doing it responsibly. And that was a hard, hard,
Speaker 1: hard pass. Like it was both from a I wouldn't
Speaker 1: feel good about my kids using this, also just from
Speaker 1: a risk standpoint, like at some point the FDA is
Speaker 1: going to look at this and y'all are going to
Speaker 1: have a bad time. Spoiler, the FDA did come down
Speaker 1: pretty hard on them, but we do. I guess I
Speaker 1: would take though it's the more optimistic version of that,
Speaker 1: which is what I'd be excited to see this exist.
Speaker 4: In the world that our kids are going to grow
Speaker 4: up in.
Speaker 1: And if it's a one hundred percent reusable rocket company,
Speaker 1: which we did see called Stoke Hell, yes, like one
Speaker 1: hundred percent reu. So now you're talking about when there's
Speaker 1: an environmental benefit to it. And two, the things we'll
Speaker 1: be able to do for all of us here on
Speaker 1: planet Earth when we have a much better, smoother relationship
Speaker 1: to low Earth orbit will be very good for humanity.
Speaker 1: But there's a there's a version for that, but it's
Speaker 1: I think it's the it's the more sort of positive lens.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The very interesting thing about founders today as well, they
Speaker 1: are more sophisticated. They also know just how big of
Speaker 1: a role technology plays in the world. And I know
Speaker 1: people would get on Zuck for his like Aweshuck's behavior
Speaker 1: probably in the earlier days where he just didn't it
Speaker 1: seemed implausible that he could not realize how much power
Speaker 1: Facebook has, and I will say, to his credit, I
Speaker 1: think his tune changed on that. And also in his defense,
Speaker 1: none of us did the idea, if you told me,
Speaker 1: probably in most of the aughts, throughout most of the
Speaker 1: aughts and probably even the early teens that these social
Speaker 1: media platforms would be among the most valuable businesses in
Speaker 1: the world. I would have been very, very, very very surprised.
Speaker 1: And you know, they made some smart m and a moves,
Speaker 1: They did the things, but like for all of us,
Speaker 1: or I can speak for myself, but I would wager
Speaker 1: Jack feels the same way with Twitter. In those early days,
Speaker 1: in those odds, you know, it was about building something
Speaker 1: that you hoped people loved. It was about keeping the
Speaker 1: servers online. It was not about, well, what is going
Speaker 1: to happen if all of a sudden there is an
Speaker 1: election that could decide that there's an election whose fate
Speaker 1: could be decided based on whether or not a post
Speaker 1: goes up or not.
Speaker 4: Like it would be laughable to have that conversation in
Speaker 4: a boardroom ten years earlier, because it's like, hey, we
Speaker 4: might die next month.
Speaker 1: The company may not be here next month. But credit
Speaker 1: to this generation of founders. Every one of them knows
Speaker 1: going into it, Hey, technology is shaping far more than
Speaker 1: It's not just these are the most powerful companies in
Speaker 1: the world or in our economy, but there are repercussions
Speaker 1: to it, and I think by and large, we want
Speaker 1: the good stuff to win but these founders today are
Speaker 1: much smarter about it.
Speaker 2: Did you and the other founders at that time ever
Speaker 2: come together, because I imagine you were the only people
Speaker 2: in the world who understand each other. I understand what
Speaker 2: you're building and going through. Did you ever get a
Speaker 2: chance to.
Speaker 1: I was not invited to those meetings, if they were happening. Admittedly,
Speaker 1: Reddit was this very solidly tier two company, right like
Speaker 1: we you know, selling the company sixteen months in was ludicrous,
Speaker 1: but it was life changing money. It was just ten
Speaker 1: million dollars for sixteen months worth of work. I thought
Speaker 1: I was getting away with something. This is nuts. And
Speaker 1: then part of Conon asked, you know, the jectory just
Speaker 1: sort of changed from when you're an independent startup, and
Speaker 1: so Reddit was really solidly a second tier social media
Speaker 1: platform for over a decade, and then it wasn't until
Speaker 1: you know, so twenty fourteen, I come back, and then
Speaker 1: probably by the late teens once it's like, oh here
Speaker 1: it's a billion dollar company again.
Speaker 4: The business is back.
Speaker 1: Let's you know, there's a path to an IPO one day,
Speaker 1: and so it if those meanings were happening, whether it
Speaker 1: was not invited, but rightly so, I wouldn't have been.
Speaker 1: I get it, we didn't have our shit together, but
Speaker 1: there's probably I don't know. I I've gotten to know Jack.
Speaker 4: A little bit. I don't really know Zuck, a few
Speaker 4: of the other folks around these other platforms, but like,
Speaker 4: there isn't there's not a group chat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a group chat, there's not already. No, there's the subreddit.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: I love it, Alexis. I want to, you know, even
Speaker 2: just listen to you now. The way you think is
Speaker 2: is mind blowing, It's fascinating. Think everyone's listening right now
Speaker 2: is probably tuned into just you know. I think it's
Speaker 2: always brilliant to dive into that mind. But I also
Speaker 2: want to focus on your personal side today because I
Speaker 2: feel that a lot of what's not seen in entrepreneurship
Speaker 2: is we get to see someone's brilliance, but we don't
Speaker 2: often get to see their the personal sacrifices, the journeys,
Speaker 2: the choices, the child does that come with that until
Speaker 2: many years after. And I actually want to go even
Speaker 2: before ready, I want to go back to your childhood.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to ask you, like, what's a childhood
Speaker 2: memory that you have that you feel has played a
Speaker 2: role in defining who you are today? Is there something
Speaker 2: that stands out?
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's my first one of my first and
Speaker 4: earliest memories. So I was.
Speaker 1: Probably like six five or six years old, and so
Speaker 1: if you cancel from the last name, I'm Armenian and
Speaker 1: my great aunt Via pulled me aside. So my birthday
Speaker 1: is April twenty fourth, which is the it's the Armenian
Speaker 1: genocide remembrance day. So it's a conflicted day for me.
Speaker 1: But this particular birthday, I learned that it was the
Speaker 1: genocide remembrance day.
Speaker 4: How did I learn?
Speaker 1: I remember my aunt Viverra pulling me aside and basically
Speaker 1: sitting me down and walking me through our family's story
Speaker 1: of survival in detail, talking about the costs, the toll
Speaker 1: it took, the things that her parents endured and what
Speaker 1: they saw and all of that, and basically how we
Speaker 1: got to America. And probably not a conversation you should
Speaker 1: be having with a six or seven year old, but
Speaker 1: our meetings would keep it real. She basically finishes up
Speaker 1: this conversation saying, listen, it's not a coincidence your birthday
Speaker 1: is April twenty fourth. You are the product of all
Speaker 1: of their sacrifice. Of all of their hard work, of
Speaker 1: everything that they endured, you have a tremendous responsibility now
Speaker 1: to make the most out of this life that you have.
Speaker 1: When I was born in New York here in the States,
Speaker 1: like couldn't ask for a better outcome, right generations later,
Speaker 1: but what they endured is something that you will have
Speaker 1: to carry for the rest of your life. Happy birthday
Speaker 1: and so yeah, no, that has never left me. And
Speaker 1: she was an amazing woman. She was a public school
Speaker 1: teacher in Brooklyn. Didn't have any kids or she was
Speaker 1: my grandfather's sisters, my great aunt Vera. She didn't be
Speaker 1: kids herself, but she saves up as much money as
Speaker 1: she could. She's the reason I could go to college.
Speaker 1: I want to University Virginia without taking on any debt.
Speaker 1: She paid for that allow and so amazing woman. She
Speaker 1: framed that for me at a very very young age.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 1: I am very fortunate. I had an amazing, loving mom.
Speaker 1: I have an amazing loving dad. I had the ultimate
Speaker 1: cheat code having that foundation. You know, grown up as
Speaker 1: as a white dude here in the States at a
Speaker 1: time when technology was starting to rep my parents put
Speaker 1: some money together to let me get a computer all
Speaker 1: that stuff lined up, and then it was imbued with
Speaker 1: this responsibility that I probably will never escape. For better
Speaker 1: or for worse. It's always going to weigh on me.
Speaker 1: I'm never gonna feel like I've done enough. And I'm
Speaker 1: not mad about it. I'm grateful for because I think
Speaker 1: that brokenness has made me who I am and it
Speaker 1: helps me do the things I do. But it instilled
Speaker 1: something in me that I just feel a tremendous responsibility for.
Speaker 4: And so I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think I've probably spent you know, I'm forty one now,
Speaker 1: I've spent three decades trying to earn that and I
Speaker 1: still haven't. And I will probably spend three more decades
Speaker 1: trying to earn that, and I still won't, and it'll
Speaker 1: be a part of me that's always feeling not that
Speaker 1: it's not good enough, but that I have not done enough.
Speaker 1: And I know this is a story shared by plenty
Speaker 1: of folks who are descendants from survivors of genocide and whatnot,
Speaker 1: but oh man, it just it always hits, and it's
Speaker 1: like I feel, And it's this juxtaposition, right, because I
Speaker 1: go through my life largely stress and anxiety free, right,
Speaker 1: and I'm aware of that and I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 1: And then there's moments where I sit with it and
Speaker 1: I'm just like I can still hear i can still
Speaker 1: see on uh telling me this, and and I'm like, like,
Speaker 1: keep going, like do better, Like you're not there there
Speaker 1: is you have a responsibility, like do more. Needless to say,
Speaker 1: I'm being very I'm very careful with explaining like I
Speaker 1: want our I want Olympian Ader of course to be
Speaker 1: proud as our meetings they're only a quarter but still
Speaker 1: our meeting that got the last name too. I want
Speaker 1: them to be aware of this stuff and be proud
Speaker 1: of their family. And obviously their mom is gonna have
Speaker 1: some some big, big stories for them too. But I'm
Speaker 1: also trying to be mindful of the fact that like
Speaker 1: maybe I'll wait until after you know, they're a little
Speaker 1: older to really going to the details of it. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's these things shape us man, And I, like I said,
Speaker 1: I am I mean, she could have just got me
Speaker 1: a normal birthday gift, but but I'm still I'm grateful
Speaker 1: for it.
