YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Chen

lines on the record: 118
first: 2021-11-30
most recent: 2021-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Games with these NFT features, it'll almost be a genre of games because it'll be sort of this contract that you're making with your players by telling them, hey, you're not going to make too many of the amazing sword that kills all your enemies but is very, very valuable because you literally can't because it's literally an NFT. Those are some of the interesting parts there. I was going to mention one last thing is there's actually a funny story I just read about this the other day where Vitalik, who of course built Ethereum One of the core reasons was he used to play World of Warcraft all the time.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One company, I think we would all hope for it to actually be really, really more like what the browser was, more like what the internet is. And you could make the argument that this is actually historical aberration because if you go back in time and you look at computing platforms, you see that all the older platforms, Unix was owned by AT&T slash Bell Labs. Then Microsoft, of course, owned Windows, and Intel owned the hardware layer. The internet, obviously open, amazing. And then the last decade or so, it's been very much about this Apple, Google Duopoly, and all the ramifications that we've had to deal with over the fact that they have control in such a stark way. And so I'm hopeful that the metaverse actually is a little bit more simultaneously fragmented and disjointed, but then also makes it very, very easy for anyone to basically get started and go. And I think a lot of the new games that people are building, whether we call them metaverse games or not, I think people will just view them potentially just.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We funded a company called Mainframe where a lot of the co founders worked on a game called Eve Online for many years ago, which is this amazing game where you fly around in these spaceships, but really it's an economic game where you're building corporations and you're trading and it's very like trading oriented kind of capitalist type of game. And that's the perfect kind of thing where if you had a fresh take on it, you could build a whole new type of experience involving Web3. And so at this point, and I think actually Chris Dixon mentioned this in a previous podcast, him and Naval, that something like 100% of the game developers that we talk to have some plan for Web3 at this point. So I think people are very, very excited. So I think that's one thing that's happening is it's getting embedded whether people want to or not. We're just going to see it all over the place. Ready Player One is such a captivating view of what the metaverse could be, but in some ways it also seems a little bit dystopian for it to be”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is why would you want to turn it into something where people can trade it and you're limited? The second part is you have an existing player base that's really happy. Well, what happens if you release a bunch of NFTs and there's a hull hype cycle and it goes up and down as we all know it will? There's going to be cycles to this thing. Are you going to end up with a bunch of pissed off players? So I think the conservative thing to do for them is to just kind of sit back and see what happens. At the same time, this is just an incredible opportunity, I think, for anybody that wants to make a new virtual world or new game experience, game new game studio right now, because you can go and take all these ideas and try to combine it in new fresh ways that sort of blend together economic gameplay with classic game design in ways that the world has never seen. And you can get that out to the world in a really interesting fresh takes. For example,”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah. Well, the nice part about working as a startup investor is we're funding all these companies that will eventually announce their products in two or three years. And so I feel like I have a little glimpse of what it is that the founders want to do and certainly something that we're trying to support. There's a couple things going on that I think are just fascinating. I think the first is that I think you're totally right that if you are one of these really big games companies and I think, for example, Tim Sweeney at EPIC has said this, you really don't have an incentive to play around with Web3 because you have an existing player base where you sell virtual items to them in one of these games, literally just custom just decorated skins or outfits will generate hundreds of millions of dollars and it's just all pure margin. There's no cost to that. I mean, I guess an artist had to make it in the first place, but there's no cost to it. Beyond that. And so what happens?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be what powers it. And so I think everyone's very excited about this, but it's sort of a mashup of a couple new technologies all together at the same time.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not. I think people have kind of written it off a little bit, but it's like actually, wow, it's actually coming back and there's a lot of usage. And then, of course, I think Web3 kind of intersects with one of the core pillars of the metaverse because when you have a persistent world that you're spending all of your time in, well, naturally, you want to be rewarded for it somehow, right? And ideally rewarded not using what we were saying earlier, like a lot of the earlier social networks are all about just likes and follows. And then now there's ways that you can make money using Twitch and so on. You can actually just generate revenue. But the next phase of this, I think, really is ownership. And if you're really early to a new metaverse property and you're able to make it a success, what do the creators get for it beyond just having large followings in this thing? And like maybe ownership is going to be the next big trend and maybe Web3 and the underlying technologies.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“VR and AR, which if you look at the VR units, I think it's kind of under the radar that there's something like 10 million units that are going to be sold of the various new modern VR units, which is approximately the same install base as the PlayStation 5. And so I think you're seeing all these wild.