the positive sides of things and then you feel like my god i'm i'm not having all these great experiences or you know if you don't have that much money you know and you see rich people flying on private jets that they're renting you know or they're the lambos that you know what i mean you feel like oh my god i don't have anything and so even from that perspective it can be so i think people should really be aware of that um um i think the follow-up question too that we got this a lot on uh twitter as well so there's this whole surge of hyper short content you know content that gets done in 30 seconds to a minute yeah we saw the rise of tick tock now we're seeing the rise of instagram reels uh youtube shorts is coming out uh that's not great news for podcasters and long format people but in saying that do you think that this short content where you know your attention span is becoming this kind of limited and this uh active uh if


this kind of limited and this uh active uh if you may or or deactivate it do you think it will have any long-term effects on an entire generation of kids who's so used to doing like who's so used to consuming short format content do you think it'll affect the brain absolutely so i mentioned before the whole whole idea of how we treat mental illness and we talked about flexibility and being flexible of you know being inflexible and being stuck on emotions is one of the problems in psychopathology but another problem in mental illness and the stress and anxiety and stuff is lack of focus attentional focus you know back 10 years ago uh you know i used to work in a laboratory where we only we only worked on training your attention we believe that if you train your attention to be stronger and more focused you can potentially get rid of anxiety or help anxiety and depression and things like that now by watching these clips 30 seconds clips and having your attention all fragmented all


seconds clips and having your attention all fragmented all over the place it's the worst thing you can do it's one of the worst things i mean it's just not healthy uh it's the opposite of meditation it's fragmenting and defragmenting thoughts so yes uh i would say focusing in on things and and not having your mind wander all over the place it's definitely uh the way to go next one's also it's like sort of a discipline based question like dot a asks uh one starts practicing something and it gets discontinued within a few days you start it again and then you're stuck with the same result so what's the psychology of practice i've practiced for 21 days and then i've missed out on my practice after that the 21 day rule hasn't worked for me is there any secret to increasing your discipline i guess that's what she's asking i think it's a it's a very it gets a very core question about how the brain works and as i mentioned before the brain is


brain works and as i mentioned before the brain is extremely plastic meaning it's malleable it can change the circuits can change and become weaker and stronger so believe it or not you know when you do a certain action over and over it could be a negative thing your brain those circuits will become more solidified in that way you know so if you train you get used to being ruminating all the time and having mind wandering and not being focused your brain will become like that those circuits will be uh more active and you know override your the other ones so the key thing is to repeat certain positive you know uh healthy habits over and over so those circuits become stronger and stronger and i don't think there's a clear rule for how long you have to repeat these things but you know you know doing things for uh at least for like a month or something like that until you see that these things become sort of second nature and easy and then that's a sign perhaps that those


and easy and then that's a sign perhaps that those circum circuits are strengthened and you no longer need to check the phone all the time that's a show that's a ways to show this so when you check the phone for example all the time for like instagram or something that's when you keep doing that you are strengthening those negative circuits you see you become more you know uh those compulsive behaviors to go check all the time become sort of more strengthened so by giving that up for example that could be a new habit you strengthen the new circuits of not doing that so the brain has this tendency which is a positive but also can be a negative thing so but keep repeating until you feel like it's easier to do and that's a sign your brain has now changed in a way so yeah do you think that one form of discipline helps you develop other forms of discipline so say if you're into a huge amount of weight training you can also be a better meditator because


training you can also be a better meditator because you've already practiced discipline in this one area oh yeah so if you train your brain to to be focused and complete tasks and um well let me let me give you another let me give you a simple one so being having focused attention right if you can train that skill to be you can apply it for everything right so you applied so you have focused attention you apply it when you read a book you apply it when you you know go out and you talk to somebody you know it's you your mind is not going to scatter all over the place you go to the gym you can focus on the you know the weight so you don't get injuries so you are present in your you know fitness so you don't but you your mind doesn't wander off and so you start you know getting injuries and stuff so training your attention is probably one of the most positive positive things or being flexible in your mind is another one training your brain too flexible you


mind is another one training your brain too flexible you these days you even have computer you know programs that train your mind to be more flexible so there's a lot of things that people are doing um so yeah those would be examples okay kishan maladkar asks is there any basic psychology that we can practice in day-to-day life for example does using particular words enhance your experience or take away from your experience i think again this is a sort of spiritual question where we try focusing on using more positive words like affirmations rather than using words like oh i hate that or i want to be able to do something can you kind of play with words to manipulate your own mind it's a good question and i don't think it's totally clear in science whether affirmations and telling yourself i feel good all the time but you know whether that's helpful but i think it possibly could i mean i think i think it's worth doing you know and i think individuals should you try you know it's it's


think individuals should you try you know it's it's a very it's a low-cost thing right it doesn't cost you much give it a try and if and especially if if you feel like those affirmations affects you know in your emotions in a positive way and that that's that's really the the the the key thing i think because if you're just saying things like i feel good good i feel you're not feeling anything emotional basically that the the thoughts are not affecting your emotions then well it's just words right but so i think if you have an emotional effect i think worth trying god um okay hemanth kumar asks how can we control or overcome fear what's the science behind fearful thoughts and negative thoughts wow what's the science between fearful and negative thoughts i mean a beautiful thought there's a huge science behind it in a way but um so how would i answer this question so how can you avoid being fearful i think is is is is you know being psychologically


i think is is is is you know being psychologically resilient being you know trying to have a positive mindset uh so in a way you can say that my my work is focused on dealing with fear and tackling fear but my fear is a different type of fear this type of fear during sleep and nightmares and things like that and there's so it seems to be it seems to be i would say i think this is the the key answer which i was sort of uh looking for fear might be you might have to tackle fear individually so it depends on the fear that you have right so so let's say you have a certain nightmare so this is how we deal with nightmares you see you keep seeing something in your nightmare so how do you deal with that you're frightened of that so one way we deal with that is we tell the person well unite me it doesn't mean anything bad this and that so we do sort of a what it's called uh just talk


do sort of a what it's called uh just talk therapy right so you you remind the person it's just a dream what not and then you do to a mental passage okay you saw this monster in your dream why what about try to imagine that monster you know as a little uh what's the what's the um there was like a little fly on there on the on the floor or something right um and you're stomping on it you're killing it the monster that's one way or maybe you're imagining that monster and and the rain is pouring on it and it's dissolving so where various way to to tackle that but so i would say it depends on on the fear it depends on the specific fear and then you address that specific fear so um it's not merely of just one science of like tackling all types of fear but you have to have emotions as a human being and fear is an intrinsic part of your emotional system so if you take away fear i mean how


system so if you take away fear i mean how do you you know disentangle that from the system well you take up maybe you can you can take away fears from specific specific things that are not healthy and i want to add here that fear itself you have fear for a certain reason you don't want to take away fear if you don't fear if there's a reason why you fear lions you know there's a reason it helps you survive right there's a reason why you fear uh the sharp sharp items and and you know we potentially have circuits in our brain that tells us look sharp things can potentially cause me damage and so it's good to fear just like it's good to feel pain it's so it's a survival thing of the brain but it's when fear becomes fears become irrational superstitious irrational you know dysfunctional that's when you tackle them using certain techniques and then you can use of course um i don't want to be too lengthy


course um i don't want to be too lengthy on you in this answer but basically what you can do let's say you have a specific fear of public speaking so a lot of people have fierce public speaking there's a specific fear the way you do that is that you expose them to their fears that's where you can tackle and deal with fear so you take them for example and you put them into a vr world and you if they have a give a talk before a fictitious audience in the vr world or even push them into a real stage and say look give a talk or maybe if you if they can't do that and then you start with a you know a gradual uh way right so you say first joe called the guy joe who fears public speaking you say joe speak to tw two people does that and you add four more okay the next session you add ten people and then you gradually reduce the fear so it's exposing them to the fear can also


so it's exposing them to the fear can also be a helpful way for your brain yeah maybe i'll just share a nugget uh from my own life i had this big fear of the dog didn't sleep alone till i was 21 22 and i got over it in a three point format the first was again it was the spiritualism where i read a line in one of my favorite books it's called the autobiography of a yogi the line was fear ceases to exist when you stare it in the eye so i kept thinking of that line a lot and maybe it rewired something in my own head um the second was uh i figured that i was afraid of the dark why i was afraid was probably some childhood trauma i went through i don't even remember yeah um but i started lighting a lamp like an oil lamp in my room when i'd go to bed so that would kind of take away the dark a little bit and help me slip into a state of sleep uh and the


