The thing that was unique about us is we never pivoted. It was always Kalshi. I mean, Kalshi is everything in Arabic. Like, we always wanted to build the everything exchange for all these different assets. And we didn't build Kalshi to build a company. We built a company to build Kalshi. It's a bit different.
We were dragged by the idea. I wasn't the type that wanted to be an entrepreneur. I think if you reroll the dice multiple times, I'd probably just be a trader or risk manager. I would not be an entrepreneur.
But the idea was so glaring in front of us that we just had to do it. We felt that we had to do it. And so the whole point of doing this whole thing is the idea.
Hey everybody. Today we have Tarek from Kalshi. He is a gem. This is a really good episode. They walked through the desert for many, many years in this company and went sideways. Then they made a very risky bet to sue the federal government and won. And this thing has ripped ever since. It's growing, you know, similar rates to OpenAI and Anthropic, but a few years behind. I think you're going to like it. I'll be back at the end for my takeaways.
We just met for the first time a couple weeks ago at David Solomon's house and it was a CEO dinner. And you had some very unusual ideas about CEOing. This is why I wanted to have you on the pod.
And so I want to get into those. Let's just start with your co-founder.
It sounded like it's a semi co-CEO relationship. How do you two run the company? How do you split it up?
Yeah, it's interesting. We've over the years constantly been asked this question. And we never really had a very clean answer to this, and we always thought it was sort of like a weakness. And our perspective on that has changed dramatically. I actually think whatever model works for us works for us.
And the best way to describe it is I think I operate at the very high level strategy, make sure that we're going in the right direction. Where's the world heading? Where are our rights to win? And just a lot of thinking continuously.
And then I'm very, very low in the details.
Okay. You're high and low.
Head in the sky, feet in the ground.
But very, very low. I'm talking like coding.
And more specifically, like marketing and the copy and the details and everything around how we're marketing something.
Yeah. How we're talking about the product. All these little things that the end consumer, whether it's someone looking at a billboard or someone who's in the product, is going to experience. Like, what are they going to feel? And everything else that is actually running the company is Lana.
Okay.
That's basically how I'd describe it. Then I do the external stuff, the regulatory, the policy, the fundraising, all the other external aspects of the job that are tied to marketing and sales. But the day-to-day running of the company, making sure that the company is actually run, is Lana.
How do you disagree? You must disagree about stuff.
Disagree a lot, like all the time.
So how does that play out?
I actually think we kind of disagree by design. We have this dynamic over time that's become a thing where we essentially will always take the opposite side of the argument.
I'm the guy in the room that will be the negative. Like, everybody's pumped about a plan. I'm like, 'Oh, here's how it's going to fail and all the issues I have.' But we tend to just disagree with each other often.
And I think also, people say, 'Oh, how do you disagree? Disagreement like continuous disagreement is an anti-pattern.' But for us, it ended up being a pattern because we're this very complicated company that has this constant, continuous, delicate balancing between how much risk to take on the regulatory front, and innovation and regulation, and you have to always balance those two things out. And you see now in AI and safety and innovation, all of that. That sort of debate is a continuous force that drives us to the middle. We end up getting not always the right answer, but we're not too far from the right answer, and we never oscillate between the two extremes. And I think that's one of the powers of having two equally powerful co-founders in an organization, because if you're the only one, anyone that reports to you, anyone that you hire that is not a founder, it's inevitable that they won't always tell you the truth. It's inevitable, no matter what culture you build, because there's a different incentive structure than someone who's a founder that owns as much equity as you. And so you can stray. But here, it's very hard for either of us to stray.
So I talked to Lana to prepare for the interview. It sounds like you're kind of the more conservative of the two.
And maybe you're on the regulatory side and she's on the innovation side. Is that the way it sort of plays out?
More often than not. Yeah.
Lana is very faith-based, optimistic. Sometimes I would say irrationally optimistic. Like, she doesn't really do the math on how something is going to work out or why it's going to work out. And that continuously happens at Kalshi. And that used to frustrate me. For years it frustrated me. I was like, this doesn't make any sense. And I'm the other side. I'm a risk manager. I'm paranoid. I have a paranoid demeanor, which is also usually an anti-pattern for a founder. I think about risk and expected values. I think probabilistically about the world and all the things that could go wrong.
And I think that tension has led to all the decisions that we've made over time. But it's interesting because, you know, Lana's approach to things, I now believe that given enough time horizon, it's going to end up being true no matter how irrational it sounds. It's kind of amazing. But I think my side is the thing that for a company that has to get regulatory right, you have to make sure that you're doing things the right way. I'm kind of that forcing function in the company. And so I think we land somewhere in the middle where we've managed to achieve the results we've achieved.
