- Duration: 32 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J6D5MQGXDXKQ9TW42GQT2JB4 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J6D5MQGXDXKQ9TW42GQT2JB4)
Transcript
[Orri Bogdan]: Yo, what’s up, Orri? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What’s up? [Orri Bogdan]: I need to get that. Whenever I have some back-to-backs, it’s just so easy to, you know, rather than going and walking around in the hot sun. [Michael Houck]: We do it at home. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Orri Bogdan]: So I have a few questions I want to ask you about the product and some potential changes around the overall package that I’m thinking about. But first, I think it’s important to talk to you about the team before you even give me your thoughts. I want to give you my perspective on it. [Orri Bogdan]: I like the team. I think we lack technical talent and I think we lack experience and Uh, I think we have a good amount of passion and people care about what we’re doing. But, um, frankly, working with Mark has kind of sucked. Um, mostly because he just doesn’t have the, he’s a good person. He just doesn’t have the time to put into it. And he, he hasn’t put any much, really much money in he’s invested 25 K cash, and then he’s paid for some other things, probably about 50 K total. Um, And, you know, I have Russ Yusupov, who built HQ Trivia and Vine, who wants to work with us. It was a 75k quote through his firm. And I have to look like an idiot and be like, I don’t have any money and I can’t talk to Mark until the end of August because he’s not. So I’ve been getting rejected by every VC because I reach out. [Orri Bogdan]: General Catalyst pair for a lot more. [Orri Bogdan]: Age of Zero, Neo, Inception. And these are people that even like have explicitly told me they want to invest in me. And I think just what we have is not We haven’t talked about this today. And basically, I think the vision of a gamified social network is too big of a leap of faith, particularly trying to kill LinkedIn. I think there’s too many leaps of faith. [Orri Bogdan]: So I’ve been rethinking about it as a gamified way to give advice connected to a leaderboard within different domains and then basically partnering with companies in those domains to give prizes to the top people every month. Basically like a way to give advice and then the top people get prizes as a result at the end and make it very simplistically that. [Orri Bogdan]: And less of a social network, which people don’t believe we can do, at least off the bat. [Orri Bogdan]: I was curious to talk to you more about that, get more of your thoughts on the team and everything. But that was sort of the background of where I’m at. It’s been an eventful few days. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you sound more, not I wouldn’t say dejected, but more tempered, I would say, than normal about it. Do you have confidence in sort of the kind of new way of framing it? Or are you still like, I don’t even know, I’m kind of in the air about whether this is the right thing for me to do next? Well, OK. [Orri Bogdan]: What I do know is that the game is fun, and people like it and want to play it. The product is good. [Orri Bogdan]: That’s why my thought was, why don’t we just make it all about the product, and then just with clear rewards that make it easy based off a leaderboard type thing, and cut all the other bullshit out, like no subreddits. [Michael Houck]: No promises, basically. [Orri Bogdan]: Yeah, basically just we’re going to build this, and there’s going to be a leaderboard, and we’re going to start running it. And it’s just going to try to get user growth incentives and fuck the forums. That feels a lot healthier to me, to be honest. So I do feel a lot better about, but we just came up with this direction after talking for like three hours. So I don’t know yet. I was curious what you think. I think personally, like in starting this new company, a big part of it was that I got to pick who I work with now and not to work with the people I worked with before. And I like, I actually think Hunter’s good. Um, like Mark’s son, I think he, the only problem with him is that he shared some of his dad’s work-life balance things where like, he really doesn’t want to work on weekends, really doesn’t want to work past five. Like just not, not the best co-founder thing. He will do it. He will do it if we make him, but he tries not to. Um, that’s not great. Jason’s my employee. He’s really good. Like he’s a really good employee. He’s just not technical. So he just does a bunch of stuff, but he’s just not a technical person. And Joseph’s really talented, but has no idea how to talk to people because he’s homeschooled. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: What, sir? Homeschooled. [Michael Houck]: Oh. So he never got socialized. [Orri Bogdan]: He’s talented, but inexperienced. So I like him. I think he’s probably my best person. [Orri Bogdan]: None of this is necessarily a problem. Like I have the most equity and I might even take more because I’m just like a leader here, which is a good thing. I want that to be the case. But I do feel like a lack of an experienced co-founder, an experienced technical co-founder would be nice. And I don’t have that. So that is something I feel is a lack. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, that might also have something to do with the kind of tepid investor reaction to the idea of building an API and having a technical co-founder. Like, that’s that makes sense. I think my read on the team when I met them was pretty similar to yours. [Michael Houck]: Joseph, who I think was on the top left of my screen, if I remember correctly, he seemed like kind of quiet, but like really like he seemed like he knew what he was doing and he had good questions to ask. [Michael Houck]: And then Hunter, I felt like, believed strongly in his perspective, without really much to back that up. [Michael Houck]: And then, I think I was Nathan, right? I have to rephrase it. He’s Jason. He’s like my employee though. [Orri Bogdan]: He’s like a, he’s a yapper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, he was, he was inquisitive. He seems like he’s a, he seems, he seems rough, but he seems like moldable. You know, he seems like he can grow into something. Yeah, I think there are pros and cons there. Honestly, my read on the whole thing was that it seemed like the team was was pretty junior, right? And so I think if that’s the full, the full scope of the team, especially without a technical person, I can understand why folks might not be as like jumping at it. But I do believe in you. And I think a lot of other people it sounds like do too. So there’s some like, level of faith and trust there. But yeah, pretty, they came off pretty junior. And also, maybe a little like overconfident, I would say. [Orri Bogdan]: Yeah. Um, I was shielding them from all their objections, but I stopped doing that. I, I told them like, Hey, every single investor that I was hoping would give us money. Is it? Um, and I think it’s fair. I think our vision was bad. I think that trying to kill LinkedIn is you better have a really good plan and we don’t. So like, I think trying to do something different, our own thing is smarter. Like I do think this new vision is a lot better. We’re going to solidify it, but I don’t know. Like there’s a world in which I just say like, fuck it. And I just take Joseph and I just find a new, like, you know what I mean? But I don’t know. I like, I like Mark. I don’t like relying on Mark. That’s sort of my issue with him. Like the fact that I have the founder of Netflix and he’s a known investor and he’s not giving me any money and I have to go. It’s such a bad signal. Yeah, it’s a bad signal. [Michael Houck]: I mean, it’s a good signal that he’s already invested, but then when people ask how much he’s put in, it sounds like a low amount, especially if he’s getting that much equity for and he’s like a quote unquote co-founder. Yeah, yeah, it feels Like, when you frame it that way, it does feel like, why isn’t he going more into it, you know? He’s such a penny pincher, bro. [Orri Bogdan]: Like, he’ll say, oh yeah, don’t forget, I also paid 25k in Hunter’s salary, so add that to the safe. Like, he’ll say like that, and I’m like, Hunter’s your son, bro. Like, that’s so ridiculous. Yikes. He’s just rude in his ways, though. He’s not a bad person, he’s just like, kind of… [Orri Bogdan]: I don’t know. Do you think that he’s like, I don’t know what Hunter’s background is before this, but like he seemed very young. [Michael Houck]: Do you think that Mark is looking at this like, oh, let me get Hunter some experience working with somebody who knows what they’re doing now? [Orri Bogdan]: Now, now it’s that initially it wasn’t because initially Mark was supposed to be like an active co-founder. I don’t think Mark, I think age is catching up with Mark and he didn’t expect it to be honest. Like I thought he still had more time to like, Grinded stuff, but he doesn’t want to give up like traveling all the time and surfing all the time while they can it’s whatever so like I think that’s what I Think that’s what’s happened That’s unfortunate. [Michael Houck]: I mean, you know, what argument can you make against that? [Orri Bogdan]: You know, not really any get get younger Yeah, I mean hey man age reversal is happening bro, just hold on um, I 30-year-old mark, but um, I Don’t know like I wonder if I’m making someone of a mistake in the sense I do like the vision that we’re going towards and stuff. I just like I’m such a good CEO. I just need good technical people around me Like I know cuz like I know what I’m capable of I know where my strengths are as a CEO and it’s like I just That’s why I like Joseph. I don’t care that he’s young and experienced. I think he’s gonna go hard but like Good. He seems good. Part of what I’m feeling is just like, you know, if I started fresh with, like if this blew up and I had to do something fresh with Joseph, completely figure out a new concept, I would find one other technical person. And I think it’d be an easier team to back, which is hilarious because I’m working with the founder of Netflix. You’d think that it’d be, it gets me in the doors, right? Like I have, I’ve talked with like Roloff Botha. I’ve talked with another supply partner who reached out to me. I’ve talked with like Mark Benioff I’m talking to. I reached out to him cold. Like, there’s so many top people that will talk to me because of Mark, but then Mark has to actually follow up. [Michael Houck]: There’s, there’s an argument you made for like a weird, a weird case here, um, where like you do this for a while, you get the, get in the doors, get your foot in the doors as a result of Mark. Yeah. Maybe you’re not as bullish on it as you were before, but you get those relationships, you get those emails, you put the face to the name for these people. And then, At some point it inevitably doesn’t work and you now have these relationships to go on and do your next thing. [Orri Bogdan]: That’s, I mean, that’s not what I’m aiming for, but like, I’m not going to, I’m going, my thought is similar where like, I’m going to stick with this because it gets me, it gets me clout. And then after that, either this works or it doesn’t work. And then I get my technical team around me after. [Michael Houck]: Because like, look, if a startup fails, like any startup can fail, right? Startups fail all the time. So many fail. It’s not going to be some big black mark if you go and build something and it doesn’t work out. The only thing you lose is your time, right? But you’re trading that time for maybe it becomes a success and becomes a big thing. But maybe more importantly, it also lets you build these relationships with folks you wouldn’t be able to as quickly without Mark kind of being part of it. Yeah, no, I agree. [Orri Bogdan]: Yeah, it’s, uh, I don’t know, it’s tough. [Orri Bogdan]: How do you feel about like, like the project, like the new, like the direction and stuff? Like, do you feel like it’s something that, like, if you were heavily, let’s say you were hypothetically heavily involved in it, like, would you, like, what would you, what would you be your next, like, approach? Like, what would you want to do? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, look, I like the idea since you mentioned it, I think simplifying it the way you have is smart. Not only for investors, but also just to sort of build momentum and find the exact customer who’s gonna be the right fit for this and all that stuff. So I would just probably be trying it out in different niches and seeing if and where it catches fire. Maybe setting up like different little communities for founders versus like consultants versus X, Y and Z, right? And let them all sort of play their own games. And then, you know, maybe one or two of those become a big hit. And you double down on that, you build the experience for them, and then kind of go from there and see how big it can get. And if you can then generalize it back down further down the road. That’s, that’s probably what I would do. I think that there’s probably a market for this competitive, incentivized, fun game experience where people get to kind of brag and show off how smart they are, like, you’re hitting a lot of very core drivers and human beings. And so I think it can work. I don’t know what the right market is for it. Maybe it’s founders. But I would bet that there is a market for it. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Orri Bogdan]: Yeah, I’m, I’m feeling energized at least because I felt very lost the last two days because I kept getting rejections. And I was like, man, like I was getting rejected by all these funds that are like, we bet on people and like we, we invest free product. And then they reject you and they’re like, and they’re like, and they’re like, not you. We bet on other people actually. We bet on smart people who went to Stanford. I just like, Yeah, I don’t know. I, uh… Bro, I just look at Brett’s fucking posts and I’m like, this idiot fucking raises. He goes like this to the beach with a dump. I’m like, bro, this guy is actually, like… His posts are literally cringier than my posts, and my posts are satire. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, honestly, I, um… I muted him, so I don’t see his posts anymore. Dude, I don’t know how the fuck you dealt with him for years. [Orri Bogdan]: Yeah, it was, uh… [Michael Houck]: The craziest part, you wanna hear the craziest part? Keep this between us because I never shared this anywhere, except with like a few people. So I founded the company, right? And then Brett and Jacob were two people who were at the first cohort. When I decided to make it into a company, I kind of brought them in as co-founders. We built the rest of it together. We came back to the US. I came back here to New York because, you know, my fiance was here and we were getting married and all that stuff. And they lived in a house in LA. And then when I went to visit the house in LA a few weeks later, they basically cooed me and like voted me out as CEO. And so then I had to work with them for two to two and a half years after that and like maintain some level of trust somehow, which was very challenging. Um, but Yeah, I mean, we just saw how fast the thing was going and how much hype was behind it. And so I was like, let me grip my teeth for a bit and see what happens. But yeah, I couldn’t recommend anyone working with them. What was their reasoning? [Orri Bogdan]: Just that they were on the ground in LA, and I wasn’t. [Michael Houck]: And also that my, like, you know, I’m, I’m from the East Coast. They’re like California boys. I mean, Jacob’s from Virginia, but he’s like become an honorary California boy, basically. And so You know, when things go wrong, I’m like, hey, I’m looking for accountability. Like, what’s up? And, you know, they can’t handle that. They want the, you know, the la-di-da, whatever. [Orri Bogdan]: Is Jacob as bad as Brett in your eyes or is Brett worse? [Michael Houck]: Depends on what vector you’re looking at. [Michael Houck]: Jacob was in charge of a lot of the decisions that got us in trouble with the press later. [Michael Houck]: I’d say on a day-to-day basis, Jacob was easier to work with, but he has horrible judgment about some things. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Orri Bogdan]: I heard he just has anger issues from Erin. That’s basically what she told me, that he cheated on his girlfriend at the place and she caught it or something. He doesn’t have anger issues. [Michael Houck]: No, Jacob’s relatively chill. [Orri Bogdan]: Apparently he threw chairs at people or something, or when he was mad. That’s just from her perspective. I don’t remember anything like that, no. [Michael Houck]: I mean, Jacob did some crazy stuff, but I don’t remember him ever having any anger issues. It’s weird. Yeah. [Orri Bogdan]: Max, I’m friends with his new co-founder, Max. So he says he was surprised to hear that, too, because I told him what Aaron said, basically, about like… Yeah. But yeah, from what I could tell, Brent was like the… He just seems like a hollow human. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: He’s smart, he knows a lot of things, but hard to work with. He’s an ideas guy, he’s a strategy guy. When the team was looking for things to get done, it was tough to work with him. [Orri Bogdan]: I mean, I’m similar in that sense. Like I, you know, I left, I’m not CEO of Vei anymore because I am not able to build products like consumer goods products. And like, we need a CEO who could actually add value. And like, it was clear I wasn’t. So I asked my mentor to become CEO. But I don’t have an ego and I don’t like, you know, I don’t pretend to like, I know what I’m good at, you know, like I know what I’m good at and it’s not that and I moved out of [Michael Houck]: the way. [Orri Bogdan]: So I don’t know. I feel like, yeah, I don’t know. I always liked you. I feel like you’ve always been very upfront and authentic with me, which I appreciated out of that whole thing. But yeah. So what do you think? What do you think we should, do you think, I guess, A, do you like the advising the team, do you like advising me? Like, how do you see that? And then how do you think we like, should I be looking for like right now looking for investors that I think are going to help me think through this part and get to like something, you know, as we keep iterating, actually give useful feedback. Do you think that’s the right approach? I guess that’s two questions there. [Michael Houck]: But yeah, so in terms of investors, like I would say you sort of just have landed on this new sort of vision in the short to medium term. Yeah. So I would say go prove that out a bit. Try it out with a couple of different niche communities. See if one takes off. If you get traction in one, capture that moment and sort of use that to go say, all right, investors, here’s where we go from here. Right. So I wouldn’t worry about the investors right now at all, honestly. Not to say it necessarily needs to be that far off, depending on how fast you move. But yeah, I would spend more time on the the different niches and finding the market first. [Orri Bogdan]: The reason I want Angels is just because I’m scared of losing Russ. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Russ? [Orri Bogdan]: Trivia and Vine Founder. I need 50k to get started with them. So like, it seems like nothing, but no, it’s a lot. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, It’s tough, man. I guess how much confidence do you have that you guys are able to sort of get it to? Because I think like order of operations would be maybe try to get some like short term consulting from them, if possible, then go implement that, see if it works. If it works, go grab investors, start working with them more and more fully. But it’s it’s tough to say go get investors when you know, You got to get real lucky and get matched with the right angel who is just passionate about the idea or loves you. It’s like more of a guessing game until you guys have that. So I don’t know. Personally, I wouldn’t spend any time on it. I just want to sort of muscle it and figure it out, which probably isn’t great advice, but that’s probably what I would do. As far as me, I’m happy to chat. I’m happy to share advice and all that stuff. I think probably makes sense to do that primarily one-on-one with you. Um, I think that’s where we get the highest like use of the time or you’ll get the most value out of the time. Um, but you know, up to you, but yeah, look, I like you. I like the direction. Um, I think there’s something there. I don’t know what it is, but I think there’s something there. So yeah, I’m happy to keep chatting, uh, depending on what this sort of time commitment is. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Orri Bogdan]: Um, Yeah, I think you’re right. Firstly, I think we have to, I mean, Russ literally, he sent me an intro link, which I will use, I guess, for this like 350 bucks, but honestly, probably worth it to talk to him. So I think we’ll use the intro link, talk to him. [Orri Bogdan]: Prove that, because Joe thinks he can get like the drop in model up within like the next end of the week. Or the start of next week. So if that can happen, then the plan would be to basically have like Monday be fundraising advice day, Tuesday be personal relationships advice. And you have to ask the question under those circumstances and just run a bunch of tests there. And like, you know, how are you guys finding the people for this? So the 30 tests we ran so far, we’re all from our network. So like from our community, like from Founders Game or from my personal network. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Okay. So if you were going to, if you were going to start in a new niche and add a second community, how, like, what would be the approach to do that? [Orri Bogdan]: I mean, I’ve already killed founders game. I just turn it into like this whole thing and then just pull people to the discord and then, uh, give information through that and use the discord, I guess it’s like the messaging medium, I assume. Um, yeah, I don’t know if it’s a better option, like, Initially we wanted to build our own like network, right? But now that’s not the goal. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I mean, you can probably, you can probably hack it with like a, like a cold email type strategy. Um, like, you know, scrape some information from people on LinkedIn who are in a certain niche, you have a certain job title, get like, I don’t know, 10,000 emails that way. And then, um, use one of these like new cold emailing tools that are out there and just, send people really simple, like one line messages, which are like, hey, you know, do you have a, like, want to get your questions answered about XYZ, click here, and they click there. And they jump into some discord or something like that. And then you have the game run at certain times. And you send out reminder emails, like right at that time for people to jump in and join. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Orri Bogdan]: I mean, my initial thought was to just use Mark’s poll and see what happened, but it might not even be founders. So you’re right. Like if we’re doing, it’s like we’re testing something other than founders. [Michael Houck]: Like you don’t need, like it could be like, um, I don’t know, like B2B marketers or something. Right. Or HR people. People fucking love stuff like this for some reason. They like, They’re always looking for community. They’re always looking for the next person to follow. I get people asking about it on megaphone all the time. Like, would you have any HR creators? And I’m like, no, I don’t have any HR creators. I have one HR creator. So it’s a big, there seems to be a growing community there. People who are like hungry for information. So I don’t know. [Orri Bogdan]: Okay. You know, I think it’s a good idea. Um, yeah, it’s been a bit of a wild day. Um, One of my friends, two of my friends who work on the project with me, we’re considering working together, one’s a girl, and she flew to Bali for a work thing, and the guy’s girlfriend was basically sexually assaulting her, grabbing at her tits, literally, and then There’s all this drama, and then this other guy who used to work for him reached out to me and was like, you told him something about me, and I actually didn’t. So then he screenshotted that I called him evil, and then I said, hey, by the way, I did it, and I proved that I did, and he was like, oh, my bad, I made a mistake. And I didn’t want another guy to know that I didn’t like him, because I don’t want to cause drama. Period sure yeah so random I just I had that happen today and then I had like I had this I had like this thing and mark’s just like completely um if mark gave me 200k I could do so much [Michael Houck]: september 1st is uh this weekend right so maybe he’s back I got a meeting with him on Tuesday. [Orri Bogdan]: And then he’s filming Elevator Pitch that week. So he said, I have lots of free time. I’m filming Elevator Pitch. Last time he did that, I was also working with him. And he canceled every single meeting we had at those times because, oh, it’s a very unsporadic calendar. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Oh, boy. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I guess play it by ear for now. Yeah. Honestly, man. [Michael Houck]: You know, it sounds like he’s not as invested as you want him to be, which is fair. Yeah. So do your best to sort of like get value out of the relationship in other ways if he isn’t going to be as involved. That’s what I’m doing. [Orri Bogdan]: I’m using the fuck out of his name to get into doors with every big VC. And I’ll keep iterating until we have something. And they’ll say, hey, you said no to me earlier. Fuck you. Here’s my new thing. Like, I don’t know. But, um. The good thing is I definitely feel myself leveling up as a founder, like people, like people, like investors fuck with my story now, like personal story. And I think they want to bet on me. Like the only reason people are having a hard time is because they want to bet on me. But the product’s vision is so shit that there’s like they can’t. And that’s where we’re at. So. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, all the more reason to not spend the time on the investors right now. You’re getting the signal from them what they want from you. They like you, but they want something more, something different. [Michael Houck]: When you get to a point where you’re like, all right, let’s take this shot with them again, then do that. But in terms of best use of your time, I would say it sounds like product and growth are one and two. I agree. [Orri Bogdan]: Okay, let me figure it all out. Are you in New York right now? Yeah, I’m in New York. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. [Orri Bogdan]: When I visit, I’ll hit you up because I haven’t met you in person yet. You’re still a homie. I’m still just a face on the Zoom screen. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Orri Bogdan]: No, I’m used to meeting people online. I’m a gamer, so it’s normal to me. Give me a shout when you’re here. [Michael Houck]: I’ll probably be around. Okay. [Orri Bogdan]: Yeah, I think we’re going to have to do another call. I appreciate the time. I’m going to grind this out. Startups are complicated, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Go, man. Chat soon. Good to talk. [Michael Houck]: Bye. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Bye.