like Sam on Instagram and Snapchat I would argue that like their biggest secret is that people care far more about their own stuff and they care about everyone else's and so we saw the same thing and so what everybody was doing is they were building these Network like companies that were like upload your video clip and then we were like no you gotta go deeply personal by building the capture layer and then expanding from there and then this was before Tick Tock wasn't a thing Tick Tock was not a thing what happened how did you blow up oh welcome to the pl where we explored the world's greatest startup stories I'm your host Turner Novak founder of banana capital and also champion of my school's unofficial Halo 3 tournament by freshman year of college today I talked to Pim dewitta co-founder and CEO of metal metal is how tens of millions of Gamers capture and share their favorite gaming moments with friends metal is one of the largest consumer startups that you've probably never heard of before we talk about why people play video games and why Roblox is at the Forefront of the industry with over 200 million active monthly players we discussed why paid user acquisition is so important in Mobile gaming and why consumer platforms need some sort of social inflection point and what that was for metal we talked through multiplayer platforms dying when their Network effects unravel why metal seed round was so hard to raise pim's biggest mistakes building metal why they no longer allow every employee to work remote how metal acquired six other companies and why rapid iteration is everything for startups thanks to David Dune for sharing questions and thanks to Pim for coming on now let's jump in after a short word from secure frame long time listeners no secure frame is the automated compliance platform built by Security Experts and in fact you all know this so much that hundreds of you have already clicked the link in the show notes sign up for a demo I want to thank everyone for supporting secure frame which indirectly supports the show if you're not familiar with secureframe thousands of customers like ramp Angelus and Coda trust secure frame to get stay and automate their compliance with security and privacy Frameworks like sock 2 ISO 2701 HIPAA and gdpr if you look through their website I'm not exaggerating when I say if you need to figure out any sort of compliance or security framework it's very likely secure frame can get you compliant in as fast as two weeks this means more time focusing on your own customers I'm an investor in Secure frame and I highly recommend it to every founder I meet check the link in the show notes and secureframe's in-house team of compliance experts and former Auditors will get you set up with the demo thank each gear frame and now let's talk to Pim and metal so I thought we could kind of kick things off can you really quick give us kind of a high level crash course on gaming is a market how big it is you know why is it interesting all that kind of stuff when you're a kid you can choose between you know spending time playing out any scenario you can imagine with your friends in a digital world versus scrolling a feed that's going to give you entertainment and I think most people pick the first one because it's more fun and more interactive and friendships are made right like inherently it's kind of ironic that the social networks that that are you know claiming to be going with social it's actually way more social to to drop in and do something with your friends inside a video game than it is to scroll a feed in isolation and so what we try to do is we try to enable people to capture edit and share the memories they create with friends while they're playing video games a way to think about it then would be 20 years ago someone might play outside at the park and maybe unequivalent of that fact that they maybe they still play outside of the park but something they maybe also do today is playing with a friend who lives across the city or across the country or the World online together exactly I would say it doesn't necessarily replace it but it does give people the ability to do that regardless of where you're located our mission at medal one of the things we say is like we think that metal is inherently good because it creates a more connected world where you can have friends all over the planet right I think it creates a level of understanding that people have about each other that transcends things like beliefs and you know things like that and so if I don't think every place is playing outside I think inherently it just it just removes the location element from doing things with your friends and I remember too even when I was growing up in high school I probably met just as many friends in class you know in that school is I did first playing a game like Call of Duty or Halo with them and then we would hang out at school or in person in my case it was very similar so I have Tourette's so for me I it was tough to make friends at school I have a lot of good friends that I have from that period but for me it was always kind of like the Oddball it's like it's okay guys see it like I twitch my eyes sometimes with games there was no barriers I was just like just like everyone else right and so I think you know for you it's a adjacent place for me it was the place right it was where I didn't feel different I would actually say for me it was probably the place maybe they were oh interesting I played a lot of like Halo growing up I played a lot of Call of Duty Gears of War those kind of games I made a lot of friends in high school like I said through gaming and what would you say is a big title for that right now is it Roblox that's kind of what a hero definitely Roblox can you explain to us what Roblox is and how big is it Roblox is essentially like a virtual sandbox it lets you create any type of game you want and invite your friends to come play it but that can be five friends or you know 50 000 friends and it allows you to monetize and you know as as these experiences get to skill I think the reason why he's doing so well compared to us to Market is I will wonder their cross-platform right so if you if you study Network effects one of the the predominant factors that determine whether something is successful or not SK factor and if you look at the K factor of Roblox versus other games the fact that Roblox is literally everywhere makes it so that they are able to capture a much wider audience and than most other games so like primarily mobile I would say is you know that they are really one of the only companies that have really really nailed that mobile to PC Loop and I think a lot of companies just haven't done that yet and if you have both mobile and PC you have a lot of the most social Gamers and so I think the the loop that drives Roblox just like runs faster than most other games the other thing that's going on with Roblox which is really interesting is that kovid drove a really really large slowdown of content production across the games industry that didn't happen with Roblox because it's just people making these games and so if you think about it with content becoming increasingly stale the largest like large multiplayer games release that got like more than 10 market share on the middle was valorants right and so realistically content is delayed because of covid and so as a result we're seeing Roblox just that's where the freshness is at now Roblox and GTA 5. Roblox is essentially most of the people quote unquote creating content they basically create games that you play and it's mostly kids right yes what's an example of a game like I'm just trying to give somebody an idea of when when you play a game on Roblox yeah so so it can range like Neopets you know you basically raise like pets with your kids or with your friends or there's fps's they're kind of like CS go most popular games have a version of them in Roblox one of the more recent Trends is this game called only up which is essentially is like an infinite well not infinite there's an end but and this is this is a game that you know goes mainstream regularly as a standalone and then Roblox users catch on and they make their own versions of it right also very popular on fortnite Creative now so you're kind of seeing this shift into games being these like trends that fit in and fade out and I think like in a way Roblox is like the tick tock amplification of games where attention spans the amount of time that people actually willing to invest in a specific game Loop before they're sold is pretty low and so they they you know they play on Roblox and then if you're not into it they'll go play something else and if they if they do if they are into it like you know they're like soccer for example is a very popular Roblox game you might have some friends there that then and transition into like professional FIFA or whatever I look at ROBLOX as kind of like Tick Tock for games because the retention like on the tail end of these games is pretty low but there's always new ones coming out right yeah yeah there's always new stuff I mean definitely moves quicker than traditional games industry but people do still flock to like the main ones but like the tail end retention is you know single digits percentage people come back on day 30 versus like day one and so what you see is that these games they are like tick tocks there are pieces of content that people consume and then once they're done with it they're done with it and I'm sure there's exceptions but that's really what's happening in Roblox and I think like most in industry hasn't really caught up with that yet so it's almost like a way to think of Roblox is it's sort of its own game engine yes in a way it's almost it's a it's a game but it's almost its own platform that other people build games on top of it absolutely is yeah and how many people use it now is it 40 50 60 million and don't quote me on this I believe they have 100 million daily active users uh in that range yeah yeah it might it's like somewhere between 50 and a million at the moment I have to chat to check and then you talked about Roblox has a really good Loop what exactly does that mean okay so if I'm playing a game on Xbox and it's an XBox exclusive and I try to invite my friend who doesn't have an Xbox then they're