me slip into a state of sleep uh and the third one was meditating before bed just to calm down my own head so that's i i guess again that's a specific feel which i uh overcame in a specific way and i don't know i feel this fear of the dark thing is a fear for a lot of people all over the world generally it's not just me why do you think that is so no though i think i've thought we fear the dark because the dark is the unknown so we fear the unknown so it's natural when you are as a human being we have these alarm bells right and we have certain things that things that can help us survive and when you are in dark in the dark you have this these alarm bells going off because threat predators can come from any angle and you are unaware of of them that's why that's why you are like that's why you were more fearful of a ghost probably where you can't see the ghost you can't see the face


can't see the ghost you can't see the face uh you probably mo that's more scary than a ghost where you see the full face you see because it's it's that uh imagination can take over and it fills in the traps oh if it's this it's balls it can come from any angle it can you know so it's a vulnerability vulnerability is a huge part of it and not knowing that that not knowing factor i think uh plays a huge role wow yeah um that's why i mean you know as they say your brain can work against you your imagination can work against you that's why it's wise to learn to grip that brain or grip that imagination which again brings us back to meditation and mindfulness that you spoke about because that's how you develop a grip i'm assuming absolutely uh um okay kushboo singh asks a very simple question i think we've addressed this but maybe we can address it a little bit again uh what is the reason behind increasing anger amongst youth


is the reason behind increasing anger amongst youth all over the world decreasing anger among youth increasing anger why do you want to increase anger no no what's the reason behind the rise of anger that we're seeing all over the world oh the rise in anger in the youth it's a good it's a good question it's almost like a philosophical or sociological question um i don't know why would people be angry right now i think covet maybe kovit is a part of it is that have you have you watched the social dilemma it's this documentary about social media platforms in general yeah i think i haven't [Music] watched it but i think social media role right because it's just this is unfiltered in a way information that comes to you all over the place and you you're exposed to so much i mean imagine if you are a little kid growing up in iraq or in india and you're seeing these people you know in in let's say i don't know in a rich country


let's say i don't know in a rich country and they have everything and they have lambos and they have all these things and you feel like you are you're deprived of things and i think that exposure to all this stuff maybe is not healthy for for access to it you know um in that way i think maybe that that could be a part of it and of course also just being on social media for a long time as we mentioned is not healthy and one of the symptoms might be an increase in in anger you know not being able to have impulse control and and you know so um that could probably be a reason i think it's a combination of a bunch of things you've said in this podcast uh one of which is what you just said about the comparison mentality where you'll constantly be comparing yourself to everyone else because numbers are so freely available on social media i think that's part of it it's a huge part of it i think that's yeah does the second would be the the


think that's yeah does the second would be the the actual physical effect of a vertical screen that you explained yes but the third third one i'd really like to highlight is echo chambers especially for aggressive thought so you see this with like political opinions a lot like in india we have your left wingers versus the right wingers who are always battling it out we're not ready to listen to the other side at all who believe that they're 100 right all the time and it's it's just india that i'm speaking about but this is a worldwide problem where uh political ideologies are polarizing people so in the documentary the social dilemma they actually showed the engineering of that polarizing thought process that the way the algorithms are built on social media you will be shown more of the content that you that kind of reaffirms your beliefs yeah so if you begin with a slightly left-wing belief what's going to happen is facebook or youtube will realize okay here's a potentially left-wing person and they'll


okay here's a potentially left-wing person and they'll show you so much anti-right-wing content that you become left-wing content or so much pro-left-wing content become even more more left-wing now when you're that far in you demonize all of these people you even demonize people who aren't as left as you are yeah so we see this a lot as social media influencers i remember speaking about being non-aligned uh politically and the amount of flack i got from both sides about just not choosing a side because that's who i am as a person but it just put me into so much uh it it kind of threw this tsunami of opinions and hate on me and that kind of made me realize wow this is the world where we live now where even someone who's got a neutral opinion is not allowed to speak up uh they're not against you they're just not completely on your side it's just the world we live in that's probably why we're seeing so much anger it's a great point and


seeing so much anger it's a great point and i actually want to add to that so what i feel like that's a great point so we're living in this polarized world or people have a tendency to see things in black and white right and if you go back to the whole idea of mental illness in fact one of the key symptoms of mental illness generally is the fact that you tend to see the world in black and white so i wonder because of social media because of these things you are becoming even more tendency to see things in a you know black and white so uh it makes you even more sort of having this contrasting view of the world and become sort of the opposite of flexibility and being able to see nuances and you know so yeah i think it's it's an interesting political perspective you provide there yeah i mean and it applies to everything else as well like i'm using politics as the bait for this conversation but it's actually all kinds of topics you have your


it's actually all kinds of topics you have your vegans versus your non-vegans you have left-wing versus right-wing you have just religions against each other there's all sorts of things going on everything's become polarized so that's probably why angers risen so much and i think people are going to realize that this is happening and take a step back and maybe work on their own mental immunity maybe through podcasts like this you never know yeah yeah yeah you hope yeah which is what i love about sport sport ends up just like bringing everybody back together you know sport isn't just uh black versus white it's it's like everyone comes together and you have a bunch of teams it's it's a beautiful concept that needs to be embraced by more souls yeah it collects people doesn't it it allows people and it's funny because with sports there's still this competitive aspect right so there it allows your human nature to well you know as a human nature we probably like that's an aspect of group


human nature we probably like that's an aspect of group versus another group but it's all within the greater competition so you're right it brings people together so so dr jalal this was the end of the twitter worst section thank you for being this candid and opening up throughout these episodes as you did yes so i'm deeply grateful towards you sir and i'm sure we're going to have you on the show again i'd love for the listeners or the viewers to comment below let us know what you would like to see from dr jalal what's your intention with these podcasts you're trying to get your knowledge out there like like you know why why why would you engage in a podcaster yeah so for me i think it's to get the knowledge out there right to to to to get the word out there and have more people know about these things and i've you know i've always been passionate about teaching so even though i met maybe give a lecture at the university i always go to the high


lecture at the university i always go to the high schools and teach and you know through podcasts like this you know potentially reach many more people than than usual so it's a way to reach reach many people so that's that's the main thing got it thank you dr jallar i'll be linking all of your handles down below i really really appreciate you teaching me on the show as well also teaching our audience thank you thank you and hopefully this piece will be viewed repeatedly over the next 10 to 20 years at least so thank you sir i hope so and that'd be wonderful you know to have this conversation recorded you know it's beautiful thank you i'm glad thank you for being on the show thank you so much so if you have listened to this podcast by this point you'll be able to understand how deep a conversation this one was i remember right after this conversation happened i went to sanjit from my team and i told him that i think we've made one of


told him that i think we've made one of our year's best pieces here this one's incredible of course if you guys want to see more episodes like this the honest answer is we need to see views and we need to see shares and we need to see your comments we need to know that you guys have enjoyed it therefore we will bring on more neuroscientists on the show we bring on dr jalal again of course but this is the real reason we began podcast to have conversations like this with experts of fields like this neuroscience it's a field that's constantly evolving guys we've just begun learning about how our brains work i hope that this podcast brought the world of science to you in a very casual consumable format comment down below let us know what you enjoyed about this episode let us know who else you would like to watch or listen to on the nv show remember to follow us on spotify every episode's available on spotify 48 hours before it's available anywhere else


on spotify 48 hours before it's available anywhere else in the world this incredible episode was very close to my heart do share it do tell your friends about all this neuroscience information that's now entered your brain enjoy yourselves [Music]


ryan who was one of the most respected people in the tech space in silicon valley and therefore pretty much in the world he founded product hunt in 2013 out of his pure passion for tech products the tech product revolution has only recently entered india it's people like ryan hoover that the indian entrepreneurship space needs to study in order elevate our own game in today's episode we spoke about everything from his own entrepreneurial journey to his love for video games to how video games actually inspire the world of tech products so if you're an aspiring entrepreneur this is the episode you need to watch almost as a postgraduate degree no matter what business you're running the pandemic has proven to us that every single business has to eventually become a tech business ryan was the man to be studied ryan who was the man to be learned from and of course even if you're not from india this is the man who's respected widely in the tech community globally do follow him on twitter but first


tech community globally do follow him on twitter but first consume this episode of the runway show remember to follow us on spotify every episode is available on spotify 48 hours before it's available anywhere else in the world the runway shows now spotify exclusive and on the spotify exclusive today we've got one of the most beautiful minds that we've ever had on the show ryan hoover breaking it down for all of us [Music] ryan hoover from sunny los angeles welcome to the runway show brother hey thanks for having me it's not too sunny today though we got some clouds but you know normally it is how are you so i'm good i'm good i'm super excited to speak about startups too i'm super excited to speak about products to you i'm super excited to speak about the future to you uh i put it i put this up on my twitter and indian twitter indian startup twitter kind of went crazy hearing your name so the work you've done in tech the work you've done in the world


done in tech the work you've done in the world of startups you have like fans all over the world man and there's a lot of people who want to ask you questions later on in the show we're going to take questions from twitter all right i want to begin this conversation by asking you about your story why don't you explain very briefly uh you know what you've done with your life what you've done at product hunt uh to someone who's just getting introduced to your work yes yes so um i was born in oregon um to entrepreneurial parents my father has been entrepreneurs since he was in his 20s and i learned a lot from him as a kid and gave me a lot of really some inspiration and opportunities to do small things like run the gumball machines at the video game store that he owned which is really cool as like 11 12 year old you know we go every sunday go to the machine and we collect these quarters and we you know buy more candy and put them


and we you know buy more candy and put them in the machine and the the concept of of doing something where you got paid not for your time but for your like actual output um was always really compelling to me as a kid and i you know i work many hourly jobs but i just never liked that because it just wasn't that motivating like you could do really well or really poorly and get paid the same amount just it's not a really efficient or motivating like economic system and so i've always been really into entrepreneurship i bought and sold things on ebay as well in like high school and college just as a side hustle um uh i modded xboxes as well back in the day um which was really fun and and uh kind of exploring more technology there and and so i grew up kind of more on a with an entrepreneurial childhood and um and then went to the university of oregon i got a business major with a computer information tech minor um which was fine um i


computer information tech minor um which was fine um i have a lot of opinions on college education but i won't go on my own rants on that topic right now um i ended up though through that getting an internship in a video game company which is a dream like as a kid who grew up playing video games like working at a game company was super cool and that led me to marketing and then product management which product management isn't wasn't really a thing that people knew about especially a decade ago it wasn't a role that i even knew about before i became one effectively and um what what is a what is a product manager like how do you explain that to a four-year-old yeah two four-year-old um so product manager's responsibility is to essentially work with both internal and external stakeholders so customers let's say or like your engineering team your design team to ultimately figure out what you're going to build like they're they're the ones that are taking all these data inputs and then providing recommendations


taking all these data inputs and then providing recommendations that hopefully align with like the overall company strategy and so a lot of that um it varies across different businesses and companies in terms of like the the role or scope of a product manager but it might result in them doing wireframes and working with design or engineering teams like here's the product that that we might be building and then also working with teams to scope um you know projects so it's really easy for like smart people to come with all these feature ideas but at the end of the day the product manager really good one will hopefully hone down into like what are the the core necessities for a product and how do you deliver that to customers and then learn and iterate from there and so i love product because it's it's you know i love a lot of roles in business and they're all very important but product fundamentally is the thing that you're delivering to customers like the product is is the thing and being involved in that and working with the


thing and being involved in that and working with the entire team to figure out what that is is super energizing to me so i sort of fell into the role and like loved it i i really enjoyed it and worked at one game company and then moved to san francisco in 2010 to work in another company that was in the mobile gaming industry and at that time mobile gaming was just taking off like we had facebook gaming was a big thing but facebook changed a lot of their apis and the way that their platform managed gaming and it really led a lot of developers to realize um smartly that mobile gaming is the future for casual gaming especially and so for three and a half years i worked there i joined as i think employee number 10 and we grew to about 100 before i left building tools for game developers and that was super fun it was a really wild ride saw you know 10x company growth from a head count perspective and learned a ton um andy yang was was the


and learned a ton um andy yang was was the ceo of the company and my boss for a good portion of that time and he taught me a lot along the way so that was all i guess pre-product on and then majority of my professional career has been product hunt and kind of building that out and so yeah happy to dive into that too if you'd like yeah of course what what have you done at product hunt like if you could just like take us through that journey a little bit yeah so so product hunt was initially a side project and it was uh late 2013 it was actually i was transitioning out of play haven was the company i was at you know ultimately i got to a point where i felt like i wasn't learning as much as i was in the early days i wasn't as motivated to be quite honest i felt like i knew i needed to do something different i'm of the mindset especially early in a career like if you're not learning like you need to figure


like if you're not learning like you need to figure something out you need to do something different and and so ultimately transitioned out of that company worked part-time for a little while as i was transitioning but ultimately started production as a side project as a newsletter to begin with and this was inspired by my my interest in just products i'm a weirdo and i would just play with products and explore products not to use them or anything just just because i was curious i felt like it was a great way to learn to as a product manager whose responsibility is to like build products and work with teams i think it's important to like be on top of what people are creating and and learn from that and so the the initial platform was an email list of me and a couple dozen friends sharing cool products that we found every day and you know it quickly got some some attention and traction because i i guess i i didn't think of this as a startup it was just a project a cool idea that i


it was just a project a cool idea that i thought would be fun but what i realized is there was this sort of hole in the market where there wasn't this simple list of here's what's cool and new to check out and there wasn't a place on the internet to talk about new products and for the tech community and i mean tech community from a global perspective to come together and kind of geek out about these things and so the emailed us list led to a very simple website uh nathan bashaw uh and i collaborated on it over like thanksgiving break served about five day period we worked on like the scopes kind of going back to the product management background like what is the mvp how do we like build a site that's really simple that you know isn't going to take a lot of time to bring to market and we modeled after like reddit largely we knew that we wanted it to have comments and discussion we wanted it to have some sort of curation mechanism so like


to have some sort of curation mechanism so like upvotes and we want to keep it relatively simple and and so we modeled the sort of ui and ux after sort of a reddit mechanic and we also felt very much that you don't need to reinvent the wheel too when you're building new products like you could imagine many different approaches to product hunt you could imagine many more innovative kind of uis but we felt like that wasn't where we needed to innovate really it was about the content the community and that's what was important and so we we launched that and you know for about five or six months it was still a side project we wasn't incorporated but it got a bunch of traction and we eventually um had some conversations with gary tan and some other yc partners and ultimately went through y combinator and raised around with some some great folks and then raised a series a with andreessen horowitz in early 2014 so that was all within you know the first nine months or


was all within you know the first nine months or so of products in its existence wow crazy uh and how did that journey end why are you still on the product on journey yeah uh yes and no um so that was a while ago it's been over seven years since progress started and up until recently i've been the ceo of a product that we were acquired by angelus in end of 2016 and then we maintained uh our own code based brand our own our own kind of mission within angelus so angelus is quite quite an interesting company because it's kind of a holdings company with many companies it has angelus venture angelus talent product on coinless is a spin-out of angellist republic is also a spin-out then you have angelus india as well which is its own you know beast and and so prototype was one kind of pillar within in the platform and the mission of angellist is is really supporting entrepreneurs and founders and startups like how do we support them and help them because we


how do we support them and help them because we fundamentally believe like startups and entrepreneurship are super net positive like they make the world better not that every company necessarily makes the world better there are certainly like things that might be net negative but on the average like startups are they they employ people they they push humanity forward like not to be cheesy but like we believe that to be true and so how do we support entrepreneurship and startups and you know through angel is it through recruiting it's through funding through prototypes distribution community and so there's a nice natural fit there and naval is a seed investor as well in product so we already had a connection um and so after that acquisition we i still led the team the ceo um you know started the fund as well kind of uh in between that time period and been investing in early stage companies and up until recently um in october i stepped down and josh buckley took over a ceo and so you know it's


took over a ceo and so you know it's i'm super proud of what we build i'm still on the team calls every monday and still advising and helping um but we have some new things coming out too that i'm super stoked about uh later this year i think i think people be surprised um and maybe maybe a little bit excited about what we're building very cool man um gonna be super authentic here i'm gonna be super straight up with you i had a bit of a concern with doing this podcast because i didn't know how deep to go i didn't know whether to make it a startup nerd podcast and ask you all those kind of questions or ask you surface level questions so what i figured is that i'm going to alternate in between right i'm going to ask you a basic question here so i want to take you back to the time where you used to work with xboxes and gumball machines that's how a lot of entrepreneurial journeys start you basically figure that


