But what we can do is we can give probabilities to a thing. We can say it's very likely that the market will do this thing. Right? In sailing, you have these decisions all the time. If you are very confident that the wind is going to shift 5° to the left over the next 5 minutes, right? You want to go towards that windshift. So you want to go towards the left side of the course. But let's imagine that the entire fleet, everyone else is going the other way. Are they being idiots? You kind of have to ask yourself, do they have information that I don't have? If I'm wrong, the risk is so high because so many people are going this direction.

So, let me mitigate that risk. While I'm highly confident this thing is going to happen, I'm going to make a different decision than I would if I was just purely trusting my instinct because the math supports the stats supports that I go over here. And so, I think that is a great proxy for how really the best decisions are made for your own career, for your own life, or business is you have to look at the information that you have available, understand that you don't have all the information, and you have to make a statistical bet. You have to say, I think it's most likely this thing will happen. And then depending on how confident you are, that's how much you invest in that thing.

A lot of people say that you shouldn't start a company. It's a bad economic decision. You know, all these things, but I like to think of things in terms of variability versus risk, right? And starting a company is a high variable thing, but it's I actually think it's a lowrisk scenario. Why? Because you learn so much being a founder of a company. You will become a more valuable asset to a company later and be able to make more money later, whether you fail or succeed.

Chess is theoretically a solved game. You can play perfectly. In poker, there are too many confounding variables and you're operating under too much uncertain information. It means that you could play quote unquote perfectly in poker and still lose because there's uncertainty. There's a variable of randomness, there's a variable of chance. In sailing, you have these decisions all the time. When you are sailing in a, you know, a seabbze environment, we can call it. So, what happens is the land will heat up faster than water. And so, when that happens, you basically get a seab breeze. And so what we see that happen in San Francisco Bay area all the time. For example, the Sanwakin Valley is, you know, 100° and the Pacific Ocean temperature is 60°. And so that temperature differential is partly what creates such a powerful sea breeze and why it's so windy in San Francisco in the summertime. And so when you know those things, you can start to predict. We know that as the land heats up, typically when there reaches this temperature differential under these pressure circumstances, that's when we expect that seabbze to come in. And we usually expect that it comes in from this direction. Right? So you can position yourself well to be prepared for that to happen. That is a great proxy for how really the best decisions are made for your own career, for your own life, for a business. And you have to make a statistical bet. You have to say, I think it's most likely this thing will happen. And then depending on how confident you are, that's how much you invest in that thing.

And after all that I thought I've got to get back to where the builders are, the people who are creating things and and find a very talent dense community. So I sought out in person San Francisco based opportunity and originally I thought I was going to go work for a startup like series B or a series C startup but was lucky enough to discover South Park Commons um which is a a community of founders basically in a venture capital firm that backs them. The answer to when I wanted to build stuff by myself has been pretty much since I was a child. The question was why didn't I? And you can be critical about a lot of things from lack of agency and things like that. Um, but I think the reality, just to be like totally honest, is I had a lot of doubt in in whether or not I could. And so actually my experience at SBC and being able to have exposure to people who were great builders and having them teach me how to do that, how to run that process, how to build things on my own was the first moment where I realized that I actually was capable of building things on my own. I knew somewhere in my brain that I was capable of it, but I hadn't actually understood it or seen that path until I was able to meet the people at SBC that were really, really amazing at being able to make things come to life.

Usually think about this as kind of two different forces. You have the driving force behind building, right? Curiosity, excitement, like wanting to do something for somebody else, wanting to solve problems, right? And then there is the sort of pulling back force of sort of doubt and like friction and sort of like difficulty of building the thing. Usually what I like to try to think about is like how can you either increase that sort of driving force which is hard to do but it's possible if you are for example really in love with somebody and you don't know how to cook but they love home-cooked meals you're going to learn how to cook because you want to make that person happy right and that is something where maybe there that motivation to learn how to cook was never there before. So this is the classic advice of like find customers who are asking you for things. If you have a group of people that you're building for and those people are asking you for things and are excited about what you're doing, that's an incredibly motivating force and that will basically pull ideas and pull things out of you as a as a person because you won't be sitting around having time to think about could I build this, could I not? You're just trying to solve the problem and getting there as quick as possible.

But now, if you have 10,000 users with an AI app, especially if they're if you're doing a good job and they're engaged and excited, uh you're spending thousands of dollars a month, right? Because the inference cost tokens are very expensive. This is why so many people are pushing for subscriptions cuz subscriptions are able to cover that cost. But it's actually not a scalable solution. For example, a good friend of ours was building a a tool basically for parents to tell stories to their kids so that their kids could kind of like visualize what was going on. So they were taking AI and allowing the parent to sort of describe different stories and then the AI would sort of like generate the images or the videos around like what that story was. the engagement was incredible and this person was getting fan mail being, wow, I like for the first time I'm really connecting with my kids and this is so fun and they love it and they're having so much, you know, but like he was losing, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month. As you know, a bootstrapped founder, it's not sustainable. And despite the fact that he had a subscription in place, it wasn't something that people were actually willing to or able to pay for. and and ultimately he ended up shutting down the business and getting a job you know at some B2B SAS company which made us really sad. We were built to solve the problem of how do we allow the developer of the AI experience, the generative experience to create a sustainable revenue source so that they can grow as large as they want to without, you know, risking basically that losing money period of time where like inference costs are, you know, higher than their revenues are, right?

People think that ads by default suck and are terrible for the user experience and everything about them is bad. We actually ran a test last week where we basically showed fewer ads. We capped the frequency at which we were showing ads and we said what happens if we only show like you know onetenth the number of ads that we were showing before. But we also measured what about the user base? And what we actually saw is when we capped the number of ads we were showing, the user engagement for organically on the app went down. People churn more often when we stopped showing ads. It's an indication that the the ads that we're serving are very high quality and actually encourage the user to spend more time on the app that they're actually in, which could indicate that the the ads themselves are a great experience. Right? So, and an example of this would be sailing in San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Bay, it's windy. There's, you know, wind shifts and things like that, but there's also a lot of current and it's a very, if you know the local sort of current patterns, you might have information that no one else has that might make what you're doing look really stupid until it pays off and then people go, "How did that person know that?" Right? And you knew it because you've seen it before. You've been you have experience there. You've tried that thing. You you were local in the space. And so again, back to what we were hearing and seeing from customers, we knew something that the market did not at that time and we were confident in that information.

Consumer behavior and sort of user adoption is lagging the technology quite a bit. The future is here. It's just not equally distributed. So for example, would you let an agent buy a car? Probably not. But would you let an agent buy a pair of socks? Maybe because like you know what the consequences are pretty low, right? And so what does that mean? What it means is that the trust is only at a very low level of consequence, right? But we think that over time both user behavior and the technology will increase to the point where we actually will start feeling like an agent could manage my investment portfolio. That's something we could imagine happening in the future because eventually we think agents might be able to prove themselves to be better at doing that than humans.

Early adopters do it. We have to see them prove it out. We have to see them build case studies. is you have to see the rest of the world kind of, you know, skeptically try it for the first time, realize it works, and then adopt it themselves. And while the technology is moving at absolutely incredible speeds, human brains still take a couple of years to kind of get used to a thing. I think all we can do and where we are as a business is position ourselves to be ready to react to the market when it's there.