I'm actually very bad at a lot of things. It's actually shocking. If you see my day-to-day...
Because you're obsessive. You're very good at a couple things.
You're a lot of founders are obsessive.
Yeah. But I'm kind of a procrastinator.
Like, I'm so disorganized. If you ask people that work around me, it's just such a [bleep] show. But Lana orchestrates everything.
Very. And she drops. But I'm the opposite of what you imagine for an operator. But I can get so obsessed with certain things that I want to get good at that I can get good at pretty fast. And I get good. So I don't think I'm a good marketer. I just got obsessed about it for long enough that I...
That's how I work with my co-founder. He's very obsessive. He goes very deep down a rabbit hole and you can't get him out of that rabbit hole.
You've had a long strange trip growing up in Beirut. Yeah. Certainly an unusual childhood. Is the risk aversion sort of rooted in growing up in such an unusual place?
For sure. I mean, most things that end up sticking with you are really how you grew up. This definitely applies here. I grew up with a single mom and I grew up in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you know, often times the headlines make it sound like a constant war zone if you read the New York Times.
Yeah, it's not. It's actually more of a volatile country. The word is volatility. It's a lot of ups, a lot of downs. You can have a lot of fun, great life, and then all of a sudden you're running from something. So the mix of those two, my mom was paranoid. She was always afraid. We would take a lot of issues that would have been thrown at us to the extreme, and we would carry them. And I was really young and I'm the eldest child. We're two brothers. And that doesn't leave you. So my brain is wired to think about all the ways that something is going to go wrong. Like, if I get on a hot air balloon, I can list immediately...
On a flight too. I can list you immediately all the 20 ways this thing is going to go south.
But it's important for our company. We're a company that takes financial risk, regulatory, all these different things. But that has helped us over time really become very hyper-attuned to what exactly is our risk in a variety of different ways, and where we can take risk and where we can't.
Okay. I've heard you on other pods bring your mom up. Can you just give us some more paragraphs on her?
Oh, it's interesting. She's definitely a tiger mom, in that sense. Very intense, very, very intense.
Yeah, I am very intense too. But yeah, my way or the highway. Completely uncompromising.
And then it was a sort of thing where, so what happened is I think she had to basically sacrifice a lot of her life, because my dad left us at age six, and she had to sacrifice a lot of her career, everything she wanted to do, to basically make sure that we're okay. And she wanted us to have the best life we could and come back to America. I was born in California, went to Lebanon, and she wanted to come back and get to a top school, etc. And so what happened is I think a lot of her personal pride ended up being attributed to her kids. Like, my kids' success are going to be what I deliver in life. And so her bar was so high on us. Everything, like we would do a sport like play tennis or play soccer, and you have to win. And if you come silver, it's bad. So that creates a hyper-competitive nature. But also there's this feeling of there's always an answer. Whenever we had a financial issue, you don't give up. You bang your head against the wall, you go up, you go left, you go right, you go down. It doesn't really matter. You're going to figure something out.
All of that I think ends up, now decades later, it's all in me, and it matters because there's this sort of higher gear sometimes. Most people have this thing of, 'Well, there are certain things that are within my control and certain things are not.' I don't really believe in that dichotomy.
Okay. I think it depends on the person.
Like some people can just make a significantly larger subset of the universe of things that are like...
I feel like it can make things happen, maybe irrational.
Yeah. You can bring more things into the control.
If you have... it's like some people just think, 'Okay, I can do it.'
Yeah. And the scale of the problem could even become big. I mean, Elon has a little bit of it, right? Like a lot.
Yeah. I feel like Elon sometimes, and I'm not, you know, my sense is as long as it doesn't break the laws of physics, we probably can make it happen. It's our control.
Yes.
Uh, we're going to get into more CEO stuff. We just heard Ken Griffin from Citadel speak at this conference we're at, and he talked about picking best practices from different companies and sort of assembling his CEO playbook from other people. He learned from Jack Welch, etc., etc. Do you look up to one CEO? Are you following a playbook or are you just I'm going to make it up as I go?
I have a lot of I'm going to make it up as I go. Yeah.
And I think this applies to Lana too. Both of us were probably very entrepreneurially illiterate. We haven't read all the books, we haven't watched all the podcasts.
You don't live on Twitter.
I do Twitter a bunch just because a lot of our users are on Twitter, but not in the sort of 'here are the four steps to build a company' sense.