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think it's one of these categories where we've seen a number of these $10 billion outcomes as a result. And I think the whole space now, Tim, I think what's interesting, just it's very timely, is that it's getting elevated where I think we all thought of this as, okay, we're in this games world and maybe there's going to be a lot of startups. But now there's this sort of concept of like metaverse, which is this much broader encompassing term that's really kind of seems like it's actually a mashup of four different things. You have the actual games experience, which is kind of the 3D experience that makes you feel like you're immersed. But then there's also this whole concept of the fact that the metaverse actually gives you a bit of like a double life where you can actually work in the metaverse. You can organize in the metaverse. And again, these are not new ideas.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Riot games, which makes League of Legends and Fortnite and Minecraft, and there's a bunch of these that are like this, that they actually end up being a next generation of social network is what's really happening. It's like I have this observation every generation seems to have their own social network. And so if you came into tech in the 90s, you know, then as a kid, maybe you were all about AOL instant messenger and that was your thing. And then if you were a little bit later, it was like Zanga and LiveJournal and those things. Then Facebook was like a real thing. And then now people are on Instagram and Discord and all that. And so when you go back and you look at what a lot of the kids are playing, they end up basically playing these inherently multiplayer kind of very long-lived, persistent kind of games. And because they're multiplayer and they play it with their friends, you end up with these deep network effects, the same ones that will make a social network really successful over time.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grand Theft Auto is a game, I think it costs 100, it might even be 200 million to actually build Grand Theft Auto. And at the same time, it's also amazing because they have like an opening weekend and Grand Theft Auto, I think in the first 24 hours, made 800 million bucks of revenue instantly. It's like incredible entertainment thing. But that's sort of like the original model because you have these game publishers like Activision and Microsoft and EA, and they actually own the IP. And so you can't really develop a startup there. And so I think what's interesting about Roblox, and I would say”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Planets. I mean, well, the things that people are playing, though, they're playing Beat Saber, they're playing VR chat. That's the thing that's getting a lot of screen time. Same for Angry Birds and iOS originally, et cetera, et cetera. And the problem from a investing standpoint with these companies has always been that they felt for a long time like they were moving.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Building one of these games, it gets super popular, gets turned into a company, it's making millions, tens of millions of dollars and off you go. And it's this entire ecosystem that's been built that way. And the CEO Dave is super interesting because this company's, he started out actually on the education side of all of this. And he was building it for 10 plus years, kind of very slowly growing the ecosystem into this product. Roblox is just, I think, a really fascinating example of, I think, a broader phenomenon that's happening, which is that first, games are often the canary in the coal mine for a lot of new computing platforms. And so when we talk about Web3 and Axie Infinity, there's a great example of that. And I think people are going to figure out that it's a natural way to onboard new casual people into crypto is by exposing them to these games. Same with VR AR. I mean, there's a lot of different applications you can imagine with VRAR. You can explore maps.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's very much targeted at, or it's very popular in 12 year olds and younger. And the idea is you go into the Roblox product. There are a ton of apps that all these games that you can play. And so if you wanted to play, you know, and it's very kind of blocky, fun, colorful, think of it kind of very Legoey kind of format. And if you want to play like a pet simulation game, there's one of those. If you want to kind of play a very friendly, funny kind of Grand Theft Auto type open world experience, those exist. There's all sorts of, you know, there's tons and tons of games in there. And the thing that's really fascinating about it is the company itself does not build the games. And so what's happened is there's all these developers that have been using the Roblox platform to build games that are targeted at millions of kids. And so some of these individuals, like they end up starting out with, I think there's an example of a 16-year-old kid that just learns how to code.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not everyone wants to drive a car, not everyone wants to deliver food or sell beanie babies on the internet, but there are new kinds of work that are forming. And if these kinds of work are more compelling, you get paid more, they're more interesting than a lot of the hourly work that we have in America. Well, what's going to happen is a lot of people are going to try to be these things. And this whole technology layer is going to support this new type of work that's going to emerge. And so we often think of kind of the information age as very much like a white-collar kind of, you sit at a desk and you're writing documents or whatever. But I think that actually a lot of this will probably lead to a ton of jobs being created and a lot of work being created that's of ultimately a creative nature. And then that may be really what people are more excited about than doing the kind of hourly work that's available.