Speaker 3: Isn't very still with us.
Speaker 4: She's not, she's not.
Speaker 1: She got to see me graduate from college, which was awesome.
Speaker 1: She was there in Charlottessviil for that and uh, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's wild.
Speaker 4: I've never I don't know, I think you know.
Speaker 1: One of the big things I did a few years
Speaker 1: back was I joined the board of robin Hood, the
Speaker 1: nonprofit in New York, and made a big grant to
Speaker 1: childcare there in the city, in part because it was
Speaker 1: there in Brooklyn. When my mother and father were working
Speaker 1: at the Ashland Place apartments there in Ford Green On
Speaker 1: Vera would pinch hit and just watch me and stuff.
Speaker 1: So when my parents were at work and all that
Speaker 1: as a little kid, and so childcare makes a huge difference.
Speaker 1: And we were lucky enough to have a family member
Speaker 1: just across almost across the hallway and another building, and
Speaker 1: so I wanted to pay it forward, and that was
Speaker 1: an honor her.
Speaker 4: That was a tribute to her. But like I said,
Speaker 4: I'll be paying that back for the rest of my
Speaker 4: life for sure.
Speaker 3: That's beautiful.
Speaker 2: I love hearing that and it must have thought so
Speaker 2: meaningful to be able to go back and say there
Speaker 2: and have an impact there.
Speaker 1: I took my pops back too, and we were walking
Speaker 1: around the four Green's changed a lot since the eighties,
Speaker 1: but the block is still there, and it was great
Speaker 1: taking my dad through there, just hearing stories from him,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's wild. Then you become a parent and
Speaker 1: you start imagining you see this little person and you're
Speaker 1: reminded that you were that little person once to your parent,
Speaker 1: and it makes your relationship to them feel very different.
Speaker 4: It was a trip, but it was great to be
Speaker 4: able to come back. And I'll, like I said, I'm
Speaker 4: paying off those deaths the rest of my life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you were saying that, you know, maybe now in
Speaker 2: your life you can go stress free and you know
Speaker 2: there are days where you're not feeling that, But in
Speaker 2: the beginning days of Reddit, it.
Speaker 3: Wasn't like that in your personal life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've mentioned to me, and you know when we
Speaker 2: were talking before we started recording this, there were certain
Speaker 2: things happening in your personal life when you began that
Speaker 2: maybe if you've revisited, you'd look at them differently.
Speaker 3: Could you walk us through what was.
Speaker 2: Going on and how you dealt with it at the time.
Speaker 4: First of all, yeah, well I dealt with it very poorly.
Speaker 1: But so for the first twenty years of my life,
Speaker 1: like I said, I mean awesome, like no real strife.
Speaker 1: I was ready to take over the world, Like I
Speaker 1: felt so confident in our ability to build this business,
Speaker 1: so excited and gosh, Like, two months in to starting Reddit,
Speaker 1: fresh out of school, my then girlfriend, who was a
Speaker 1: year younger than May, she was studying abroad, she had
Speaker 1: a pretty serious accident, big fall. She was in a
Speaker 1: coma flatxgo seor. She survived, she made a nearly full
Speaker 1: recovery actually, but the like the first month two months
Speaker 1: of why Combinator was this, And you get that phone
Speaker 1: call and you're like, and again, I was very lucky.
Speaker 1: I'd never had a phone call like that before in
Speaker 1: my life. And you get that phone call and it
Speaker 1: guts you, and you're on the first plane to Germany
Speaker 1: and you're trying to just make sense of the world. Right,
Speaker 1: this person you love, this person you care about. And
Speaker 1: another month or two later and then I get the
Speaker 1: call that my mom has had a seizure and she's
Speaker 1: been diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer glioblastoma multi forma
Speaker 1: stage four, And there's the words you don't want to hear,
Speaker 1: and you know that that was really the crippling blow,
Speaker 1: where you know, here was someone who I'm an ad
Speaker 1: a like I said, great relationship both with my parents,
Speaker 1: but like definitely.
Speaker 4: A mama's boy. And I was an only child. What
Speaker 4: can I say? I was pretty cool? But now she was.
Speaker 4: She was amazing.
Speaker 1: And the first thing I did when I saw her
Speaker 1: so I flied out of Baltimore. First thing I did
Speaker 1: when I saw was asking, you know, how are you?
Speaker 1: How's everything going, how are you feeling? And her first response,
Speaker 1: first words out of her mouth, where I am sorry.
Speaker 4: And I was like, what do you mean? You don't
Speaker 4: mean sorry?
Speaker 1: And she's like, well, I know you're starting this company,
Speaker 1: You're supposed to be a CEO right now. You got
Speaker 1: to focus on Reddit, don't focus on me. And I
Speaker 1: know how much of a distraction this is going to
Speaker 1: be for you. And you hear something like that from
Speaker 1: someone who you love so much, who's already given you
Speaker 1: so much man, and and I thought, I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm the life person you should be, Apoli. You should
Speaker 1: not be a politizing to me right now, like focus
Speaker 1: on yourself please, Like I'm gonna be fine. You owe
Speaker 1: me nothing, You've already given me everything. And that's emblematic
Speaker 1: of who she was. What it did was it gave
Speaker 1: me a confidence I knew I there was no way
Speaker 1: Reddit would fail, no way, no chance I was gonna
Speaker 1: let it, no way it could possibly not succeed, because
Speaker 1: she she blessed it with that. She she really, even
Speaker 1: in those situations, still still was looking out for her
Speaker 1: little boy above herself. And you know she fought for
Speaker 1: another three four years she got to see me sell Reddit.
Speaker 1: It had a lot not gonna lie right. You know,
Speaker 1: in the grand scheme of tech, a ten million dollar
Speaker 1: exit is minuscule for sixteen months worth of work. Pretty
Speaker 1: good ROI. But to be able to make that call
Speaker 1: to my mom to say, hey, your faith in me
Speaker 1: paid off, Like what can I buy you?
Speaker 4: Was worth everything.
Speaker 1: And then true to form, true to form, like I
Speaker 1: knew I was gonna get my dad some season tickets
Speaker 1: for our local NFL team there true to form, though
Speaker 1: my mom was like I don't want anything. I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna let you do this. Come on, what
Speaker 1: do you want? She was like, I don't want anything.
Speaker 1: And I ended up making a donation for her to
Speaker 1: her favorite nonprofit. She was like, all right, if you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to give me something, you can do that.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: And I was so mad.
Speaker 1: I was so mad because I'm like, lovingly, I was like, God,
Speaker 1: there's no way I'm ever gonna top this. Like you
Speaker 1: realize you have set the bar so high that if
Speaker 1: I ever have kids, I am going to be chasing
Speaker 1: that goal.
Speaker 4: But that, like I said, that's who she was. That's
Speaker 4: all she cared about. She was.
Speaker 1: She was an undocumented immigrant. She was an no pair
Speaker 1: from Germany who overstayed her visa because she fell in
Speaker 1: love with my dad, this Armenian American here in the States.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they eventually got married, had me, but.
Speaker 1: She, you know, she worked the jobs she needed to
Speaker 1: work to pay the bills and do the things. And
Speaker 1: her number one, I mean her. I think anyone would
Speaker 1: have told you the most important thing to her was
Speaker 1: her family. And you know I was an only child,
Speaker 1: so I got all the shine from that. But that
Speaker 1: was the foundation, man. And when folks want to know
Speaker 1: how or why all this stuff, man, I pointed to her, Sorry, dad,
Speaker 1: you get some credit to But having that confidence, having
Speaker 1: that support, having that on wavering when I told her,
Speaker 1: I told this woman I wanted to be a professional
Speaker 1: waiter in high school because I was so good serving
Speaker 1: at pizza hut souse. I worked pizza in high school
Speaker 1: and I was a dishwasher. Then I was a cook
Speaker 1: and then those deep the deep dish pizzas are a sleeper.
Speaker 1: I'll make them at home now with the cast iron.
Speaker 4: They're good.
Speaker 1: And eventually I made it as a serving and I
Speaker 1: was I was pretty good. At my boss Tony, he
Speaker 1: was like, hey, you know what, instead of going to college,
Speaker 1: I think you could do this full time, like you're
Speaker 1: really good. And I was like really and he was
Speaker 1: like yeah. And I was like, I could move to
Speaker 1: New York and he's like, you can move to New York.
Speaker 1: You can make a great career out of this, and
Speaker 1: h and So I remember going home and tell my parents.
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm thinking about not going to college.
Speaker 1: And the last thing you would tell on Armenian dad
Speaker 1: is that you're not gonna to go to college, just
Speaker 1: to be clear. And my dad, to his credit, didn't
Speaker 1: say anything. My mom though, so sweet. She was like, look,
Speaker 1: whatever you do, I know you're gonna be the best
Speaker 1: at it. I know you're gonna work your hardest. Why
Speaker 1: don't you start with a budget and figure out what
Speaker 1: it would cost to live there, and then how much
Speaker 1: you'll get paid and see if that's something you want
Speaker 1: to accomplish. And thankfully my add brain switched pretty soon thereafter.
Speaker 1: But like, this was a woman who, no matter what,
Speaker 1: was gonna support whatever I was doing. And then when
Speaker 1: it just so happened to be a tech startup, she
Speaker 1: was like great. She literally the first person to buy
Speaker 1: our merch, the first person to post on God. There
Speaker 1: are comments from my mom on tech Crunch circa two
Speaker 1: thousand and five that no one else would notice, but
Speaker 1: I know because I can see her user name and
Speaker 1: it's the most like crazy German mom English you can imagine,
Speaker 1: but it's the sweetest thing.
Speaker 4: And like she was a ride or.
Speaker 1: Die and so that was the that was the bar
Speaker 1: I had, and so even when those things came up,
Speaker 1: I just knew I can't quit. Now Here's where I
Speaker 1: looked up was I mean intense compartmentalization, and it was
Speaker 1: what I felt I needed to do at that time,
Speaker 1: which was, let me just use work as therapy. Let
Speaker 1: me just work my ass off, because I cannot work anyone.