You're not in that ecosystem.
But I look up to... there's a lot of aspects. I can honestly say there are a lot of aspects of CEOs I look up to. I think the extreme boldness of Elon, his ability to attract talent is amazing. I think Tony Hsieh, I always go back to because I think his operational discipline and execution is one of the best. His business is so hard.
So hard. So is yours by the way.
Yeah, our business is hard and marketplace and all these issues. But I think those are two names that consistently come to mind. But there's everyone, there's so many people. I mean, the Carlson have done such a great job at creating this sort of brand aura around their company to attract incredibly talented people, to build something that just goes beyond what the company is exactly building. And so I observe a lot of these different things and figure out what I can take. But then after that, it's continuous iteration.
What we do well is we just try, and we try fast, and we're continuously like, 'Did this work? Didn't work? Okay, change it fast.' Whether it's a hire, whether it's an approach to things, whether it's my own voice, whatever it is. And I think that's the best way to find the right answer, because often times these things are very, I'm going to say company dependent, but as I was saying, it's very CEO or founder dependent. It's to your image. It's very hard to market even your product if it's not coming truly from who you are, because the company is going to be to your image no matter what you do.
And your headquarters is in New York. Do you think if you were based here, you would be more in the mold of every other company?
Probably. I also think it would have been harder, because...
You would talk out of some of your crazy ideas.
Yeah, maybe to some extent. The harder piece I was thinking is just recruiting. I mean, one of the reasons we moved at the time, what I like about New York is for our company's mission, which is, you know, figuring out how to build this idea of infinite market, the next generation exchange, fundamentally rebuilding Wall Street, this new Wall Street that is more global, more for the people. It attracts... it has a stronger, let's call it, market fit with the talent in New York.
Much better. And there I felt confident we could hire the top 1% of talent, whereas here...
Maybe, but I don't see it. It doesn't feel like it burns as cleanly. I think here it's really AI right now. And even if, I mean, we didn't necessarily know that in 2020, but even if it wasn't AI, it was going to be something that is not finance.
Okay. You and Lana have, I think it's 130 direct reports if I got that about right.
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, there's some functions that we sort of let them do what they do, but pretty much most of the company reports to between the two of us.
Yeah, it's pretty unusual.
It's unusual because it's small and it's unusual because it's zero hierarchy and it's unusual because they report to both of you. How does it actually work? How is it not chaos?
But I think you could build an organization that's somewhat okay with that, because what you get out of chaos is continuous, constant adaptability. It's very easy for a company to adapt. Very easy. I mean, Sam talked about pivoting, and pivoting feels like a bit of a strong word, but the point is you want to constantly reorient and reassemble around the biggest challenges or biggest opportunities for the company, and you want to be able to do that with no friction. That's inherently chaotic.
That's a complex system. It's like organisms and cells are sort of moving around and floating in the ether and then they... you know what I mean? The world is an inherently chaotic system. And so we're trying to impose structure that is unnatural given how the world is moving, in a world that's accelerating over time.
You kind of have to be more sensitive to the fact that it's increasing more chaotic. And so your structure needs to be as adaptable as possible.
Okay, this is sort of the crux of the podcast, because the CEO playbook that I grew up with, handed down through the generations, I think is getting a big rethink. And Brian Armstrong and Jack Dorsey are talking a lot about this new way to organize where it's not a pyramid, it's a circle. AI's in the middle. You're training the AI. All your systems are legible. Your people are feeding the AI and the AI makes more and more decisions. Org charts gone. Compensation's different. All the things are getting thrown out. Are you following along with any of that or you just kind of making it up as you go?
Making up as I go. I didn't even know about that. I never heard about that. But, um, it's interesting.
One of the things I've learned by the way about all this, I've interviewed all these CEOs. There's no one way to do it. You look the way Jensen does, it's totally different than Elon. It's totally different from...
Yeah. I was saying imagine Jensen running Citadel.
That would be nuts. Or imagine Ken getting dropped into OpenAI to run it. It would be so crazy. But I'm actually curious to hear your thoughts. The world is more interconnected than ever. And I think things are accelerating, the rate of learning, the rate of change. If it used to be that you have to readjust fundamentally every three to four years, then every year. I honestly think you have to readjust fundamentally every month or two.
I kind of agree. I'm learning so much faster than I used to learn. I'm picking up skills so much faster than I used to learn.
Yeah, the world has changed. Like January to today, it's so crazy. It's hard for me to imagine making a certain set of decisions in January.
That truly applies still today.
Okay. So, how do you plan dynamically?
