So I'm coming back from Tulu, Mexico, back home. The next day I'm joining a meeting and I look at those rick-a-ngles so people in Google Meet and people just play their role. They connect to the Matrix from their bedrooms. It was so bizarre. It was a very bizarre feeling. I'm like, what am I doing here? Basically, for me, it was a realization, like, whatever is going to happen. Like, this I cannot do anymore. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Episode 24 of the Metacast Podcast.
So typically, the even episodes are with guests. And then the odd episodes are when Ilya and I, the co-host of this Metacast Podcast, we talk about how our recording was and experiences and stuff like that. Because this is Episode 24, we are kind of nearing a milestone at Episode 25 and there's been a few big life events, especially in Ilya's life recently. We thought we'd do a special episode.
So this would be more like our very first episode where I interviewed Ilya about stuff and we'll tell you what that stuff is in a little bit. So, yeah, stay tuned for this. Maybe if it goes too long, maybe we'll do it in a few parts or something. See how we go about it. Hey, this is Ilya interrupting Arnav from the future. We had to split this episode into two parts, just like he said, because we went way too long. Please enjoy Part 1 and come back for Part 2 next week.
Also, I regret some of the things that I said. I said that Google's culture has changed and Google no longer deprecates things left and right when it's convenient for them. Apparently, it's not a case about a week after we recorded the episode. Google entered an agreement to sell off their Google Domains business to Squarespace, upsetting millions of customers who registered domains through the service, including myself and Arnav.
It's kind of sad that some companies just never learn to serve developers and enterprise customers and still do these kind of things to them. I'm very disappointed. Yeah, so take everything I said about the culture change for the great insult. Now back to Arnav. Cool, cool, cool. So Ilya, what is this big life event that we've been alluding to? Yeah, so today is June 8th, 2023. I mean, the episode will come out in a couple of weeks, but we are recording this in June 8th.
So exactly a week ago, June 1st was my last day with Google and it ended the three-year career Google. It ended in eight-year period in my life with Big Tech, where I spent previous five years with Amazon. Yeah, and it marks a new chapter. So officially, I'm currently unemployed. Yeah. But today, we've filed for incorporation of a company with an undisclosed name. Yeah, that you and I are co-founders of. So before we get into that, what did you do in Google in the last three years?
What part of Google were you in? Yeah. So last almost two years, I spent at the Google Maps platform. I mean, everybody knows Google Maps, obviously. But if you open, let's say, Airbnb or an Uber app or Zelo or Redfin, or any other account, you name it, an app that uses a map. And there was a Google map in there. They added that map to their application, their website using Google Maps API. So I was responsible for that Maps API on the product side. Right.
And you've been a product manager there for the last three years, right? Yeah, yeah. So I've been with Maps for two years, and then I also spent my first year at Google Cloud Platform, where I worked first on a product that was supposed to make managing Kubernetes more easy. And then I also worked on Google Cloud Functions. What do you mean by it was supposed to? Yeah, in the end, there was some priority change. I guess we couldn't take it as far as we wanted to.
That's the pretty typical life events in a big tech company. Or any big company, to be honest. Yeah, when you have a company that does like, I don't know, 500,000 different things with 100,000 employees. Yeah, sometimes things get reparatized, deparatized, et cetera. Google has a term for this. It's called Defrag. That's not what happened to this project. There was going to be different outcome. Google Reader is a good example of a Defrag.
So for those of you who have already served her too young, Google Reader was shut down in 2011, I believe. Too much big dismay across the whole world. Like tens of millions of people probably got like, absolutely pissed at Google for doing this. We'll get back to what you are saying just a second. But I want to set a little bit of context. In today's world, it's pretty common to hear that Google is shutting down something. That's kind of part of the DNA of the company at this point.
And there's even a website like Killed by Google. There is actually even a podcast, Kory Quinn's podcast. I think it's called Screaming in the Cloud. There is an episode with a Killed by Google guy. And Kory himself likes to make fun about Google for doing this. However, to Google's credit, I've seen that culture change taking the fact over my three years there. They recognized that it does affect the reputation.
When they shut things down like this, just like, oh, like next month, study is going the way. Or like Google Reader is just all of a sudden, like you have a month to continue enjoying it and then it goes away, right? They've changed that. That's good. Yeah. Why I brought that up is I think from what I recollect, Google Reader was the first of these big instances of like Google shutting down something in the whole world going like, what? That makes no sense.