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was above teacher athlete musician. And then the last one on the list was being an astronaut. So no one wants to be an astronaut. They want to be YouTubers. This might be bad, but it is really interesting. And I think Twitch actually was so early in all this because they built all these tools exactly what you're saying. They basically became a way for people to earn a new kind of living, which is amazing because instead of”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Privacy issues that people talk about and the targeting and all the stuff that's been happening is really because we decided to go with Banner ads instead of having people pay each other online. And we're kind of in this really interesting point of the ecosystem where we're able to kind of unlock that because there was a really funny poll that Lego actually ran where they surveyed a bunch of kids. It was like 3,000 kids and asked them what are the professions that they wanted to do. And if you look at the results, maybe it's both funny and maybe dystopian that very high up on the list, the first thing on the list is being a YouTuber.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you really look at it, Twitch unlock the ability. I mean, I think Twitch and Patreon and Substack, and there's a couple of these companies that are now part of the creator economy really made it so that people could think, wow, like instead of starting a small business, doing the kinds of things that people did back in the day, you opened a small coffee shop or you do whatever. It's like you can make millions of dollars a year being a content creator on the internet. And it really solves, I think. something that I think that has been called the original sin of the internet, which is that we have an advertising-based system. Like how much of the”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You end up not chasing these little things, which is one of the amazing parts that a startup can actually do is they can just focus very much on that and expand from there.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think they were just seeing, and I think this is true of a lot of these network effect-driven companies, that it's not just one network. It's actually a lot of different networks kind of all under one roof. So if you think about what Twitch or what Justin TV was at the time, it was gaming, but it was also sports and it was also creative stuff and it was also, you know, all these other things. And the most interesting part of the early data was that they saw that there was just so much more engagement in this narrow niche. And so even though it wasn't clear that this was going to be a big idea, and this is for a long time, people just didn't understand Twitch, they could see that there was a small group of people that were just like fanatical about it. And so if you chase that, often then you can kind of expand that goodness. And maybe there's a whole product that's just about that. And I think that's often very counterintuitive because especially when you're at a bigger company, you end up being very oriented around can this be big enough? Can this move the needle?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There. And so they ended up basically spinning this off as its own separate property. And amazingly, it was like a very interesting journey because it became all about League of Legends for a long time. Like it was just watching people run that tournament. And then eventually Amazon bought them. I mean, it was, I think, a steal for just under a billion dollars. I forget which year it was of the company, but it was probably like year like five or six or something of the company. And I think everyone thinks of Twitch as kind of like this weird overnight success when in reality you see all the stops and starts along the way for it to become the success that it is.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe only 5% of Justin TV. So it wasn't like an obvious thing to do. The second thing they did was rather than making it about the viewers because streaming is so much about viewing, instead let's make it all about creators. What's the creator's incentive in doing all of this? And so they ended up basically making it about monetization. And one of the interviews that I had with Emmett, who's now CEO of Twitch, he talked about this, which is it's amazing what happens when you are able to give any creator someone on the internet 50 bucks. For us, you may think, oh, well, what's 50 bucks? But for them, it's just like it's a huge aha moment to go from creating content just purely for follows and likes and views to being able to monetize it at all, 50 bucks, to a point where maybe every time you log in, you know that you're going to make a bunch of money. And then being able to go professional is kind of like the next level up.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything. And the thing is, it kind of worked, but not really. I remember using the product during that period and when interviewing them, they were basically saying, yeah, people would just stream pirated NFL games. And that was one of the major cases. And then other people would try to stream other kinds of weird things like people are cooking or they're just doing like random stuff. And the most interesting thing of, you know, and that went on for several years. And they got to a point where it was just kind of growing and they were feeling weird about it and should they go and work on another company or should they start a new company. And they ended up working on a couple new ideas at once and one of them ended up being to take the really, really narrow set of streamers that were part of Justin TV that were focused on games. And they just decided, okay, well, why don't we make a bunch of changes all at once? Let's first of all make all the streams just about games. At that point, they said that gaming was”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing that is, it was just if you were working in tech at the time and you were like, what's Justin up to? You could pull up Justin TV and you would say, oh, he's doing the exact same thing that I'm doing, which is just staring at a monitor, you know, coding or whatever. It was like a little bit of a critique of your own life, actually, is what it turned into. But he just did that for many months. And he ended up basically realizing like, okay, you could build a much more interesting company by allowing people, anybody to stream not just Justin, obviously, but you can think of going back to that atomic network concept, the atomic network was Justin and his nerdy viewers, including myself there. And so he said, okay, well, let's build that out. And so him and his co-founders, which include Kyle, who eventually started Cruz, very amazing guy, Michael Seibel, who eventually is president at Y Combinator. His whole crew, all really impressive people, basically started to work on a platform where anybody could start.