Speaker 1: And if I've got her pulling from me, I will
Speaker 1: crush any competitors.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: My co founder wasn't really equipped to have those conversations
Speaker 1: or really be a support at all. But I mean
Speaker 1: we were kids, right, and so I just decided work
Speaker 1: is the therapy, and for the next ten years, you know,
Speaker 1: really did not think about explore, delve into anything other
Speaker 1: than I'm just going to do my work and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna Obviously, I took as many AirTran trips home as
Speaker 1: I could to spend time with my mom and dad
Speaker 1: on weekends, but like, let me not go any deeper
Speaker 1: than yeah, here's this shitty thing. I'm going to compartmentalize
Speaker 1: it and just focus on the tasks at hand. And
Speaker 1: there were areas, Look, I think compartmentalization gets a bad rap.
Speaker 1: I do think there are areas where it's actually tremendously helpful.
Speaker 1: But with some Now my my take is a little
Speaker 1: bit more nuanced, where I think with some work it's
Speaker 1: good to go into the box to rearrange some stuff,
Speaker 1: to sort through some stuff, to organize it. But I
Speaker 1: actually think there is a value to having some stuff
Speaker 1: in boxes and to compartmentalize, because I also don't want
Speaker 1: to spend my days like reliving and rehashing and just
Speaker 1: analyzing those experiences. Right, I'm not doing her any favors, right,
Speaker 1: Her greatest joy was seeing me be successful as a CEO,
Speaker 1: as a startup founder, and whether it was Reddit or
Speaker 1: anything else, that's what mattered. And so it's a shame, right,
Speaker 1: she hasn't gotten to see me get married. She hasn't
Speaker 1: gotten to see me have kids. She hasn't she'd have
Speaker 1: been an amazing grandmother. She hasn't gotten to see me
Speaker 1: build a lot of businesses I've built. She's saw me, though,
Speaker 1: live my dream. And when I decided it was time
Speaker 1: to build my own venture firm, I took the lessons
Speaker 1: from those days a y combinator because Jay I agonized
Speaker 1: over a two hundred dollars plane ticket on air tran
Speaker 1: to Baltimore because we only had seventy two thousand dollars
Speaker 1: in the bank. We didn't raise that much money. This
Speaker 1: is a very different era. But even if we had
Speaker 1: raised the normal round today it would be maybe a
Speaker 1: few million dollars. I still don't want a CEO deciding, God,
Speaker 1: this is going to cut our this is going to
Speaker 1: hurt our burn, Do I really want to take that trip?
Speaker 1: And we built a program into seven seven six specifically
Speaker 1: say there are tens of thousands of dollars a founder
Speaker 1: can use that we are paying for it's coming out
Speaker 1: of our fees, for their wellness, their development, any caregiving
Speaker 1: needs like we've had founders use this to pay for
Speaker 1: a babysitter and a date night with their partner awesome.
Speaker 1: We've have founders use it for you know, therapy, for
Speaker 1: executive coaching, for surfing lessons, right if it helps them
Speaker 1: find their focus, find their balance, be better founders. For
Speaker 1: early stage companies, that's often the entire business is the founder.
Speaker 1: And if y Combinator had had a program like that,
Speaker 1: I think it would have made all the difference. And
Speaker 1: it's not to slight them. They didn't know what they
Speaker 1: were doing. They were building the firm for the first time.
Speaker 1: But I want to do seven to seven six differently,
Speaker 1: and not because it feels good, but because I actually
Speaker 1: think it will drive better outcomes. It will mean better leaders,
Speaker 1: better managers, better founders, which will lead to healthier organizations,
Speaker 1: which I think will lead to more returns. And these
Speaker 1: are the ways that we're trying to learn from those experiences.
Speaker 1: And I speak with founders to this all the time,
Speaker 1: especially at the early days. But it never goes away,
Speaker 1: but especially the early days, so much of the company
Speaker 1: takes on your neuroses. You like you are setting so
Speaker 1: much of the culture and don't even realize it, even
Speaker 1: just the way you show up on a zoom call, right,
Speaker 1: because you're the founder, you're the CEO, like you are
Speaker 1: dictating so much of how other people are going to move.
Speaker 1: And once you repeat those behaviors over and over again,
Speaker 1: what you've done is created a culture, intentionally or not.
Speaker 1: And so your baggage, your challenges, the things that you're
Speaker 1: not addressing and working through to be your best are
Speaker 1: going to be inherited by your team. And that's again
Speaker 1: none of this is this isn't This is the souleest
Speaker 1: capitalist talking here, right. I think there's a fantastic emotional
Speaker 1: argument for it and a health argument for it, But
Speaker 1: I always try to come first from just the business argument,
Speaker 1: because if it makes sense for business, then it's a
Speaker 1: no brainer. Then obviously, if it's going to be for
Speaker 1: your health and wellness envelopment, then you should do it.
Speaker 1: But I do think it has a bottom line impact.
Speaker 1: I really do.
Speaker 2: What was the behavior you saw in yourself that you
Speaker 2: had to readdress or check yourself that you felt was
Speaker 2: seeping into the culture and any of the companies you've got, Oh,
Speaker 2: I got that.
Speaker 4: So here I'll give you an example. Let it illustrate it.
Speaker 1: So like two years into condon Ast when there's the
Speaker 1: meme in the.
Speaker 4: Silicon Valley show of resting investing.
Speaker 1: So normally when a founder gets acquired, they just hang
Speaker 1: out of the company and just they don't do anything
Speaker 1: and they earn out and they leave. But again not
Speaker 1: me crazy, so like I want to keep shipping, I
Speaker 1: want to keep building things.
Speaker 4: And instead of actually.
Speaker 1: Making the case for the engineering team to go and build,
Speaker 1: in this case, it was a mobile app. So if
Speaker 1: you can believe it, in two thousand and nine ten,
Speaker 1: there was this new thing called the iPhone and some
Speaker 1: people were talking about how it was going to be
Speaker 1: the future of computing. Now, I was one of those
Speaker 1: people who hook line and Sinker was like, this is
Speaker 1: a big deal and if we're building Reddit to be
Speaker 1: like the destination for what's new and interesting on the Internet,
Speaker 1: we need a mobile app.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: Engineering team did not agree because the way things had
Speaker 1: always worked, it was fine on the browser, worked great
Speaker 1: on the browser. The company was growing, Why change it
Speaker 1: if it ain't broken. And instead of doing what I
Speaker 1: should have done, which would have been better leadership, which
Speaker 1: is actually bring folks in, win them over, make the case,
Speaker 1: get the buy in, and then change the product plan,
Speaker 1: I just hired a freelance team to go and build
Speaker 1: it because I made a half step of an effort
Speaker 1: to make the case and do the right thing, as
Speaker 1: like a mature manager. And when I wasn't getting the
Speaker 1: progress I wanted, my impatience on my relentlessness was like,
Speaker 1: we're just going to I can hire other people to
Speaker 1: build it.
Speaker 4: We'll just build it. And it worked.
Speaker 1: We shipped it, read it had a mobile app called
Speaker 1: I Read It, and it was doing well. I was
Speaker 1: really happy with that pun. I hope people would say
Speaker 1: I read it on Reddit. I don't know if anyone's
Speaker 1: ever said that, but that was the hope. But then
Speaker 1: a year later I leave, You know, the handcuffs had
Speaker 1: come off and fully vested. And then what happened. The
Speaker 1: app died because there was no one left to support
Speaker 1: it and there was no institutional buy in. And so
Speaker 1: imagine four years later, five years later, I come back,
Speaker 1: and now it's twenty fourteen and everyone knows you need
Speaker 1: a mobile app. You have to have a mobile ap
Speaker 1: and the culture i've read it is still solidly desktop
Speaker 1: is only what matters.
Speaker 4: Why do we need a mobile app? And I'm like,
Speaker 4: I failed, Like I failed.
Speaker 1: We had this five years ago, and yet here we
Speaker 1: are and we actually now need to do it right
Speaker 1: this time, Actually get the buy in, actually bring in
Speaker 1: the folks. Actually finally shipped app probably a year later.
Speaker 1: But it that so it was an unwillingness to actually lead,
Speaker 1: and it was a relentless desire to just keep moving
Speaker 1: forward with or without an actual team. And that is
Speaker 1: a terrible way to be a CEO.
Speaker 4: Terrible.
Speaker 1: It's something, frankly, I think I still struggle with in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. I will never be hanging out
Speaker 1: on a beach. I will never retire. I love the
Speaker 1: work that I do. Yeah, if I do it well,
Speaker 1: I get very well rewarded for it, and that helps.
Speaker 1: But it's not about that I love the work that
Speaker 1: I do. It's very satisfying. It's it's something I genuinely
Speaker 1: would want to do all the time. And my wife
Speaker 1: knows this, and you know, she's someone who knows a
Speaker 1: thing or two about relentlessness and hard work. But even
Speaker 1: she would admit and has has said on numerous occasions
Speaker 1: at the dinner table that like, there's sometimes I take
Speaker 1: it a little too far, swear to God. And I
Speaker 1: actually had I had an LP so one of our investors.
Speaker 1: So about ten percent of the money we invest out
Speaker 1: of seven times six is my money, but then ninety
Speaker 1: percent of it is from institutions, universities, all values aligned,
Speaker 1: good folks. And I had one of our LPs casually
Speaker 1: be like, oh, hey, I heard you were or I
Speaker 1: saw you were at the Olympics, look like it was
Speaker 1: a lot of fun. And I was like, are you
Speaker 1: implying that I was just hanging out the Olympics for
Speaker 1: two weeks? And he's like, no, it's the summer. I
Speaker 1: totally get it, Like it's fine. But and I as
Speaker 1: I was retelling this story to my wife, and she's like,
Speaker 1: I will literally call him up because they know each other,
Speaker 1: it be casual, and I will assure him that I
Speaker 1: have countless times complained about the fact you were working
Speaker 1: too much. And I'm like, baby, from any partner that
Speaker 1: would be powerful, but coming from you, right, it carries
Speaker 1: a lot more weight. But the reality is I love
Speaker 1: this and unlike being a professional athlete. I get to
Speaker 1: do this forever as long as my brain's working right.