I'm not saying everybody uses it, why are you shutting it down? Yeah. And Google Reader was a web application that you could use to read RSS feeds, which was an all-way to subscribe to websites. So you would basically have all of those subscriptions in your Google Reader application, which was very, very neat. I even read it on Blackberry. It was so good that it even worked on like shitty Blackberry's browser 12 years ago. It was my favorite app too. It was like absolutely amazing.
And by Apple, it was a website. It was a web-based app, web app. Yeah, but I think it was probably the first, but then later came whatever Google Wave thing. Wave Do! I don't know how many chat messengers and things like that. The big difference between Google Reader and let's say Do and Wave and other stuff, is that probably nobody used Do or anyway? But Google Reader was a big deal. It's like imagine Google shuts down Gmail now. It's kind of not comparable, I guess, at this stage.
Not that big, but it is similar. But it's like, yeah, you have lots and lots and lots of people. Also, I remember reading somebody who was a reporter, I think for TechCrunch, or maybe venture-bite or something. For him, it was a professional tool. That's a tool that he used to catch up on news. Well, he was writing to the office where people work together. Right? On a train. Yeah, and he had to figure out a new way to do that. Shares has never really recovered from that for websites.
There were other websites that tried to take over, like Bacon Reader and all that, but nothing got close to that much, I think, popularity. Yeah, I think Fidley was pretty much the careerplaker. But I think one Google Reader was gone, it was gone, essentially. And I think that's when new sliders became kind of the new norm. Those like Substack, maybe we would never have been born if we could still use RSS Reader today. And by the way, podcasts are fully based on RSS.
And yeah, actually, I'm going to shoot now to, I think Dave Winner is the guy who was behind the protocol. So we'll try to get him on the podcast because podcasts are distributed by RSS feed. That's probably the biggest use case for RSS feed at this point today. Okay, cool. So fast forwarding to 2023. You spent five years in AWS. That's when you worked with me too. We had so much fun. Then you decided to leave and go to Google. Then you had three years. And now you've left Google.
We won't get into what we are working on in this episode. I think that'll be in the next episode or one of the upcoming future episodes. I think we will probably keep secrets what we're working on until we actually have something to show. Yeah, and we're very close. We are very, very close, but it will probably be another few weeks. So you and I are using the app already. We're just waiting to like add a few more things and start giving it to some friends and family and people for alpha testing.
Yeah, yeah. If you listen to all of our episodes and gather those bits and pieces where we complained about how bad podcasting apps are, we are scratching our own agent, fix some of those problems. Yeah, he's subscribed. Stay tuned to the updates on what we're working on. Also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. So today I wanted to ask why. So what led you to leave Amazon and Google and go on this thing on your own?
Yeah, I think it's a theme in my career when I do things until I just can't anymore. I left my previous job, I guess previous previous job. So I was with DHL for eight years and I was doing business intelligence and also some program management in IT all over the world. I wouldn't say the job was very interesting. Or just jobs I had there. I think I had like six or seven different positions there. They were all kind of the same domain, but I was changing countries, changing the regions.
It was interesting. But because I was able to move so much around the world. It kind of kept me going. You know, it never got old. We used to live in Singapore, Dubai, Germany, Moscow. So it was really, really interesting on the personal level. I didn't quite like the job, but like, did you have kids all through? So we had our first child right before I left in 2012. We were in Germany. My older one was born in Germany there. We were here before I left the job.
But then there, that last job I had there was so unbearable, I guess. It was like a typical big company stuff. I had to replace the old systems that people use for customs clearance and shipping processing in European countries with the newer systems. And it was just boring. I wasn't doing any work on the ground. I was managing those projects. And I didn't enjoy that. But these were software, technical projects. Yeah, software were very technical.
But I was sitting in the ivory tower working with project managers who were managing the projects. So I was managing the project managers. It was not fun. What was your role, like, officially? What was the name of that role? I think it was called program manager, senior program manager or something like that. Yeah. And then I'm like, I'm done. So then I left to do an MBA for two years. Right. Where did you do your MBA? I went to Wharton. That's how I moved to the US.
It was really nice. But then I did an internship at Amazon and I came to Amazon full-time. And your first internship was in the SSB, the seller ads org or in Amazon? It was, I think, back in the day it was called Amazon clicks. It was, yes, sponsored products, product ads. And there was a thing called sponsored links. I think only sponsored products still exist to this day. I think back in the day they were all pretty small and they were still figuring out which one is going to take off.