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing guy, yeah, and I've gotten to work with him in a couple different capacities. But if you go back in time, this was like early Y Combinator. And Y Combinator at the time was sort of viewed as kind of this weird, why would you even do that? And it's like all these kids in it. And it's sort of maybe for people that aren't legit. Obviously, they've completely proven that what an amazing idea it was at the time. And so Justin's project at that point was called Justin TV. And he basically would just go and wear this backpack that had a laptop connected to all the cellular networks and it was kind of like all multiplex together. So you get maximum bandwidth. And then that laptop then connected into a hat like a camera that sat on his hat. And he would just live stream his entire life 24-7. I think this went on for months, months and months and months. And the funny thing about Justin.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Twitch is such a funny story because Justin Kahn, who's himself now this B2B content creator person and has stayed very true to his roots. He was super sweet guy”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both great, and maybe I'll do the Twitch one because I like that. But I was just going to go back to the Uber thing for one second. One of my favorite things, by the way, is to go find the original pitch decks of these great companies. Just read them. I mean, online, you can find if you search for Coinbase original pitch deck, there's an amazing deck that was put together by Brian Armstrong that's worth looking at. And same for Uber. Garrett Camp actually ended up posting his original deck. And at the time, it was like he wasn't sure if it was going to be a thing. They had, I think, three different CEOs kind of in the first year or two, and like all that stuff. It was definitely one that broke all the rules. But yeah, let's go to Twitch.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think these lessons are interesting mainly because when you look at Uber, you look at Slack now, or you look at Instacart or you look at any of these companies, people tend to think that viral growth and network effects are this like weird, like there's this silver bullet that once your product has it, you just are kind of on this amazing trajectory. And what you find instead when you look inside is you see like thousands of people working their asses off and they're doing all these little tests and they're doing all these things just to kind of stay above the growth goal. And I think that's what you really see is the hard work that actually goes into these companies is just an incredible amount of work.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I joined the company, it was adding 3% of the world's population into the app each year. And all those users ended up seeing all these product experiences that my teams built there because I was running all the rider growth side of things. And so I would say just going back to your original question, I mean, I think the difference between solving the cold star problem and throwing college parties and all that stuff becomes very, very different when you're kind of at this escape velocity phase where you're just, we have billions of dollars and how do we scale it more? And the reason is because when you look at marketing and you look at growth, there ends up only being a couple things that can scale to be really, really big. I mean, it's basically paid marketing forms of viral growth, including referrals and also things like SEO. Sometimes the smattering of partnerships. And I would say that this was a period in Uber where we were trying to do all of it and spending billions of dollars each way and trying to get there.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as you know, Tim, I mean, a lot of startups have war rooms. I mean, a lot of times they just commandeer a conference room and you just make it your war room to do a project. But this was like permanent war room was like, you know, the setup. And this was also at a point where the company had just gotten into China. And I think we were losing like a billion dollars a year. But we were also growing like many billions of dollars per year. We had just been doing self-driving. And I remember visiting and sitting in one of the trucks that we were building with all the LIDAR stuff on it.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was all like LEDs, and everything was black. And then in the middle of the floor, there was a room that was built. It was a special room that was often, there was like security guards next to it. And it was like a private conference room. And it was literally just named the war room.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was Uber. That was a good time to be an advisor for sure. Yeah, Uber was such an interesting experience. So I ended up there because I was working at a startup at the time. And this is back when people were building apps on the Facebook platform. You know, there was an era where people thought that you could build apps on iOS and Facebook was going to give you a way to build apps also. And so I actually started the company. I was a founder. My co-founder was an early YC guy named Matt Rubens. And we ended up getting funded by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who led the seed round and then subsequently raised VC and so on. And so what ended up happening was when that didn't work out, I ended up talking with Ed Baker and Emile at Uber and ended up getting acquired into the company to work on growth. And at the time, I mean, just to tell you kind of like how unique this place was, we had the main floor of the company when you walked in. It was very Star Wars.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Copy and paste messages. What's That's right. That's right. And I think that's one of the things that you find in all of these stories there's some good ones in there about Zoom and Slack and Dropbox and all these is that especially during the cold start in the really early days, the approach to solving ends up being usually pretty idiosyncratic in some cases, it's college parties, in other cases it's putting something on hacker news and having it take off. In other days it's going on Discord and trying to grow these communities. And so you have a lot of different approaches.