not gonna be able to play my game right you know you you see this with like GTA 5 for example they don't have a mobile client right and so very very popular on PC but they don't get to Roblox skill probably because there's no way somebody for mobile can actually access that right and so an optimized Loop lets people play where they want to play if you then you know if you think about it out of every four friends you invite if only one of them can play then your game is hypothetically going to grow at 25 of what it really could be growing at right because you're inviting four friends so Roblox is an optimized Loop in the sense that the places where people want to play they generally have a way to play feels like they've done a good job with content on other platforms like people will make videos about a game that they made in Roblox which will then drive more people to play Roblox as a whole right yes exactly because it's loaded barrier to entries your crate is so low people will just create and then talk about it and see if it sticks versus game studios who spend millions of dollars building something without knowing if it's gonna work and like we talked about it's literally gonna be like a 13 year old kid just yep makes a game and millions of people play and it's hosted by Roblox it's killed by Roblox it's kind of magical which I guess switching topics a little bit that's sort of what you did back in the day would you I think you were 13 or 14. you had a private RuneScape server can you I guess first explain what that is for people don't know and then just talk about what that whole business was yeah so what it is is RuneScape the original game was uh written in Java and so what that means is that they were Distributing a client through Java applets on web which are executable jar files which you're able to reverse engineer and basically turn into your own version of the game like let's say A World of Warcraft you could you could go in and you could like look at the code right not literally you can't because you know like it is heavily obfuscated but you could technically like it's much harder to do with games than weren't written than Java there was a huge Community this wasn't something that I did you know personally there was a community of people that were really into reverse engineering the RuneScape client and at some points we went from we can modify this thing into what if we actually built our own server it corresponds to these things that we can do in the client and basically have the whole thing so you sort of like took the existing just like world and you just split it into your own version that wasn't controlled by the company that owned RuneScape and you almost had your own yes so it has to be very clear there are different versions of this there is like definitely not supposed to do that this was definitely in that definitely Minecraft is encouraged right because on Minecraft you're connecting to the servers through the official client whereas with RuneScape there was no functionality for that it was redistributed the clients so people would go and play with so you're like simply clear you're definitely not supposed to do this but I was like I was 13 years old I was really really pissed off that RuneScape removed my favorite part of the game and I really wanted that back and so I was extremely motivated to go and do that what did they remove the Wilderness there's two punches there was the Wilderness and free trade which was basically I really love the economy part of the game and they basically removed the ability for me to go kill to the other players for their items or from me to go trade and merge items and so that was the whole game for me and so I kind of wanted that right and so I discovered this private server scene and then I got really into private servers playing them and then I tried to make a few got like super addicted to coding basically basically got that as addicted to coding as I did too video games really it was like magic to me right like you can kind of Imagine like I'm a kid with Tourette's in school wondering like am I gonna get a job is anyone gonna hire me and then I discovered this world of people making tons of money doing this thing called coding and you never even have to talk to people you know what I mean like so for me this for me this was like the thing and so yeah I would skip school and code and I would code literally all day every day and you were in eighth grade ninth grade I think this is when I was like 13 years old yeah so in in the Dutch version I was in Hope which is eighth grade ish so you basically learned how to code so that you could build your own server yes that's correct and it's very common a lot of kids that's how you learn how to code but that's how I started to in addition to that like I was into websites and stuff so I was like designing uh websites for people at school and selling them I was basically doing designs in like Photoshop and then exporting them to Dreamweaver and then exporting them from Dreamweaver to like usable HTML PHP and then I would sell them to people at school so I was into all the different ways of code and then obviously private server took off so I didn't end up working much more on selling websites but yeah I I was built obviously the private server website and things like that and maintain that you've said before you had just a desire to build things that people used what do you think drove that I don't know if I could pinpoint a specific thing I just love the building stuff and then people loving what I built I don't think that there is a recognition of that you're building things that people like I think was very like again as some as somebody who didn't get a lot of recognition from peers as a kid right because again I was in school I wasn't exactly the popular kid in school so I was I think as a kid I was looking for a lot of peer recognition and I think probably Building Products gave me a lot of pure recognition at the time I mean as as weird as you almost get a lot of social capital from being good at gaming in some cases yeah I think in my case so so what happened which is it's pretty funny so all RuneScape got so popular that all the schools they banned the IP addresses and websites of RuneScape in school so you could have played in schools yeah okay but you could play my server so what happened like one of the big reasons why my server became so popular is because we kept the memory limit and like usage of C CPU really really low so I could run on school computers it would run on like 50 150 megabytes of memory what happened is you could embed that in a web browser um in a Java applet and people would play my server instead of playing the main game so I've actually had scenarios like I've been beaten up at school not really like I wasn't hurt that bad but they wanted items in the game where uh where they were basically threatening me like give me items on the other hand people just come up to me it's like oh I need a guide I built a server I love to play and prove it to me I don't believe you like you're lying I guess it's really funny like as a teenager that's amazing right and you I mean you got it up to like one and a half million in Revenue what were people paying for did they pay for Access or items or something well I think in the downside of an economy is that you lose sometimes right so people would buy items they would sell them if they died in the wilderness they would buy more items there was memberships a lot of different ways I even had like ads on the web player where like if you played on the website I would monetize with Google AdSense for example all these different ways of making money and then when someone bought what did you use to facilitate the transactions back in the day was this like PayPal probably no so you couldn't because it was a high-risk vendor so as a private server I wasn't allowed to transact with like traditional payments platforms because we would be considered high risk so we actually had to go through what they call Merchant of Records which is basically what they do is they blend a whole bunch of companies like high risk and low risk so their average risk profile is lower and so as long as you stay under a certain amount of charge back so keep working with youth yeah so we had we had a number of different payment providers so not around anymore today I wonder why no no I mean there's still Merchant records by the way like there's not inherently this model I think worked fine because what they do is they do kick out the ones that are actually very risky right so they basically keep a baseline profile and I think they might also have like their own Merchant Bank where like they they go and they they work with a bank that is high risk but like inherently you have to stay under a certain amount but that's how we got payments process uh yeah we got out to a million half in Revenue when I was about 18 years old and I mean we lived in Netherlands so taxes and everything's really high but it was like for an 18 year old that's great right and you had some employees that you paid to right students yeah so we had uh like the cool student job was working for my private server we had like an office right next to University within 10 minutes or so and then they would just bike and they would check in as a support agent or as like a safety Specialists or as like a technical help person and they would make money by the hour and then go back to school very little full-time people like four full-time people and the rest was just like students that work by the hour so then what is sort of the final outcome for a business business like that did because did you eventually just wind it down did you sell it or how does that work we run it down one I turned 18 which means I'm actually liable for stuff I do and okay so uh so before that like you know No One's Gonna if you're under 18 realistically you know I wasn't really worried about it when I turned 18 you know I started talking to a company that runs RuneScape and you know eventually we decided that it was best for us to shut down so we tried a bunch of things worked for a little while and then after a while decided that shutting down was was the way to go so I want to say it was 2015 or so okay eight years yeah in the summer and then that