00:07:50 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:07:50] S0: Most of us that got computers early, like, started in some kind of gaming. For me, it was typing in games from a magazine and watching them run because they didn't have storage and then when you'd have storage, you'd get games and then you would try to find games from your friends and then eventually, you get into programming. Was there a moment where you moved from kind of using the computer to programming the computer?
00:08:12 · Markie Wagner
[00:08:12] S1: Yeah. I have a very distinct memory. I was sitting on my childhood, like, living room couch, and I go, oh my god. Websites are so cool. I want a website. Like, I want my own website. I have to have my own website. And so I like yelled at my mom, like, mom, I want to, I'm going to go build a website. And she says, as long as it's free. And that led me to building my own little Frankenstein website. The first one that I ever built was a website about my pet hamster, Natasha. Hamstersandus.com, it's still up to this day. And it was nothing special. It was just kind of stitched together, but it was so fun to have a domain that I could send to my friends and family that had pictures of hamsters that I thought were cool and very misguided advice about how to take care of your hamsters that I thought was true. And for me, that was the most amazing thing. And that was something so special. And it would make everyone open it on every device they had all the time. And I would post it all over Yahoo! Answers, of course. Every hamster themed question, it would be like, have you guys heard of this amazing website about how to take care of your hamsters? Oh, Oh man, this gem, this diamond in the rough right here, got to get a load of it. And so attracted a small measly group of users to that, which was just so fun. I just couldn't get enough of it. I built a couple other ones like this built up for selling random stuff on the internet and build them in volume from there.
00:09:40 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:09:40] S0: Yeah. And how did you learn? Like, when it comes to the sort of now you wanted to build a website, like, what was the process for figuring out, like, the HTML or the hosting? How did you figure out how to go from using them to building them? [00:09:53] S1: Yeah. My first v 0.0 website was like a free website hosting situation. And then I said, oh man, this is cool, but it doesn't quite look how I want. And so from there, we'd start using HTML templates, tweaking that a little bit. I kind of learned by changing the code little by little, and then eventually changing bigger and bigger chunks of it to make it look how I wanted. And so, yeah, internet resources, online videos, emailing random people who are engineers saying like, hey, this is my first website. Like, can you help me solve this problem? [00:10:28] S0: Is your day like you go to grade school, come home, turn on the computer, basically stay online for four or five hours, and then just go to bed and repeat? [00:10:40] S1: Yeah, absolutely. That was literally exactly my childhood. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't enrolled in any sports or athletic activities. So that was my day. It was like, play my online games. Minecraft entered the picture at some point to play that. It was like this really amazing, like hunger games Minecraft server. That was really fun. And then when I felt inspiration or when I felt like I wanted to just go build stuff too. It was all kind of blended together.
00:10:40 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:10:40] S1: Yeah, absolutely. That was literally exactly my childhood. Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't enrolled in any sports or athletic activities. So that was my day. It was like, play my online games. Minecraft entered the picture at some point to play that. It was like this really amazing, like hunger games Minecraft server. That was really fun. And then when I felt inspiration or when I felt like I wanted to just go build stuff too. It was all kind of blended together. [00:11:09] S0: Did your online friends ever become your physical real friends? I mean, you ever meet folks that you ended up building, like, a real relationship with in grade school, or was it always, like, people through the internet that you never get a chance to meet? [00:11:22] S1: I know some people in Skype. I don't know if you remember Skype back in the day. Had Skyped some people. I met more of them in middle school. In middle school, I kind of realized that I could strong-arm my way to going to different conventions and things in the real world and start to meet some people. But that's like another sub story, but I was very deep in the Tumblr fandom era and community. And a lot of those people would meet up for, like, premieres or conventions and stuff like that.
00:11:22 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:11:22] S1: I know some people in Skype. I don't know if you remember Skype back in the day. Had Skyped some people. I met more of them in middle school. In middle school, I kind of realized that I could strong-arm my way to going to different conventions and things in the real world and start to meet some people. But that's like another sub story, but I was very deep in the Tumblr fandom era and community. And a lot of those people would meet up for, like, premieres or conventions and stuff like that. [00:11:52] S0: So Well, I definitely wanna get to that. And I think that you described kind of like, hey. You were really into the web in grade school. But then I think you happened to be in school when the iPhone and mobile became a thing. And I'm curious as to, like, how did you react to all the sort of hysteria? I was in industry at the time and it clearly was a huge thing for all of us, kind of like AI is today. But that, like, wave of the phone probably happened when you were in school. So curious, was that a moment or was this something that you were late to the game on?
00:12:28 · Markie Wagner
[00:12:28] S1: It was a moment that I was the only person in the entire world that cared about it. I had gotten my first iPhone and kind of like begged my family for the first iPhone. I actually ended up getting the three g when it came out and when the App Store came out. And for me, you know, I was like, oh, I'll need it whenever I walk home from school to make sure I can text or something. I made up some excuse of why it had to be that iPhone. But I remember I got it and I was like, this is the most incredible thing I've ever seen in my life. And the app store had just been kind of accompanying as the three gs came out, the app store came online and I had no job. Like school is just not that overwhelming at that age. And so I would spend all day, My fascination with desktop computers switched to mobile, basically. And I'd spend all day playing all the early apps on the App Store, which of course were so buggy, Tapzoo. All of the early primitives of what became the farm bills and things like that were kind of happening on the app store. I'm like, and I would just spend all my time on it. I remember I would like get iTunes gift cards and then spend it on the in app purchases. And I was like, this is the best use of money I've ever seen. And so I was just doing that all day. And I think there's actually a really funny story. I want to say it was third grade or fourth grade or something. Might be the wrong time period, but everyone in my class had to write or make some kind of art project about the thing that they love the most in the entire world. For most people, that was like their pet, ballet, their family, the ocean. But for me, that was the iPhone. And so I have this scrapbook in my childhood home that's like 45 pages of like really detailed feature reviews of of what Voice Memos did. I'm like, this is what iTunes looks like. Just going into such detail about it. And I remember I presented it. Everyone's like, what is this? Why is this what you love the most in the world? And I was like, it's what I love the most in the world. So I have that very, very explicit memory. But it was just like magic.