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the way that Sean describes it, he's like, back in the day, if you were like an attractive person and you used one of these apps, you would go to work and do email all day. And then you'd go home. And for your dating life, you'd also do email all day. And it just wasn't fun. And just making it visual and interesting and everything was.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a smaller party and would have worked a couple hundred. And you could basically just, if you could build one atomic network, you can then build a second one and a third one. And so there are whole early, early days was just about just throwing these parties. And of course the product itself was just also really well done. Back in the day before Tinder, this will make you laugh to him, if you recall, this was like the match.com days and plenty of fish and all of these, right? Where basically you would post your profile and then anyone who wanted to message you could message you.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it'll be like this really amazing, really sick, just birthday party to be sponsored. We'll just go all out. But we're going to put a bouncer in front of the door. And we're going to make it so that you have to install Tinder in order for it to happen. And so the way that Sean and John and all these guys tell it, this was like the party because what happened was they got a couple hundred people all to go to the party. They all installed Tinder. And they didn't use the app that day. But the next morning they woke up and they had this app and they were like, oh, all there's all these cute people that I hadn't talked to last night. Now I can kind of swipe through them and I can message them. Holy shit, that's amazing. And then from that, they were able to take over the rest of USE. And once you figure out how to build, so I have this concept in the book that I call an atomic network, which is like, what is the smallest network that you need that can retain and be engaged and be functional? And they figured out that it's 500 or maybe they could even go.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sean, who was the iOS developer there, he actually kept a deck of cards with him, and he would just play with the deck of cards while he was coding. And he just added it in last minute. And it's so iconic now, but it's funny that that's how it really came about. It was really an accident. But in the early days, they built Tinder and it looked plus or minus kind of the way it was. And what ended up happening was they just invited all their friends. Now in those days, it was kind of like an insult to tell one of your friends, like you're single, you need to use an online dating app. So the invitation strategy was not really going to work for them. But they tried. They tried to invite a bunch of friends off their address book. It didn't work. And so what they realized was, well, maybe we just need a bunch of people. How do we get a lot of people, hundreds of people onto the app at the same time? One of the co-founders had a friend on the USC campus that was a very popular, very social person and said, you know, what if we just did this birthday party for this girl?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need other users in order to make a product work. And so you have this problem where you're just like, well, how do I get enough people into the product at the same time so that we can all use it together? And I'll describe one of the solutions that I just love because it's such a, it's so spot on. So when you study all these consumer startups, one of the first things you realize is that so many of them start at colleges. And you're just like, why? That's crazy. Well, the reason is because Facebook started at a college. You know, Snap was more high school. And then the example I'm going to use is Tinder, which started at USE. And the reason why it's so interesting is because Sean Rad and Justin Maten and Jonathan Badine and some of the early people, when they originally started Tinder, first of all, didn't even have the right swipe, left swipe thing. That was added later. It was just like a check mark, like a green check mark, you know, and a red X.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a different problem. Well, matching is at the heart of a lot of this. So, yeah, I mean, that is certainly true. And so we could go on and use a bunch of different examples, but they all kind of have this core concept of.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I set out to do that three years ago. And the Cold Star problem refers to the fact that if we look at a product like Slack, if you open up Slack and none of your coworkers are on it and you're typing things in and no one's replying to you, that's not useful as a product. That's not a thing. And in the same way, if you use Tinder and you open up Tinder and in your city, no one else is using Tinder or the people that you're not attracted to or are using Tinder, then your types on Tinder, then that's also a cold star problem because, okay, like how are you going to match who you want?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like an Airbnb or an Uber or an eBay or whatnot. And there's a bunch of companies that are kind of more like marketplaces. Sometimes you're connecting people because of work. Slack and Zoom and Dropbox and all these other tools are really about collaboration. Games also have this aspect where there's really like network effects at the heart of these companies. And so this term that I'd heard a million billion times while being in tech, which is like, oh, of course it's successful. It has network effects or, you know, hey, XYZ company, the Apple ecosystem, the app ecosystem is amazing because it has network effects. And I was kind of like, wow, that's kind of crazy that you have this something that's really this central and really, in my mind, the secret to why the technology sector in the Bay Area is so incredible. And there isn't really a really definitive unpacking of all of it. So that's what I set out to do.