Speaker 1: I have compounding that I get out of age and experience.
Speaker 1: And it's the unfair advantage of all of us where
Speaker 1: not professional athletes, is that we actually continue to compound
Speaker 1: the expertise over time and get to keep doing the
Speaker 1: thing that we loved in our twenties, in our thirties
Speaker 1: and our forties and our fifties. And it's a great blessing.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, I have this, and I think the
Speaker 1: downside has been historically making sure I was either I
Speaker 1: was building teams and building organizations that were aligned with this.
Speaker 1: And that was a big part of the decision four
Speaker 1: years ago to say, Okay, you know Caitlin, who I
Speaker 1: founded seven seventy six with, she had joined me early
Speaker 1: in the Reddit turnaround almost know that time was like
Speaker 1: six years earlier. I know she's got the same whatever brokenness,
Speaker 1: that relentlessness, that hunger, and having a partner like her,
Speaker 1: and then Lizzie who also came over now she runs
Speaker 1: my foundation. Those are the folks I just want to
Speaker 1: spend the rest of my years building with and working with.
Speaker 1: And that's not a judgment like y'all got to find
Speaker 1: whatever you need. And I think one of the things
Speaker 1: that always gets so twisted because I am look hashtag
Speaker 1: business dad. I'm out here making pancakes every Sunday for
Speaker 1: my girls. I do crapes on Saturdays. Post it on
Speaker 1: social Yes, I've gotten into smoking meats lately, and I'm
Speaker 1: very proud of that. But like all things on social media,
Speaker 1: you're seeing a curated version of the things. But the
Speaker 1: promise that I made to my kids is the same
Speaker 1: promise I make to my team, which is like, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry to my childhood friends, but I'm like, when I'm
Speaker 1: on the clock for work, I'm going to show up
Speaker 1: here the best way that I can. When I'm on
Speaker 1: the clock for my family, I'm going to show up
Speaker 1: there the best way that I can. And that's frankly,
Speaker 1: all the bandwidth I have in my life, and I
Speaker 1: think one of the areas I should be investing more into,
Speaker 1: and maybe there'll be a time, But it's the relationships
Speaker 1: I have with other men.
Speaker 4: And these are the guys. I've known them since I
Speaker 4: was five. These are my best friends. We're in the group,
Speaker 4: chat daily, we see each other Now maybe once a year,
Speaker 4: twice a year, but I, and you know, I got
Speaker 4: to organize it.
Speaker 1: I organize a really proper guys trip at least once
Speaker 1: a year.
Speaker 4: Now we've added a second one.
Speaker 1: But that's the one area where I know I've made
Speaker 1: a sacrifice and I've just said, look, this isn't a
Speaker 1: part of the equation anymore. We used to play video
Speaker 1: games all the time. After school, we get off the bus,
Speaker 1: we go to Mike's house, fire up GoldenEye, and then
Speaker 1: sixty four wouldn't do my homework.
Speaker 4: But that's chatter my life. That's closed. And now I
Speaker 4: have to make these trade offs.
Speaker 1: And so when I always get a little miffed when
Speaker 1: people twist it as like, oh, this guy is not
Speaker 1: that serious, and it's like no, Like there is nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with caring about being the absolute best at work
Speaker 1: and also for your family. Those things should not be
Speaker 1: mutually exclusive. And I don't know how we created this
Speaker 1: myth that it had, Like, yeah, it sucks. There's no
Speaker 1: such thing as balance. You've got to figure it out.
Speaker 1: You're always never doing enough. But hell, modern women have
Speaker 1: had to endure this for quite some time now, and
Speaker 1: I think only recently.
Speaker 4: Has it come up for dads.
Speaker 1: But I'm glad it's getting talked about more and I'm
Speaker 1: fine with the juxtaposition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, I mean I feel like that lack of
Speaker 2: presence bleeds into the other area anyway. So if you're
Speaker 2: at work and you're not present, you can't suddenly be
Speaker 2: present at home, Yes, And if you're absent at home,
Speaker 2: you can't suddenly be present at work because our mind
Speaker 2: doesn't have an on and off button that just switches
Speaker 2: on and off as quickly as that. And so hearing
Speaker 2: that makes a lot of sense to me. Why why
Speaker 2: are those male relationships are important to you at this stage?
Speaker 2: Like why are they valuable? And why does it feel
Speaker 2: like there may be a time where they're needed? Like
Speaker 2: what would they serve you with? Like how would that
Speaker 2: help you?
Speaker 4: Now? Humility?
Speaker 1: I mean, these are the guys who still like they'll
Speaker 1: give me shit all day long, and that's great because
Speaker 1: I need it sometimes and it's helpful also knowing these
Speaker 1: guys for as long as I have, it's one hundred
Speaker 1: percent genuine and you see it right like you get
Speaker 1: as you find success, as you find fame, as you
Speaker 1: find wealth. There's a difference in the relationships there's always
Speaker 1: this like is a little bit raised eyebrow, right, And
Speaker 1: I know how or I've seen how isolating that can
Speaker 1: be for folks, and I've never wanted that for me.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I've always appreciated is that
Speaker 1: these guys have been my best friends, like I said,
Speaker 1: since I was a kid. And when we get together,
Speaker 1: you know, the only things that that's changed is that
Speaker 1: we're older, we got some we got some money now,
Speaker 1: But like we're it's the same bullshit and they treat
Speaker 1: me exactly the same way. And like I said, it's
Speaker 1: a good humbling thing to have your friends talk shit
Speaker 1: to you on the group chat. I think male companionship
Speaker 1: is underrated, and like I said, it's the one area
Speaker 1: where I know I could be doing more work the challenges.
Speaker 1: A lot of us have young kids right now, and
Speaker 1: that again it's the priority I think. I think it'll
Speaker 1: shift again when I've got teenagers and they no longer
Speaker 1: want to hang out with me. But all you know,
Speaker 1: almost all of us have kids that are young, and
Speaker 1: we get it. We'll bring we'll bring the gang together,
Speaker 1: but we live in different places.
Speaker 4: And it is what it is.
Speaker 1: And then candidly, one of our guys, Adam suddenly had
Speaker 1: a heart attack and he was training. He was the
Speaker 1: most fit out of all of us. He was at
Speaker 1: the gym, his heart gave out and he passed on
Speaker 1: the way to the hospital.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: And then again you get that fucking phone call and
Speaker 1: you're just like, no, this is a joke, Like there's
Speaker 1: no way, no chance, no chance. And that was a
Speaker 1: wake up call for me. And you know he didn't
Speaker 1: have children. But we're all looking around each other at
Speaker 1: the funeral, and again a lot of us with kids
Speaker 1: just thinking like Christ, like we we have to show
Speaker 1: up in such a big way for these little humans.
Speaker 1: And you can't help but take it to that selfish place,
Speaker 1: right and be like I deeply missed this guy, and
Speaker 1: I feel like I owe it to him. Like I said,
Speaker 1: he was the most fit out all of us. This
Speaker 1: dude crossfiting, I mean. And Adam was, to his credit
Speaker 1: to man, the guy always was down. It did not
Speaker 1: matter what it could have been. Let's just go see
Speaker 1: a dumb movie on a Tuesday night. He always always
Speaker 1: was a strong yes and that mindset and this is
Speaker 1: something I always try to take and I've tried to
Speaker 1: tell founders this too, Like it's not my quote, but
Speaker 1: it's the one about the average of your five closest friends.
Speaker 1: And I think a lot about this because, like you know,
Speaker 1: these guys, we've all had very different lives. There are
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'd start a company with any
Speaker 1: of these guys, but there are attributes about each one
Speaker 1: of them that I find really remarkable. And those are
Speaker 1: the things that I keep in mind when I'm like,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons I love staying close to you guys,
Speaker 1: is I care about you. I love you like we've
Speaker 1: known each other through so much. We've I we've done
Speaker 1: a lot together, We've experienced so fucking much, and there
Speaker 1: are still parts of you that just make me want
Speaker 1: to get better. And for Adam, it was the relentless
Speaker 1: commitment to his health and fitness, and I just I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but think, God, I really got to get
Speaker 1: my life right. And I started with the whole battery
Speaker 1: of tests, Like I'm getting blood work, see he scanned,
Speaker 1: doing all the heart like everything I can now and
Speaker 1: really rigorously. I'm not a hypochondriac, but I'm like, I
Speaker 1: need to get some basslines. I need to be checking
Speaker 1: up on this. I need to actually be like making
Speaker 1: like thoughtful visits to the doctor fairly regularly because and
Speaker 1: as a dude, you're just like whatever, the cultures put
Speaker 1: some dirt on it and you're fine. And like, that's
Speaker 1: how I lived for forty years. And that was the
Speaker 1: wake up call. And I feel like I owe it
Speaker 1: to him. And so when I get up in the
Speaker 1: morning and you know, I'm like, okay, I drag masked
Speaker 1: the gym, I'm like, come on, show up, keep going,
Speaker 1: man like, do it for Adam. It's a thing where
Speaker 1: now it puts a framing on all the times we
Speaker 1: get together because we know at some point it'll be
Speaker 1: the last one that someone is going to be there,
Speaker 1: could be us. And and so again we're not I mean, look,
Speaker 1: we're still doing the same dumb shit like we were
Speaker 1: at a brewery in Baltimore last time. Like it's not
Speaker 1: who We're not that sophisticated about it. But I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what, though we've gotten a lot smarter as we've
Speaker 1: gotten older, I think we have gotten a lot better
Speaker 1: telling one another actually how we feel, which is again,
Speaker 1: this is a nuts thing for you. Talk to my
Speaker 1: twenty year old self, like would you imagine yourself having
Speaker 1: like thoughtful conversations about like life with your guys And
Speaker 1: the answer would have been no, of course, not like
Speaker 1: we're talking about football or video games or girls. But
Speaker 1: that's been a nice part of getting older is now
Speaker 1: there's more depth to this relationship, Like we have true,
Speaker 1: true trust and intimacy, and we have this feeling like
Speaker 1: I can literally tell this person everything because he's seen
Speaker 1: me at my best and my worst, and like this
Speaker 1: is my boy, right and that unlock gives me something
Speaker 1: that powers me up for you know, however long it
Speaker 1: is until I see them again. And when I think
Speaker 1: about what is missing right now, I think about all
Speaker 1: of the young men who don't have great role models
Speaker 1: and can now access any role model they want, but
Speaker 1: they are going to default to the junk food. And
Speaker 1: that's not a judgment. It's the same reason I really
Speaker 1: want to pick up the snickers right instead of whatever
Speaker 1: the better choice is. There's an intellectual version of that
Speaker 1: junk food that exists, which is not nourishing, it's not
Speaker 1: actually helping you grow, and it's trying to fill avoid
Speaker 1: you have a hunger for this thing.