Okay. But it's the end of December. You got a board meeting. Alfred Lin's on your board. What do you actually even present to the board?
Yeah. It's kind of hazy a bit. The board used to be like, 'Oh, it's not structured enough.' But now I think they're kind of used to it.
Usually... it's a good question. I tend to not have too much structure. And one other thing actually at Kalshi, we're not super metrics-y.
Okay. In general, I thought you'd be the opposite.
No, we're metric-y very hardcore on like risk, how much margin we're giving to customers, things that go directly into the product. But in terms of decision-making, we should be a little bit more, and we will probably get there a little bit more over time, but it's really more like what are the customers saying, what are the pockets of demand where the energy is, and where can we basically be first or be most aggressive or have a right to win. That's all the conversation where it's at. And then there's usually one or two key challenges that tend to be the single most important challenges in the organization.
Let me give you the last sort of, you know, maybe 18 months. So off of the election, all the conversations were, 'What are we going to do about election? How are you going to cross-sell people? Are they going to stick?' And what they were saying at the time is, 'Well, let's prove that this network effect engine... we had a massive growth catalyst... that it is going to create the chain reaction. Let's figure out how to make sure that people are adopting other products and get going.' And that worked. We really created that network effect where we use that new demand to attract more liquidity, which boosted all the other markets, and then that helps us get demand at a lower cost, and then we basically compounded there.
Then after that, it was essentially like, okay, we need to prove our broker strategy is working. So we had the direct-to-consumer that was growing pretty well, but we wanted to make this bet that becoming an infrastructure layer, like all traditional financial markets, we enable a bunch of brokers to basically go... could we prove that we can do both at once? And that one was going a little bit slow. So the next six months were like scaling that. We got a bunch of brokers that sort of really started working out.
Then the next challenge was actually proving that we're not too dependent on the brokers.
Okay, because those became...
Worked too well. They became 80% of our revenue.
So all of a sudden it's like, 'Oh, amazing. The revenue ripped, but now you're super dependent on a bunch of your big broker partners.'
So what are you going to do now? It's like, okay, now we have to go back to focus on the direct and really scale that now that we have an extremely liquid ecosystem, because the brokers brought more demand, more liquidity. The whole thing is flowing now. Now the brokers are like 10% of our volume.
Okay. All the way back to 10.
Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about this adaptability thing, because all of these were... we're talking about going from elections, then sports, then we got into financials, then you went to consumer business, then a B2B enterprise motion, and we went back and we did all these in the span of like eight months. And then a lot of the policy stuff, and we should talk about that a little bit, but you're exciting, exciting, exciting all the way to till you get mainstream, and when you get mainstream, society all of a sudden is like, 'Whoa, whoa, stop, stop right there. Let's figure out what this is. We don't understand it.' Now you have the grandmas and the...
Feel like that's going on right now.
Yes, exactly. It's been going on for six months, but in AI, you know, AI is battling with it. Airbnb, Uber, all of them at some point you get a reckoning. And now, like, number one priority since January, and I think we've done a great job at sort of positioning ourselves as a safe, responsible actor. But particularly right now after all the news about Polymarket recently...
And we've done a really good job at always being kind of regulatory first, do the right thing, but we had to tell that story, and that's also hard and comes with all these challenges.
But think about that. It's completely different functions. Even if I build the best consumer marketing company, how is that going to help me with the brokers? And if I build the best sales function, how is it going to help me with... and so it goes back to, I think, how do we solve these problems? Generally, there needs to be at least one founder in any of these big meaty problems that we need to get right. I really strongly, affirmatively strongly believe in that.
And so is there one of you that's the DRI on these big hairy issues?
Like the responsibility, the person that is going to get grilled, is one of Lana and I on these top issues, these things that we need to get right. And I cannot... and I may be wrong, and maybe over time as the company gets more mature, I may change. So maybe in a few years we should have another chat and see what I think. But in this sort of growth phase, it's my analogy, and I think honestly this applies to any company at any scale. I really think so. It's like you're on this big ship and you're driving the ship as fast as you can. You're trying to win this, but there's always a hole in the ship, and that hole is leaking. There's water coming out of it. And I think there's two types of organizations.
One where the CEO or the founders are straight up staring at the hole all day, every day, which is brutal. It's painful.
Yeah. It's you, right? I think you talked about that. And the other type of organization that sort of either gives it to someone.