So sponsored products, I think is the one that eventually won the trace. Yeah. And then I came back to AWS. I was working on analytics with you. I remember when I came in, so my manager Craig gave me a list of people to meet. Yours was one of those few names. He's like, yeah, meet Arnab. He's going to be your partner. And then I think we met in my first week, first two days.
And then, yeah, like all my time at Amazon throughout all those five years, I think we never stopped working together for maybe except a few weeks. It was a great time. But yeah, but then like Amazon at the end of it, I got the promotion. We launched the project that we were working on. Yeah, we launched a new chatbot, which was a great service. Well, it still is a great service for managing infrastructure from Slack. And other chat clients, it was great.
And the team was growing quite a bit. Big. Yeah. After getting that promo though, I think things started to change. Because when we started the project, it was just a few of us. And I was actually a product manager, but I was also managing the team. So it was like running a small startup within Amazon. I reported directly to VP and she'd reported directly to Jassie, who is now the CEO of Amazon. I basically had my hands completely anti it. Like I was protected from like everything.
And so was the team, right? Like we weren't really part of the whole Amazon kind of politics stuff, which I think was very unusual to a generic experience that people get at Amazon. It was possible because it was a very small team at that time and working on a new experimental idea. It was almost like an R&D kind of project, go figure out what can we do in this space. Yes, that's true.
Yeah, and we also, like the reporting structure also made it very straightforward because the VP didn't have time. We probably had one in one's every two weeks or so. And that was pretty much it. So like nobody really managed us. So we managed ourselves. But then I think towards the end of my tenure there, you know, we've gotten a lot more people come in, they all grew so much, our team grew so much, we launched all of the expectations from the leadership started to kick in.
And that's when I started to burn out. And I'm like, I'm spending more time managing upwards than actually working on the product. And I think I alluded to that in one of our episodes. There was one particular meeting that marked the end of the Amazon journey for me. It was a two day off site where people were talking about all of these different things where I just couldn't pay attention. I'm just not interested.
And then somebody who both you and I know who was also part of our team, but also part to larger team, he told me that when you're a principal now, you like got a step up. I'm like, I'm not interested. So I look for different teams at Amazon. And then I just realized it's going to be more of the same. But Google was this kind of thing where like I read about Google, I read books about Google, Google was this shiny bright company, like the best company in the world. And yeah, I had this thing.
I was rejected by Google two times. I think that's a full look for that. I was not responded to even more times when you would like apply. Yeah, and I got to drop out Google and I came in. So that was the cloud functions. It was a Kubernetes thing. It took a few weeks to realize, OK, it's actually one more of the same. It's just a different brand name. A few weeks, usually that period lasts at least like three months or so. It's called the honeymoon period when you join a new company.
So yeah, maybe a couple of months, maybe two or three months, for the honeymoon to be like done. In a year, you realize you just get unplugged into the different kind of matrix, which is better in some ways, but worse in some other ways, kind of the same in most other ways. I guess you're coming up to a point where you're feeling like this is more of the same. I want to do something else.
What made you kind of figure out what is that something else you want to make, which makes it concrete for you to be able to leave a really good job? Yeah, that's true. I've been wanting to do something on my own for a long time. Actually, there was something that I heard recently. I was listening to this podcast with the guy called Alex Harmoji. I think that's what his name is. He's an entrepreneur worth, I think, a few hundred million dollars. He was a guest on the diary of the CEO podcast.
And he said that what made him quit his job when he was very young, he read a book about entrepreneurship, which said there are entrepreneurs and there are wanted-prinners. And he said the main difference is that they want the brineurs. They always read about things, the learn things, but they should never do things. You remember how last year in August, I left Amazon. And unlike you, because thanks to me, you have me, right? So you know what you're working on. Thank you, Arnava.
I appreciate you so much. I didn't know what I was going to do, right? But I knew that it was over for me. So the first three months, I basically like hiked around thanks to my wife. We had like somebody earning and everything. So we spent like a month in Banff in that period. Just like you said, I was reading a lot about like entrepreneurship and all that, right? I must say this. You even had one entrepreneur in your LinkedIn had exactly.
That's what I was coming to for those three, four months. I actually changed my LinkedIn title to like one entrepreneur. The big difference was though that you already quit your job with the clear intention, right? But I wasn't still sure, right? I didn't know whether I do something or not. Might have turned out that after four months, I would like go look for a different job. I didn't know.
I actually remember talking to you back then, even before you left your job, you came to Seattle and we were chatting. And you said that you'll just go figure things out, maybe build a game for kids or something. Maybe very likely, maybe join the smaller company as a CTO. I think that that was your sort of game plan, right? Yeah, yeah. That's what I meant. So I think around January, we started the podcast in January.
Like we had the first episode in January, but we started working on the podcast in October. And I think around then is when I kind of started figuring out that, no, I actually want to work on this specific idea. And that's when I changed it from one to a entrepreneur to an actual entrepreneur. All right. So yeah, back to you. Tell us more about that part of you deciding what you're going to work on. Yeah. So I have been a one-tip entrepreneur all my life.
Actually, I was an entrepreneur when I was 20, when I was 20, I started a web development company while still in college. So I did it for two years. I built a couple of really cool products. One of them was a map. The other one was a CMS. So I have lots of interest actually in mapping and managing content, managing knowledge. This was like my very, very early days. Do you still have that map, by the way, the one that you made of? Was it of your city or it was of my city?
Oh, I guess the funny story there is, you know, I didn't know anything about licensing or any of this kind of stuff. So we just purchased a huge map, like a wall map that had like 50 or so sheets, like A3 sheets. They like the double letter size, the US letter size, like double A4 European size. So it was like 50 something big pieces of paper, a scandal all using those, you know, like table scanners. Because like, mind you, it was 2003, 2004, right?
So we scanned them all, let us teach them together in a huge file. And then I wrote software to put shapes around those buildings and roads. And it was all became like a database. It was a vector map. And I wrote a program in C++, C++ builder to be precise from Portland. That made it to Windows application. And we distributed it on a CD, on the CD RAM. But it was fun. I still have screenshots. I actually still have the executables. And I think I even still have the code.
I don't have a computer to run it on. It cannot run on Windows. And I'm pretty sure the Portland C++ builder of 20 years old ID will not work on a modern computer anymore. Yeah, in any case. So, but yeah, but then I was like always thinking about things. I was like doing some side projects, a t-shirt making business, t-shirt making business. I had like a website for selling secondhand stuff in Singapore Craigslist kind of thing.
I had a website for tracking how much carbon and garbage you dump emit. I also had actually another secondhand classified website for university campuses, which I did with two other guys while I was at work. And so I did a bunch of things like that. But none of them really took off. But then somebody else's products took off. Right. Very similar products. Yeah. Those are the products. Yes. I think one of the reasons for that was that unless you pour energy into what you're working on,
it's not going to grow. Like if you just purse your energy, think that you don't make money with. Always will be like falling by way side. If you are making like significantly more money from something else at that same time. Right. Yes. So you have a full-time job that you work with also depends on. And then you have like a child and you have a wife. And you also need to rest and sleep. And then you only work on this new thing for maybe like an hour to the day.
And it just goes nowhere eventually. Especially when things start to get hard. And you would be like, why am I doing this? So yeah. And yeah, when we met and talked. And I'm like, okay. So actually, I want to be working with you on those ideas that we talked about. And leaving the job and joining you was a matter of timing, as opposed to... anything else. But I think it's like fear. Fear I think is what really stopped me from jumping sheep and just doing it right away.
And yeah, we can go a little bit into overcoming that. We'll talk a little bit about the fears and everything else today. So the next part of this is how did you prepare yourself, your family, finances and all that to like be able to like leave a job at Google? So you are a product manager at Google, raking in like hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. How do you go from that to basically uncertainty? Basically living off savings. Yeah. Because that's what I'm doing right now.
I guess we'll have to talk about fears now. Because that was the biggest fear for me. It's like what if it doesn't work out and we run out of money and you have to sell the house and whatever. And like if you think about all of the worst case scenarios, it's like I would never be able to find a job. So all of those things that even if you spell out on paper, I had like a spreadsheet that showed me the runway. And like let's say if I work X months more, then this is what my runway will look like.
If I work fewer months, it will be shorter, et cetera. And I think it doesn't help. When you really have like fear that not on your belly, it only helps so much. I made the decision to leave the job sometime in October, I think. But it took eight more months to actually do that. I would wake up in the middle of the night just sweating heavy nightmares. And like thinking about quitting the job would send me into the panic attack. It was like that bad.
But I think things start to change when in October last year, I went to a spiritual retreat. And they don't do it anymore. So the person's name is Sasha Cobra. She was a Netflix on the show called Unwell. So she does a bunch of things. But that particular 10-day retreat was based on tantric approaches. So it's about moving the energy, letting the energy flow in your body. And that retreat is when I was really able to connect with myself really well, really feel myself, clear my mind.
It was really, really good. And I met some incredible people there as well. That was in Mexico. So I'm coming back from Tulum, Mexico back home in late October. And I think next day I'm joining a meeting. And I look at those squares or rectangles of people in Google Meet. And people just play their role. They connect to the matrix from their bedrooms. And like talking to those like whatever can't phrases. It was so bizarre. It was a very bizarre feeling. I'm like, what am I doing here?
Basically, for me, it was a realization like whatever is going to happen. Like this, I cannot do anymore. This chapter is over. I'm done. I can't do this again. I remember crying multiple times. The day crying multiple times that week, I was just talking to my wife. I'm like, I just want to quit right away. But then the fear would start to come back and all that. Well, it's not just the fear. It's the reality too.
You can't leave a job that's like paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and like leave immediately on a whim. It depends on how you manage your finances. So yeah, we purchased house last year. So like with more of the original lead. So yeah, there are some financial responsibilities. So if this came up right before we purchased the house, I could have just quit the same day. Because I would have all the money that I poured into the damn payment to leave off.
But then I actually think at the time, I don't know if I would be ready for this. But yeah, but that money would have given me a longer runway for sure. So what is the runway length that you thought you could... Okay, talking about a runway, take off at and did you wait that runway? What is your runway now? Yeah, so I think initially I thought like six months would be good enough because we wanted to get venture funding and maybe getting into a white combinator.
So basically it was like, let's do it in a six months runway. Figure out if you can launch and get some financing within three months. If you can't, I go back to the job. But then the longer I guess we thought about that, the more it felt like it's just too short. Like three months is nothing. And also the current economic climate, it's not guaranteed that you can get financing so quickly. So eventually I stayed a lot longer than I intended. And I think right now my runway is about a year.
But there are different options that I can take some debt, for example. And also there are some other ways which I won't go to. But like I can potentially send it two years. If this doesn't work out, like I would be like indebted. But I've done it before. When I graduated from my MBA, I had 180,000 in debt, which I was able to pay off within two years. So I'm not afraid of this anymore. I hope you don't get into like 180k debt though this time. I hope I would have to use any debt. Exactly, yeah.
So and I'll plug in my bit of like how I prepared for it to. Unlike you, I think our situations are a bit different, right? Where I was also making a lot of money at Amazon. But I also have my wife who's making a pretty good salary and everything, right? So what we did is we did financial analysis long term. For the short term, we knew that, okay, our lifestyles will change a little bit, but not that much.
Like before, when I was working at Amazon, we wouldn't think about like anything pretty much, right? We never budgeted for anything. Now we do, we actually like look at how much are we spending? Is that the right amount? Was that what our goal was for the month? And did we accomplish that? And if not, that's okay. But why not buy how much not? What can we do? That sort of stuff. Anyway, these are I think good things to do in your life anyway, whether you're working in a big company or not.
But what we did is we did like a long term projection, not just by ourselves, we got some like actual people who do the scenario planning and all that. So they took some like assumptions, right? Let's say that both me and my wife keep working for another 15 years in a similar job with a similar salary, given the savings and investments and all that that you have and the debt that you have like the mortgage and all that. What is your net worth?
Let's say at the age of 70, at the age of 80, and at the age of 90. And then we did some scenarios. What if I don't earn anything for two years or three years or five years? What is the difference between that net worth at the age of 70, 80, and 90 versus this? And turns out thanks to the wonders of the finance world and compounding interest and all, there's almost no difference. There is a little difference, but it doesn't really matter to us.
So that's when I knew that, okay, I can easily take like about two years without making a big difference in the long term finances of my family and like for basically legacy. And that's what made me feel secure that, okay, I have the time. Let's do it. If I don't do it now, I'll not do it. Interesting that you think in these terms. Because it wouldn't even occur to me to do this kind of calculation.
And now that you've just mentioned how you did it, I leave my life more in risk-controlled bets, even when I was still in college, like I quit my job. I mean, I was like freelancing when I had a half-time job. And I just quit a job like next day and corporate company started doing the other thing. Then I just quit my own company, sold the product, went to work for like DHL. And then I got an offer from Moscow, like to move to Moscow. Like the salary wasn't good, but we just went for it.
My wife and I knew each other for three months. She wasn't even my wife then. She went with me. Yeah, and then like when we got some international offers, we would just accept them without even visiting the country that we were going to. Because for me, it sounds like this has a lot of potential. The downside is that, yeah, we lose the money that we already have, but we learn a lot. So living the life is what I guess I was always after.
So for me, when I was thinking about quitting the corporate career and starting our own company with you, it was more like these stars have aligned. It's time to do it. Because like, A, we have a great idea on our hands. Unicorn or not, it doesn't matter. Like I don't want to think like a Silicon Valley startup. It can go different ways. But I think which way it goes, unless something goes terribly, terribly wrong. I think we'll be able to make as much money as we make in our corporate jobs.
Probably a lot more in order of a few orders of magnitude more. And I think the money itself, money fuels your life, right? But that's the risk management part, right? Right. But what you really want is the enjoyment that I'm having over the last like, I don't know, four months of working on this thing. You can't get that from anywhere else. I talk to like ex colleagues and I show them what I'm working on. And I feel so first of all, happy and second proud.
But also the amount of decision making power that's on you. At the same time, there's the risk of decision making also. But it's all on you. I feel like I'm energized by that. Man, the last week of my life, after living Google and actually starting to work on this, like being able to open to talk about, you know, the idea is not that, that's absolutely incredible. Yeah, there isn't a mention of money, it's because it's a risk management part.
You can be like excited and all that, but like if you don't have the money to live on, what do you do? And if you take a jump like that without planning for it, then it's very likely that you will get burned out even faster. Because of all the stress, right? All the stress, yeah. I mean, financial stress is probably the one of the biggest stresses in life. Yes, especially if you have like a mortgage and kids.
You know, when I think about those young Silicon Valley start-appers, who like, we live in their friends bedroom, eat ramen, they can probably survive on like $2,000 a month, maybe even less, right? Yeah, I would have had like a very, very long runaway if I could afford to live like that. You know, that could have just rented like the one bedroom apartment for $2,000 a month. Right. In, I don't know, Gary in DMA. Oh, that would probably be like $1,000 a month.
No, that would be like $400 a month, I think. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, I think like the risk side of things, like the financial side of things, I think that's one of the start that was aligned because previously all those ideas were like sort of ideas. But this one is very concrete. It's a very specific idea, with a very specific business model. Then second is like, you've already quit your job. You can actually coach me on how do you do that.
I think if you didn't quit almost a year ago, I would have struggled a lot more. Because I basically, I'm following your footsteps. Maybe it would be different to be thinking about this differently. But I'm following your footsteps. It gives me a lot of confidence. And then third thing is having a partner like you, not like you, I should have a new as a partner. Because you and I worked together for five years. We've known each other for eight. And we worked together really, really well.
I think we complement each other really well. So yeah, that was just kind of perfect. That is the one of the biggest struggles I hear from people who start to do indie development. So indie, by the way, I think maybe not all of our audiences would know these things. Some of them for sure would know more than us, but some probably would not know anything about it. So let's just explain what that is.
Typically, when people leave and go create their own companies, the traditional model is like get some sort of venture funding, large amounts of money from a VC that fuels your growth for the next X years or something and then try to grow your business and go from there. And sell to Facebook. Yeah, exactly. Exit, yeah. Yes. A newer model is you basically don't take money from anybody. You bootstrap your business.
So it's never going to become like that, like Google or at least not in four or five years. I don't think it's a newer model. It just used to be called business. And it's like bootstraping. Right. It used to be called more traditional businesses. Yeah, like you're opening your restaurant or something like that. In software, that's pretty new. New as in like maybe last five, six years, I don't know.
I think it depends if you think about all of those large unicorns like Airbnb and Dropbox because those are the companies that everybody knows. But then for example, I have a friend who started the company 20 years ago in New York because he was doing some, I think some freelance work for one of the banks. And then he figured out that he can actually create a product out of it. And then he created the product, which is like a company of just a few people.
And there are lots and lots and lots of those small companies that create small niche products. Like nobody has ever heard about except for that niche where they operate. So from this perspective, I actually don't think it's so uncommon. It's just less visible. Yes. Today with the internet and social media and all and IndieHacker.com and their podcast, it has become very visible and popular.
And I think it has opened the eyes of a lot of people that I don't need to always go get VC funding and do this. Yeah. But I think for us, it's not clear yet whether we are going to take VC funding or not in the future. But I think for now, we will just go the bootstrapping route, launch, see how it goes. Because I think one of the risk factors for a business like ours is cost. Would our business model work to cover the costs of operating? And I'm not even talking about our salaries.
I'm talking about actually cost of doing business. Sorry, what would be called cost of goods sold in the traditional world? Like all the infrastructure that we have to use for doing this. Yeah, would like the free or speed model work for us? You know, all those things. Like if for some reason we get a lot of, let's say, adoption, but nobody pays for it. We will wake up a lot of costs and then maybe that would be the time to take VC funding. We see from here, right?
Yeah. Because then you show like traction and growth and all that. But you have not figured out the actual financial side of it. Yeah, but you need time to figure out the economics otherwise you die, right? The business dies. Yeah, let's hope our MBA helps us here. But like you never know, it's so much uncertainty. Yeah. Okay, so we talked a lot about the finance side of it, like preparing for it and like how you think about it. What about the family itself?
How did you prepare with them or prepare them? Yeah, so just give some context. My wife doesn't work. She's a full-time mom. Yeah, I have two children. So she works full-time at home. Yeah, she makes no money, right? She doesn't show any spends money. Everybody else in the family spends money at the time. So obviously they want to support what I'm doing, but then my wife also is pragmatic. Like what about the finances?
Yeah, she was the primary driver for me to like pushing out my exit date with Google for as long as possible because she wanted to have more confidence. But I think after I came back from the retreat and then I also went to another retreat and coming back from the other retreat, that was it. That was the March one. It was February. February, yeah. So I went to Peru to do Ayahuasca, which we can talk about a little bit.
But yeah, I came back with a very clear state of mind that whatever I'm doing right now, I'm just killing myself. So it's like when you were talking about what your net worth be by the time you retire, for me it's like if I retire doing what I'm doing right now, I would have just wasted my life. And I would like leave a miserable life for the rest of my life. And this is not to say that I will never work for a corporation again, because I might.
But like right at this moment in time, I feel like I've not tried my best to do the thing that is right for me. Or at least I think is right for me or I feel is right for me, right? So there is a quick framework I'll plug it in here from Jeff Bezos, Call of Regret Minimization Framework. That's what you're following. And that was one of my things too. Like if I don't do it now, I'm not going to do it.
Yes. Because I'm like, if you think about time, like do you remember when your child was just born? That was how many years ago? Remember as in, yeah, yeah. But it was like how many 11 years ago, right? But it still feels like yesterday, right? But guess what? Like 10 years from now, you will think about today's conversation as if it was yesterday. And when you will be 80, you would be like, okay, my life is just all passed by, right?
The only time we really have, and that's what I saw during my I wask experience, is the only time we have is right now. You know, they talk about the present moment a lot. But I personally, you know, I read all of those books and heard all those people and I like, I never really fully understood it until I actually experienced it, you know, underhand or it's like delicate substance.
This like future is nonexistent, it's just potential. The past, you know, it might as well not even ever exist, right? It's gone. The only thing you have, the only time you have is right now. And the quality of your life is defined by what you do this very moment. And for me, it's like, I make all this money, but like I feel miserable most of the time. So it was a bit of running away from that life, but also like the stars aligned, I have very certain vision to what I'm running to.
And that's what kind of help me make the jump and talking to my wife also she was very supportive. Before we move on, I'll plug in Kung Fu Panda. You know what I'm talking, what I'm going to say, I think immediately. Now, I watched the movie, but I don't know what you're going to say. Oh, really? So Kung Fu Panda, you know that master Rookway, right? The turtle. Now, you'll have to give context. Okay, the turtle, the very old wise turtle who kind of is trying to teach this guy.
He's like Yoda, Yoda in, in Kung Fu Panda. Yeah, he's like Yoda. So one of his favorite quotes from that movie, it's delivered in a hilarious way. Go watch it after. It's yesterday's history. Tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why it's called a present. Oh, interesting. I definitely have heard this phrase, I just didn't know it was from that movie. Right. Yeah, it's done in a beautiful way in that movie. So go watch it. All right, so now, sorry, sorry for the interruption.
The thing I want to say is, my wife showed me her messages with her family. And on the other side, I mean, her mom was saying, like, are you sure, like, you want to leave over your savings? You're going to just expand all that money, right? And my wife responds to her. She's like, yeah, but he earned all this money or he earned his right to like, leave life he wants. And I'm reading this. I'm like, okay, so this is what the support means. And she didn't come to me to ask what to respond to her.
She showed it to me after the fact. So she's really supportive. I think for me, one of the things was like, I let go my attachment to the house. And like, worst case scenario, probably have to sell the house. And maybe move to a smaller house or like rent. Hopefully it won't come to that. That would be crazy. But here's the thing, right? It's like fear. When you really fear something, fear, fear losing something that you attach to, that's what can really drive you like nuts.
It will prevent you from making the decision you need to make. But like, once you realize that everything in life is temporary. Basically, like, this house, like, I don't own this house. I'm going to be gone. Maybe if 50 years max, right? I have on this earth, I'll be gone. Anything that I've made here, even the business that we are going to be working on, all of that will be gone. So thinking that we own anything is a delusion in that way.
So it's like a social construct, like this ownership thing. So everybody's going to die. And it's a quality of the day-to-day experiences that you have. That's what's going to dictate the quality of your life overall. And your relationship with your children and wife and everything. So, yeah, totally. Yeah, which is part of that kind of quality of life, right? Every moment, yeah. In the US, this is very, I think, important health insurance.
So for me in Canada, that was another thing I didn't have to deal with. And plus my wife is working. So whatever other things that is not covered by the government, like dental and all that is covered by her, by her employer. So we didn't have to deal with any of that. But you, you're not working now. Your wife is not working. And health insurance is a big deal in the US. So tell us more about like the specifics of what you have planned for that. Yeah. So I just typed health insurance in Google.
And there was a website that came first in the organic search. I don't remember which website it was. It was like a broker website where you just type your email and then a couple of people reach out to you like agents. Got a quote. Yeah, it says like get an instant quote, but like you never get an instant quote. It's so deceptive. Give us your email and we'll get back to you. Yeah. But then this guy, his name is Ethan. He got back to me.
He is based here out of Florida on the other coast in Tampa. And he was very nice actually. So I talked to him a few times and he gave me different options. He explained things really well. And yeah, then, yeah, basically family plan for insurance. It's like $850 a month I think. So that's you, your wife and two kids? Yes. Can you tell us the age of the kids? Because that probably factors into the insurance. It's 11 and almost five. So it's 50 a month. That's quite a lot. Yeah. It's quite a lot.
But there's another option. I could continue the insurance I have with Google for 2500 a month. That's what's called cobra. It's a cobra stands for something. It's like an abbreviation. So you can just continue the coverage you have. The $2,500 a month is a lot. So basically I just wanted to find the cheapest thing because we almost never go to doctors. So it's basically just for a catastrophic kind of event that we needed for. Insurance insurance. Yes, exactly. That's what it is.
So 850. Like once we start bringing any revenue health insurance is one of the first things I want the company to play for. But let's say somebody is starting up just them and their spouse. Is that going to be like significantly less because they don't have kids or do you know do you have any idea? Yes, it will be less. I don't know about how much but it will definitely be less. And is the coverage similar to what you had with Google for this 850? Actually, I think it's a bit different.
I don't know the details. It's just so complicated. It's so convoluted. I like absolutely despise that whole area of business. That's health insurance. That's how you can insurance. I think current insurance is okay. But they just intentionally making things so convoluted. It's incredible. One thing that I did do right before living. Oh, by the way, I don't know.
Different companies might have different policies but at Google, the insurance lasts until the last day of the month of your departure. So I left in June 1st. I remember. So you and I were talking and initially your last date was made 24th or 25th of Friday. And then you figured out that all my insurance will go on for the whole month if I live on the first. Yeah, makes sense. Yes, yeah, yeah. I worked with you a few more days and that extended my insurance.
And primarily it was because of dental. I'm not buying dental insurance. But just before my exit, I'm like, okay, I have unused dental insurance. Why don't I use it? So I went to dentists and yet discovered that they need, I think like $2500 worth of stuff with crowns that need to be done. The insurance would pay for 60% of this. And I'm like, okay, let's do it. But then making those crowns and all that, it takes time. And that's what drove me to reconsider the exit date.
And on this dental note, part one is over. Please come back next week for part two, where we will talk about our next story of living Amazon as a principal engineer. It's a pretty big deal to diving time certainty. We will also talk about the cultures of Amazon and Google and how they differ and play out some of our goals for next year. Please come back and in the meantime, give us a five-star review or send us a note at helloatmetacastpodcast.com.
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