Speaker 4: And I think men in particular the shadow of all
Speaker 4: of the.
Speaker 1: Emphasis being put on women is that so little attention
Speaker 1: has been put on our young men. And I would
Speaker 1: love to see not attention taken away, but more attention
Speaker 1: found to be placed on talking about young men, supporting
Speaker 1: young men, because and there have been so I was
Speaker 1: briefly a Kiva fellows. I volunteered for Kivo when I
Speaker 1: left read it the first time. So it's in Armenia
Speaker 1: working with entrepreneurs, and it was amazing. One of the
Speaker 1: lessons they take away from that is is women entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: anywhere in the world are a far better investment than
Speaker 1: men because the money that you invest in them, that
Speaker 1: they use to help build a business oftentimes gets reinvested
Speaker 1: more often than not in the family, in the community,
Speaker 1: versus if you do it for men, some of the
Speaker 1: money goes to the family, communities, some of the money.
Speaker 4: Goes to the local bar, local establishment, whatever.
Speaker 1: Like Basically, investing in women in emerging economies just has
Speaker 1: a bigger impact on society.
Speaker 4: And it kind of tracks.
Speaker 1: It's a generalization, but I think we're sitting here going yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that kind of tracks. But then you go a step
Speaker 1: further and it's like, Okay, under duress, and this is
Speaker 1: closely related. Women tend to endure a lot better than men,
Speaker 1: and this is one of the reasons why when you
Speaker 1: look at prisons, you look at terrorist organizations, you look
Speaker 1: at when people are pushed to extremes disproportionately men that
Speaker 1: end up not turning out well. So I think we
Speaker 1: have an imperative here where if we have a generation
Speaker 1: of young men who are feeling disabion, who are feeling demoralized,
Speaker 1: who are feeling this insecurity, this deep, deep, deep pain,
Speaker 1: like we all have an incentive to make sure that
Speaker 1: they're getting that high protein diet of things that will
Speaker 1: actually help them be better and actually give them a
Speaker 1: path towards self improvement and give them a path towards
Speaker 1: being successful, viable members of society, because unlike women, they're
Speaker 1: not going to handle that well. And so I can
Speaker 1: make the case from a a value standpoint, like, hey,
Speaker 1: I think it's important to support these young men, but
Speaker 1: I also would make the case just from a societal standpoint,
Speaker 1: like it is in our best interests for public safety,
Speaker 1: for all the things to make sure we get those
Speaker 1: sort of that generation back on track. And I think
Speaker 1: it starts with conversations like this between high profile men
Speaker 1: who've had success in their careers, who can talk about
Speaker 1: and normalize a lot of this stuff, because at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, if we don't have those examples,
Speaker 1: what else fills the gaps?
Speaker 4: And I don't like the alternatives that fill the gaps.
Speaker 1: And what's wild is, you know, I didn't really have
Speaker 1: and I very much broke into tech and business and
Speaker 1: learned a ton. And every time I keep going up
Speaker 1: and I tell the guys this all the time. I
Speaker 1: keep leveling up, right, and I keep meeting new people
Speaker 1: and sort of getting another peak behind the curtain of
Speaker 1: like how the world works or how business works and
Speaker 1: all that stuff. And it's been eye opening because like,
Speaker 1: their's shit. I would if I just could tell my
Speaker 1: fifteen year old self and be like, don't do that.
Speaker 1: That's stupid, Like there's actually a smarter way to do that.
Speaker 1: And I hope to always keep feeling that to some extent.
Speaker 1: But as I keep doing that and keep meeting more
Speaker 1: and more folks, I have yet to meet one who
Speaker 1: doesn't have this level of introspection and depth. And I'll
Speaker 1: tell you it's most telling. Among the billionaires who are
Speaker 1: now grandparents, men who have achieved everything you could hope
Speaker 1: for in business, doesn't matter the industry who are looking
Speaker 1: at their grandkids as a second chance because they didn't
Speaker 1: get to or didn't want to, or weren't just didn't
Speaker 1: all whatever we want, call it spending that time with
Speaker 1: their own kids, and they're so grateful for that second chance.
Speaker 1: But I keep looking at all these stories from men
Speaker 1: who I really, really really respect, and the ones who
Speaker 1: feel like they've had the most fulfilling life, all keep
Speaker 1: coming coming back to human experiences they have with loved ones,
Speaker 1: with family, And like I said, I got a much
Speaker 1: smaller scale version of that with my own mom, who
Speaker 1: never wanted for anything. And when you get to spend
Speaker 1: time with folks who have a few years left to live,
Speaker 1: it becomes very telling, and especially to do it in
Speaker 1: my twenties, full of all that youthful vigor and vulnerability,
Speaker 1: to get humbled and see someone who does not care
Speaker 1: for anything other than the experiences she had and the
Speaker 1: humans she loves. Bro That was probably one of the
Speaker 1: greatest gifts she could have given me, was that perspective,
Speaker 1: so that when I did find wealth, when I did
Speaker 1: find notoriety, I'd be lying if I said it doesn't
Speaker 1: affect me in some way. It's sure it affects me,
Speaker 1: But I have never never gotten a twist about what
Speaker 1: actually mattered. And I've never wanted for notoriety or fame.
Speaker 1: I've never wanted for wealth. I've wanted for things that
Speaker 1: helped me get more time with the people I care
Speaker 1: about and make me feel like I am living a fulfilled,
Speaker 1: like a fulfilled and purposeful life that's providing value to people.
Speaker 4: And that was a gift she gave.
Speaker 1: And so I don't know the more that we can
Speaker 1: normalize this stuff, especially among folks, and I say men
Speaker 1: in particular, about all people, but especially men who have
Speaker 1: reached the highest levels. I want that eighteen year old
Speaker 1: or that sixteen year old, that twelve year old to
Speaker 1: be watching or looking and going like, hey, all right,
Speaker 1: these guys are talking about stuff that feels like it
Speaker 1: has substance, that has meaning and has purpose, and there's
Speaker 1: still the ass kickers in the day job whatever it
Speaker 1: is across the industry, like these things are not mutually exclusive,
Speaker 1: and I just I want to see more of those
Speaker 1: voices like yours get amplified because it's I think it's very,
Speaker 1: very important.
Speaker 2: And I love that where you said that juxtaposition again,
Speaker 2: the ability to be a killer in the workplace, a
Speaker 2: brilliant leader, a powerful individual, and at the same time
Speaker 2: being able to be empathetic, passionate, vulnerable. That's the power
Speaker 2: is always in the juxtaposition, right. You look at it
Speaker 2: in anything, whether it's a community, a company, an individual.
Speaker 2: And I think a big part of that, going back
Speaker 2: to what you've been talking about, is also seeing men's
Speaker 2: relationship with their wives. Like I think that's a big
Speaker 2: part that For years when we were talking about the
Speaker 2: lack of role models or the lack of the ability
Speaker 2: to look at something, it sounded like your parents had
Speaker 2: a wonderful marriage and yeah, and demoed a beautiful connection
Speaker 2: in front of you that you got to see. With
Speaker 2: you and your wife having such busy lives, having priorities
Speaker 2: both of you professionally, partnerships, places to be, travel and
Speaker 2: then you've got kids, how have you found a way
Speaker 2: to prioritize each other with the million things going on?
Speaker 1: That is at the crux of of I think every
Speaker 1: conversation we ultimately have a couple, which is it's funny.
Speaker 1: I'm very obviously high tech. She's very low tech. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it literally comes down to calendaring and making sure, like
Speaker 1: if I had my brothers, it would all be digital.
Speaker 1: I finally got Serena to modernize a little bit, and
Speaker 1: now we have a giant, like a dry erase board
Speaker 1: calendar that sits at the dinner table where she'll put
Speaker 1: in her schedule and then I have to go, and
Speaker 1: usually I'll take a photo of it to send in
Speaker 1: my admins.
Speaker 4: And then we'll write in mail.
Speaker 1: At least we have one shared space where we know, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: Papa's out of town for this business trip, Mom's going
Speaker 1: to this thing. And it is the hardest thing. It
Speaker 1: is explicitly creating date nights. I mean, it's funny. It's
Speaker 1: the same tactics that you'd hear any couple talking about
Speaker 1: with a therapist about like, hey, what are the ways
Speaker 1: to keep the relationship going, the romance all that stuff,
Speaker 1: And it is definitely amplified in all kinds of ways
Speaker 1: with a higher profile relationship. But the other reality is
Speaker 1: so Serena's been working since she was a kid, right,
Speaker 1: like tennis was not. I mean, it is a sport,
Speaker 1: but like it's a job. Right, the amount of hours
Speaker 1: she's putting in the responsibility as soon as she started
Speaker 1: like playing, like playing, playing with tremendous responsibility. So you know,
Speaker 1: I'm married to someone who has been working for thirty
Speaker 1: five thirty six years and who had a childhood and
Speaker 1: I think Serena would say like was a great childhood,
Speaker 1: not a normal childhood. But now she's evolved her word
Speaker 1: into you know, she's still got businesses. Just launched this
Speaker 1: beauty brand, win shameless plug great brand, and so she's
Speaker 1: still doing business things, she's investing, but she also loves
Speaker 1: I mean, she's her class she's the classroom mom for Olympia.