was around the time I think you started doing some hackathon I knew it was gonna have to shut down you know a few months in advance and so I started figuring out what I wanted to do next uh it's like private server was good money but at the same time it was like again living in Netherlands I made good money but not nearly as much as people think I did um and uh and so yeah I was like yeah I want to figure out like to go to college or get a job I had a good amount of money saved out so I was like yeah I can kind of just go do whatever I want right now and so somebody at Dr sideboarders Who I I had placed like I think I play second I think I technically didn't win the thing they kept in touch they called and they were like hey we have this problem with local network infrastructure which is very similar to the private servers you used to work on can you come solve it with us which was during Ebola yeah so I ended up going to Dr suborders to work on this problem and liked it so much that I stayed for almost three years so this was kind of 18 through 21 ish no this was 15 through 18. and towards the end of that uh my co-founder tonight from soul split so the company was technically founded in 2017 we started like tinkering with with making games and then towards 20 uh like we released a mobile game that we built and we still fun today it was just like our own money uh mobile game failed and you tried to raise money for the game or something yeah and we actually end up raising 150k at a one million dollar evaluation at the time it was all we could get like no nobody was fun funding what we were doing why did no one want to fund it I mean you had obviously built some pretty cool stuff well I think part of it is I was just a super random kid from there I like remind you at the time like I was 20 and I didn't I didn't really know how the world worked so I didn't know there was one combinator I didn't know there was VCS I had tried emailing a bunch of VCS but like nobody really responded I reached out to some people in the Netherlands who I knew through mutual context from running the private server and they introduced me to some of their friends and they ended up doing 150k yeah it's pretty funny they're like we still have them in the cap table and they were the first people that bet on us but they were very happy were you kind of still at Doctors Without Borders while you were working on metal so the Doncaster borders projects they were said budget so like I had a budget to deliver this project which was in this case this project was 50k and I knew that that Dr Subway is a charity right so we delivered the projects and it was doing well and started picking up work on my game after like the project so it got taken over by Heidelberg University which is a popular University in Germany specifically when it comes to GIS work which is what's qualified as that's like mapping right JS mapping yeah so we got like a very good home for it everybody felt pretty comfortable I started working on the game with my co-fundors and built the game shift the game day one retention was great day seven retention was terrible oh really okay yeah because like what we find out is that like you need player liquidity to like hold people engaged right and so we were hoping that would happen organically but what we found out is that with mobile games session lengths are so low that that's actually really hard to do without paid spend where you push people at these similar times we just didn't have the money for that okay so in gaming the strategy is typically like you need to spend a bunch experts to just get a bunch of people at the same time or at once yeah but generally spurts because the problem is that when you get a bunch of people are really good at the game they'll beat everyone who's bad at the game and they'll all quit right oh no okay so so you need liquidity at if you're building a competitive game you need player liquidity at each of the levels right and the problem is that there is no actual levels right because it's like people's levels a skill at the game and so the amount of player liquidity that you need to actually build a successful competitive game is massive which is why it's so rare and so uh yeah this is why when I see like game pitches for like competitive games it's it's very tough to say yes to because this this problem particular and you kind of started metal as a way to solve that problem right exactly so our Theory our theory was we get a bunch people to watch video clips on the platform and then we send a push notification that our game is live few times a day metal got so many downloads that we ended up deciding that metal was the bigger opportunity our thesis was okay like we could we could build this large gaming platform and eventually if it has enough layers we can go always lunch games anyways it kind of felt like a more a more organic way to do things so we we pivoted and that's kind of the start of where we are today maybe we can kind of talk through then the metal Journey but I'm just curious as of today what is is metal like how do you describe it to someone in just like a sentence or two yeah so so metal is a camera for digital environments like this is this is what we're really good at whether that's a PC game or like a VR chat environment for example right like we try to be really good at capturing whatever whatever meaningful thing is happening on your screen then there's a whole platform behind that where you can share what you captured you can edit it you can tag your friends you can message your friends about the thing that just captured and then we figured out that when you actually capture these moments it's then very meaningful to connect the people that were in these moments and so as of last year we're now also really good at recommending who else was in the moments that you captured and therefore building a social graph on the platform which then let people follow each other and you can see the moments they capture Etc okay so it's almost like you've instead of like Facebook for your real photos with you're getting tagged from your friends or Instagram or you're posting and you're showing a feed of pictures from someone's camera roll on their phone metal is entirely moments from like you said within Roblox or within a certain game that they might be playing on their phone on their computer do you guys have Xbox and PlayStation and different consoles yeah Xbox and Playstation both have native video capture functionality which you can just import through to mobile app and we do have an integration with Xbox specifically which lets you pull directly from your Xbox with PlayStation not yet but it's quite easy because they all have these moments in their mobile app you can just share it on them straight to metal so I would say for mobile and PC we're we're capture for console we're one step further in a funnel or more like editing and sharing and obviously you didn't start there so what did you start with initially the very first metal concept we started with a mobile app that would pull all the top clips from Reddit just show them in a dedicated environment why did that work because you could just go on Reddit I guess right it was more noisy and you had to go into individual subreddits like at the time they didn't do as good of a job you had merging the highlights from the different games it wasn't and I think we also included some other sources like for example we had a Square bot that people could go and submit their own Clips so we built this like Reddit and Discord integrated video consumption product that people downloaded but they didn't really stick with like we got a lot of downloads like I think we got like a thousand downloads a day however uh what we found when we actually talked to those people is that they weren't posting consistently because it didn't have a way to capture it consistently it was very hard to go from a game to a short video and looking back that was because all those recorders were built for a long recording all of them are built reader life live stream or YouTube at the time like nothing was built for short form I think I think actually largely this is still the case most recorders are built yeah most recorders like OBS now has some functionality to make it easier to export like most platforms are making it easier but most capture software is inherently built for for long form and so we learned from our users so it's really difficult to capture a short form and we made it easier for them to capture short videos and send it to their phone and then this was before tick tock wasn't a thing Tic Tac was not a thing yeah so there were two things that happened that blew us a fortnight in Tick Tock so what happened how did you blow up I mean everybody all of a sudden needed like easier ways to capture a sword from video and fortnite particular is super clippable right you know constantly experiencing cool moments kovid obviously fortnite covet is like your friends for an entire generation of high schoolers their junior year and Senior a year they're 100 if they weren't seeing friends like they're on metal right like that's where you have your memories because you're playing games together it was a combination of fortnite tick-tock and covet that really led to the platform blowing up you guys are still going yeah yeah we're still growing despite covet unwinding which is nice that's honestly I mean it's kind of rare I mean there's a lot of people who the trends were just too hard against them that they couldn't fight through it the cool thing about metal is that it's a really good single player experience so if you look at if you look at companies that ended up trending down a lot of it was because they were very good multiplayer environments but they were not good single player environments because metal is inherently that like capture motivation capture edit share those are inherently single player behaviors Instagram by the way Kevin system said the same thing about Instagram before build a good single player environment and figure out how to turn it into multiplayer environments if you have only a multiplayer environment naturally when that Network effects start shrinking your platform dies right it's like your liquidity of content posting browsing what viewing the time at