Conrad tried around 40 products while searching for a business

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 20:31

   build it themselves internally. And so I went back to our investors again. And one of them told me that I should stare into the ocean and then I should come back and just try shit for like forever. And so I was like, yes, sir. And then Dalton Caldwell said, don't die. And I was like, yeah, don't die. Got it. Shout out Dalton. Shout out Dalton. And internalize that turns out way more things you should know other than just don't die. And tried like 40 products of different things. Gave up on some of them way too early because somebody told me that they were stupid.

2. 21:02

   And I was like, oh, this person must be very smart. And so therefore, it's done. That was the wrong decision. So I went on that for like four years or so. And I think the thing that it drove into my head is if you just do a lot of iterations and loops, you realize what works and what doesn't. It also sounds like the don't die was really important there too, because part of me when I hear your story, I'm like, okay, you didn't have to go resell all this compute. You could have taken the bankruptcy, taken the L, moved on to another startup and not wasted time on something that theoretically you didn't enjoy. Obviously, you must enjoy it now or you wouldn't be doing it. But there must have been a moment there where you guys at least discussed, should we bother doing this, right? In the early days of San Francisco Compute, we hired a bunch of people

3. 21:46

   And they were going through a lot. Like, it was not a good time in the early days of San Francisco Compute because our economic incentives around us was insane. We had like a month of runway at any given point. And so just the pressure and stress of that was like throughout the company. But why were you subjecting them to it? Why do it? What had made you not want to just shut down and take the loss on the cluster you'd overcommitted to?

4. 22:12

   In my head, I just didn't want to fire everybody. Like, I didn't want to let everybody go and, like, let everyone down. Like, if I left, then everyone else would have gotten, like, screwed in some capacity. Never crossed your mind. Let's just sunk costs, you know, move people to something else. There's a bigger goal that I have. I think I... I assumed that if, like, the first company basically didn't work, and the reason the first company didn't work in some ways is that I kept trying things over and over again and just, like, doing something different, and I think I was assuming that if I quit this one, even though to some extent, like, this wasn't a pivot, this was, like, a forced into this sort of thing, I think I just assumed that I would, like, never be able to get a job or fundraise or do anything ever again.

5. 22:52

   I don't think I'm very good at working for other people.