SOCIAL MEDIA ECHO CHAMBERS w/ Vernon Coleman

another social media app. What did Vernon c missing in the marketplace that made him say, you know what I'm going in for us? I think it's about allowing people to be able to do three things. One is silenced the noise increased the signal. I think in the world where you have Facebook, Twitter, TikTok like all these platforms have a lot going on and a lot of content, and so almost there's almost a lack of mindfulness, right. That's why we have this term called doom scrolling where

it's just always on, right, So that's one. The second I think think is about allowing people to reduce their curation and increase their rate of connection. So I think that on all these platforms, besides having and inundated and content, that content is also heavily curated and curated in a way where people are showing their best sells or their

perfect selves. And I think that also, you know, has some negative psychological effects on how you're thinking about and perceiving your own life, especially for gen Z where where we've kind of come into an age of hypercuration. And then I think the third is is really about essentially the pressure that we face on these platforms to not just curate our best selves but also constantly perform right.

And so a lot of these plays, a lot of these platforms have followings, which is another word for audience, and any time you get on stage and you're in front of audience, you to the fuel they need to perform. We even saw that with like Clubhouse back in the day, right, like you would go up on stage and then people

will put their corporate voice on because there's an audience there. Um. And so you know, we've we've really been focused around buildion products that allow people to to increase their their rate of connection, reduce curation, and have more peace um. And so you know, we've built we've built one product where actually been testing another product that I think is doing a lot better in the in regards to a new new way for people to to use social media.

And so, you know, I don't know how old job, but I don't know if you remember Path, it was an app about ten years ago or so. I loved Path, and perhaps it was ten years before its time, you know. And what makes what's different today that makes a private or more curated social experience viable that didn't exist when

Path was making you run at it? I think there's a couple things, right, Because it's like Path, Path, if I remember correctly, they limited the social graph by one hundred and fifty, right, And I think that was just based off of some of the data that Machom glad Well talked about in Tipping Point. Right after one hundred and fifty people, an organization, doesn't, you know, it loses it's it's a rate of connectivity amongst amongst different different members of that org. And I think Path I was

actually reading about this a couple weeks ago. I think one issue that it had was that people actually want to constantly expand their social graph. And so because a lot of these games, a lot of these these products are based around gaming mechanics. So when I started in my career, I was building in iOS and android games

in high school. I've always been a heavy gamer, and like, when you study game mechanics, right, it's about like, uh, for social media, it's about increasing status as a point as opposed to like your your your points or whatever, right, and so status Unfortunately, you want to create an endless status game. Facebook did that well, Instagram did that well,

TikTok's doing it well now. But when it come came to something like Path right one hundred, maxing your your cap out one hundred and fifty people seemed great, but the ideas once you you know, essentially everybody can max out their social status game. So that was one issue with it as as it was back then. But I think today we live in an age where path came

about before Instagram was really blowing up. I mean, Instagram was its thing, but it wasn't a billion users, basically hadn't even started yet, which evolved in a TikTok, and Snapchat was nascent at best, if it was if it was even out. And so I think that what's happened

is that gen Z one crazy more authenticity. And I think that because we've been inundated and grown up with the Instagram and gone to snapchat and gone to TikTok, which I think our indicators are more authentic forms of expression. Even if they are a little bit performative, it's still a more authentic form of expression. What I think has happened there is that you now get to a world where we're in a data with notifications, in a data with content, and we want a little less, but we

still want to express. So you get a ride of something like be real, right, where it's like, hey, you know what, it's just gonna be one shitty photo of a day. Really that's the intention, right, It's like, this

is not high quality content. So snapchot was always a low quality content platform, but when you're constantly inundated with like constantly having a snap, caring about the view count instead, let's just shift this back to I think we're seeing a rise of close friends apps because we've essentially we've we've been playing these status games for a long time, but now the status games have lost their their their appeal, right, every game, video games have a half life, and I

think social networks the half life is really about seven to ten years. I think we're just tired of playing the game where you know, I might become the world's next Instagram model or the top you know, top TikToker or whatever. So those those kind of my my stream of conscious around path and and today's networks. Yeah, and you did bring up that, you know, there is some sort of performative mechanism that today social media offerings rely on.

And even with that that, you know, there's so much of our content that revolves around dancing and imitation and etc. And this is an opportunity to even talk about how your product works because this is still unlimited beta for a lot of folks, and so a lot of people don't have access to it. But how do you imagine this might evolve having that performative style that we have, a matter of fact, I want to I want to

act this in there. Also. I remember it was one of the founders of Twitter who talked about I don't remember it was Ev Williams. As a matter of fact, it was Ev Williams who had put out a comment about how to grow products and he was like, if you're trying to get people to change what they do, you have a very hard time in success and trying to find success in business. But if you make it easier to do what they already want to do and what they already do, then you'll find an easier path

to success. So, because we're getting further in further along the road of performance and you know, trying to find good angles, even on TikTok and snapchat, you're still looking for the right light, right, And so, um, how do you imagine this might evolve inside of a more curated private network? Oh yeah, so I think this is this is interesting because um, we've over the last couple of years, we've been building um, different products around the idea of

how do you connect people in a more meaningful way. So, like, uh, with what we had recently built click was video chat communities and being able to meet and interact with people based on your interest graphs. Right. So if I want to meet other black founders at a raised ventric capital, right, I don't need to be in San Francisco or New York or London or whatever. I can be in South Carolina and still be able to interact with these people.

And the thesis was that that that that increasing the level of connection right, Actually one, because it's in synchronous, people are going to be more of their real selves. But two of these rooms are less than six people each, right, and so there's less of an audience or a rate of performance, and in theory, right, like people will just

use it to talk. Unfortunately, what we've recently realized is that this is not back to what you're saying about, Evan Williams, this is not what people at least adults. Teenagers and other markets might be a completely different thing, but when it comes to adults, right, what we found was like it was cool. People enjoyed the experience of being on to meet somebody knew that they wouldn't ordinarily met or catch up with people that they don't ordinarily

fee on clip. But the reality is it's like this is not something they're already actively doing to stay connected with people. Right, Like we thought about, you know, how do we change fundamentally how community works on the Internet all of its asynchronous. We thought synchronous might work, but there's so many in a world where we're constantly moving and a world where we have constant inundated of content and other things that we could do. It's just easier

to stay connected on Discord. It's easier to stay connected on Twitter, it's easier stay connected on Instagram, be Real, et cetera. And so I think that Discord is like the hardest app to use by the ways. Yeah, I agree, I agree, I agree, I agree. Um, but it's it's one of those things where it's like, you know, if the only way you were able to connect with people was like you had to get on a real time video call with them, right, all of a sudden, it's like,

use the product once a week. It's not been into your life. And so I think for us, what we had actually we had done different experiments and we actually came up with this new product called jot uh. And what jot is it's literally, I think be real meets ig notes, So you can post once a day. It's only text based content. You can post to your friends.

It's friends first, and you could post publicly if you would like, right, And so like what we're seeing, um like, uh, people are one loving that, But that this aspect where we realize that like people already express themselves through text.

Gen Z does not use Twitter for the most part, bespides like this all subset of tech gen Z, and people are looking for a way to express themselves stay in touch with their friends that might not be as performative as putting the camera in front of my face, but just taking a thought out of my head and putting it into the world in a much more simpler manner. And so I think there's tremendous opportunity in the text medium for this kind of once a day app products.

And I think it's more like anything with social media. It's very ze guy store, right, and I think the zeitgeis wants to use their phones a little bit less. They want to get out what they're saying, they don't want to carrate themselves too much, and they don't want to worry about a timeline following them five years later.

So that's kind of my thoughts around that. Yeah, as you brought up a term that I want to recall, this idea of the interest graph versus the social graph, and more and more social apps are moving to the interest graph that you know, the fyp page for you page, and I wonder your thoughts on the implications of moving

to the interest graph. We have had long conversations about connectivity and staying connected with people that you know love and friends that you're into high school with and etcetera, etc. And I want to have that conversation about the interest graph because in a world where you can go down a rabbit hole on any conversation or any topic, the interest graph and not to be provocative, but the interest graph reverberates that it makes that even more an issue.

And so what are your thoughts on how we manage as a society, again, not to be provocative, but how we manage as a society the implications of the interest graph versus the social graph. Yeah, that's a great question. It's tough, right, because I think that when it comes to we live in an age where information is completely accessible and therefore we're constantly able to expound our interests,

change our interests. But a lot of interest graph networks are very much echo chambery, right, So it's not really about who Will is today, it's showing you who will was a month ago, a year ago, whatever, Right, Whatever, whatever loop you got into is usually the content it continues to show you, which is cool in some sense because like you've self curated your algorithm, But in another sense, it's like human beings grow evolved, and change, except we

don't want to, especially when it comes to consuming content or or being social on the internet. We don't want to do too much work. Right, Like if if they're asking, you know, you to go and say, hey, now go reselect your interests, go relook at all these different videos, like you're kind of like, now, it's easier to just kind of stay in that, in that in that loop. And I think that it's hard because we create connectivity as human beings, and I think we get it out.

You know, when when I was younger and playing like Call of Duty or or Tighten Far or whatever, right, we hop on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network with my friends and that's how we stay connected. But as I got older, right, it's like you kind of just I just see what's going on on Stagram, I see what's going on Twitter, and these things are evolving from my friends and now what they have going on to just

this interest graph. And you combine that with AI, you combine that with deep fakes, and I'm really really good at being able to show you, you know, exactly what might be of interest but also skew you towards a more radicalized approach or whatever it is that you're into, right, And so I think it's I think I think the world needs both because I think it's it's good to have a place where you can just explore your interests and see what's going on in the world, or see

what's going on within your interest segment or what people what thought leaders are people who think about whatever your interest is are doing. But I think it's also we can't lose this ability to stay connected with our friends and feel that true sense of connection because I think, you know, we're basically an error where it's hard to separate what's on TV from from you know, who's outside. Essentially, right,

TV used to be the quote unquote interest graph. It used to be the place where we consume content, and outside was where we saw our friends and spend time. But now those worlds are kind of getting a little bit too blended, right, And so that's why you might see your friends, like on Instagram constantly posting content as a way to cry to an interest graph as opposed to connecting with you as a human being. So, I don't know, I think it's important for us to keep

a balance. I think we can need it inso a society, But it's it's gonna be tough, especially when you start adding adding the fact that byte dances, you know, essentially a Chinese sponsor government product in terms of one of the largest interstgraph products in the market today. I hear that the algorithm that works in China is not the algorithm we get. Yeah, that's that's I've heard that too. I've heard that, I've heard different things. I've heard that

before you know when you're a teenager. When you're a teenager, so I think before sixteen or fourteen, a lot of the contents focus on educational self improvement, self empowerment, different things that get people's minds and particularly teenagers' minds to think about creating and building in and purpose. Where it's in America, it's the algorithm. Teams are often showed it's more about dancing having fun, which is all fine and dandy,

but the issue is what you then create, right. There's been multiple studies around this is that gen Z younger gen Z as well as the Alpha's the generation after gen Z, they're top things that they want to be as a content creator, but it's not the content that these people want to create are not widely built around purpose or things that actually help help you as an adult.

It's more about status or more about you know, having the most amount of eyeballs, rather it's doing something outrageous whatever, And so I think that's a whole different problem instead of policy that hopefully will get either some heavy regulation or figure out how to how to how to have just as much control of such a widely used platform here in the States. So it's it's interesting with what

you just brought up. So I imagine five, ten, fifteen years ago, when when social media companies were being built, they could just build software and build tech and put it out in the world. But what I'm hearing you say and correct me if I'm wrong, is that when you're building social media tech today, you've got to be thinking about implications and regulatory things and what it does to society. And you can't just build tech for tech sake or just tech for fun, but you got to

think about so many other things. Yeah, this is this is interesting because I think when early early on as a builder, I have always approached building products as an as an artist, and so I think that's what you needed to consumer social products to get anything good out of it, Because I do believe fundamentally consumer, especially the ones that strike it's very much with the zeitgeist, and it's very much in the moment and in the times.

And I think that when you approach it as an artist, you're very good at capturing the energy that's in the ether right now and funneling it into something that people can now you know, millions, if not billions of people can now use to express. And so I think it starts off as fun, right like our product JOT started off as I woke up December twenty third and I said, hey, I called some of our engineers and I said, I want to do something around text based expression. Here's how

we're going to do it. Design the mechanics in a day and just started going right. But I think that as you start to you can't just put it out into the world and start growing as fast as possible without taking at least some time, which is what we've been doing in a beta testing phase, in a trunch growth phase where maybe you're you know, you vote in it to the public, but you're you know, you're not

letting it get to millions of users. You're actually constraining the growth because you're trying to trying to be mindful of the dynamics and the certain certain ways and with certain mechanics that you designed and product can have an

implication that's on society. But it's it's it's one of those things where I think you have to start off as fun, but you have to be mindful once you start creating something that people actually want to play, right, um, and in thinking about how you how how that, how you can how those because each platform, right, there's different phases in which you have to think about different things.

We don't have to worry about modification of elections out one hundred thousand or even a million users, right Like you don't need to really worry about that, Like you might hurt your brain thinking too much. But as you know, ten million, one hundred million users, it might be good to think about that. So there's you know, I think it's also a timing thing, but it's it's a it's definitely an important thing to be thinking about that and

so many other things around social and there's a lot. Yeah, And so I'm curious on your perspective on how the economic needs of a business dictate things that people may appreciate about the product. And so the example I'll give is, you know organic timelines versus you know, egalitarian timelines, and you know, but the ones that are driven by economic incentives.

But you run in a business, right and while you may have a crowd of people who shake their fists because their timeline is no longer in order by you know, actual congruent like you know actual and you know the clock, there's an economic incentive to do it a different way. And so not necessarily with that particular instance, but how do you balance what might have been cool, might have been a feature, but a need to drive economy mix because it's still a business and if you're not paying

for it, you're the product. Yeah, so this is this is I have a couple of thoughts here, and I think it's when it's very platform dependent and what that platform actually offers people. But I fundamentally believe that the biggest, one of the best things that could have happened and the worst thing that could have happened in the early parts of the app Store, when apps started just becoming a thing, the best thing and the worst thing was

everybody started expecting products for free. So as a builder, as a business owner, right, we can put hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars into development. People might not use the product, right, people might use the product, I don't know, but guess what, Rather they use it or they don't use it. Everybody expects it for free, and unfortunately, right the millions of dollars needs to be you know, recouped in some form

or fashion. And so I think what's happened is that because people we go on the free route and we see what companies have to do to monetize free based platforms, and I think people are more and more not liking that, right. And I think that on top of that, people are just are also just willing to pay for things. If the value proposition is clear or you you you you yeah, I think it's the value proposition is clear, people are

willing to pay for things. And so I think, you know, there was one point I thought about putting an app out in the app store for three hundred dollars. Initially, I think that people should be or builders companies. If they build something that people actually love, you can charge money for in the app store. You can charge money for it via a subscription. You could charge money for it versus a freemium model. Right. So, like if you look at something like Tender, Tender is a free product.

It is, but it operates like a video game in the sense where hey, you know, after I don't know what it is nowadays, but like back in then it needs to be like fifty swipes, right, you know, if you want more swipes, you need to pay, or if you want to be able to to see who's who's swiped on you first, you know, pay the subscription. And that's a model that's working very well for Tender. I think they've they've crossed at least over you know, one

point five billion dollars an annual recruiting revenue. And it's a product that's both free and paid. And so I think what I think that we need to move into a direction where we have more freemium models. Um. And so what that does is it makes up for the if the if you're if a person's not paying for the product, it doesn't mean you are the product. It just means that, due to network effects, somebody else in the network is paying for your ability to use the product. Right.

I think that's a more it's just basic business and hopefully you know, I think Hopefully that becomes more of a standard because far the longest time, I think just what happened was like, you know, even back in the day, Snapchat was like, oh, we'll charge money for filtering, right, like, we're not gonna do advertising, We're not gonna do media. And like people, I'm not favorite filters. I love youth

and filters, but I don't want to favorite filters. And it's like, well, you know, just as though we are businesses, we also have to answer to the market, and the market don't want something. We just can't make it, make it happen. You know, when you're building consumer phacing applications, there are certain metrics that indicate if you're finding success long before you make it to an afrotech dot com headline.

You could prioritize engagement rates, video views, sign up completion rates, but there are other metrics that can be even more important. Vernon speaks on it, it was like an intimate happy hour, and for us, the metrics were about retention day twenty eight. Retention. We're obviously looking at day three, day seven, but day twenty eight is really where you see the make or break, because after day twenty eight usually you'll you'll see eighty

to ninety percent of that cohort stick. Well, well, you know months later, right, and so we're looking heavily at day twenty eight retention, we're looking heavily at times spent. So I think some of four of the more recent metrics around click were like, uh, you know, time spent was around I think three hours and thirty six minutes a week, right, And so like you look deeper in those metrics, you say, well, how you know, how many times do they open the app? How many times are

they hopping into a chat room? And of those times that they hop into a chat room, or are these you know, thirty or forty chats where you're doing ten minute conversations or think it's like two chats where you have an hour and a half conversation each. And so we try to look at that data in different different ways to understand and it more. But we care a lot about time spent and retention. I think, but jot,

which is you know, very very different. It's asynchronous first, right, you're putting out a thought in sixty characters or less. It disappears twenty four hours later, and you can't see your friends stuff until you post right, and so with JO we're looking at we're looking at time spent, which is good, but our more important metrics are still retention

day twenty, day three, day seven, day twenty eight. With a product like job, day twenty eight still matters, but day three and day seven can tell you a lot very quickly, just because it's so much the barrier to entry. To use it does not require a conversation. It just

requires letting out whatever is in your mind. And so we think about the retention and then K factor, which is really really important, and so K factor is really the I think the tech took that term from from medicine, which is like the rate in which a virus virus spreads. It is long before COVID. It was just like, how do you how does you know if each The whole point of K factor is like if does one user

become two users? Right, or does one user become you know, three, or whatever the case may be for an early stage product, well for a late stage product. I remember talking to

the founder of Door to Action years ago. It's like, you're usually gonna have a K factor around point three, eight point four eight when you're much later, but that is not the case when your social networks early, your social network when it's early, the K factors should really be uh, you know two or above, right, like if people if if you get on, if you get on job will and you don't send it to you only send it to like one friend. And K factor is not about how many invites you sent, it's the rate

of invites that were accepted and people signed up. So if you sent four but two accepted, then you know, like that's actually what matters. And so if you know, I think the perfect example was early Cuphouse, right, like people were K factor people were each person wasn't bringing on one person, they were bringing on four people on average, five people on average. And that's how you have this like Crazil crazy, you know, viral moment and so you know,

I yeah, it's for different platforms, requires different things. For Job, it's retention, it's it's K factor, it's time spent. And outside of that, it's really about looking top of funnel at downloads. And so I'll just say this one last thing about downloads, like build a social network nowadays. There was a time in twenty twenty where me and a group of fifty random gen z did the Imaufi movement where we captured Twitter's attention for thirty six hours and

we raised over three hundred. People thought we had a real product, and we funneled all we funneled all this interest and all this energy. Explain what that is so people we wouldn't know. Yeah, so so so we basically h we basically me and fifty gen z had i emog malth emog i emog. We had created a viral little website that let people retweet like you would sign up, give us your information. It was a lackey website and then you once you finish, it was like getting their

early access. People don't even know what they were getting early access to retweet, right, So that's a viral people started sharing. So within less than thirty six hours, there's over fifty thousand people signed up. Right. We did a merch drop in a minute. In twenty eight seconds, we sold over ten thousand dollars worth of merch. There was vcson every in all fifty of our dms asking to us to lead a round of something they didn't know about,

just because we could capture attention. And at the end of it, we ended up raising I think about three hundred and fifty k or four hunder k for different Black Lives Matter organizations at that time. But it was

basically a weekend project where we capture people's attention. And you see this with companies like Mischief and others where when you're looking at top of I correlate that to the aspect of getting top of funnel downs for anybody out there who might be thinking about building a consumer product,

you have to create viral moments. This is why most products from airbuds to Sincerely or anything else that's currently popping off that's probably gonna raise like ten to twenty million dollars in the next couple of weeks, they've captured viral moments through either TikTok or their You know, Mischief is constantly get a different influence to where those little red boots and post about it and it creates a

moment where people want to talk about something. But you have to be willing to do wacky, weird stuff to capture people's attention in a world where they're inundated by everything, right, because if you don't get the top of funnel, every viral moment needs a catalyst, just like every virus needs a catalyst. You got to start it off and kick

it off. I'm glad you brought up Clubhouse a second ago, as a part of that success was we were all locked in the house because they happen during COVID, and some of that has proven out other than the fact that you know, maybe they've got some issues getting rolling out cool features in et cetera. But part of that is proving out because we're outside now and they aren't

as popular as they were. But I'm using that example because you raised money during COVID, and what was the opera tunity you saw during that time that made it still the right time to raise capital when everyone else was well, everybody was uncertain and what the future looked like. Oh yeah, every everybody was so uncertain. And not just on Twitter, but if I was, I was talking to friends and advisors and everybody's like, you know, that was

out of good time to raise money, YadA YadA, YadA. Um. We you know we even had like we had only raised like fifty K and angel money, which is not a lowed when you're living in San Francisco and you dropped out of college a year before that, it's just not much to live off of UM and so we we we were we were pretty much completely out of money UM and we were we had like two acquisition offers,

which would have been great. But the thought process, the thing I was thinking back to what we said earlier in this interview was like social is like geistel and so we had spent a lot of time building a product around connecting people in person on college campuses, and it was working and we had great retention. We had tens of thousand users. Still could have raised any money. I think we know why. But the point is that I was like, wait a minute, I really care about

allowing people to be their authentic selves. I really care about community. And so on that eight weeks, me, me and a friend went out to the mountains in South Carolina and we just started building. In that eight weeks, we were trying a bunch of different ideas and I was like, you know what, we can connect people through video and audio. And I actually know that The last person, one of the last people I met in San Francisco

was Paul Davidson before you put out Clubhouse. So I was already understood and we had a zoom like the week the week before he released it that one and he was talking about this aspect of building products with just one button, and I was like, there's gonna be a moment. You know, if everybody starts talking about it now is the time, then you sometimes you've already missed the boat versus just saying, you know what, I can

create the time. And it felt like the Zeke guys people, we're gonna build things that allow people to communicate and interact with this new found where we lived in where we're just in our houses and we weren't able to travel and we didn't really want to meet people in person. Clubhouse was one of them, Locker room was one of them, Real Time was one of them. There was a lot of different different products around that time, but I felt like I just felt like it was the time for

that product for the market. And usually capital follows. We noticed vcs. They'll tend to say, oh, well, you know those just say whatever, whatever the thing is right, and then when it changes, that change didn't just come out

of nowhere. Came out of something. Yes, we can talk about zero interest rates or whatever, but it also came out of consumers wanting something new and actually gravitating towards that so much that I had a market pool to say, oh, you know what this is consumers, we're funding again, so and sos worth doing this. But if you you know, if I listened to I spent four or five years building consumer products that just weren't getting funded because it

wasn't the time. Even though it was the time another product or getting funded, It's just way harder to raise money while you're black. And so I just was like, I just to me, I just felt like it's the right time to be building what we're building, That's all that matters. And secondly, talking to talking to some of the best investors right like Sam Altman came in and came into our round, founder open Ai. A lot of people think Alexis had like was the first catalyst and

then everything else changed. Alexis is the last last check at nat Troncha Capital. Before Alexis, we had Sam Altman, we had the founder Kickstarter, Nancy Stricker, the founder of meet Up, the founder of coruntry World, the largest anime platform in the world, you know, the founder of Twitch. Like.

We had pretty much have been raising funding before we had our our bigger moment with our larger steed round but it just came from just keep going and building what we thought people would actually want, even though our business was completely irrelevant beforehand. In terms of IROL and college campuses, those were both done for in March to

twenty twenty. Yeah, I mean, you've got some incredible, incredibly smart investors UM and particularly I mean you got again you named him Sam Altman, who's investing heavily and spending his time heavily in AIM. And they've seen a million ideas, particularly Sam tole me he ran hy combinators. I mean, they've seen a million ideas, really great ideas, and they passed on probably more way more than they took. Right, what was it about you that they said, we're making

the beat if you can put yourself in the shoes. Yeah, I'm thinking about that because it's it's it's and we still never got into YC. So that's you know. But the thing about Sam is, like all these different people someone want to met through others, but for instance, Sam I met so before I dropped out of college. I would take the bus and I would take ride shares with random people on Facebook, like college ride share groups, and I would come up to the city. That's like

a two to three hour thing. And I remember I had maybe like one hundred dollars in my account or something, and but my AirPods were broken. And I love listening to music. I make music, I make fashion, I do I do other things outside of just product, but it helps create better ideas. I needed to go to replace my AirPods. It was like sixty dollars and I was like,

I'm just gonna spend it. I don't care, right, Like, forty dollars should be enough for me to get back down to Santa Cruz and I ran into Sam Altman at the Apple Store. And I had been watching back in high schools, watching Why see Startup Schools, watching all these things, and so I have heavy, heavy facial recognition. The way I had met Sam, I did not ask

talk to him about my company. I talked to him about what was first on my mind, which was YC and Black Founders and what is YC thinking about around that. I think that was something that kind of was like one that's different. Most people are not talking about that. This is not the climate of D D and I yet, so people were really even especially Black D and I, was a completely different thing. But like we were just

having a real conversation about that. We talked a little bit about my company, and then we had just kept a relationship going for two years, and that's you know, when the time came, I just I gave him a call, I gave him a text. He's like I could talk to night. And we talked the next day and then he was like, hey, yeah, like I'll put in put in money. I mean, we literally got a recommendation from great people at YC. We got to our interview and

still didn't get into YC. And people used to have my mind jacked up thinking I had to have an accelerate, I had to have this. But you know, Sam wasn't just the only person where it was a random running like that. The CPO tender, the founder Kickstarter, these were all like me hustling and randomly walking into these people are going to have ment where these people would be speaking and you know, sneaking backstage to talk to him.

And so I think just being my full authentic self and just following the energy, despite what some idea of a rule of what you shouldn't say, what you can't say, what you shouldn't do, I think that's what's helped me stick stuck out in the minds of these people? But I'm sure they can answer that question a whole lot better than me. I'm just one account. Black tag Green Money is a production of Blackvity Afro Tech, a black

effect podcast network. Can I Hire Media? You Just Produced by Morgan Dubond and me Well Lucas well additional production support by Sarah Ergony Rose McLucas. Special thank you to Michael David. Something That's a serranto. Learn more about my guest and other technistupen an innovators at afrotech dot com. Enjoying Black Tech Green Money. Share this with somebody, Go get your money. Peace of luck,