Funny Business
00:11:26 · Adam Miller
[00:11:26] S2: of snowballing on from there? Yeah. There's... I think, like, sometimes you have really big guests on, like, when we had on Malcolm Turnbull in, like, 2021, and it just felt a bit like, wow, we're talking to a former prime minister and it feels like, you know, like, really exciting in the moment and just... Yeah. Because it's a big guess, but then sometimes you get on guests that, like, you're excited about, but then they just tell you a story which you feel is really amazing. Or you're sitting in the room and you're just, like, you're entranced and you're, this is the most incredible story I've I've ever heard. Like, we had on a quantum physicist called Michelle Simmons on a few weeks ago. She's a former Australian of the year. And she was talking about her effort to build a quantum computer and about how all her intensity in life is directed to that. And it's just this conversation where you're so present and engaged because you're hearing someone talk about something that's so important at such a fundamental level and someone with so much passion for what they're doing. And it's just the most exciting thing in the world being in those conversations and hearing the truth come out of someone's mouth. Or, like, when we talked to Nick Crocker, like a Blackbird partner about the struggles of his relationship when he had, like, a seven year long distance relationship when he moved to New York to build a company. And it's just a really emotional conversation, and sometimes those hit you in the feels really hard. So there's, yeah, there's so many different elements of how it can hit you. Yeah. I feel
00:12:43 · Sachin, Lachlan Bradford, Adam Miller
[00:12:43] S3: like there's almost no correlation between how big the guest is and how much we enjoy the conversation. Like, obviously, we enjoy all conversations, but sometimes there's ones that will surprise you where these people are relatively unknown or not talked about in mainstream tech media where the conversation blows you away? [00:12:59] S0: I think that's where the magic is, to be honest. Like, there are a lot of, you know, big guests and big people doing cool things. They get a lot of coverage, and I suppose you hear that story a lot. And we find that the same too. Like, if we get someone... We do it more, say, high profile, it's like how do we ask different questions than what everyone else has sort of asked. [00:13:15] S2: But Yeah. [00:13:16] S0: I love the fact of, like, uncovering stories and, like, like, thinking about, like, what sort of problems people are solving and all that type of stuff. I feel like that's the cool part of podcasts is, like, unearthing people and sort of... Like, the... One of the things that we love is, like, sometimes being the first people to interview these people and ask them about these things, and then you go on and see them smash it on other pods and build up a sick brand, and it's just like Mhmm. That's done. We feel like honored that they come on and shoot
00:13:16 · Lachlan Bradford, Adam Miller, Robbie Hicks
[00:13:16] S0: I love the fact of, like, uncovering stories and, like, like, thinking about, like, what sort of problems people are solving and all that type of stuff. I feel like that's the cool part of podcasts is, like, unearthing people and sort of... Like, the... One of the things that we love is, like, sometimes being the first people to interview these people and ask them about these things, and then you go on and see them smash it on other pods and build up a sick brand, and it's just like Mhmm. That's done. We feel like honored that they come on and shoot [00:13:43] S2: their stories. Completely like that's the exciting part when you're uncovering someone or something, not when you're talking to someone who has some PR antics and they're telling the same story in a slightly different way for a 100 times. And I think there's, like, two ways to do that. One that you can uncover really cool people that haven't talked much before, or you can in... Interview people that are so dynamic that they can tell you different stories every time. Like, one of my favorite intellectuals is this economist, podcaster, and investor called Tyler Cowen. And he's been on, you know, hundreds of podcasts and he could do hundreds of more. And you'd always have new information because he's... The breadth and depth of his knowledge across all the humanities and technology, it's just never ending. But not everyone's like that as well. [00:14:22] S1: No. I feel like me and you just regurgitate the same shit.
00:14:22 · Robbie Hicks, Lachlan Bradford
[00:14:22] S1: No. I feel like me and you just regurgitate the same shit. [00:14:26] S0: Hey. If someone makes a good someone makes a good point, I'll just latch on to that point and then use that. [00:14:30] S1: And what you said sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go and talk about how you went from the pod to what are you doing now. Yeah.
00:14:38 · Adam Miller
[00:14:38] S2: It was a funny journey because I think Sachin and I, we always wanted to do something together because we always felt like we had this special friendship, this special energy together, and we have very, very similar values about what we want out of life. One of those values is about we wanna do really ambitious things, and we wanna do really impactful things to help humanity in whatever way, and we really care about tech and startups and all that stuff. And we actually originally thought that this would manifest in creating a venture capital firm together. Like, we both really like investing. We think it's a very intellectually stimulating sort of domain to sit in. You get to meet a lot of people. We're both very extroverted. And we could see ourselves, like, being really fulfilled in that way, and we started to head in that direction. So Sachin went to Airtree. I was a year behind him, so I was, like, hopefully about to jump into a venture job. And that was where we thought our path was gonna go down. And we sort of hit this this fork in the road in 2023, like early twenty twenty three where Sachin was thinking about, you know, potentially taking his career to America, and I was thinking about next steps. And we realized that we weren't gonna be doing something together if we took that step. And so we started to think about, like, what could we do together that could be something that's super impactful, really ambitious, but we sort of stay together. And so the first iteration of that was, like, alright, should we do the podcast full time? And we're, like, we're starting to get in sponsorship revenues. We could bootstrap that. That would be really fun. And ironically, we'd always, like, joked about doing the podcast full time, but the moment it became a reality, it didn't feel ambitious enough. I think we're like, oh, fuck. Like, are we just gonna do a podcast full time? And then that sort of went rolling from there.
00:16:16 · Lachlan Bradford, Sachin
[00:16:16] S0: Yeah. And then I think that was the start [00:16:17] S3: of us thinking about things, and that's kind of where we came out with the concept of Kindling from. And then the other kind of factor in this equation was that, like, we started talking to people about, like, okay. If we build x y z, what would that look like in terms of funding? So we could have gone down the bootstrapped route and built a good cash flow business. And sometimes I think that's, like, the... One of best paths to take because you can take profit out of your business and live a comfortable life. But instead, we took the more frugal approach of not paying ourselves much, raising money, and trying to build a bigger business. And that was almost more like a... We know this problem is to be solved in the creative space and this problem is we're really passionate about, but it's also this almost soulful thing of like, hey, we we wanna be fulfilled by doing something really big and something that feels really hard to do. I think just doing the podcast by itself didn't feel like it was stretching ourselves enough.