01:07:40 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[01:07:40] S1: Maybe fifteen. That's the [01:07:41] S0: beauty of this model is you basically do an interview as early as possible with someone working on something really hard and then you do a follow-up the year after and the year after and the year after. You keep on doing this and you basically document the growth of the company and the person over time. [01:07:53] S1: See how gray their hair goes over that time. First [01:07:58] S0: you lose the hair slowly over preceding rounds and then eventually it all comes back and then it goes gray. Yeah. [01:08:05] S1: Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a hair loss from the stress, and then there's the hair transplant from the IPO. And then there's the slow graying over time, but still with a full head of hair because you got the transplant. Exactly. [01:08:18] S0: Exactly. And eventually, you go to the full blown blood boy situation just to survive as long as possible. That's that's that's the that's the next date after that. You were talking with John and Jordy from TBPN a couple days ago, believe. And you mentioned you you would have thought that the... Like, building a company the second time would be slightly easier than the first one. But I think that hasn't probably been the case. Like, it's just I think it's probably just as hard. Even if you have resources, it's just as hard [01:08:46] S1: Yeah. [01:08:47] S0: The second time. How did you kind of think about that going in? And then what what made you reevaluate that?
01:08:52 · Baiju Bhatt
[01:08:52] S1: Look. Starting a company at a small stage is like full of stuff not working. Right? You hire two to three people to do a function. You hire one person to do a function. That one person is good and they up and leave. And you're like, fuck. I am back to absolute square one here. And I have to, like, go and do this again, and that's not easy, and it's not fun. Right? Or you hire a team of people and, like, maybe there's a couple of people that aren't the right fit on it. And then you have to get rid of them, and then you have, again, not enough people to do the thing that you're trying to do. And you're like, fuck. And you're like, how are we gonna fix this? Well, we need recruiting. And then you're like, wait a second. We're not very good at recruiting. You're like, ugh. Gotta figure that one out. By the way, I think we are pretty good at recruiting. It's hypothetical. So, like, that kind of stuff is... It's hard, right? It's not like I did it before and so these problems evaporate. It's like, no, these problems are just like they were ten, fifteen years ago. They're oddly similar. But like, what's the difference? I honestly think where the first time around, some of these things would happen, and they would feel existential. Right? Like, oh, my God. Like, what if what if this happens? Right? Like, what if this other thing happens? Like, it's gonna be catastrophic. Where this time around, I'm like, now I'll figure it out. It's like, yeah, it's it's it's it's much more of like a lot of things with the sobriety of experience don't look catastrophic, but they look annoying. Yeah. Or they look like a paper cut where it's like, yes, this is not good. It's a problem that has to be solved. It will take some time to solve the problem. In between, we're gonna have to figure it out, but we will solve it. And then guess what? We're gonna have some new problem to solve. And the same thing... You know what I mean?
01:10:57 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[01:10:57] S0: Sam Altman talks about this specifically where he says, like, the first time you experience a company killing or an existential event, it feels like the world's falling apart and everything's going to shit. But then you survive that. And by, like, the sixth or seventh time where you feel like there's this company killing existential event, it's like, well, we survived the first six, so this is probably gonna be similar. [01:11:17] S1: Yeah. And it's like the the mental models for it are like if you're in the middle of some catastrophic thing, which, you know, fingers crossed never happens here, but I'm sure inevitably will at some point. And what do you do? Well, you you control the things you can control, and you put one foot in front of the other. You have a realistic view on what the timeframe is for it to resolve. And then you just fucking do it. You know, like that's it's nothing more. It's nothing less. You just approach it with the sort of like calmness and the sobriety of having done it before and realizing that there is a path. Like if you're not breaking the laws of man and you're not breaking the laws of physics, there will be a path. [01:12:04] S0: I love the line of, if you're going through hell, just keep going. [01:12:08] S1: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the times the answer is not like the only way out is through. Right. So just go do it. [01:12:16] S0: Yeah. You mentioned that you like love music and you worked out a lot as a kid. Did you play any games or what what are the favorite your favorite like games to play?
01:12:16 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[01:12:16] S0: Yeah. You mentioned that you like love music and you worked out a lot as a kid. Did you play any games or what what are the favorite your favorite like games to play? [01:12:27] S1: I love Magic the Gathering. [01:12:28] S0: Okay. What about that? [01:12:30] S1: I loved it as a kid. It reminds me of... I love many, many aspects of it. It reminds me of my childhood, which inherently, I think, speaks to the monkey brain in some way. I love the artwork. I love the old cards as well. I love all things nineties because it kind of... I think we were talking about this. I can't remember if it was right at the beginning of the podcast or right before about, like, what the human brain was like before every plug Simulation. Yes. Mobile phones. But I remember, like, the artwork from old Magic cards and the the way that they made me feel. Like, I grew up pretty poor, and so I didn't have... I definitely... Not the Magic card collection I do now, but I had some cards back then. Yeah. Very nerdy hobby. [01:13:15] S0: Talk about IPO days. Basically, just I get all the magic cards I wanted. Yes.
01:13:19 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
[01:13:19] S1: Give me the magic cards. No. Although I think I did have some magic cards with me on the IPO trip to New York. I'm pretty sure I did. Magic cards. Yes. I love the artwork. I also loved playing as a kid, and I rediscovered it in, like, 2015 or 2016, somewhere in that time frame. I was actually walking around Berkeley, and I walked into a game store, and I was like, I remember these things. That's really fun. I was like, maybe I'll just buy buy some cards. I think I... It's like, I think I still know where my cards are at home. And I go... I started going through them, and it gave me that feeling of like awe and wonder as a kid. And then I started playing the game and a whole another light bulb went off, which is this is a thing to do with people that is purely analog. And you can sit down with another person and you can engage with them and your phones are nowhere to be found. And like it's an hour of you and that person like engaging in an intellectual way with one another. And it's also super fucking nerdy because you're, like, pretending to be a wizard and casting spells. The game, I believe, in my in my experience, the game has, like, a real longevity to it because the way that the game is made it was made by a mathematician, a combinatorics mathematician. And so the game is not simple and there's always room to get better. So like the best people like have win rates of like 65, 70% against other really good people. And it kinda speaks to the fact that it's like it's a game of skill. There's also, [01:15:02] S0: like, a
01:15:02 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[01:15:02] S0: like, a [01:15:03] S1: randomness to it. Yeah. Exactly. [01:15:05] S0: From what I've seen, the very... Like, the best. Used to play Magic when I was a kid. I didn't ever... I got really into Catan, and I have... Like, against people that don't really know how to play, it's probably, like, an 80, 90% win rate, which is very easy, but I would just, like, play online. But there's there's something definitely special. Like, business is not... And building companies is not... It's not guaranteed. It's it's... And it's also fun to understand that there is risk, that there is chance on some level, but then try to understand, like, where are those points of failure and then systematically, like, eliminate or lower the probability. Like, part of the reason why, you know, a really pro Magic player might have a... That type of win rate is because they understand their deck. Like, they've they've they've constructed this deck for a specific style of play. And then by the time that they're actually doing that for, I don't know, hundredth game, they know what they're doing, and they kinda understand where is the risk in my deck.