Speaker 1: She gets to spend so much of her time now
Speaker 1: being an active and super engaged mom for her kids.
Speaker 1: And I can't and I've told her this too, can
Speaker 1: up but feel like this is a chance for her.
Speaker 1: She's on the other side of it now. But to
Speaker 1: live that life that you didn't really have, which was,
Speaker 1: you know where your number one job as a kid
Speaker 1: is just to go to school, learn things, hang out
Speaker 1: with your friends. And who knows, if Olympia keeps going
Speaker 1: with the tennis or the golf, we'll see. But she's
Speaker 1: relishing that opportunity, and so that helps me a ton,
Speaker 1: because right, that's ironically that's the thing that I grew
Speaker 1: up with, the boring, typical suburban lifestyle that most people
Speaker 1: in my position, myself included, will spend a lot of
Speaker 1: their lives trying to maybe not get or run away
Speaker 1: from because they want something else. And yet here she is,
Speaker 1: having gone to the top of the mountain, achieved everything,
Speaker 1: and that's actually the thing she loves most. And so
Speaker 1: how we make it work, it's all it's banal stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like making sure we prioritize. It's trying to figure
Speaker 1: out and also decoding the differences. Obviously an interracial relationship,
Speaker 1: I don't think that'll surprise anyone. And as a white
Speaker 1: dude married to a black woman, you have a societal
Speaker 1: golf right between us in terms of the ways we've
Speaker 1: experienced our lives right in the American hierarchy of things, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, we have very different lived experiences. You just
Speaker 1: set us out obviously the fame, notoriety, career stuff, but
Speaker 1: like even if we just operated this life as two
Speaker 1: random people with our makeups, we'd have very different points
Speaker 1: of view, experiences all that stuff, and it's probably the
Speaker 1: hardest and best element to the relationship, where like the
Speaker 1: table stakes are, we love each other, We've made two
Speaker 1: incredible humans together. We will do anything. I mean believing
Speaker 1: that too. She jokes that I'm like the psychopathic dad.
Speaker 1: Like there's an Armenian dad meme in here, by the way,
Speaker 1: Like we're very protective of our kids, but she's super mama.
Speaker 1: So like we have things that we care so so
Speaker 1: deeply about that we know we're on the same team for.
Speaker 1: And so it's probably the best way of all the
Speaker 1: ways to be checked on, like a blind spot. Let's say,
Speaker 1: it's best to have it come from someone who you
Speaker 1: know cares so much. And that's where the growth happens.
Speaker 1: That's the tension. And so like if I say something
Speaker 1: or do something and again nothing crazy here, but like
Speaker 1: if I say something or do something and she's able
Speaker 1: to shine a light on and be like, hey, did
Speaker 1: you notice blah blah blah, or hey, this is like
Speaker 1: bringing up these things to help me have better awareness,
Speaker 1: because look, I got two black daughters. I want to
Speaker 1: make sure I'm showing up the best way I can
Speaker 1: for them. It helps because I still feel that pain
Speaker 1: because I'm like, I'm not a racist, I'm not a
Speaker 1: bad person. But then you sit with it for a second,
Speaker 1: you're like, Okay, just hear this feedback, right, And it
Speaker 1: reminds me it's just like going to the gym. You're
Speaker 1: pushing some weight and you're trying to get to that
Speaker 1: next level and it's going to hurt because that's where
Speaker 1: the muscles tear, but that's where it grows back stronger.
Speaker 1: And so I feel the same way when I take that,
Speaker 1: I'm like, ah, Okay, fight the impulse, don't be defensive
Speaker 1: and just listen and here and try to understand. And
Speaker 1: I will say, though it's and I've talked to other
Speaker 1: folks in interracial relationships, it is definitely there's a dynamic
Speaker 1: there that creates new challenges or even I think any
Speaker 1: cross cultural relationship creates those challenges.
Speaker 4: I bet I don't know if I was.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm a weird mid Atlantic guy, but the
Speaker 1: difference is to me and even a white person from
Speaker 1: Appalachia is going to have those cultural challenges, right, But
Speaker 1: across those lines, that's where you get again with a
Speaker 1: relationship built on love, you get this opportunity to say, okay, like,
Speaker 1: let me try to learn and try to be a
Speaker 1: little better. That I think helps. But like I said,
Speaker 1: it's probably the worst part is the dynamic. There's a
Speaker 1: reason we live in the middle of nowhere of Florida.
Speaker 1: Like I love being here in La but like I
Speaker 1: think we live in such a weird culture that you know,
Speaker 1: the celebritization of things is just it's different. And one
Speaker 1: of the things that we always wanted for our girls
Speaker 1: is for them to have I mean, they're not going
Speaker 1: to have a normal life, but to not be living
Speaker 1: in it and to have the ability to do that
Speaker 1: from you know, sort of the middle of nowhere Florida
Speaker 1: has been probably the biggest secret weapon.
Speaker 3: What did you.
Speaker 2: What I love though, is the awareness you have of
Speaker 2: the upbringing you had and how that's impacted you now
Speaker 2: with you wanting the opposite.
Speaker 3: And how the upbringing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I love that awareness because it's such a
Speaker 2: subtle point, but it's such a powerful one because it
Speaker 2: sounds like you both accept why you're wired the way
Speaker 2: you are. Because I think it could be really tempting
Speaker 2: to project and hope that, well, you know, Alexis has
Speaker 2: achieved everything too, so shouldn't we both just let everything
Speaker 2: go and just be home with the kids, or you
Speaker 2: to be like, well, you've achieved so much, we should
Speaker 2: just be going for the next mountain, which I think
Speaker 2: we do a lot with our partners where we reflect
Speaker 2: what stage of life we're on. Like I remember when
Speaker 2: my wife and I first met, I was ambitious and
Speaker 2: driven and she was definitely the homemaker and curator. And
Speaker 2: then as I've become more set in my world and
Speaker 2: have more time, my wife's career has like really taken
Speaker 2: off and she's really found her purpose and it's amazing.
Speaker 2: But I just love watching her flourish. So even though
Speaker 2: I have more free time to be able to spend
Speaker 2: together now than I did eight years ago, I recognize
Speaker 2: that watching her grow and watching her thrive is actually
Speaker 2: the most inspiring thing. And now that just because I
Speaker 2: have more time doesn't mean she has to adapt and
Speaker 2: adjust around that.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, I find.
Speaker 2: It's a really but it's such a common thing I
Speaker 2: see where it's like, I wish you were at the
Speaker 2: stage of life that I'm at, and that seems to
Speaker 2: be the hardest, most impossible thing to demand.
Speaker 1: You know, the challenge I had in previous relationships, the
Speaker 1: general theme was.
Speaker 4: I knew I was super ambitious.
Speaker 1: I was very upfront about it, but it still doesn't
Speaker 1: really land until three months in, six months in, nine
Speaker 1: months in and you realize, oh, this guy is not
Speaker 1: going to change. And it seems like a fun thing
Speaker 1: for a little bit, and then at a certain amount,
Speaker 1: like eventually push comes to shove and there's a gap
Speaker 1: because they didn't get it. And again, I don't think
Speaker 1: that's a right or wrong here, but it's an incompatibility.
Speaker 1: And part of what attracted me so much to Serena
Speaker 1: was the fact that I knew we would never have
Speaker 1: this conversation about like, well, why do you have to
Speaker 1: do this thing? Or why is this so important? Or
Speaker 1: like why what do you mean you have to get
Speaker 1: this done tonight? Like that could never happen because of
Speaker 1: everything she had to do in order to achieve the
Speaker 1: heights that she had gotten to. And so that to
Speaker 1: me was already very appealing because I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is table stakes. I found someone who has clearly
Speaker 1: even more ambition than me, who has achieved so much
Speaker 1: and in a way so I don't know if I'd
Speaker 1: say the same thing if I were an athlete. I
Speaker 1: think that might have been harder. But to be with
Speaker 1: someone like Serena, right, that's like literally one word, like
Speaker 1: you don't even need to say her full name. It
Speaker 1: is tremendously liberating because I know, and also because of
Speaker 1: who we are and where we come from. Jay, there
Speaker 1: is literally nothing I could do. I could one day,
Speaker 1: god willing, I.
Speaker 4: Will be a billionaire. I will never run for president.
Speaker 1: But let's say I could be a billionaire who runs
Speaker 1: for president, and I'll still be Serena William's husband or
Speaker 1: Serena's husband. Right, I could be I could be an astronaut.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter. It literally does not matter.
Speaker 1: And part of that is a testament to like where
Speaker 1: she started, where she got, what she did, all those
Speaker 1: doors that she opened, all those things. And so in
Speaker 1: a way it's kind of liberating as a suite ambitious person,
Speaker 1: especially in a society where like it's a meme just
Speaker 1: to literally say, oh, that guy is comfortable being called
Speaker 1: Serena William's husband. Now, candidly, if we live an ideal world,
Speaker 1: no one is anyone's anyone, right, But I do appreciate
Speaker 1: I understand why the Internet finds that really exciting and interesting,
Speaker 1: But the bigger story here is the fact that if
Speaker 1: you have this kind of partnership you're talking about, you're
Speaker 1: able to let one another flourish at those things at
Speaker 1: that time when they're ready. And maybe I didn't see it,
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe I missed out on some great relationships earlier
Speaker 1: because it wasn't there at that time. But at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, one of the best parts, you know,
Speaker 1: dating Serena while she was winning Grand slam after Grand slams,
Speaker 1: breaking every record, doing all this stuff with Olympia and
Speaker 1: her belly, I might add, you know, the pinnacle of
Speaker 1: sports excellence, and then also seeing her now like making
Speaker 1: cinnamon rolls for the second grade class, Like both of
Speaker 1: those things bring me someonech s joy and frankly, I
Speaker 1: love seeing the ladder more because it doesn't come with
Speaker 1: all the baggage of being the public persona that you
Speaker 1: just have to endure doing that job. And I know
Speaker 1: she doesn't miss it at all for those same reasons,
Speaker 1: and I think that's I don't know, that's been why.
Speaker 4: It's just, I don't.