which you like look at Facebook right the time at which I took Facebook to become irrelevant after the core people started leaving was very very low it wasn't a very long period because there was nothing interesting on Facebook anymore and so a few other platforms have the same problem post covet obviously but we didn't because it is inherently a single player Behavior now games do have that problem which means we do see the aftermath right because games that are inherently multiplayer they are going to go through these Network effects shrinking but for the most part on those games we saw them transition more into like a weekly habit as opposed to a daily habit and then there's other games like Roblox that didn't have that problem and then you kind of almost benefit from the Ebbs and flows of different games like you kind of you're shock absorber like maybe for a couple months valorant rocket League Minecraft is popular but then Roblox take some share and they're still on metal and you you kind of benefit from like gaming time spent as a whole in a way any like consumer or mass consumer platform that had like an organic go to market you can tie almost all of them to this thing called like a social inflection point like next door is tied to um when you buy a new house or move into a new neighborhood Twitter is tight and telegram are both tied to major world events um slack is tied to when you build when you go join or build a new project and so metal is high to new games I think yeah these are definitely inflection points for us these are what drive all our organic growth and they're very good for us were you still doing all this on 150k or was there another point where a thing you just needed money or we raise our c-run I believe 2018. was that shortly after you launched or a little bit after shortly after we launched metal yes nice what was that process like was it a little bit easier uh no because we were splitting our Focus we hadn't decided to pivot yet like we were working on metal we were also still working on the game so like our story was pretty unclear so my first race was actually pretty hard because like we weren't really sure which one we were gonna do and obviously like as a company like we had been trying to raise for a long time so it wasn't really working I think I think I have the sheet somewhere it was like 87 meetings and one yes that ended up doing it and then that one yes ended up turning into obviously a lot more yeses but yeah it was hard do you know like what was the thing people were buying into did they really like the thesis did they just really buy into you in the team uh in retrospect they've told us that they bought into us as a team but at the time it definitely felt like they were pretty invested in the products that we were building but I think that's normal for a Founder I think this is an ego thing like I thought they liked the products but they liked us it's really interesting like a lot of people have different opinions on this and I try to form my own opinions but it's always like sometimes you're more influenced by the founder you're like she's just gonna figure something out or like or it's that products just so good like you you know that the founders passion or intellect or drive is like being reflected in how good the product is so it's hard to really tie it down but I think it does usually come back to just I mean it usually comes back to the founders that's how you build a good product is it's through the team okay so you raised a c round what were you using the money for were you guys like doing a lot of customer acquisition was a hiring team to like build product like at what point then did you decide to kind of go all in on this clip thing yeah I mean we were trying a bunch of stuff like we we obviously had to build a team because we wanted to building a video platform is surprisingly hard there's a lot to it especially if you're trying to do recorder mobile app website desktop app so what all did you try so we started off as just a mobile app and then we built a recorder on PC and then we had to obviously the recorder worked so we had to build a desktop app for the recorder and then people wanted the mobile app to go along with their Clips because they wanted to view their stuff when they're at school right and show their friends then we had to build a mobile app and then eventually mobile app became very popular for also viewing content so then we were you know we initially built the mobile app and JavaScript that was actually one of of my projects I made the like mobile version and then eventually hired an engineer to maintain it but then we decided to go native so yeah we ended it was it was very expensive and like long company to build to get like to a really good product quality but yeah so that's what we use most money for and then uh we just try we tried pay to user acquisition for two years and then we didn't need any more so were you mostly in terms of all these different features you were adding how did you know what to do were you just talking to users talking to users and using the product to be honest like playing games and then finding every little annoyance that you find and then fixing it for us like if you think about it like taking a clip and sharing it really quick is not that complicated of a use case like it's something that you could very easily test yourself on a bunch of low-end devices and see if it works well most of it was us using the product ourselves and then fixing it up and then shipping you know when we had updates was there any times where you're like holy this works like this is actually a real company I mean some point we had 10 000 videos captured per day which right now we're at three and a half million which is which is like that was a big moment for us it was like whoa people are capturing like 10 000 of these moments and then they were uploading like 5 000 of them or something so we were like this is really like people are doing this and I mean we had pretty high conviction at that point we were seeing like good both organic and paid installs were there any pieces that were breaking like things that didn't work or were like you needed to plug holes or for sure I mean I wrote the first version of the back end that was just like at some point queries were just timing out and we had to write a new version because mine was too Scrappy frankly so we had to hire a better back-end engineer to build a better version of the back end so mobile app was written in JavaScript right so we we took a lot of the the code from that and turned it into desktop because we had like the account system and all these things we already built and so the desktop app was like a copy and paste of the existing mobile app that we had and then with the desktop functionality built around it uh which initially was like a very bad architecture so we had to do a lot of things to get out of that they say like gross was everything and like honestly that's true I like unless your growth is unprofitable and it will eventually kill you which you and I have seen um then uh then it will uh it will actually solve all problems as long as you're growing it's easier to recruit it's easier to find investors get the best talent that is really the main problem solve and we had that we always did which is which is really nice yeah I mean talking about recruiting I think you've mentioned before that every single employee you had at soul split your RuneScape server now works on metal is that that's true it's most of them I wouldn't say it's every single one of them all the ones that we had the opportunity to work with we worked with and I want to say it's like 60 to 80 of them so definitely a majority but when you like working with people why not do it again like my my partner at my private server Josh is now a CTO at metal we grew together like we grew up together right and so I think in a way it was kind of interesting because like my private server I was the person or really calling the shots because of my private server but this was like the first time that we actually collaborated and did it together which was which created a very different Dynamic which has been really good so yeah it's uh all the ones all the talent from the private server we brought them in together to do this one and yeah it's turned out great do you have a strategy for hiring or for do you have like a favorite interview question or something that you look for in people I do I do have a number of favorite interview questions so the first one like the easiest one that I really like to ask is asking somebody to explain to me how a system works that they worked on because I tell it it's super simple right like it tells you so much about like the thing that they take pride in how much did they actually learn about it and so if somebody can tells me if somebody can tell me like the network protocol that the different connections are running it was a game server right like Network protocol why you pick that protocol the problems with it if you can go like to this level of granularity I can tell that you were the person right and if you're telling me about high level strategy and when I dig a Little Deeper about how these systems actually they work it gets a little iffy I can tell that you're usually using it to to get ahead and so it wasn't actually your work so I that's my favorite question and and this can range from like how did the website work to how did the server work and then I'll just ask a lot of like clarifying questions so make sure that I understand and then usually I get a good idea of one how technical the person is to how ambitious they are and three how deep they go on the things that they work on and the deeper you go to better so that's probably my favorite one I have a few things that I look for like if somebody speaks ill the people they used to work with seriously because they're trying to hide something that they did I've run into this one a few times where somebody comes in and they speak ill of the people that they used to work with and usually when you check it's because there was something wrong there so like you I always look at that as like a really big red flag if they're like trying to not have you talk to the people that they used to work for if they don't take ownership of the