of entrepreneurial journeys start you basically figure that okay here's this thing i've built and maybe i can sell this and make a profit that's basically what business is at its core a lot of indian college entrepreneurs think of products like okay let me start a t-shirt company let me start e-commerce for college-based t-shirts let me start uh some kind of services let me start an internship portal not too many people think of consumer based tech products not too many people think of building the next instagram i'm talking about india specifically not too many people think of building some kind of app that you can put in someone else's hand which will eventually help that person with their life it will eventually help make your consumer's life easier not too many people think like that so um what was that switch for you where did you realize that okay when i bring tech into all my business ideas that's where the game will change was there any point like that in your life maybe in your teenage so could you just take


life maybe in your teenage so could you just take us through that a little bit to give some of the college listeners some perspective yeah i mean if if i'm honest with myself i don't think i had a super clear game plan like even when production started it wasn't necessarily intended to be a company nor did i realize the potential of what it would be or become um but going back to earlier in my life i i've always been interested in technology video games were my gateway into tech related things to be honest um you know i was a kid uh building websites for fun i there's actually this friend of mine i don't think i've told told this story of friends um in high school that built this simple website of like jokes and comics and things like that and i think he made like a hundred thousand dollars as like a 14 year old and i remember hearing that my dad was like he he heard the story too and he's like ryan you should try that too and


and he's like ryan you should try that too and so i tried that i made 70 7-0 so i didn't make a hundred thousand but anyway that that was inspirational to me and and i you know it taught me to how to build websites and like some some basic things like that and then going back to video games again um you know modding xboxes and building computers so i could like play pc games online and things like that that was that was another um source of like inspiration or motivation like play with technology and so i don't know i sort of organically fell into it my father he he's an entrepreneur but he's not a tech entrepreneur in fact he he doesn't come from from the world of like vc and and that it's he's comes from like the normal world which is you build a business that makes money and then you reinvest that money to like grow and scale and um and they've done really really well but um but it's a different world in like building tech products


but it's a different world in like building tech products i think where i got excited about tech i think largely is it's certainly gaming was part of it another part of it was they're growing up in in you know the internet age i guess um there's something really fascinating about like building something that anyone on the internet could use and then building something that's like there and accessible without me being involved like a website for example where anyone around the world at any moment could be using this thing and there's something so motivating about building something that people use that's probably one of the most motivating things actually beyond even just like the money that you might make but you know seeing a product that people use um you know product was one side product i built some other like tiny side products that never took off but the process of building and and everything was really fun and um as i get older and maybe more like how do i say this is i think more of it from like an impact or a


think more of it from like an impact or a business perspective like technology is is such a huge lever and opportunity for people to scale themselves and scale in ways that aren't possible through traditional like entrepreneurship um or businesses and so i don't know i'm you know andreessen of course says software's in the world and that's certainly true and more and more companies are adopting technology in different ways and now today technology tech businesses or tech startups is is at some point it won't it'll just be businesses like everyone will be a tech company in some form or another hmm that's just how the world is progressing i think uh the key word to be noted for young entrepreneurs is scalability that's what you get when you bring tech into any traditional business uh you brought up video games a lot takes me back to my childhood when i was playing a lot of video games and my parents had an issue with that and i remember my parents and relatives saying that you know how is this ever


relatives saying that you know how is this ever going to benefit you and i kind of believe that growing up but once i grew up and i started working on product myself forget product even before that when i was just a youtuber i started applying fonts that i saw in games as kids onto youtube thumbnails because even that is a form of consumer experience that you're giving your viewer on youtube and i realized hold on maybe all those video games have entered my subconscious mind and given me some sort of training you know uh so like my question to you is about the world of video games i feel that beyond the obvious video game benefits of better reflexes or you know a potential career in the world of gaming it does a lot for you if you're going to become a designer at some point in your life if you're going to become a product manager at some point if you're gonna become an entrepreneur if you're gonna become a youtuber if you're gonna become


become a youtuber if you're gonna become a creative professional there's a lot of inspiration you can take from the world of video games so i'm sure you still game even if it's a little bit i'd love to ask you some uh anecdotes from the world of gaming for your own mind from your childhood and from the games we see nowadays what are things you're applying in your own entrepreneurial world yeah well um so i grew up most of my childhood was actually we lived in the country we didn't have broadband internet which was a huge bummer um you know i wanted to play games online and i did try you know in my 56k battle up i used to play starcraft and tfc and my my ping was ridiculous and like i was definitely not competitive but um i did do that and i actually went to my grandparents past all the time and would just like say hey grandma can i come over and play video games and uh because they had broadband um but you


and uh because they had broadband um but you know there's there's one side of video games which um competitive gaming uh let's take starcraft is a really good example competitive gaming is is just like you know traditional sports too i grew up playing soccer as well competitively and you learn a lot i don't think i realized this until later in my my adulthood how how valuable i think the collaboration and competitive nature of sports in general is in in building um building just i think positive characteristics whether it's how do you collaborate and work with others um how do you push through um difficulties like you know training and and competing um that's true in sports it's true in esports and with something like starcraft it's such a intellectual game in some some ways like it's about strategy it's about like game theory and it's about all these things and as a kid you don't really think about that it's just like oh this is fun but i think in hindsight you kind of realize oh


i think in hindsight you kind of realize oh wow actually those those things that i used to do they're quite relevant i think to like the real world in different ways um and so um the other part of gaming that i think is the most fascinating maybe i'm super biased but i i have a bias towards people who have built games who have worked in the gaming industry in that i think they're some of the smartest people because gaming creating games now disclaimer i actually didn't create games we built tools for game developers two companies that i worked at but the people that built games they they need to apply two different like really important things one is they need to really understand human psychology and behavior because like gaming is all about creating fun entertainment which is a very difficult thing to do extremely hard and the process of understanding the psychology everything from high level things to like the the details like how onboarding flows work like you know mario actually like super mario world there's some some blog posts


like super mario world there's some some blog posts about this but the design of mario super mario world is brilliant many games like that because they onboard the user and teach them new skills in a very like almost like invisibly like the user doesn't really realize what's happening but they're being taught and they're learning and they're progressing and there's a lot of like really smart people that have that operating gaming that i think you know when applied to other industries is really powerful the other point of gaming that's really powerful this is more recent relatively speaking in the gaming world i would say in the past may 10 10 years it's not super recent but the use of data and how data is used to optimize and essentially build games is also a real soft superpower if you have experience really understanding and interpreting data in a gaming kind of context i think that's really powerful also for other industries and businesses and so i love gaming for that reason i think people


so i love gaming for that reason i think people that build games are some of the best entrepreneurs or best product people in the world and the last point i'll make too is gaming is oftentimes using new technologies and on the forefront of tech whether it's you know maybe today it's something in like vr and ar it's ai or there's a lot of other really interesting emergent technology trends or shifts that are being applied and used in gaming before any other industry and so i just love gaming for that reason also i actually don't play as many games anymore i did i did pick up warzone and i've been playing that with some friends which by the way amazing amazing game and brilliantly design like it's it's just so impressive what they've done um but but yeah it's i have a lot of a lot of love for the gaming industry even though people like to hate on it it's like oh it's not it's not useful or productive it's like that's fine like


not useful or productive it's like that's fine like you can have entertainment and like by the way you actually are learning some things it's not just a waste of time entirely yeah uh i think it becomes a waste of time when it becomes an addiction but it's actually the next question i have for you from the world of product i mean the basis of designing really good products especially really good tech products is sort of creating an addiction within your user's mind the more your user enjoys your product the more your user gets the dopamine hits from using that product the better the product is or the likelihood it is to be successful so again coming back to basics when you're trying to create a business you create something that solves a real world problem look at your own life perceive your own problems and create something that will help you a product that will help you but the second step to that the second level is that that product needs to be addictive that's what we call stickability in the


addictive that's what we call stickability in the startup world it needs to be stickable creates stickability within a product uh i think that's something that the world of gaming does really well that games become addictive because the people who created it have created addiction within that system so from that perspective i'd love to ask you the approach that product developers like yourself have towards creating products how do you all make it addictive is there these tips and tricks which actually make products uh stickable or you know whatever can you can you manipulate your consumers into thinking about your product when they're not using the product yeah i i try not to use word addiction because there's um well so i i worked with near eol in his book hooked which is all about how to form how to build habit forming products and in the book there there's a lot of discussion around addiction and morality of building products because you can it is a superpower in many ways like technology allows you to scale and do things and