Speaker 1: Know, been an easy transition for her, and frankly, been
Speaker 1: a lot of fun to see this evolution for me.
Speaker 3: How did you meet.
Speaker 1: Six months into the Reddit turnaround, I was burnt out
Speaker 1: and my head of comm said I needed to go.
Speaker 4: She was like, go to Italy and I was like what.
Speaker 4: And she's like there was a speaking gig that wanted
Speaker 4: me there, and I was like sure. I was like,
Speaker 4: wait no, but this is a boondoggle, like there's no point.
Speaker 4: We're not ready to like win over marketers. She's like,
Speaker 4: just do it please, like you need a day or two,
Speaker 4: just go. I was like, all right, fine, I go.
Speaker 4: I flake out.
Speaker 1: On the conference that first day and I just find
Speaker 1: a cafe and I started doodling, working on some sketches
Speaker 1: for product stuff. I meet up with a friend of
Speaker 1: a friend and very random, they just walked in and
Speaker 1: they're like, hey, can we use the table. I'm like sure,
Speaker 1: get some drinks. We're out that nine till like three
Speaker 1: in the morning, and I get home hung over. The
Speaker 1: next morning, I need coffee. Addicted, go downstairs. I say, sir,
Speaker 1: breakfast is over, but if you want coffee, can go
Speaker 1: sit by the pool. I go sit by the pool.
Speaker 1: I take up my laptop and there's a table next
Speaker 1: to me. The Australian. There's an Austraining at the table
Speaker 1: tells me to move. He says, there's a rat at
Speaker 1: the table. I say, I'm not afraid of rats. From Brooklyn.
Speaker 1: I see rats all the time. He's like, I might
Speaker 1: as a rat. You better leave and I was like, no,
Speaker 1: thank you, I'm good and I was just working. And
Speaker 1: then the lady next to him turns around.
Speaker 4: It's Serena and she's like, oh, you're not afraid of rats,
Speaker 4: Like no, not. If you don't bother them, they won't
Speaker 4: bother you. And she's like, oh, you're here for the
Speaker 4: tech conference and I was like I am. She's like,
Speaker 4: you here to see someone speak in particular. I said no,
Speaker 4: I'm speaking. She was like oh, She's like, what's your company?
Speaker 4: I was like Reddit and she she lied. She's like,
Speaker 4: oh yeah, I read it. She had never heard of it.
Speaker 1: And we started talking and she said, listen, the rest
Speaker 1: of my team was going to use this table, So
Speaker 1: can you just move when they get here? And I
Speaker 1: said no, but like they can join me and we'll
Speaker 1: all just have breakfast and so exchange numbers. And I
Speaker 1: saw her play later that night in Rome and that
Speaker 1: was the start of it all. So it's breakfast at
Speaker 1: a Hotel, the Cavaliery in Rome, great breakfast, wonderful truffle omelet, Okaserie.
Speaker 1: If you want to get the Alexis special, it's the
Speaker 1: truffle Omelet.
Speaker 4: That's a great, great omelet.
Speaker 3: I love it, Alexis.
Speaker 2: It's thank you for Sharon that it's beautiful to you know,
Speaker 2: just even how you're speaking about your wife. And again
Speaker 2: going back to that point, we were talking about having
Speaker 2: positive conversations in that way of you know what a
Speaker 2: healthy relationship looks like, challenges, ups and downs, difficulties of
Speaker 2: course with any relationship. But you know, one of the
Speaker 2: things that I wanted to ask you about that before
Speaker 2: we get to the end of our conversation is this idea.
Speaker 2: I mean, you were very humble a few seconds ago,
Speaker 2: and it's beautiful to see you have reached. You know,
Speaker 2: you've created something that in and of itself is a
Speaker 2: word right Like it's like read, it is recognizable, used,
Speaker 2: it's in pop culture, like, it's everywhere. Like you've built
Speaker 2: something that is fully recognizable, let alone recognizable just everyone
Speaker 2: knows what it is. And then Serena has this incredible success.
Speaker 2: Of course, no need to explain. How do you both
Speaker 2: think about defining success for your kids and the pressure
Speaker 2: that obviously will naturally sit on them with whatever they do.
Speaker 2: And then how do you think about defining success towards
Speaker 2: your futures as well together and as individuals, because you've
Speaker 2: both had an experience so much success.
Speaker 4: With our kids.
Speaker 1: It's the cliche you want to be happy, productive members
Speaker 1: of society. I mean that, like i'd say, the other
Speaker 1: wrinkle I'll put on there and I tell them in
Speaker 1: biaus all the time, and I will tell Adira again, she's.
Speaker 4: Just one, she's doing her best. She's an active kid.
Speaker 4: Yes it's six. I'll sit her down.
Speaker 1: But like whatever they want to do, I have zero tolerance.
Speaker 1: I should say, we have zero toms for them not
Speaker 1: trying their absolute best. Again, I know that seems cliche,
Speaker 1: Like I don't even let Olympia say can't.
Speaker 4: We'll see how long that lasts.
Speaker 1: But I will not let her say can If she
Speaker 1: says can't, I'm like, what was it? We don't we
Speaker 1: don't say that word like that because I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't even want her uttering that she can't do a thing,
Speaker 1: like you can choose not to do it, but we
Speaker 1: don't say that. We don't say that word. And I
Speaker 1: try to reiterate to her. I want her to love
Speaker 1: the act of trying.
Speaker 4: We used to do.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a YouTube channel. There's a few actually
Speaker 1: that'll do these drawing classes. And I'm pretty good drawn.
Speaker 1: I made the Reddit logo Snow, I drawed the pancakes,
Speaker 1: and and during COVID, I was like, Hey, we're gonna
Speaker 1: do drawing class. Pop can do our class. I can
Speaker 1: do math in English, but art's more fun. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna do our classes together. And you know, early on
Speaker 1: she'd be like, wow, Papa, you're really good at trying.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, do you think I was born this way?
Speaker 1: And she was like maybe, And I was like no,
Speaker 1: it's like Papa practiced. Papa drew a lot. And I
Speaker 1: want even for mundane things like hey, we're drawing Princess Peach.
Speaker 1: I desperately want her to take only one thing away,
Speaker 1: which is even the stuff you think your papa is
Speaker 1: great at, he sucked at when he started, Even the
Speaker 1: things your mama is great at. Maybe she didn't suck
Speaker 1: at when she started, but like she had to learn,
Speaker 1: she was bad, she had to get better. You might
Speaker 1: have some natural inclinations here and there for different stuff.
Speaker 1: But I want to see her get comfortable with failing
Speaker 1: and struggling and then improving. Getting her into golf has
Speaker 1: been opened. I had never played golf, but Uncle Tiger
Speaker 1: gave me some clubs for her, so I was like, letpe,
Speaker 1: you got to play golf now.
Speaker 4: And we go to lessons every Sunday.
Speaker 1: And that actually has been a great sport for humbling
Speaker 1: and for getting her comfortable with the process, because it's
Speaker 1: such a brutal, hard sport and you have to get
Speaker 1: comfortable with failure and messing up. And she'll still it's funny,
Speaker 1: She'll whack at one hundred yards. I'll be so proud
Speaker 1: of her, and then she'll totally whiff on a ball.
Speaker 1: And once she got so upset she almost she almost
Speaker 1: pulled the Serena. She pulled the club up and was
Speaker 1: about to smash it. I was like, Olypia just casually
Speaker 1: put the thing down. I was like, oh, you got
Speaker 1: that Serena in you. But you see that, and you
Speaker 1: see she's she's got that tenacity and she is so
Speaker 1: hard on herself when she doesn't get it right. But
Speaker 1: I need her to sit in that and soak that
Speaker 1: up and get okay with it so that whatever she
Speaker 1: does again, if she it changes every week. Veterinarian fashion designer.
Speaker 1: Right now, she wants to be a singer. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't care what it is, you just need to know.
Speaker 1: I'll like what you love that Beyonce video. How many
Speaker 1: hours do you think Beyonce spent rehearsing the dance moves,
Speaker 1: rehearsing that song, singing over and over and over and over,
Speaker 1: like do not get seduced?
Speaker 4: And it's crazy. I I don't know.
Speaker 1: I did not have anyone like sit me down and
Speaker 1: tell me that that explicitly. And maybe it just ruins,
Speaker 1: maybe just ruins life.
Speaker 4: We'll see.
Speaker 1: But I need her to know anytime she sees excellence,
Speaker 1: the only reason she's seeing is because of countless, countless
Speaker 1: hours of trying and failing and practicing that led up
Speaker 1: to it that no one saw, that no one cared about.
Speaker 1: And you know, with her mom as an example, she's
Speaker 1: got the goat of a role model and she does
Speaker 1: do tennis now twice a week.
Speaker 4: I think, I mean, she's got some good athletic jeans.
Speaker 4: Let's be honest.
Speaker 1: No, but she might I don't know if she plays sports.
Speaker 1: The goodness is her mom will be able to have
Speaker 1: a conversation with her early on about just what it's
Speaker 1: going to take and if she wants to do it,
Speaker 1: God Blessed will support.
Speaker 4: Her, you know. But I I'm not worried. It's weird.
Speaker 4: This is not a thing. Okay.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, I used to be pretty
Speaker 1: I don't want to say anti rich people, but like
Speaker 1: I distinctly remember going to UVA and I went to
Speaker 1: some good public schools in Howard County, Maryland, like they
Speaker 1: were fine there, but I got to I played football
Speaker 1: with kids who had free lunches and kids whose parents
Speaker 1: were lawyers. So it's like I got exposed to a
Speaker 1: pretty decent range of kids, which was great. And then
Speaker 1: I got to UVA and I finally met like rich
Speaker 1: people and it was so excited because I was like,
Speaker 1: these kids are so soft. I was like this is
Speaker 1: going to be great, like this is my competition, Like
Speaker 1: this is phenomenal.
Speaker 4: And it tracked. But I now I'm like.