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies like YouTube and Yelp and LinkedIn and so on. And I remember reading about all these guys and I was like, what do they know that no one else knows? And a bunch of them obviously got involved with Facebook and other mega companies. So when I came to Bay Area, that was one of my express goals was I was like, I am going to meet all the PayPal people and I'm going to try and figure out what it is that they know that I don't. And so I think in a broader way, it sort of ties him to a lot of topics we've touched on, which is, you know, they had a very quantitative view of growth. They kind of had a critical mass of technology skill set and how you scale these things over time. But one of the things that I think is also in particular really fascinating is that these companies that were getting built by the PayPal Mafia and also just more broadly, including Airbnb and Uber and Pinterest and all these companies that we love are at their core about connecting people with one another. And sometimes you're being connected over commerce.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's such an interesting phenomenon, right? But basically, PayPal was built at a time where eBay was also trying to build a competitor called Billpoint. And what happened was they were all competing against each other. And eBay, as you guys know, in the earliest days, there was no way for the buyers and sellers to pay each other. They literally needed these badges that were like, we accept PayPal badges to put into all the eBay listings so that the buyers and sellers, I mean, this is like Web 1.0 kind of stuff. And so funny enough, this whole group, including Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman and Keith Raboy and, you know, some of the greats in the technology industry, they were all together at the same time at PayPal. And they took the company public and eventually eBay bought PayPal in one of the great traditions and life cycles of the Bay Area. All the amazing people all left at the same time to go start other companies. And so this group went on to start all these.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I started to write my blog for many years, what I found was I found I basically wrote all these one-off articles and they were great and it was a fun way to engage people. But if you recall the original reason why I started in the first place was I'm going to find the secret of Silicon Valley. I'm going to figure out what it is that makes the kinds of companies that are built in the Bay Area as huge as they are. And in particular, I ended up actually spending a lot of time with a bunch of folks in the PayPal Mafia who built Yelp and YouTube and LinkedIn and all these amazing companies.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm self-parenting. That's when you know you have too low of an attention span is when you have to embrace all of this tooling to manage your time. That's basically been my life for the last two years or so.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The time's safe, right? Yeah, the time's safe. Yeah. So I have one in, I think I have three or four of them now, and I have them all over the place in my house. And you basically, you, so the way it works is you put your phone in and then you say, hey, I'm not going to get my phone out for five hours. And you just stick it in and you set it and you just lock it away from yourself. I also turn on all the kids safe tools. Your computer, you can block individual websites, and then you have a unique password. And so I'll just make up a password and then write it on a piece of paper and then just hide it somewhere for myself. And I'll turn off Reddit. I'll turn off all my favorite websites. Now, were you doing that?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yeah, and I think what ends up happening is if I'm organized about it, I will actually schedule blocks of time in my calendar to say this is writing time and I'll build my whole schedule around it. And when I was writing my book, I actually went even further than that. I was like, I actually need five plus hours of writing time each day in order to make progress on all this. And so the only way to do that was how do I write for five hours without when there's like Twitter and TikTok and there's Netflix and there's all these wonderful things in the world. And I just completely organized my workflow where I would have a desk where I can just sit. Myself with a computer that only has writing apps installed on it, I would lock away my phone. There's a great product called the KSAF. I don't know if you've seen one of these, Tim.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Channel is TikTok anyway. And what should you watch out for? So I might, for example, try to take that observation and go on Twitter and then write a tweet about it, you know, kind of the perils of using TikTok as the way to grow your product and what are good ways and what are bad ways. And then if that ends up catching on, then I'll basically develop a whole article about it and go from there.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, what Yeah, I think that one of the nice things about being in tech is you just get exposed to a lot of new ideas every day. And so through the course of a day, you might learn about camping and then pets, and then you might hear about productivity tools, and then you might hear about podcasting, and you might work on something else entirely. And through that course of the day, what you end up learning about is you try to generalize and try to figure out, okay, how do I feel about each one of these ideas and strategies and everything. And so, for example, you might see a new approach where a new social app is using TikTok to drive a lot of new users. But on the other hand, you also see that, wow, a lot of those new users, they all seem to follow a certain shape. They all seem to get a big spike of users. And then the next day, they all seem to leave. And so over time, you're kind of like, okay, well, you know, how good of a customer acquisition?”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my creative process is a little bit funny because what I end up doing is I end up starting with that. Unit of opinions. And I basically collect in a notes file all sorts of random little opinions that I'll have through the course of a day.”
2021-11-30 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #550: Andrew Chen — Metaverse, Metrics, and Meerkats · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT