Started the company with just $2,000. Now we're generating 1,000,000 of dollars in revenue. What the heck do you do? The idea is to give every person in the workplace their own executive assistant. You got to 16,000,000 users with $0 spent in marketing. The ultimate form of marketing is when Krish, you have a company that's generated 8 figures in revenue that you started at just 20 years old. What the heck do you do?
We're building AI for all the back office work that people do that is gonna replace much of the tedious tasks that you would have to do on a day in day out basis. The idea is to give every person in the workplace their own executive assistant, not just the executives, not just the c suite. When I was at Microsoft, that's what I thought. Like, why are only the c suite people getting these, assistance?
What if we could do that where every single person has someone that follows them around, gets work done? And, we started with that idea as just an idea 8 years ago. And then after a lot of iteration and a lot of innovation that's happening in the AI space, it's become a reality in the last couple years. You mentioned Microsoft. I really wanna understand exactly what you've done to end up where you are today. How did you become one of the youngest people on the Microsoft team?
Growing up, I hated school. It wasn't just the idea of school, but it's just being in an environment where you're sitting in class regurgitating information. I was always distracted. That wasn't my favorite thing. So I told myself that I would graduate as quickly as possible, took 7, 8 courses, myself that I would graduate as quickly as possible, took 7, 8 courses a semester, and ended up graduating. From there, I had a few offers.
I ended up choosing the Microsoft offer, which initially wasn't even the goal. Like, the goal was to come back to California, where I grew up. But they gave me an offer I couldn't resist and ended up going to Microsoft. And I was a product manager there.
So this 20, 21 year old PM working with people in their forties and fifties, that was an eye opening experience because you wonder, like, how seriously will they take this, like, kid in, like, this work environment where they've been working for several decades? And I learned a lot there. Speaking of going into the workforce that young, it's it's such a big tech tech company. I think there are a lot of people who might be listening to this wondering how they can end up in a similar position.
I know there are a lot of students at my school that are like, hey. How can I get these internships? And they're all going through the traditional path. But I think if you're a college student, there's one thing that you can do to kinda set yourself apart and get an internship within 90 days. I think if you follow a few key steps. Curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I think first, similar to what you've done, you create a list of the top 50 people that you want to work for.
10 to 15 of them should be in an area that's local to you. So for example, if you're in New York, find 10 to 15 people in New York. From there, just send them an email and just say 3 things about you that make you important and why they should talk to you. And say, hey, these are the 3 things about me. I'd love to buy you coffee or lunch and see how I can be helpful. It's a very small ask and I think it opens up the door quite early to potential larger opportunities down the road.
Well, when I was a student looking for internships, I didn't get any internships my 1st year after college. So me and my friend decided to create our own internship and start working on our own project. That was our game of playing a start up. We ended up hiring a bunch of our teammates have it, or from school who didn't also have internships, have them tag along, and we created something, right. We needed to put something on our resume.
When you apply for an internship and all you have is coursework, no one's gonna take you seriously. Because a lot of these businesses are gonna look at you and say, what do you have to offer? What skill sets do you have to offer? And again, it's unfair to ask a student to have tons of experience, but have you done projects? Have you done things that make you look resourceful? So we had to be resourceful when big companies were not looking at us because we were just students.
So for me, building up my credentials by doing hackathons, doing all these, like, projects, and then building a team shows responsibility, accountability, and that initiative. And then I can go talk about those projects, the challenges I faced, the difficulties in solving them, and you become a lot more relevant. So after my sophomore year, I ended up getting a product management internship at a company called Workday, a big ERP HR company.
And that was their 1st year doing a PM internship cadence. So that was really cool because a lot of the skills that I learned starting my own thing and managing, our own team and then building the product, all of that stuff translated directly into being what a PM is. You have to take ownership and accountability without influence. I think that was, like, the best way. That's the secret. And maybe things have changed now. It's a very competitive job market.
There are very talented people with great GPAs in software engineering, studying computer science where it's very tough. They're applying to thousands of places. But if you're applying to the same place or the same way with the same resume, and it's not working after like the first 20, maybe you need to change things up, Maybe you need to look at your resume. Maybe you need to get, like, a different set of skills in order to go.