mistakes like I always ask people to describe their mistakes and I always ask them what they could have done different and how they respond to that question like even if they did nothing wrong if you're like a humble person and you're not like not a massive ego you can still respond to that question and say I could have encouraged us to work more as a team by facilitating more of these discussions for example even though your team didn't work well together you know it's probably not just your fault but realistically there's always something that you could have done better so the way that somebody actually responds to that very often tells me how they're going to deal with failure it tells me if they've run away from it for me if something fails I want to know everything about it I am obsessed with why things either work or don't work in this world and so for me like a failure is like an opportunity to regroup rephrase modify edit keep going and then there's people who look at that and they get really discouraged and that's fine too that tells me a lot about the person and then oftentimes if somebody has a then this is controversial but I look very negatively at people with very short work stints generally speaking so startups are hard projects are hard people are hard and I'm not going to invest my time until somebody who I think is going to leave at the first sign of trouble or not be invested in you and metal like you want to be a mutual investment it's not even about that for me I think it's a because the thing is like I could really mess up right you know we're really far now but hypothetically like three years ago we could have chosen to Pivot I don't really care about that I care about that you are obsessed with the building for people right and that you are able to take a few hits and and you have built that like personal environment where you can take those hits and at the same time you're not somebody that jumps to the next shiny object and that's hard because there's like you know people pay a lot in Tech right and so this is something that that people do and I get it if that's your style that's your style but that does mean I'm probably not going to hire you I'm looking for people who are the builders who they want to learn how to build things that people want with one of the most unique groups of people that I've ever worked with and sure like eventually you know after we raised our B and C that meant like yeah we're going to obviously also pay you a lot of money but but initially that wasn't possible right so I had to look for those things so I guess actually you had a really interesting point about talking about mistakes I want to flip the question on you what do you think was the biggest thing you messed up with metal like anything you would change if you could go back the biggest mistake that I made was overreacting to remote work um and moving everybody remote after we had built an amazing in-person culture like if I look at the most destructive thing I've ever did it will stop can you talk us through that in remote environments it's very hard for work environments to be different or unique because in the end it's like a lot of it is about your connection with people and the problems that you're solving together and if you're isolated then the job is just a job and so you could be working on a really interesting problem but there's plenty of interesting problems all about the people that you're working on these problems with what I found is that remotely the company metal and it started sealing to people like just the job uh the second mistake that I made is that I'd didn't keep the bar high enough for a while I think as a result of that so as a result of that being the accepted culture like my thinking was there's a mass pandemic going there's like at the time you had Trump in office there was a lot of political uncertainty and so I was like people are just burned out so this is just this is gonna fly over and and so I'm going to like that bar of like intense builders that just like love shipping I ended up lowering it a little bit because hiring was so hard like that's probably the second biggest mistake you might see them as one but I think the second is that during covid while we were remote because we wanted to hire we over hired and we hired people that didn't meet those criteria you know we we ended up Shifting the company back to in person which was a very obviously painful move we lost a lot of people but what I have seen is that culture is back but I will say that like that probably put the company back I I don't even think it was legal to say in person frankly so but we should have we should have went back to the office sooner and we should have you know we should have spent more time together and um we probably shouldn't have lowered the bar during covet just to be able to hire people we should have probably just stayed a little bit smaller for a little bit longer um so we grew to almost with groups at one point we were 105 people I believe in total and now we're about 45 just for contacts and we are doing way more revenue and have way more users than we did during covet so if if you're optimizing for team you're optimizing for density and nothing else right you're optimizing for the density of the people and if you find somebody that doesn't meet the criteria like I've adapted this thing that's I over I overheard it from another entrepreneur it's in our culture if it's not a hell yes it's a no which makes it very very easy to say no to things right and so I've really adopted that culture in hiring and everything that if it's not a hell yes it's a no yeah and you had quite a few employees in Europe right and you were saying we're going to move in person in New York yeah so so our version of in person I would say is probably a little bit different than other companies so at the very minimum because we do recognize that there are ICS that work remotely before covid we were about 75 in person my first company I built 100 remotely right but obviously I was also more like running things by myself so like there weren't like decision making was very centralized because it was me making the decisions right I think how remote a company can be is directly correlated to the amount of people involved in the decision making process the people making decisions need to be in the same room and by the way uh if those decisions need to be group decisions code decisions usually don't need to be group decisions design generally does need to be a group decision the iteration and the user research those things don't you can do this by yourself because they need to directly marry product strategy and so those things do need to be group decisions so what we do is we have a rule that if you are a people manager you have to be in person no exceptions and you're in the office five days a week if you are an IC you're actually allowed to be remote metal but you're spending 10 business days out of every eight weeks in the office that's per team so as a team you can choose to come in on a Monday work through the weekend and leave like mid the next week or you can spend time in New York on the weekend do stuff together which most people tend to do and then work again the next week it's kind of up to them usually it's a mix so you have to spend 10 business days every eight weeks if you're an IC and this is very good because it keeps the culture eight weeks is the perfect period to like keep that culture really really ingrained and decision makers you have to be in person like it's just a message to the whole company like if you want to be involved in making decisions you have to move and which which also at the same time it really helps us filter out the people who just want to write code and you know and and get stuff done versus the people that actually do want to become leaders right and so we had this really really dense culture of leaders and constantly ICS rotating in and out which is awesome because they have a ton of energy and as leaders are cool because you're constantly spending time with new teams right so we we rotate teams with ICS in and out Oh you mean like you switch what team you're on inside of metal no they fly in so they're 10 business days right and they're never there all the same time so every every 10 days there's a different team in New York basically so as Leaders it's really cool because you're constantly getting fresh context on everything that's going on in the different teams in getting exposure and every eight weeks you see the whole company and those people spend a ton of time in person with you so for the leaders it feels like 100 in person because you're 100 in person you're constantly spending time in the teams at the same time if there are ICS that just want to get stuff done they can do that they can spend six weeks getting stuff done 10 days in the office with us making sure the stuff that they're working on is the right thing uh having you know personal conversations also the thing is that those ICS being close to the decision makers and doing things together is a large part of motivation because they want to trust the decision makers right and if you don't talk to each other you don't trust each other yeah this is our this has been our structure for almost a year now and our culture is like better than it was before covet and I think it was because we made such a commitment to spending time in person like the truth is that we have tried every other thing we had tried before we yeah we had tried career ladders uh bringing in excellent VPS from top companies uh we had tried semi-annual Retreats together we had tried literally everything to the point where we were like the problem is remote and this was this was before everybody started realizing this this was in like mid last early to mid last year right in 2022. we started like very aggressively moving into like spending more time in person then and then we pulled the plug on New York because we had a lot of people who are from Europe who work at metal and so we were all in LA but a lot of people from Europe that moved back to Europe and New York's the place that is the most accessible from Europe for traveling because it's a short flight compared to SF or L.A for the management team for people that are a little bit more senior