like technology allows you to scale and do things and now we have these phones and eventually we're going to have like you know glasses and things that allow technology to to invade you know invade or enhance our life depending on how you look at it and so the way we see it um and when i say we it's near and i have talked a lot about this i think there's there's there's some things that are um addictive is a negative thing like you don't want people to be addicted uh addicted to things and one way to frame it is there are certain products let's take strava as an example like so strava is an app to help you track your your cycling it's essentially an app to help you maintain um you know helpful habits and and be fit and the design of strava the the product designers behind that their intention is essentially for you as a consumer to enjoy this and use this and engage with this product and this product they believe will enhance your


product and this product they believe will enhance your life it'll make you healthier it'll be actually a net positive for you and so that that's sort of just one example of like the more engagement you could argue is always going to be better of course there isn't a point where anything it can be taken to to the nth degree and be a net negative even if it's a helpful habit but the the design of creating an engaging product is super important it's not a negative it doesn't mean it's addictive necessarily one way to frame it too is if you are a creator this is actually a good litmus test if you're creating something and of course you want it to be engaging and it's important for it to be engaging for a number of reasons maybe for your business model maybe just because it's a sign of a product that people actually like engagement is a reflection of that one way one litmus test is to say like do you you you use it like do you believe this is


you you use it like do you believe this is helpful and do you use it yourself and when you compare it to like a drug dealer let's take a drug dealer who like deals crack on the streets um there's a lot of those drug dealers who don't use it because they know it's terrible and they know it's going to harm them and probably kill them in the end but they still give it out they still sell drugs and that's that's a good example where it sort of passes that limits test where it's like well you're you're creating addiction you're creating um ultimately a net negative like why aren't you participating or using this product yourself you clearly know it's not healthy it's not a good thing for your end customers and so i think that's a good way to frame it and look at it i think there's a lot of talk about tech addiction and you know the the whole documentary and forgetting the name of it um that was on netflix uh got a lot


it um that was on netflix uh got a lot of attention as well um social dilemma yes yes the social dilemma um yeah that was how do i want to be careful how i say this but uh it was it portrayed technology just say it out loud we love yeah yeah yeah i mean don't worry about offending people on this podcast yeah good well it's it is they bring up some valid points i'll give them that but it is propaganda towards one one perspective and the social dilemma essentially is is assuming people don't have agency assuming people don't have self-control assuming that people can't make their own decisions it's also disregarding all the value that facebook is just one example is creating in the world and we we've gotten to this point in technology and the ecosystem where people are super skeptical and there's reasons to be skeptical but they're very negative about engaging products products that people use on a regular basis and i just think we should equip and this is near's


i just think we should equip and this is near's perspective he wrote a whole second book called indestructible which is all about equipping consumers with a better understanding of how these products work and how to break unhealthful habits or addictions and i think what we need to do instead of criticizing uh you know these products that people do use and love because it's valuable for them we should be instead equipping people with you know a better understanding and maybe the tools to stop addictions if they do occur and so ultimately i i'm more of a what you'll learn from me is i'm more of an optimism optimistic person especially around technology we have too many haters too many critics too many armchair ceos saying how bad you know technology is and that's not to say there aren't bad things that occur from technology it's that's you know since the beginning of time like cars were invented cars are technology and people die every day lots of people die um but it's also enabled so many other


people die um but it's also enabled so many other things and so that's how i kind of look at things i think it's important for entrepreneurs and product designers to be thoughtful and really think of it like if i was using this product um what would i do in my life and is it a net positive um but ultimately like we should be supportive i believe of companies and highly engaging products is not a bad thing i think product design is possibly one of the most important subjects you can learn as a human being if you have entrepreneurial ambitions and the way to work that muscle is compassion at the end of the day understand how other human beings minds work understand other human beings problems understand how they'd interact with the stuff you're building so keeping that in mind i'd love for you to break down the product design of any popular social media platform what's your favorite social media platform twitter twitter twitter is up there yeah i love twitter i use it every day um yes we can


twitter i use it every day um yes we can use that could you break it down from a product design perspective that okay as users of twitter we're using it every day we love twitter it's helping our minds it's helping our perspectives widen but what has the product team at twitter thought of while designing twitter yeah so um so first first it kind of starts with what are you building and why do people want it and so with twitter twitter's evolution and i won't obviously pretend to speak on their behalf entirely but as i understand it it's you know it was very organic i think in how things formed i don't think anyone really truly understood what it would you know turn into today what twitter provides is a few things one it's um you know essentially it's the best place to see what's happening right now it is where you find breaking news it's where you get information directly from people around the world um whether it's people you know in in in the press or


it's people you know in in in the press or individuals or you know uh it's really created um it's almost like its own api of information um on the internet and that's really fascinating the second thing is it really creates a place for community for you to learn and connect with other people and i would say like those are the two primary values in my mind of what what twitter provides now if you break it down i think one one model to look at twitter and really almost any social product or consumer product is to use the hooked the hooked model which near came up with and i love it because you can actually map pretty much any product to this like four step process and let's use twitter is just just one example so one one example early days of twitter it was on sms so you sign up and you use sms to send tweets 140 characters and you get sms's back and so there's this four step process is trigger action uh variable reward and investment and so the trigger might be getting a a tweet


and so the trigger might be getting a a tweet from somebody that you follow so a message comes in the sms the the notification is is that initial trigger and that's what brings you brings the attention to the service now the trigger is super important because in the early days of building or using a product you don't you haven't built a habit you haven't actually built this like muscle memory to like go back to the product so you need an external trigger at some point to like remind you to say like hey here's a thing that's interesting or useful for you and so when you get that trigger you get the notification the action is you know opening up that sms and like viewing it so it's really simple the lower the friction to take the action the better so on your phone is simply a tap but if it was if you had to go to your mailbox to see your tweets like that's a lot of friction like you got to be there you have to like walk over there you have to open


have to like walk over there you have to open up the letters that's obviously a ridiculous example but that shows like the difference in friction is just dramatically dramatically lower and now the the variable reward um now um thinking this in real time so maybe this might not be the best example but the variable reward is the that's the reward that's the thing that you get so when you're opening up that tweet let's say you don't read the full tweet then the the initial message when you tap that action you open up that that tweet or that message you now see the message that's the reward it's it's a variable meaning you don't know what you're gonna get if it's always predictable just like you know this goes back to the the gambling side like slot machines are variable uh by definition they kind of have to be but like if it was always the same you know every time you pulled that crank it's the same results that wouldn't be nearly as interesting or engaging and now the


be nearly as interesting or engaging and now the last thing the investment piece is the thing that people don't think about as much so the other user like sees the message they tap the action they view the tweet the investment is when the user contributes something back to the service which ultimately brings them back so an example of that could be let's say the tweet is a message from my friend ask me a question now i my investment is messaging that friend back responding to their their answer what i've done now is contributed to the system and that person now is going to get a trigger and they're going to get the action reward themselves and they might also respond to me again which will pull me back into the flow and so the entire hook model is designed to break down like this the simple flow in this loop that all these different products email facebook snapchat to like twitter all these products can be mapped to these different flows and what they do is they ultimately drive engagement and over time those external


they ultimately drive engagement and over time those external triggers actually don't have to exist anymore technically like today i actually don't have any notifications except for twitter dms on my phone enabled so i never get notifications saying like somebody tweeted something but i checked twitter dozens of times a day because i i've now been habituated to think in my head oh twitter is where i'm gonna go to see what's happening right now or twitter i might have some more notifications from some friends i should probably check that out right now or i'm in between meetings like let me see what's happening right now on twitter and so over time you see these external notifications become less important and in fact i think your product has at some point it almost should never have to rely on external triggers ideally and instead it rely entirely on internal triggers things that comes up in the user's mind in certain occasions that pulls them back into the service without any kind of external prompt or push that's the engineer


kind of external prompt or push that's the engineer inside you breaking down this process i feel like it's actually again compassion that you've tapped into but you've broken it down into this four-step process yeah well it you know near near takes all the credit because he's the one that kind of like dissected this through like years and years of studying um both studying products but also studying like the psychology research papers and um but what's interesting about this model is so that that might be the core loop but then there are a lot of other loops that you'll find too like twitter dms it has its own loop as well it's totally separate twitter dms you know you get a dm you get a message action response like there are multiple loops usually within these these platforms production has multiple loops as well like the the core home page has its own loot but then we also introduce collections where people could collect and essentially bookmark products um under their own account which has its own loop which creates both that entire


which has its own loop which creates both that entire like trigger action reward investment kind of flow as well and i love i love this part of product design and thinking through product because it's super fun to think through almost like in systems like how does a system work together and then how do you optimize each step and it usually starts with what is the goal that the user has in mind like what are they trying to achieve and two what are they already trying to do like what what behavior are they almost trying to hack around or use um in a way that you might not expect before beautiful ryan talk to me about the indian startup scene from a world view how's the world thinking of india because what you've pretty much done on this episode is also a bit of a coaching class when it comes to product i'm sure there's a bunch of indian entrepreneurs listening to this podcast till this point uh what's the world view about india what should we be doing uh i know that there's a lot


we be doing uh i know that there's a lot of knowledge and wisdom that's a part of this country's culture my hunch is that over the next 10 to 20 years we're going to take all that knowledge and wisdom and turn it into some form of tech i also feel like when there's that much knowledge and wisdom in culture if you engage with that knowledge and wisdom you do become compassionate which again for me is the core of product design understanding how other humans minds work so whether it's about ai whether it's about ar uh i feel like we are going to see some big indian tech startups over the next 10 to 20 years but i'd love to know what the world thinks yeah actually i was looking this up recently um this year 2021 there have been um and i someone should should double check me on this because i haven't like you know triple checked these metrics but there have been 12 new unicorns formed in india this year compared to last year all of 2020 it was


compared to last year all of 2020 it was nine um 20 uh 19 it was eight um so by the end of this year you know maybe it'll be 20 maybe it'll be more than double what it was last year is just one example and you know the indian tech scene so we i'm investing as well we've invested in six or seven companies in india including one we literally just just committed to invest in and you know we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurship a lot of really interesting ideas come out of the ecosystem and furthermore on the consumer side we're also seeing this like digitization happening where internet access you know broadband access high speed access is now more and more you know available across the country covet of course has changed the world but certainly india as well as you know you know people consumers and businesses have had to adopt like distributed working and online e-commerce and things like that and so we are very bullish on on india and will continue to be investing in


on india and will continue to be investing in that category and we're also seeing a lot of other investors as well invest in the ecosystem one of one of the concerns and risk that early stage investors have always had with with investing outside of you know let's say silicon valley and some of the us tech hubs is that well who's going to who's going to follow on who's going to invest in the series a and the series b and i think that was a very valid concern five to ten years ago relatively speaking to now now nowadays i have zero concern if a company's doing well it will find funding and it will grow and be successful and angel as i mentioned earlier they expanded into india i think it was 2018 when they did that and i was just chatting with utsav uh who leads a team there and they they're through the angelus platform they're doing at least one investment a day i believe um roughly speaking um in the indian ecosystem which is


speaking um in the indian ecosystem which is is wild there are thousands of investors on the angelus india platform and they launched equity list as well so they're investing heavily there yc is also invested heavily in india in the last batch there are about 300 companies and i think almost 50 of them were from india so almost 20 of those companies um in that batch were from india and that's been that's not new for this last batch that's actually been pretty consistent with prior batches over the past i don't know three-ish years so long story short more people are investing in the ecosystem as more companies get bigger and more successful what happens is you have these companies scale they learn a bunch of things about building companies and they meet really talented people they spin off they start their own company and there's a beautiful flywheel effect that happens and so you know that's what happened with silicon valley you know 15 20 years ago we had this this density of talent


20 years ago we had this this density of talent and these these companies scale and grow and that led to more and more companies you know both starting but also getting funded and that's had a huge impact on on the world and so i think we're we're going to see a lot more indian unicorns and a lot more innovation coming out of the ecosystem i want you to be rude here what do you think uh india can learn from america and what do you think america can learn from india and you can be rude both be ruthless um let me start with the latter one um well i mean i have a lot to learn still about about india i mean i come i grew up in oregon lived in silicon valley and now live in l.a and um i had more to learn about india culturally and so i always feel vetica works with me at weekend fund she she's born in india and so she comes from that culture she's now in london um but she


that culture she's now in london um but she she's in many ways like my cultural partner when it comes to like understanding the space and the ecosystem and i think that's that's important i think for us entrepreneurs and investors to understand better is is just how what is the indian ecosystem like um culturally but also from a regulatory perspective it's very different um and so that that's one thing that's been on my mind a lot lately the other in terms of how what india can learn from the u.s and i say this with the most utmost respect but historically indian companies have not been the best in design um they've been great in other areas but i think the design aesthetics and design execution is what's probably been lacking compared to other ecosystems and you see you see a lot of really amazing indian companies and um the design is just isn't quite there compared to like maybe uh well france actually is a good example where their design aesthetics and their design


good example where their design aesthetics and their design skills there are fantastic um i've also spoken to a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs in france and their product design like just aesthetic design um execution is always like world class and so i think that's that's one of the biggest things missing i think in india because you know ultimately a lot of indian companies are actually building for a global audience and you know maybe indian consumers might have a different um expectation when it comes to design execution but the world you're right yeah no no you're right like if if you're an indian startup in a particular space and design is you know one of your strengths it's a way to break out so you're spot on yeah and i don't know i haven't done enough research to understand why that is like why are and this isn't a knock against india specifically because each ecosystem has its own characteristics like um you know uh silicon valley might be like maybe too engineering focused um


valley might be like maybe too engineering focused um to to too much of that kind of like perspective um and and then when you look at like france um you know they're really strong in design but not in other areas and you look at other other ecosystems like israel maybe they're really good in like ai and some of the hard tech but not so much in design execution as well and so it is interesting to see it's almost like each ecosystem tends to have different characteristics or strengths or weaknesses so here's my two cents on the same subject [Music] most of our population hadn't got access to the internet until recently a big part of our population didn't even have access to television okay so the rest of the world is watching television together we're watching old shows like fear factor and malcolm in the middle and like all these shows which only urban indian audiences were watching so urban indian audiences kind of progressed in terms of design along with the rest of the world so


of design along with the rest of the world so when instagram came out it appealed as much to us we started using instagram almost at the same time as when the rest of the world did but the rest of india hadn't got access to television to the internet they were still watching films from the 90s films from the 80s so their design aesthetics are still stuck there now if you're an indian product and you're designing primarily for india first you've got to design it according to the average of the mindset of the population so even if there were designers who were talented within those teams probably the founders said no this is not the vision we have because our customer comes from the interiors of the country and then design it according to their design aesthetic which doesn't match the rest of the world but since the whole internet boom has happened during 2016 uh you know i think india is becoming more globalized in terms of design uh products like pubg took off a lot in interior


products like pubg took off a lot in interior india um you know we're using the same social media platforms that the rest of the world is using so i think the country is catching up but it will take another five years and within these five years companies that actually focus on design aesthetics that'll kind of be a strength there'll be a way for these companies to break out from the pack so that's my two cents on it yeah i know that's interesting i love i love learning from you on that that's um that makes a lot of sense yeah uh urban india is another country it's completely different urban india is like the rest of the world uh the clothes we like the food we like it's like the rest of the world the interiors of india are another country and india is kind of pretty much a collection of multiple countries together and everyone's got their own design aesthetic that's the other the other kind of point within that uh topic okay we gotta move on to the twitterverse questions


okay we gotta move on to the twitterverse questions because there's a lot of questions sent in for you sure uh let's do it right now okay ryan hoover we gotta talk about questions i'm gonna take questions from my team first uh the first question is from ipshita have you experienced a significant shift in how you perceive life since the pandemic began and i'd also love the entrepreneur in you speaking up and answering this particular question because wherever there's a shift in lifestyle there are opportunities for entrepreneurship yeah for me for me not as much um the reason for that is the the product my team has been fully distributed everywhere from we have teammates in india to canada to london uh paris and um and also uh vatica works in the weekend fund she's also in london so remote distributed working has been like normal for me so in many ways maybe i have been far less affected um i suppose but it's getting us to question actually do we want to live in multiple


to question actually do we want to live in multiple locations we're now here in l.a we like it here but we might actually shift and move in into a different city and kind of split time um and kind of be more global in that sense so work from home is your big highlight that got solidified after the pandemic pretty much i was already working from home actually so it was just um what changed is is my partner susie she now works from home and i love that because you know i have to wait for her to like come home to like eat dinner together and also now she and i can can travel and work remotely together as well got it uh satyam pandey from my team asks what are some future technologies that you should keep your eye on again from an entrepreneurial or start-up perspective what's silicon valley thinking about that's my follow-up question to that yeah i mean everyone everyone has a different i would say preference or bias towards like what they're excited about i mean


bias towards like what they're excited about i mean we're we're excited about um not just i hate to say in the crypto world but uh very excited about crypto and what's happening there um more so now than i would say in the last boom i think we're seeing a lot more maturity in the sense of um you know infrastructure and even the number of people investing and spending time in it and we're frankly we're doing some investments in the space we're trying to get smarter about the space but over time what we'll see is web 2.0 and 2.0 kind of merge um and in ultimately web 3.0 we'll take over a lot of what i think we've seen historically um in the next decade so what that actually looks like is kind of tvd but the space and opportunities is just massive um a few other interesting categories of audio and voice is super interesting to us it has been for a while partly because you have smart speakers and at least in the us


you have smart speakers and at least in the us i think half of us homes have a smart speaker like an alexa device or a google home um we have these air pods in our ears that seem really small but like going back to the friction piece that i mentioned earlier even small reductions of friction can dramatically increase engagement um and i'm sure apple will also open up more apis and functionality too to build on top of that um and you know distributed and remote working also is something that we've been excited about since the beginning of weekend fund in 2017. i just think that that is the future um i mean you you've you know ayush who introduced us from pesto they're a part of that future you know bridging the gap between us and and indian talent and uh so those are a few categories we're really excited about that we're following do you think that there's a lot of untapped indian talent like from your experiences and you don't need to be nice here


experiences and you don't need to be nice here you can just be honest like are we on par with the rest of the world or is the world way ahead of us in terms of coding in terms of artificial intelligence knowledge in terms of creating futuristic product or is there talent that exists within india that just hasn't got opportunity yet according to you yeah so honestly the truth is i i don't know um it's hard to take like averages um there's no doubt many of the best like engineers are in india um i think the big difference in gaap is companies finding those people right right now there's a problem with the way that we hire people in the us and really globally is that a lot of people use resumes like what school did you go to and what company did you work at and that is a proxy for talent but it's it's not sufficient and to use an example a product and um ratto he's head of engineering been working with me in the team for i


engineering been working with me in the team for i think six years now he he's in sofia bulgaria i don't even know if he went to school i don't know where he worked at before like meaning like i don't care but he's one of the best engineers i've ever worked with um and we just need to find new ways to be able to surface and and curate uh and match talent to two companies i think that's the bigger issue um they're there it's just how do we match people together um so what do you suggest should be you know uh a replacement for resumes like what what like some kind of test some kind of platform um well the the best way to get to know how good someone is is to work with them but obviously that's you can't work with everybody that applies for a job so my initial thinking is how do you work backwards from that how do you get more data on how people actually work i think seeing what people have built like actually seeing in the


seeing what people have built like actually seeing in the case of engineering actually look at the code of projects they've built before like that can be extremely telling um and and i think there's also an opportunity around references still that hasn't been tapped i think references are super powerful but there's a lot of reasons why it's very difficult to get honest uh references either for social cultural reasons um or just it's it's just not it's not the most scalable thing um so i'm not sure what the answer is exactly but those are the two areas i would look at um lots of questions about the investment side of things you've invested in startups yourself so again this is ipshita from my team the question is what do you look for in startups that you'd like to invest in do you look into the team in detail do you look into the market that they're in you look into the product what what's in your mind or what have you learned over time yeah yeah i mean there's the


learned over time yeah yeah i mean there's the old um you know team market product um or three like major variables and some some investors have different biases maybe they're more market focused some are more team focused um we don't ours is more of a contextual answer i think ultimately what we're looking for are teams that are capitalizing on a consumer behavior shift or a technology shift so consumer behavior shift could be essentially what does the world want now that they didn't want before how is their life changing so an example could be remote distributed working is actually a very obvious cultural and consumer behavior shift we now work from home and that doesn't just change work it changes education it changes travel it changes a lot of things so we like to understand like what does this founder this team understand and what insight do they have into this shift and then the technology side it's essentially what technologies are available now that you know weren't available yesterday and what what can you build now with that technology whether it's audio


can you build now with that technology whether it's audio and voice like i mentioned before or you know crypto is unlocking a lot of opportunities and so our thinking is really like what is that shift and what insight do they have and then from there we try to understand okay well why is this the team to build it like what unique insight or experience or um product do they have in the market that's capitalizing on these things so yeah i wish i had like a formula a job would be a lot easier if there was like a formula i could like put everybody through but you know we're investing super early sometimes pre-product and so um you know it takes a lot of i think conviction in the team and the market to to make those kind of decisions got it um aryan sharma he's asked you a question i already asked you but i have a follow-up question what he's asking his question is what's some product trends that he's excited about in the next five years i'm guessing


excited about in the next five years i'm guessing you're gonna say crypto you also said you've invested in crypto and or you want to invest in crypto based startups going forward but what is a crypto based startup and correct me if i'm wrong but is it something like okay so you have the whole traditional financial world with all its workings and then it's going to be mimicked in the blockchain world in the crypto world and there's going to be opportunity to create businesses which kind of make a real world uh analog finances business but in the world of crypto and blockchain is it these businesses that you speak of yeah there there's a lot so the word crypto is so broad it could touch so many different things to your point um the areas that we're excited about in in this space and frankly we're still learning because it's it's changing you know every month but the areas that we're particularly excited about right now are social or community tokens is really fascinating to us uh buddy


community tokens is really fascinating to us uh buddy of mine trevor started fwb which is a tokenized discord community uh to start with meaning you have to buy fwb tokens to get access into this discord and similar to like bitcoin and many other currencies there's a finite number of fwb coins and so as more people buy the price appreciates it's it's like currencies within games like in the same way that you'd purchase uh currencies within a fifa or an nba game uh you do this to be a part of that app or whatever that service and then there's a whole loop within that its own cryptocurrency loop yes yeah in fact going back to the the video game conversation um in this this this part um you know gaming gaming has illustrated a lot of these like virtual economies like some of the most sophisticated game design thinkers and and uh effectively like economists are building like these these economies inside of digital games and digital worlds and we're starting to see this now being applied


and we're starting to see this now being applied to you know the real world i put that in quotes um but what what that unlocks like social or community tokens is very fascinating because it's frankly i don't know exactly what people are going to launch but a lot of people experiment with things this guy named alex created his own coin and his his motivation was actually to have people invest in him and give him enough money to move to san francisco and like build you know a company and it was just a crazy experiment he got some money got people to buy in um he also allowed them to vote on certain things like what he would eat uh so like is very experimental and so i love i love weird stuff like that that are on the fringes um and so social community tokens and kind of what that enables it also touches on the creator economy and how do you create different types of almost like ways for creators to monetize and make money um but also allow their community or


and make money um but also allow their community or their users to benefit and that that progression or that um success i think is really fascinating so that's probably the most exciting or interesting area of crypto but there are a number of others too to explore um you know when they talk about creator economy based startups i'm a creative i'm a very active creator right now i've been a creator for like five six years now um i feel this consolidation that's happened in the creative space at least in india people have been there like solidified themselves they have a position for themselves and these creator economy-based products are primarily meant for people who are on the up but the issue is that in india we don't have that many creators on the up that will kind of help these startups actually become profitable so i feel when we speak about creator economy products we're still like five years behind in india but the world is ready for them actually what do you have to say about


for them actually what do you have to say about that what are you sensing about the creator economy in usa yeah that is an interesting point um yeah i think it's similar to what we were saying before when you have more and more unicorns in in in terms of um successful companies in india that scale and you know have hundreds of employees or teammates um what that leads to is is really this flywheel effect and i imagine something similar will will happen in the creator economy as well as more and more um you know massive successful creators come out of india that will also inspire more people to do it in their region because i think representation is uh representation is important um i wish that nobody i wish we didn't have to to i wish representation wasn't a necessity but it is a necessity sometimes to inspire a little kid to like see somebody that's like that person looks like me and i can relate to that maybe i can do that too and so i think that's a


can do that too and so i think that's a part of it um ultimately it kind of comes down to this compounding effect where in five years india from a tech perspective might be dramatically larger and more successful uh because of all these these like effects over time that compound got it because we're catching up with the rest of the world so when an economy is on the rise there's opportunity there yes yes that's how i look at it um how does the world of product and how does generally you know tech companies in silicon valley look at the world of content how do they look at content creators because i feel like there's a skill that we call code coding and then there's another skill of content creating gripping videos being able to sell yourself on social media so do you think these two worlds are gonna converge at some point are they already converging uh ayush actually had told me this way back about a couple of years ago he said that the easiest way to


years ago he said that the easiest way to create stickability and product is put great content into it people come back for the content i d i couldn't wrap my head around the statement back then over time since i've began i've since i've begun working on my own products i've understood the power of that statement i've said oh i didn't even know that this skill i had worked on is actually useful even outside of social media yeah but i'd love for you to expand on that thought well yeah i mean another way that i look at it is um what's the hardest thing in building a product in a company and for many it isn't the the act of like can you build it like it's actually easier and easier to build things now this of course isn't true necessarily for like you know cutting edge ml perhaps but like the average startup tech startup is is um the risk isn't can they build it it's actually can they get users and can they get attention and that's partly because


and can they get attention and that's partly because it's becoming increasingly competitive um you know globally but certainly in india as well and this is where creators or those with audiences are extremely powerful and impactful and frankly i think their influence will will continue to be on the rise as more and more competition comes in finding ways to get distribution attention is going to be more important i wrote a blog post uh i forget like three or four years ago um just about like audience first startups meaning like there are certain people that have started with building an audience they don't have a product yet maybe not even a company but they actually invest a lot of time in building content or building something that creates an audience for themselves and also creates influence that they control like casey neistat is is kind of uh you know just one of many examples where he spent years and years flogging and you know built an amazing massive following and you know eventually he started building beam and while beam


you know eventually he started building beam and while beam didn't ultimately take off um you know it was like a social really creative like social network kind of ugc play um he had guaranteed distribution from day one like he de-risked the hardest part of building a company especially in consumer social which is distribution and so i i think that having some audience is super important and um the the second part of that that i'll also mention though is there's also there's another lever to that so there's audience which is one thing which is a one-to-many kind of thing it's like you create content any number of people can interact and consume it but what's really powerful is if you can build community which is a many to many kind of relationship and like production for example i i blogged a lot and i didn't have a massive audience but i built a big enough audience that when product launched i had users from day one and i had like at least enough to like kickstart the community but over time


enough to like kickstart the community but over time like i don't post on product like a ton i don't have to like the community is posting the community is doing all the content creation and i can go on vacation and it's still happening and so that is something that i think is worth worth thinking about not that everyone needs to build a community but those are the audiences if you can transfer that audience into a community it's actually dramatically more powerful and more scalable than just a pure kind of audience play so what i hear from you is mainly distribution and marketing but do you do you feel i mean after interacting with content creators that you've met do you feel that any other skills that the world of content gives you that can be applied in the startup world like for example i feel like it does kind of work that design muscle for a lot of people it it also works the compassion muscles like understanding consumer psychology because you have immediate feedback for something you're releasing like


you have immediate feedback for something you're releasing like you've worked for days you work for weeks on a project a video an article you put it out and you know immediately how this is gonna be received so over time you kind of understand psychology on a much deeper level but that's just what i feel uh what do you think about this yeah i think it depends on um there are different forms of of course like podcasting and um vlogging and that that is one form um there's many other forms like content creation i think um well one thing i love about content creation specifically writing actually is you writing is a vehicle to learn and writing to write something you have to understand it and so in some ways the act of creating that content hopefully helps you better understand your audience or your product or whatever like you're writing about you should better understand that space or that topic and it also creates more um relatability to your point but also authority in a sense so when you create some content and people


a sense so when you create some content and people find it of value and they learn from it they now trust you more and that trust can be transferred into like let's say conversions for your product over time um so yeah i think i think a good a good i think it's really important to think about audience um as a part of most companies um not that you can't just purely build a you know product and avoid any of that audience building kind of processes but i don't know i'm a big fan of those that are building audiences like yourself because i think it's it's really powerful and allows you to also segway and transfer that to different products over time let's say you come up with a product idea tomorrow and you know ultimately it doesn't work out but then like next year you try a totally different product for the same kind of demographic that you built an audience for that that still carries with you it's like it's it's it's like this evergreen like uh value that


it's it's like this evergreen like uh value that you have that helps with all projects that you start in the future thank you for the mentorship session man i appreciate it learned a lot on this podcast as did all the listeners all the young entrepreneurs the college students the dreamers listening to this till this point ryan one last simple question from you breaking away from the entrepreneurial side of things if you were dying in the next one hour what would you like to tell the world right now if i was dying next hour wow so morbid um oh man um [Music] well i wish i had like a really catchy catchy like one liner to give you but uh in less catchy like succinct ways i think i'm just super pro entrepreneurship i'm pro building procreating um procreating not like babies but like procreating products and technology um because the reason for that is like product and part of my my motivation with it is not necessarily to always you know spotlight the well-funded big companies in


always you know spotlight the well-funded big companies in the world the majority of projects on product fund are side projects or really small startups that no one has heard about before and i think it's really important for us to to going back to what it's about optimism like we should be optimistic we should encourage people to build things even if it's awful and shitty frankly like that first who's whose first product or first like essay or first anything wasn't shitty like it always is but we should encourage people and give them the motivation to keep pursuing that i think ambition because you know that's just making the world better ultimately um so that that's a lot of what i think about and that's why i'm investing that's that's part of the reason why i'm so excited about prototype still you know more than seven years later and um and so yeah go go build i guess is maybe what i would recommend everyone do beautiful ryan hoover thank you for being on the runway show brother i'll


you for being on the runway show brother i'll be linking all your social media handles down below big thank you from the bottom of my heart and from the bottom of the hearts of all the listeners of this podcast appreciate you being on the show yeah thanks thanks for having me so that was the episode with ryan hoover if you enjoyed it make sure you share it with all your entrepreneurial buddies everyone who wants to learn a little bit more about the tech space from a global perspective on a very personal level this was a tuition class for me because i have experienced the world of entrepreneurship in the services business through monk entertainment creating level which is a tech product and a very loaded tech product that requires a certain amount of mentorship a certain amount of guidance a lot of the questions that i asked ryan who were very specific to the product that we are trying to build at level um before this podcast was released for you guys we even ran it through the entire level


guys we even ran it through the entire level team just to ensure that all our bases are covered that we're covering the basics and that's kind of the power that i want to bring out in every single episode of this podcast every single episode should change you a bit should elevate you should help you out in your actual professional and personal life we didn't talk much about relationships or spirituality on this one but this one was a professional gold mine of information honestly at least for me at least for my fellow entrepreneurs at least for people who are interested in the tech space so if you enjoyed it make sure you tell us drop a comment also follow us on spotify we're a spotify exclusive every episodes available 48 hours before it's available anywhere else in the world if you want more episodes like this please let us know follow us on social media and tell us who else you'd like to see on the runway [Music] show [Music] bye


everyone perceives cryptocurrencies as a means to become rich as a possible investment option for their future but if you really want to understand the world of crypto beyond bitcoin this is the episode for you sandeep nalwal is the co-founder of the token called polygon formerly known as matic which has garnered international attention which has been in the news because mark cuban also bought a huge amount of this token now what is this token why is it valued so highly what is the future of cryptocurrencies what's the future of blockchain how did sandeep nail wall and his team crack this formula of creating a very futuristic token that actually found real world application this and more this very special episode of the runway show remember to follow us on spotify because trs is now spotify exclusive every episode of trs is available on spotify 48 hours before it's available anywhere else in the world we're always going to be talking about future tech we're always going to be talking about subjects that will help you become more informed


about subjects that will help you become more informed this particular episode is very very heavy it's kind of engineering centric but trust me you've got to know about these topics if you yourself are heading into a successful 2020s and 2030s this is the episode that will give you an edge enjoy sandeep nelwal on the ranvier show [Music] my brother sandeep hello this is another detailed crypto conversation i am here just to learn from you uh first i want to tell you something i thought of about you i feel key the lockdown has been devastating for so many businesses so many people is it fair to say it's been life-changing for you yes in a way yes like yeah life-changing but yeah i mean it has been good i would not say life-changing life-changing was uh 2019 also but then yeah this was also pretty intense yeah so for people who don't know anything about polygon normatic or even ethereum how would you explain what you do in the world of crypto so yeah i would say that uh