But sometimes we just try to do the same thing a 100 times even if it's not working. So my best advice is try to look at your resume, look at skills and things that you can pick up that will help you stand out from the crowd. And that stint at Microsoft didn't last so long. You quit pretty pretty quickly and you and your cofounder Sam decided to start the business that you have today, except there are many iterations before that.
What gave you the conviction to go quit high paying job and go start a business with, very little money at the time, I believe? I at least worked for a year. My cofounder has no work experience outside of an internship. Internship, so he's never worked in a corporate setting in a full time capacity. So we didn't even know the basics of building a company. I didn't have an MBA. I did not know most of these things. We learned it on the fly.
But what we did was we always questioned why things were done the way they were. If you're in a large company, people will tell you, well that's just the way we do things. When we got to build our company, we could question every decision and say, I actually don't like that. We're gonna do this differently. Why do I have to be in the office 5 days a week? I don't like that. We're gonna do it remote from day 1. So we changed every piece of the puzzle when we got to build it.
So we got to start with a blank slate. That's the advantage, superpower that my co founder Sam had. For myself it was less about conviction and more about I wanted to do something interesting. I felt when you are young that's the time when you get to experiment and you get to take on challenges. Because when you are married or have kids or a family, it's a lot harder to take those risks. I see that in my own family, with my parents. And I'm grateful that they gave me this foundation.
But ultimately I felt like I can always come back to a big tech job, and that's a luxury that we have in big tech is you can go try out this entrepreneurship stuff, do a startup. If it fails, you can always go back. It's not looked down upon. I wanna optimize for learning early in my career. It wasn't about the pay. In fact, when I started Fireflies, I was taking money out of my savings from the 1st year and putting it into the business.
We started the company with just $2,000 and now we're generating 1,000,000 of dollars in revenue. But I remember that time when it was just $2,000 and then I was paying for my own rent, taking things out of my own pocket and living off my savings. For my cofounder, it was even more critical because he went all in. He had probably a few $100 of savings after the $2,000 he put into the business. So I put in 2,000, he put in 2,000. That's how we got the business started.
So it was not about conviction, but it was this idea of I wanna do something So it was not about conviction, but it was this idea of I wanna do something interesting. I wanna work for myself, and I wanna optimize for learning. And it should feel like fun and not work. You weren't making much money for the first 4 years, I believe. Why did you keep going? You're trying out all these different apps. Take me back to that moment in time. What were you trying? What wasn't working?
And and how did you land at what you have today? 2016, I left Microsoft, supposed to go to business school, ended up turning that down, went to Boston, I had a month of free time, spent time with Sam who had just graduated from MIT. A nice VC was giving us some co working space and said hey, you kids can just work out of here every day. And we went in every day, we worked, had a bunch of ideas. Nothing really stuck, but at the end of the summer we were at a crossroads.
We had to decide if we were gonna keep iterating on a bunch of these ideas or we should go off our separate ways. Sam had an exciting grad school offer at Stanford. He had a upcoming job offer as well, and I just had the business school after I left Microsoft. So we said, you know what, this is way more fun. Let's just give it a go. Let's give it a year. A year turned into 4 years of iterating and experimenting. So from 2016 to 2018, we were trying idea after idea after idea.
We didn't have the money to get a office space. We couldn't go out and raise large amounts of capital. We didn't wanna take money from friends and family, because we ourselves weren't sure what was gonna work. So we went through all of these experiments, and I still remember we would go to this coffee shop in San Francisco. We'd order a coffee, and then get free WiFi for the rest of the day.
And I know that that coffee shop owner probably looked at us like we're occupying the space, but we would just go back and order more coffee. I don't even drink coffee, so I'd get something else. But we would just be there and work, and then afterwards we would just go coffee shop to coffee shop. And we did that for like 6 months. And there were times when we would even go to the San Francisco Westfield Mall, and we'd go sit in the food court, plug in there, and then work from there.
So that was our first office. We had to be very scrappy, very resourceful. Afterwards, we were able to meet people who said, hey, we have a bunch of open space, and you can come work out of our office space. So in the history of Fireflies, we've now have over a 100 employees. We've never had an office space. And the 1st year, 1, 2 years, we worked in person before we said let's just go fully remote. It just did not make sense.
I see companies that are raising money, and the first thing they do is go spend tens of 1,000 of dollars a month on office space. We said we're not gonna do that. It's just not, worth it. And I have my own take on remote work and versus in person. I'm contrarian to what most people believe today. But yeah. 2016 to 2018, we started experimenting on lots of different ideas, And ultimately, we ended up deciding that we should pick an area that directly impacts us every day.
And that area was meetings. We take a lot of meetings. And if we wanna build an assistant, we can't build a general assistant for everything. We gotta pick a use case. And so we decided we're gonna build a meeting assistant that's gonna join my meetings, transcribe stuff, and write down notes for me. That's what, like, an EA does usually, is they follow you around, they take notes, they send out emails on your behalf and action items. So we started with that idea.
And when we started, most people said this is not gonna work. If it worked, big companies would have already done it by now. So you're wasting your time. The technology is not good enough. So you get all of these noes from investors, and you realize, okay. We in order to prove them wrong, we have to actually build it. We have to get real customers. A lot of different failures. There were times when we we just wanted to give up.
But we told ourselves, look, we don't even need to make a lot of money. We just need to make enough money to pay for rent, and we need enough money to, basically pay our basic expenses and we'd be good. I remember my 2nd or third year, it was around 2018. I was living at home, in California and I would commute into San Francisco. I decided if if I really wanted to take this seriously, I needed to be in San Francisco for a year. Well, I had to dip into my savings.
2 of my friends from college were getting a apartment, and SF apartments are incredibly expensive. This was like $4,000 or $5,000 per month, and I didn't have that. So what I what we did was we took the 2 bedroom apartment, and both of them took the 2 bedrooms, and then I converted my the living room into a makeshift bedroom. And I would just, like, work, and I was staying in Faizais. So it was a 5, 10 minute walk, into the co working space that we got for free, from someone.
So it was super scrappy beginnings. And I would get time to time from my, like, parents, you left a nice 6 figure job. You could have bought a house by now. What are you doing? So and I felt for my parents, and, there was there was definitely a lot of pressure. And then it wasn't until 2019 that we started getting our first customers that were paying. A millionaire said this to me, and it gave me chills the other week.
He said, you want 7 out of 10 people to think what you're doing is a bad idea. You want people to think that you're completely delusional. And the reason why is if you don't, then you're not pushing the outer limits of your potential. You got to 16,000,000 users with no marketing expense, $0 spent in marketing. And you said most of it was through word-of-mouth.
And I hear this a lot, founders who might end up reaching a large audience will say, hey, yeah, but we didn't actually spend any money on marketing. It was all through word-of-mouth. What does that actually look like? And how do you create a product from the get go that can grow virally through word-of-mouth? In the consumer space, the best products you probably heard not through marketing, but through word-of-mouth. Google, YouTube, Gmail. Just look at Google's entire product suite. Netflix.
Yes, now you see some ads for Netflix, but many times in the beginning people just heard it through word-of-mouth. So most of the tools that people were using that you use every day, you heard it from someone first. Marketing is just a additional layer, but it's not a replacement for building a great product that people want to share. The ultimate form of marketing is when someone likes your product enough to use it and then go out there and recommend it to a dozen people.
That is the ultimate marketing. That is what leads to virality. With Fireflies, we were lucky because people would see it in a meeting, then they would talk about it, and the person would say, I should really like using this for note taking purposes. And the other person was, like, could you send me the notes afterwards? I'd love to see it. So you were experiencing Fireflies before you even become a user. And when you're able to do that, that's the moment for people.
So just word-of-mouth conversations was the key to all of our growth. We're doing some marketing now, after we've reached this level of scale, but that's just more supplementary. Like, it has to start with people wanting to be excited about being associated with the brand. Like, that's how these things are that's how cults are formed. Right? Cult products is because people are very excited about it. You look at Tesla, they don't do any TV marketing. They don't almost do any advertising.
And you don't even have to go to the showroom to buy. They can go on the website and buy a Tesla. So they've created that sort of brand where the customers are the best marketers that a company can ever ask for. Yeah. That's how I first came across Fireflies. Because my former boss, as I told you earlier, I was on a sales call. And I was basically just sitting there watching in to kinda see what he does and how he performs sales calls. And there's this little Fireflies AI window.
And after the call, I'm like, what is that? He's like, oh, it just took notes from me during the meeting. I'm like, what? Like, you didn't have to do anything? He's like, yeah, I'll send you the notes. And that's how I first came across it. And, I think it's this part of it is this novelty. And then the other part is, like, wow, there are actually tools that can do things we never thought were possible before. Your company has raised up to $20,000,000 to this point from pretty famous investors.
One of which is an investor of yours named Vinod Khosla, who's a billionaire entrepreneur. What have you learned from him that's changed your perspective on life? Vinod is the master of long term bets. What you described earlier, what people might think is silly and might not make sense now. He will believe, well, if this were to work, how would it change the world? So he's obviously made a lot of money, he's very successful.
So he doesn't have to go after these smaller bets, the one x, two x wins. He's going after things that will fundamentally change the world. And every time I go to the Khosla Summit where all of the portfolio companies get together, he mentions that. Right? He wants to work on things that are going to change the world in one way or the other. He's done great work in the health care space and many of these other deep tech products.
So one thing that's helped me over the last couple years is once we got to a level of stability and scale and profitability, what we now start to think about is, what are where do we wanna be 10 years from now? And what sort of impact do we wanna be? Like, you need to have that 10 year plan, and then you need to work back to the next 1 month plan. So that's been really helpful to be able to think about where we want to end up. Obviously, you have to survive to get to the 10 year period.
But if you can have that longer term vision, and then work backwards and build smaller milestones to get to where you want to, you can build a generational company. And that's something that we've really been focused on over the last couple years, once we've gotten to that scale. Like what's next? You always want to be there. I'm someone where once you reach a certain milestone, I don't wanna get complacent. So I'll celebrate for maybe like a couple hours or for that day.
But the next day, it's like, what's next? What's the next milestone? If I don't do that, I will feel unsatisfied. I'll feel incomplete. So both myself and Sam are just so we're just doing that for that excitement is always about finding the next, big milestone for us to work on. Do you think you can ever feel fully satisfied and complete? I asked someone who sold their company. They made a lot of money, at a young age.
And they spent 6 months traveling the world, buying whatever they wanted, helping their parents retire, all of those things. But then they felt a void after 6 months. At some point in time, you realize, what more can I buy? There's a limit to how much I can buy. Again, if you your aspirations are to buy a private jet or a yacht, that's different. Those are not my aspirations. But at some point in time, all of your basic needs are met. You are in a comfortable position.
You can choose to work on whatever you want. And I think the things that we need to value at that point in time is time, who you spend it with, and what you do. So many people either completely get pulled into their vices and they feel incomplete. Now if money was the only form of happiness, money definitely brings people lots of happiness. I will not disagree with that. But there are still rich people that are very unhappy, because at that point in time, purpose is more important.
So a lot of these people go back, start something new, because they want a sense of purpose. They want a sense of belonging. So to your question, I would have one day said, I can walk away from all this and, like, you know, I I never have to look at tech again. I have enough money in the bank. I'd be totally fine with that. I would have said, yeah, I I could have done that. But now I'm at a place where working for a sense of purpose is probably the most important thing.
That's why the happiest people are always working late into their eighties nineties, doing the things that they wanna do. I'm not talking about going in and doing a repetitive corporate job. Well, my take on corporate jobs is, they train us to not be super creative and just follow commands. But if you have the opportunity or the luxury like these people are, why would you stop working? You should, continue pursuing more entrepreneurial stuff. 100%.
There's this guy I interviewed a couple weeks ago named Ankar Nagpal. So he founded Teachable. They sold that company for 250,000,000. But before Teachable, he was working at Amazon. And he he and his team I think he was, like, 18 years old, so very similar to your story, super young working at Amazon. He and a team of, like, 5, 10 other programmers were working on this one page on the Amazon seller website, super micro small page, and that's all they were doing the entire time.
And I think he remembered telling me he was like, yeah, one day I just didn't even show up for work and nobody even asked where I was. And he's like, I felt like a cog in a machine. That's why I decided to leave and and start my own business. But we've seen this a lot with a lot of massive corporate companies is they just sometimes hire just to hire and not give people purpose and mission alignment.
I wonder if some of these big companies do that where they take incredibly smart people and put them on these tiny, tiny problems and pay them a lot of good money. It's golden handcuffs. So again, the chances are they're not gonna go build your next competitor. That could be potentially a reason. Or the organization itself just becomes so big and then drained in bureaucracy that, even the people that wanna be creative can't be.
So I think large organizations, not because they don't want to, it's just the nature of the beast, the structure kills creativity. The other thing is people always ask, hey, is AI gonna replace jobs? And if so, what fields are, like, the most at risk?
I always think that some of the skills that you are learning at universities and the things that you are trained to go do just following commands, being a cog in the machine, those are the ones that are gonna be the most likely to be disrupted and replaced. So I think that we all need to strive to be more creative and have a sense of purpose, Because you're gonna be spending more time at work than with your partner or your spouse, over, you know, 20, 30, 40 years.
So if you just feel like being a cog in a machine and doing the same thing every single day, that's not happiness. And again, we're in a place where we're very privileged to be saying that because a lot of people in tech can choose what they work on. But there are people that work in other roles outside of tech where they do the same thing. I I I met someone who works a admin office role, who's been working in the same role, doing the same thing for 20 years.
And, they have their same routine, and they like that, because they have something else outside of work. Work is just to pay the bills, but they look for other things to they go to the ball game, they go shopping, they spend time with their kids, that's their happiness. But doing the same thing over and over and over again we're not machines.
So I think that those are the things that if we can all strive for, that financial freedom or independence, or working at a place where we genuinely enjoy it, I think that that's the ultimate prize. It's It's not the money. I would guess it's a bureaucracy issue more than trying to stifle competition.
The only reason I say this is because I think it wouldn't be too difficult to set up a lab component of the company where you just take the top 1% smartest people that are interested in building things and incentivize them to build things within the company. And then any companies that spin out of that are now intellectual property of the massive corporation. One of our clients is a venture firm called Primary Venture Partners.
So they are a $1,000,000,000 seed stage fund or oil stage fund in New York City. And once they got to that level of scale, they started building something called Primary Labs. So they'll they'll incubate companies of their own and just bring in top operators into the businesses. And then now they have a significant stake in those companies. They can just put the smartest people in the world to kind of build those solutions out to those problems and and grow from that.
So that would be my bet, but who knows? You think a lot about organizational structure for your business. You've kept your team pretty lean. What frameworks have you built out when building out your team? I just take a very first principled approach and look at how do we optimize, how do we be more efficient, what can we replace, remove, strip down to the bare minimum, and then build back up. So that's how we build our organizations. I believe generalists are fantastic for a company of our size.
We don't need hyper specialists. I don't overvalue experience as much as hustle and energy and potential to learn. So we've hired engineers that were 19 years old and who are now team leads. So that's the other thing.
I don't believe in outside executive hiring as much as possible, because hiring in itself is very difficult, but hiring executives is even more difficult, because as you get up the corporate ladder, the better they are at lying and presenting themselves as better than who they actually are. Whereas if you're hiring someone who's an IC, you can measure them on their work and their results, and then you can grow them, grow their talent, and promote them. That's what I like to do.
But I've seen I've I've burned my hands a few times, doing this, and I've seen other companies who've made that regret, where they brought in, like, a CRO when they didn't need a CRO. They brought in a VP that when they didn't need it. There's a lot of advice out there, saying, oh, once you hire your VPs, once you have some really good VPs, you can really step back and let the business run itself. Nothing is furthest from the truth in my own experience. I feel you have to be deeply involved.
I'm not saying micromanaging, but you have to be deeply involved if you want to move fast in every aspect. Nowadays people call that founder mode, but that's just something that I've been able to do, from day 1. And by keeping the team small, we can eliminate bureaucracy. And I'm just one message away from any teammate. My direct reports, my skip level reports, it doesn't matter. You mentioned advice earlier.
What's one unconventional piece of advice that you'd give to entrepreneurs starting their first business today? One advice I would give is don't do what is status quo just because it's the state, just because someone says it is. Question everything. And I would honestly, like, ask yourself why when you start something. So for example, remote work. Beef when we started, remote work was not popular at all. And we said we're gonna do remote work from day 1. This is how we're gonna run our business.
Then the pandemic happens, and people say, you're a genius. Remote work is like the way of the future. Now we have a reverse trend where people say, no. Remote remote work is horrible. People are very inefficient. You need to be back in the office at least 3 times a week, at least 4 times a week. So you have to question it. Why is remote work bad if it is, in fact, bad? Why is in person work better? Could it be possibly because of the type of people you hire?
Could it be possibly because of a lack of motivation, lack of accountability? And maybe managers realize people are slacking off when it's remote. So maybe if you change your hiring practices, that's probably gonna be the right thing to do, but it's much easier to just mandate everyone to be back in the office so you can monitor them. So that's why ask the why and just don't follow the herd just because that's the conventional norm. You mentioned speed.
This has been a recurring theme on our show. I've noticed some of the smartest and wealthiest people in the world operate with speed. I asked a 17 year old who makes $1,000,000 a month with his app, why do you think you've been so successful? And he told me, because I operate with speed. When I have an idea, I just go execute on it immediately. Meanwhile, our competitors might take months deciding whether or not that idea is good.
By the time they figure it out, we already have our product out into the market making money. What are the defining characteristics that make an entrepreneur successful? The best entrepreneurs take the unproven path, and they are the hardest workers. The best ones are the hardest workers. It's not about the glamour. It's not about sounding smart.
It's not about having a PhD. It's about, are you willing to keep trying things, keep getting punched in the face, and getting back up and trying again and again? Because there are maybe a dozen times in our 8 year journey where we want to quit. And, yeah, just being smart enough isn't enough. Yes. Speaking of trying to sound smart, I've noticed there's a reason why, for example, Warren Buffett will write his annual shareholder letter in, like, a 6th grade reading level.
I never understood why because I was, like, he's a pretty smart guy. I'm pretty sure he could use more complicated language. And then I was listening to a podcast and I eventually figured out if he writes, like, in 12th, 13th grade reading level, less people understand him, which means less people might be compelled to invest in Berkshire stock.
But if he writes in a 6th grade reading level, he now can access a broader audience, allowing more people to understand what they do and more people to invest. And I've noticed some of the smartest people in the world can actually distill really complex ideas into super simple things that make it very easy to understand. I agree with you. The better you understand the concept, the simpler you can explain it.
So I think there's a direct correlation between intelligence and explaining it in simple terms. The people that don't know something will use big complex words and make it even more complicated than it actually is. You spent years in AI. Is there anything that the average person should be doing to capitalize on the opportunity that AI presents today? My understanding of AI in the simplest terms is it can now do things that humans historically are able to do.
I feel that there are certain repeatable, monotonous tasks that if you ask yourself, what am I doing every day that's, like, tedious and repetitive, and how can AI potentially solve that? So we go through these, like, sort of case studies and examples. I had a hypothetical discussion with a friend who's a doctor. And we sit down, and we ask this, like, do you think AI is going to replace doctors? Well, let's go through what a doctor does on a day to day basis.
Which of these things are unique to what doctors can do? Well, if you think about it, AI can now speak to you, it can see you, and it can hear and understand. And it has infinite memory, meaning I can give it infinite memory, meaning I can give it 10,000 medical journals and books, and it'll have perfect recall. Almost better than a doctor that has to go and Google things up. Right? And it probably knows everything about the different medicines and how you will react to it and stuff.
So in the long term case, AI will probably be able to look at x rays, can look at images, MRIs, look at maybe the skin condition, the photo, and probably give you, with 90% accuracy, what the issue is and what the treatment would be and what medicine you should take. And then the doctor will probably just need to say, okay. I agree with this diagnosis. Let's go ahead with it. If that were the case, think about how many more patients that a doctor could, see, with the help of AI.
AI is, like, automating 90% of it. So instead of seeing 10 patients a day, they can see a 100 patients a day, And health care could become way more affordable. Now we're gonna be in industries where they'll say, we can't trust the AI. We need a human to do all of these things. There's gonna be regulatory capture, all of that stuff. But what I'm saying is every role and function, there's some pieces of it that can be automated.
Pick a role, and then how do you just break it down to infinite, like finite tasks and solve that? And at the end of the day, when you go through this exercise, we'll all come to this realization, we're not that special, and we're also programmable in many ways. So, that you'll get a weird sense of the world when you go through this exercise, but you realize that we're not special, and there's a lot of things that AI can do that And to wrap it up here, we have a couple of closing questions.
What was your greatest failure, and what did you learn from it? My greatest failure was probably giving up on certain ideas too soon, and we iterated 7 times on 7 different, products. But I'm sure at least 1 or 2 of them, if we kept with it, it would have been really effective. My other biggest failure is following the hype and the crowd and realizing, okay, I have to go to these conferences, I have to go to these events, I have to network with people in order to be successful.
Nothing is further from the truth. I don't believe in my industry for what I'm building. Maybe it's true in finance and other inders industries. I hate networking. Even if I go into a conference, I'll do my presentation or keynote, and then I will leave. Maybe if I have some prescheduled meetings, I'll do it, but I cannot wine, dine, schmooze. That's not me, who who it is, and that's just my personality. So there are too many entrepreneurs that over optimize for that, and that's a problem.
And so instead, you should be building, not networking. 100%. Those, I've noticed when I interviewed Pejhmaun Nossat from Per. He was telling me some of the smartest or some of the most successful entrepreneurs that he's invested in, they don't you will never see them at some of these networking events because they're actually building things.
I've noticed this is very true because early on when I was in New York City during my gap year, I would try to go to as many of these networking events as possible because I thought, hey, I need to do that to become successful. I realized about 80% of them were complete waste of time. Like, you just have a bunch of randos, like, not really knowing what to do or what they're doing that are kinda burning your time and their time. I'm like, okay. Sure. Networking is fine.
But the way that most people do it is overrated. Instead, just find particular people that you want to meet and learn from or particular hyper focused events that are super high caliber people, bring some of the smartest people in your industry in the world in one place. Outside of that, I won't go to any other traditional networking events. But those that's what I stick it to. Second, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received? Focus on one thing and do it really well.
It's easy to want to parallel process. And this is the hardest thing for me, is I wanna work on 10 different ideas, at the same time. But it's better to see one thing to completion before jumping to the next one. Because the moment you take your focus away from that one thing, it will stall, it will move slower. So you have to force yourself to do not parallel process.
And that sounds hard, but there is only one thing, maybe 2 if you're if you're fortunate enough, that you should be focusing on at one time. What's one rule you live by that most people don't? I think time is the most important thing, in anyone's life. So I want to focus on using that time to do things that are meaningful to me. I am learning to say no to things that make me feel uncomfortable or is not, like, worth my time, and is not what's gonna bring me happiness.
So it's not about the material stuff. Like, I would rather pay for things to help me optimize my time to do the things that I love. And I think as we get older, we realize time is best spent with the people you care about, with products and goals and projects that you are passionate about. Because when you look back, that's what's gonna be really important to you. So optimize for time starting early. And if I slid you over a phone and you could call your 20 year old self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say? I would say keep at it, don't give up, and do not compromise on settling, for what's convenient. I think throughout my life, I've always had to make hard decisions that were uncomfortable in the short term that caused a lot of suffering and, pain, but it made me grow as a person. And, I think some amount of pain and, stretching is good for us. So don't get complacent. Just because you have a nice job at this, like, cushy company, don't get complacent.
And, way too many people get, way too comfortable with where they're in life, and any ambition and goals they have slowly starts to die. So don't ever get too comfortable. Awesome. Well, I think that's a great way to end it. We'll have a link to Fireflies in the episode description down below. If anyone wants to check it out, you can there. And thanks very much for joining, Chris. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.