it's 100 in person but if you're more of an IC it's like 75 remote but you still spend a bunch of time in person and get Facebook yeah but the two weeks are intense like they are intense and 75 but we like to think it's more like 60 40. yeah so you describe it as being very much in person but you're you still are kind of hybrid it seems like you found a very interesting kind of sweet spot of the amount of impact somebody has at a company is not like a one to ten skill it's like a one to a thousand skill and perhaps even minus one thousand to a thousand skill and so if you start looking at it like that in a remote environment the place where you where somebody comes in is very often the place where they'll stay so if they're like let's say they're plus 100 and that's on like minus one thousand to plus one thousand score card if you're a plus 100 you're probably gonna stay at a plus 100 you're maybe going to become a plus 150 because you're gonna work a little faster you know you might become a plus 180 because like you you get a little better but in person when you're constantly observing those like Founders who are at plus 700 plus 800 that's contagious and so those people they pick they go from like zero to 500 much quicker and so the way I look at remotes you can be remote if you're like a 9 out of 10 performer already and you are already at that point where like you don't need that and so so like the amount of people that I'm talking about remote is like 20 right like in this in this space so like we've hand-picked the people that are allowed to operate in the structure and it's very unlikely that we'll hire new people into it but that's how we made sure that we didn't lose them uh so we hire in person we don't hire remotely um which is why I describe it as an in-person culture because we only hire in person but we do have this structure for the people that just couldn't come to New York because that happens we kind of went pretty deep on this remote work throughout covid I think you kind of raised a couple rounds sort of during covet if I'm remembering right so you raise the C round then you raise the series a was that kind of like when it was like working you had 10 000 Clips a day was that one the point like it was a hundred thousand seriously it was a hundred thousand Clips a day so are you basically like all right people are using this we need some more money it's just like pay the bills we need to figure out how to make money like that how did that all go down so our secret was really hard our series a was I would say less difficult because we were getting pretty good at fundraising so we did all our meetings for the series a at GDC in 2019 and what GDC is that game game developer conference it's like the largest it's like the largest gaming Conference of the Year all the investors were there correct and so we lined up all the meetings at GDC we ended up you know we ended up Josh and I printed from meeting the meeting but we had him lined up right because the metrics were good and so um we did back-to-back meetings ended up getting two term sheets at GDC one of which we accepted and we're very happy with so uh seriously it was fairly easy series B we raised right when covet broke up because I was actually very concerned about the market there was there was a period when so the series B was mostly like insiders because I was I was very cons like the company was doing really well and I didn't know that like what would happen with kovid like the market crashed right and also for context like I had worked at Dr Scott borders on Ebola before starting metal so my idea of what could happen here was pretty grim and I think I probably looked I probably overreacted a bit and so yeah we raised series B well things were going extremely well that's a good time to raise though it's good to raise when you look like a good investment yeah and luckily we had a like makers photos on the cap table for us so they didn't they were in a major stakeholder before but they really liked us and so they they bought a bunch more of the company in series B which was which was great even though they're not they're traditionally not a series B fund those like unusual times so they did the series B and then we raised a series C from omers and Hill house uh in late 2021 and also Dune and then the rest was internal as well we raised up a one year in between every fundraise up until about late 2021 which two things happened after that is valuations reset obviously so it wasn't a great time to raise and also um we turned on Revenue so like we were in the process of turning on Revenue so we knew that we were gonna have to you know the company was going to be valued on Revenue moving forward right so we were doing the very typical like consumer growth play where you know you have good retention and you have good organic growth you don't spend money in your marketing you assume you can make money but we weren't sure the other thing is that because we're a video it's traditionally easy to monetize because it's very very engaging I think money for us like we wanted to push it off because the market was very competitive like we spend most of 2021 buying companies and kind of building the good product together so 2021 was really interesting Razer last round late 2021 and then 2022 was like a reset for us reset the culture back to in person and then 2023 for us has been growing again like we're basically turning that growth into like a Precision work where we know exactly what we're doing having a culture that we love having a product that is working and and also now monetizing really well and then figuring out how do you get that to scale as quickly as possible so we're very much in like the scaling phases now and like less so in like figuring stuff out which is really nice can you talk much about the monetization I guess I have a couple ideas in my head about how you might be making money but it's very easy it's subscriptions what do people pay for like what are they what are you giving them when they when they subscribe so it's 9.99 a month so you can go from uploads that are two minutes to uploads that are 10 minutes you can download videos without the metal watermark on them we give you like status symbols around your profile when you're using the product so you'll like your background on your profile is gold your activity shows up goals in the background and so it's a kind of a combination of a profile status play and utility and that's going really well yeah we have revenues so Revenue went live July of 2022 and I believe it's grown on average like between 50 and 25 per month since then like basically we're now at the point where we're pretty close to being profitable just off subscriptions we haven't even launched Twitter monetization we haven't even launched ads David at Dune told me that I had to ask you this question you had a something really like a really interesting I think you like didn't have a deck or something crazy in either your is a series a or series B deck does that ring a bell do you know what I'm talking about yeah but the context here I believe it was probably the series B where we didn't have a deck because one we were growing really fast to it was covid three we already had a lead which makers we already knew that they like the company yeah also four I'm extremely consistent with investor updates so like you can literally go back every month and like read what's going on with the companies like my my investors they knew what was going on so they were ready to commit so so I've raced two rounds without a deck my series A Plus which was basically after we got our series a locked in there were a bunch of people that wanted exposure to the company that we couldn't fit into the A and I didn't take their money at first because I didn't have a way to use it and then once we started ramping up paid for a little bit like end of 2019 we decided that we were going to take that money and then put it in paid paid advertising and so it was people that had already seen the company that I I said no to that later I went back to and said yes to so that was a round that I already saw an email that was 3.6 million dollars um that was my series A Plus because we raised 7.5 in the A and then we get we did this one we did like maybe like three to six months later which was pretty cool it was an uncapped note it was crazy yeah it's This Disaster for most investors but I know but well the cool thing is they did really well because the note end up converting right when covet broke out so it wasn't too far off and so that was the other round that didn't have a deck which is where David came in which maker sled which uh was because we were already quite consistent so so yes I know it's a bit of a meme to raise around without a deck but like again I stand by that like this whole business it's all about building trust and maintaining relationships and like doing what you're saying you're gonna do he said the deck included a potato house what does that even mean okay so there was this is true this was technically a strategy appendix this was not a fundraising deck this is something that there were people who were interested in around in the series B that I had sent like an additional like maybe like 10 15 slides of like my thoughts on the business strategy that they had asked for so I built this deck that was like Instagram for games has been tried a thousand times what you care about is somebody who's sharing these memories it's first and foremost your own moments before anyone else says like same on Instagram I would Arc and Snapchat I would argue that like their biggest secret is that people are far more about their own stuff and they care about everyone else's so like as a product person that's where you invest right and so we saw the same thing and so what everybody was doing is they were building these Network like companies that were like upload your video clip and then we were like no you got to go deeply personal by building the capture layer and then expanding from there so um the potato was because my argument was this has been tried a bunch of times here are the examples here's the competition I can find more efficient ways to light money on fire like did you know they made house out of potatoes and yes there was a picture of it as well so it was it was kind of like a me way of like saying like this strategy doesn't work we're gonna do something better but it did definitely it was for it made for a memorable deck for sure I can send it to you after and you mentioned you you had a bunch of slide about strategy so how much do you share because I know like some people you'll you'll like dig into it like maybe they're pretty early and they're like they don't want to tell you their their vision for the company like is it a good idea to share exactly what you want to build with investor the amount of people that can actually do things in this world and like make a vision come true are far more limited than we imagine the majority of people frankly are not occupied with what you're doing um that's like the big myth there are people that will copy you don't get me wrong but in the end like in the end if it's that easy to just copy you as like a network of like as a company that has skill they'll do that anyways so the way the way that I'm looking at it is everything that you do in startups it comes down to your own speed and your own Merit and if you are comfortable with your own speed and your own Merit and you know you're better than the people you're competing with then by all means go shout it right like if you don't think that anyone can can like do what you're doing and do it better then share it we were already at a point where like we realized it was pretty difficult for competitors to go build what we were building in fact a lot of them had tried and failed and so we kind of knew that we were kind of the favorites to win this particular segment of the market already and this was like the series B where you had to hit like a certain amount of scale where it was like it was when we turned off paid user acquisition and the company was still growing more than 10 a month like that's when we kind of knew that things were just really working there were a bunch of companies that still try to go through space after that um that still got funding and most of them are are either doing adjacent like stuff or a lot of them are pretty interesting they're focusing on like Tick Tock capture now so like the same problem that I described to you which is that you were capturing off live streams or you kept basically a lot of the recording software was built for local for long-form recording as opposed to short film recording all that is true for like live streaming software still so like there's now like things like metal that you can have good short form recording but for long-form recording from live streams and tournament to short firm is still really difficult it's like a lot of competitors are now in that space which is really interesting our competition is mostly coming from the larger companies now actually what's funny is you kind of go from like fearing your competitors to fearing your users really which is even more scary yeah because when there's nobody in space really chasing you it's very hard to get that same level of urgency behind a lot of things that you're doing until you look at like your retention data when people hit certain paths in the product where they just quit do you kind of go from like really worrying about your competitors to really worrying about the problems that you have with your own product and and the users and so it's very refreshing I think I think the lesson there is that actually probably should have cared less about competitors and more about those problems in the first few years I think there was probably at least a year that we spent too much time worrying about the competition that's probably my third biggest mistake so what are examples of maybe places where you you didn't focus enough on the customer or you you lost people because you didn't listen to them enough doing video capture is incredibly difficult so like every PC has different Hardware um different versions of the operating system different encoders GPU encoding CPU encoding integrated GPU or not and it has to work perfectly with all these things webcam enabled webcam mod enabled game that you're allowed to inject into to capture the frames versus you have to capture the screen so there's all these like variations under which the software has to work really well and I think for a good period of time we care too much about the network and too little about like the edge 10 of use cases that need to be supported well for example if you think about it if you're growing 10 less for a year every single month that compounds to a lot less than what you could have been and so I think the lesson there is that like I was probably too fast in a lot of the network decisions and too slow in a lot of the core product quality decisions luckily that didn't lead to us losing our our position in the market you know we were always quite careful with it but we could have made more people happy faster if we switch that priority a little bit a little sooner so what would that have been because I guess when I think about what's like the common advice you know there's like a Pareto Principle it's like listen to the 80 or the 20 of people that drive 80 of the outcomes like some people might say screw the 10 that you're not hitting why was that important I take feedback on the product very personally and and maybe that's just me Maybe here's the thing right metal is my first product that go that went beyond 10 million people and so I've never tried running product the other way right like it's too risky for me because I notice sing is working and so I fear the feedback that my users are giving me and the potential size of those problems because I'm pretty good at quantifying product problems when they're presented so it's always hard to take a like non-quonified thing and weigh it against a very Quantified problem so like it's kind of easy to look at it as like a failure like in retrospect I think we could have done both better but I think the outcome is that social graph and social growth and content consumption started growing like crazy but at the same time we have a lot of users now that for example have specific problems where we now have like a year worth of recorder backlog that we have to go and solve so so I think if I had done it again and knowing what would have worked I would have spent a lot less time chasing the high upside social graph connecting in the fear of the competitor coming and wiping those out and spend more time on those 10 of like recorder people because that's her Baseline we did good but we could have done better so how do you think about iterating on product the main thing I would add there on how to iterate on product is that rapid fire iteration your speed is everything and you don't you have nothing until you have retention like don't let anybody convince you of anything until you have if you're a network more than 20 day 30 retention on the 30th day and you just iterate until then and then everything works itself out if you manage to figure out how to grow as well so but yeah iteration is speed and if you're not shipping every day then it's probably problematic what kind of the state of mental now I don't know if I've like seen like how big are you guys like publicly what are you saying yeah so we have uh Dau and Mau are single digit Millions at the moment but growing at like you know same roughly like very consistently same Pace since kobit and as of the last six to 12 months we've really been able to start building that on platform social graph and content graph so that the use case has become more social sharing versus the capture components in addition to that Revenue obviously working so we're our state is basically we have this base engine that's working really well now we're trying to take that into Latin America and Japan and try to figure out how we can replicate that success to get even faster growth so we have this like Baseline engine that's growing steadily in like Europe and the US and now we're trying to figure out can we plant that in Brazil can we plant that in Japan Etc and you've gone from kind of this tool to a little bit more and more of a destination that people will visit it just unlocks more on the business model too of what all you can do yeah we have this interesting Trend which is kind of like if you think about you know what I said at the beginning is that feeds are less engaging than than interactive entertainments what we are seeing however is that people are starting to watch more than they play but that's not necessarily Tick Tock feeds a lot of those like YouTube and we see we see it in our own data as well so like a lot of time if your friends playing for example that's still interactive and fun so you'll watch your friend play what we've seen is that a lot of dot Trend in the past year is that we're going from a lot of play to a lot of watch which has been really interesting so you guys have acquired I think you said six companies how do you acquire a company what's the process like if I'm a Founder trying to think about it what should I be thinking about each of them is different the most straightforward ones are the ones where you need the tech that they have so we did two Acquisitions which was the PC editor and the mobile editor which were just straight up we have a very clear goal this is how much we're willing to pay and then generally you kind of wait for a point where that company is interested and you're kind of paying for r d or like you would have had to hire these people to build and it would have taken time and and once you get a product that's skill like you realize that actually going zero to one on things is really really hard and so it's actually much less risky to buy something that has went zero to one and maybe found like mediocre success that you can improve then like try to figure everything out on your on your own so we did that with the editor and we did that with the mobile editor as well so PC and mobile those were both technical Acquisitions we did another technical acquisition which was Cloud clipping which is where you basically generate the video also already like regenerate the videos inside the cloud bought the best company at that so that we could go and integrate it into the products so that was sort of another r d that was gift your game yeah give your game so yeah r d as well but it was less clear it was more Vision future the first two is like we have a problem we can quantify how much we would pay for it on like time and we'll spend the money or not plus we get a good really good team right um that is passionate about this space we also use the fact that we had Razer series C which kind of cemented our position into markets and our growth where most of the other companies weren't growing anymore we kind of used that to get a lot of those companies on board with us so that they would retain upside in the market which I spent like four to five years building in and they could go do something else right so three of those companies were kind of of that caliber so you would give them equity in metal and then they would not have to keep working and they could go correct three of our Acquisitions where Founders who deeply believed in the space who we competed with before who saw that we were very successful and decided that they wanted to join up with us as opposed to continue to compete against us like there's you know there's views and like to an extent there's actually one that we haven't announced that it happened years ago but they wanted to keep it quiet that's of the same nature those are easy because like you don't have to spend a ton of cash because the founders want to stay long and as long as the investors are okay with that they kind of like shift their interests to a different asset that worked really well for us then we've done a few cash deals that were primarily for like talents obviously you give the talent Equity but you got to buy out the cap table so we've done done a few of those and then you know we've done so every single one of my Acquisitions have been like strategic to where I want that to be a part of the product or the roadmap at some point it's just that like level of clarity was very clear on some and not very clear on others right like Mega cool for example is the B2B clipping we knew that that would be five years before we got to it right but the team was really okay so it's primarily an aqua hire and then we knew that the product would become useful and the knowledge would become useful gift your game same thing two three years in the future but the talent was really good team was really good fuse and this other company that I can talk about fit in right then and there we just have to go do it and then what I learned is like you can't bet on like you have to be okay whether or not that acquisition is successful or not because they take time and so it's like the speed the speed of clothes is really important to your entire org because they need Clarity are you gonna build the thing are we going to buy the thing like look at Microsoft Activision like I cannot imagine how hard that was for the people doing making decisions there right because you either have a singer you don't how long did that play out I think it's over a year now okay and is it like officially didn't get like approved or something like legal review yeah so I believe they are allowed to close before October 18th or something like that I think the major folder hurdles are probably over but like that just gives you anything like you got to do them quick that's the other thing that I learned it's like good deals happen quickly or not at all if you don't have velocity behind the process it's gonna fail you have to see eye to eye with the founders obviously like if it's already like a combative process during the negotiation it's just not going to work unless you have like a billion dollar proven business you buy another billion dollar proven business and it's a different story because you're built you're buying a system not a team and a product and then each each of the Acquisitions just have their own nuances and again everything comes I think for me everything comes down to its relationships the thing that I I think did really well is that I'm still close with most of the founders that we acquire companies from and I could call them anytime and ask them a question right and they would help I think the people aspect is very important do you spend time getting to know your competitors even if it's just like a friendly like hey we should probably just yeah know each other so fuse and give your game which which were two of our competitors we bought both these companies on the same day we we shook Hands-On terms on the same day they didn't know oh interesting okay I had dinner with the founder of give your game and then at 7 pm the founder of fuse texted me that he was interested in selling and I went to his house they both both in La so dinner in Santa Monica at the found honor of gift your game we were already talking they already knew so we agreed on terms with them and then got the text it was it was crazy I told my team about it and I went and and and shook hands on the terms for fuse at like 10 pm that night and the reason was because I already knew these people right they knew they could text me I had never really like positioned myself as like this combative Force I was I was always kind of there if they needed me in a good way right like I wouldn't speak all of them I wouldn't make life difficult for them like and we respected each other because we competed right that's the other thing that I learned is that you respect your competitors and like I'm good friends with a lot of people that I've competed with in the past but I think for the audience too they might not know I invested in a competitor of metal before I met him and we're just we're friends now like I feel like there's a lot to learn to from competitors also and again like they might pivot also and then maybe you guys like allies down the road or you team up and you work together I feel like there's a lot of ways to approach it I think like a competitor relation is just another relationship it's just like yeah the timing isn't right you know yeah and truly at the end of the day if you both become a sustainable business you have different customers probably so maybe you you compete adjacent in a way but you're still like you serve probably different customer segments or one of you won't exist eventually look as long as you stay like above the bills product development and getting things adopted by people is like as much of a meritocracy as it should be you are judged entirely on your results and not in your efforts which is like the ultimate game in my opinion and so that's the thing about competition right if they can beat you is because you're not good enough let's just face it right and you know that's a very like absolute take but that's the truth if you're not good enough means you have to fix something right and so competitors are good because they keep you on your toes again there are things that you can do that are below the belt that you likely won't have a relationship but I mean most most companies don't do that all right let's show them into rapid fire so do you have favorite CEO that you really look up to that you've learned a lot from Elon Musk pre 2023 so this was before he went down this interesting path with Twitter okay it went from real interesting and relatable to real interesting but less relatable real quick and I think his style is very very interesting let me put it this way okay I really liked everything he did up until the point where he started messing with the things that I knew a lot about and I knew there were the wrong decisions yeah which is when I started thinking that there were maybe a few weaknesses to his approach as well I admire everything he did and then there were a few things that he did in 2023 and when it comes to people and when it comes to products I know taking a slower approach is better he would still probably be my number one pick if it was like a CEO I looked up to but I wish he slowed down a little bit some science do you like his like commitment passion Vision dedication to the mission willingness to get into weeds and not being afraid of being contrarian and people pleasing or caring about Optics like what he did with Twitter really was the beginning of like a great reset and Tech when it comes to expectations and work ethic frankly the thing that I really like about him is that he leads with big missions which allows people to buy into big missions and solve big problems despite him not necessarily being there for everything and so I think leading with a big mission is just really really important if you're going to do a big company you know he did this with with Tesla neuraling boring so so I think there's just a Playbook that is like very very respectable to me and then the means of executing it sometimes have question marks but I think the basis I really respect favorite game what are you playing right now rocket League Rock League I feel like that's you've played that for a long time I it's one of those games where I got to like a place in the ranks letters that I I'm just so consumed by it that like no other game comes close in terms of how it engages me just to explain rocket League Super quickly for people it's soccer but you have a car that you instead of the person it's a car basically yeah it goes really really deep and they're like the physics are very interesting right where the way it all bounces and moves yeah okay and oh and it's in a closed course right and you can drive up the sides yeah exactly there is there is so much to it it's such a simple game but there's so much depth to the mechanics in play style is that like I could play for a very long time it gets very tiring because like very high Pace but it's it's amazing awesome well it's big amazing this is a great conversation thanks for coming on hopefully people learned something I feel like we went deep on a lot of interesting topics so thanks again for joining thank you for tuning into the peel a lot of takeaways from him especially for those of us who grew up playing video games online if you want to support the show best ways as always are to leave a review wherever you're listening like comment subscribe on YouTube give us a shout out on Twitter or in your own newsletter you travels with one friend who might like it if you want to miss an episode subscribe to the newsletter in the show notes and you'll get new ones in your inbox the moment they drop thanks again for listening see you next time foreign [Music]