Speaker 1: On the other end, and I'm not trying to It's
Speaker 1: not for sympathy here, but like there is I am
Speaker 1: much more appreciative of the challenges that wealthier families have
Speaker 1: making sure their kids have have it, have that grit,
Speaker 1: have that whatever you want to call it. And so
Speaker 1: that's something we're acutely aware of and mindful of and
Speaker 1: hoping for. And like I, like I said, I want
Speaker 1: to Limpy to work. Either it's got to be either
Speaker 1: a retail job or food service, like some kind of
Speaker 1: service job for sure, like high school. Like it's good
Speaker 1: enough for Papa, it's good enough for you, Like I
Speaker 1: need you to experience these moments and feel some kind
Speaker 1: of connection, like you're gonna have You're gonna be fine, right,
Speaker 1: But I need you to be a productive members of society.
Speaker 1: I need you to be a good person. I need
Speaker 1: you to know the value of a hard day's work.
Speaker 1: And like I said, it's a weird thing to navigate. Obviously,
Speaker 1: Serena doesn't have any kind of equipment for that and
Speaker 1: everything her parents put up with in order to give
Speaker 1: her that life, Like it's a wild perspective, but that's
Speaker 1: it's something we actually think about and talk about quite
Speaker 1: a bit. And the good news is, you know, at
Speaker 1: least olympiad it is fun too. They're tracking to be good.
Speaker 4: Humans, which I feel like is number one, and that.
Speaker 1: If they can be good humans who are also productive
Speaker 1: members of society, Like I feel like we're living the dream.
Speaker 1: But there is that part of me that just thinks,
Speaker 1: like you want you want to create just enough for
Speaker 1: that strife to create that resilience and that ability to thrive.
Speaker 1: And it's so ironic because if you look at so
Speaker 1: many of the stories of excellence, there's always some version,
Speaker 1: there's some part, there's something that happens that creates it,
Speaker 1: and it's usually strife.
Speaker 4: And so it's like, on.
Speaker 1: The one hand, you don't want to, like part of
Speaker 1: the reason you did the thing was so that your
Speaker 1: kid wouldn't have to endure the thing, and yet you
Speaker 1: still find yourself saying, God, I just kind of wish
Speaker 1: they would have to endure some of that strife. But
Speaker 1: it's that I mean, like, that's to me, that's actually
Speaker 1: been one of the most satisfying parts of fatherhood is
Speaker 1: seeing your kid fail and then seeing your kid get
Speaker 1: it right. I get so much there's so much more
Speaker 1: of a high from that than seeing my kid get
Speaker 1: it right the first time. I really enjoy and I'm
Speaker 1: not sadistic. I like it's it just feels like it
Speaker 1: feels so much more satisfying because you're like, Okay, that
Speaker 1: actually feels like a moment, will you There's some part
Speaker 1: of you that just like a synapse fired and some line,
Speaker 1: some dot in your mind connected with this other dot
Speaker 1: where it's.
Speaker 4: Like, Okay, I figured it out. I couldn't do it before,
Speaker 4: I can do it now and it could be right now.
Speaker 1: It's it's like multiplication and it's just being able to
Speaker 1: start to see those dots really connect that I just
Speaker 1: I love. It's very satisfying. It's like a Pokemon evolving
Speaker 1: in front of your eyes.
Speaker 3: I love it, Alexis, it has been such a joy.
Speaker 3: So honestly, this has been amazing.
Speaker 2: Just learnings from you from whether it's tech to AI,
Speaker 2: to fatherhood, brotherhood to love is great.
Speaker 4: This is great.
Speaker 3: You're very kind. I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: But Alexis, we end every on Purpose episode with a
Speaker 2: fast five for a final five, which means every question
Speaker 2: has to be answered in one word or one sentence maximum.
Speaker 2: So Alexis, these are your fast five. The first question
Speaker 2: is what is the best life advice you've ever heard
Speaker 2: or received?
Speaker 4: Be useful? It's ernold Schwarzenegger quote. Sorry, Arnold, I like it.
Speaker 2: Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever heard
Speaker 2: or received?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: I didn't take it. I have to have taken it. No,
Speaker 1: Paul Graham told me to get rid of the Reddit
Speaker 1: alien and change the name to octopop. And I said, no,
Speaker 1: I'm keeping snow and I'm going to keep calling it
Speaker 1: reddit And that was a good It works out, Yeah, octopop?
Speaker 4: Would you all be using octopop right now? And he
Speaker 4: wanted to change the alien.
Speaker 1: To an octopus. I'm like, Paul, come on, we're not
Speaker 1: doing that. Brilliant guy, just not not great with the branding.
Speaker 2: No question number three, if there's any other business dads
Speaker 2: listening that are struggling with the business and being a
Speaker 2: dad and trying to manage it all, what would be
Speaker 2: your advice for them?
Speaker 1: Aside from listening to my podcast? The goodness is there
Speaker 1: are more avenues than ever because there are more and
Speaker 1: more people talking about this than ever. What book were
Speaker 1: we reading tonight? Like what are you most excited about?
Speaker 1: And then when I'm on the clock for weekends in particular,
Speaker 1: I really try to lock in and so it can
Speaker 1: be whatever you need to do obviously your family is
Speaker 1: going to have different prescriptions. But create those traditions, create
Speaker 1: those routines. And that's one thing I would give advice
Speaker 1: to myself at twenty about over again, when I had
Speaker 1: more free time, when I had more youthful vigor, if
Speaker 1: I had more discipline, I would have been ten times
Speaker 1: more productive.
Speaker 4: And it shows up in sneaky ways.
Speaker 1: If if I had gone to bed at midnight because
Speaker 1: I knew like my I was, the dimishing marginal returns
Speaker 1: of my productivity were falling off a cliff and just
Speaker 1: gone to bed, slept for seven hours, eight hours, and
Speaker 1: then woken up and done the thing, I would have
Speaker 1: done it in twenty minutes instead of staying awake for
Speaker 1: another two and a half hours, Like, no, that's not.
Speaker 1: Actually the best use of your time and discipline is
Speaker 1: freedom and I never would have believed that in my
Speaker 1: twenties or even in my early thirties, but becoming a parent,
Speaker 1: that's the only way I'm able to do these things.
Speaker 1: And that's not to say I'm perfect, But if you
Speaker 1: can incorporate ritual routine even before you have kids, you
Speaker 1: can be even better at what you're building. And then
Speaker 1: once you have kids. It's it's kind of the only
Speaker 1: way to do it. Frankly, I love it.
Speaker 3: Question before, how would you do find your current purpose?
Speaker 1: My current purpose is enabling a whole other generation of
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs to do even bigger and better things than I did.
Speaker 3: I love that's such a very answer.
Speaker 1: And I mean it's it's also you sleep a lot
Speaker 1: better at night because it's not your ass on the
Speaker 1: line for every one of those companies too, So it's
Speaker 1: a it's a blessed position of being.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 2: And fifth and final question we asked this to every
Speaker 2: guest who's ever been on the show. The question is,
Speaker 2: if you had to create one law that everyone in
Speaker 2: the world had to follow, what would it be?
Speaker 1: Okay, this one I cheated, and I wanted to have
Speaker 1: one prepared that had been a good idea, But I
Speaker 1: think the best thing I came back with was a joke,
Speaker 1: which was, you know, everyone should be able to experience
Speaker 1: the joy of making someone they truly love happy. You
Speaker 1: talked about this earlier. Again, it's not really a practical law. No,
Speaker 1: I like that, but I have never felt more satisfied
Speaker 1: or happy, or richer or taller or what. I've never
Speaker 1: felt more any positive feeling you could feel than when
Speaker 1: I get the unsolicited I love you, Papa hug from
Speaker 1: my daughter. And again it doesn't have to be your daughter,
Speaker 1: be anyone. But like those moments for me are like
Speaker 1: black tar heroin. I am addicted to it. And so
Speaker 1: when I think back, hopefully as an old man one
Speaker 1: day and I think about, like, what are the things
Speaker 1: that really really made me so incredibly happy, it's going
Speaker 1: to come back to those moments. And so I wish
Speaker 1: that for everyone as often as humanly possible. And the
Speaker 1: irony is right. It usually doesn't cost any money. It
Speaker 1: means time, it means intentionality, it means other humans, and
Speaker 1: we're going to keep getting really good at making artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: And I don't want that to scare folks because I hope,
Speaker 1: I really really hope and want to believe it gives
Speaker 1: us more time for the human communing that far few
Speaker 1: of us or not enough of us have a chance
Speaker 1: to do often enough. So I don't know whenever you're
Speaker 1: if you're breaking bread with people you love, Like I said,
Speaker 1: these are all the things. Going going to a sporting event,
Speaker 1: going to an Angel City match, you're you're enjoying these
Speaker 1: moments of humanity with people you care about and uh
Speaker 1: and and make an effort to tell those people, especially
Speaker 1: men out there, dudes. Normalize telling the man in your
Speaker 1: life that you love them, whether that's your father, your brother,
Speaker 1: your best friend. You don't have to go buy a billboard.
Speaker 1: You can if you want up to you, but like,
Speaker 1: normalize having that conversation.
Speaker 4: You will not regret it.
Speaker 2: I love that, Alexis, honey and everyone business dad poscast
Speaker 2: make sure you're subsided, right. And Alexis, I'm so grateful
Speaker 2: to your parents. You know you carry them, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you carry them.
Speaker 3: And their energy so well.
Speaker 2: You can tell how deeply rooted their love is for you,
Speaker 2: and the love that they had for the world that
Speaker 2: seems to be oozing out of you. So it's really
Speaker 2: beautiful to experience that today. And I'm grateful that you
Speaker 2: came and spend these couple of hours with me.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much. This was awesome, man, Thank you,
Speaker 4: thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If
Speaker 2: you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant
Speaker 2: on why discomfort is the key to growth and the
Speaker 2: strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. If you know you
Speaker 2: want to be more and achieve more this year, go
Speaker 2: check it out right now.
Speaker 1: You set a goal today, you achieve it in six months,
Speaker 1: and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief.
Speaker 4: There's no sense of meaning and purpose.
Speaker 1: You sort of expected it, and you would have been
Speaker 1: disappointed if it didn't happen.