And generally what that someone is going to do... it's very painful. Why would they take through all that pain? I mean, you know how painful it is. It's constant pain. It's essentially continuous torture. And so they add a rug on top of the hole, and you know, 'We're good, things are growing.' But inevitably, that hole at some point is going to start sinking the ship, inevitably. And whether this is Google and AI is coming after you, or you're AI and 90% of America hates you, you know what I mean?
What's your hole now? What hole have you got?
I think in January, what I would say our big hole was, we need to differentiate ourselves with the unregulated stuff and the insider trading issue, because you've always taken it seriously, but you poll people and they have no idea what the difference is between the regulated onshore prediction markets like Kalshi and Robinhood and others, and some like Polymarket and others that were doing it offshore. And that was really bad for the industry. So we had to kind of clean up the industry's reputation. And I would say we've made a significant amount of progress, but that hole is not fully covered yet. We still have work to do in terms of explaining that, look, the right solution to all these things is get it regulated, do it the right way, and there are people doing it the right way, and here's how. Like with all things, the right solution for AI is you don't decelerate AI, you add the right guardrails. And I think figuring out what those guardrails are, and figuring out how to communicate it effectively, figuring out why they're the right ones, is the whole... And that's where I spend pretty much like 80% of my time right now.
Okay. The hole is an interesting spot. Your competitor has been called out by the Wall Street Journal for their marketing practices, and Congress is taking up money on it. You're used to all this stuff. Is this thing that's happening to Polymarket at this moment good for you or bad for you?
Yeah, for sure. I think when you start competing, you realize competition is actually really never a real problem. I really think so. I mean, unless you're in a small market, I guess maybe that's a problem. But if you're in a small market, then you figure out the next big market and figure out how to go take it and split it with the competition. It's okay.
We used to always say at HubSpot, we competed with Salesforce.com. And every time Salesforce would move the ship a little bit, everybody in the company would say, 'We got to move the ship in the exact same direction.' And I would say, 'Every time they zig, we got to zag.'
Yeah. I mean, maybe let me say it in a slightly more nuanced way. I don't think competition will ever be a true company killer. If you're in a big market, you're going to have a big piece of the pie. And if you're not, you should probably be constantly iterating and shipping product and finding new untapped markets to basically go and win in. I believe in abundance. I mean, it's hard not to believe in abundance, right? Look at the last five years. It's crazy.
And so you were well behind them, and you've passed them, from what I can tell, a lot of it in sports, like really crushing that.
We're bigger than them across... in the US, 95% market share now.
You were way behind.
You know, it's interesting. We were way behind in the headlines, maybe, but we started the company in 2018. It's been a long time. But we didn't relaunch to the general public until end of '22, and I think our proper launch was the end of '24 when we were allowed to do the markets that people really want, which is the election and other markets. And they launched in 2019, a year later or started the company, and then they launched immediately without the license. So they were the brand that sort of did it, but we were very dogmatic in our approach, which was we're going to do it the right way.
I think there's two reasons. One that is practical, which I think in financial services and healthcare, I don't think you can cut too many corners. I don't really believe in that. I know in Silicon Valley it's like move fast and break things and figure out how to regulate later. Not in financial services. Inevitably things go wrong, and when they go wrong, they go wrong bad. If you want to build true mainstream adoption and true institutional adoption, these people will care about how you're doing things. Are you regulated? So that was one.
Number two is honestly it's a bit more philosophical. I was excited about changing the system fundamentally, building the next generation New York Stock Exchange from within, changing the system no matter how hard it is, than going offshore and building something on the side. That was just not exciting to me. I wasn't pumped about doing that. So we stayed dogmatic about that approach. But what we were doing is building an incredibly great product and great infrastructure and great regulatory infrastructure. The word trust, I think people trust us more. When they put their money, they feel good about putting money with us.
Put some money on the Red Sox last night and they beat the Yankees. Yes.
Yeah, nice. Great. But I think when we did get regulated and got approved, our trajectory just went parabolic. And I think it's a mix of that foundation laying that we've done for a while, which I really believed in. If you believe that you're going towards a good market, building a solid foundation, even if you're not growing, is okay. And then I think we just have superior execution on product and growth. We compound at a much, much faster rate. And give it enough time, the results start showing.
While you're there, it's 2018. Start the company. You wandered through the desert for a long, long time.
Uh, CFTC was smacking you, saying no.
Yeah. The government was trying to kill us.
Yes. It was brutal. What was the lowest point?
Honestly, I don't even remember. It was basically just sort of... it was bad. It was so bad. You're constantly in a state of grief, and then you start... you're in this desert and you start seeing... you literally start, you're so desperate that you start seeing fake mirages.
Mirages. Yeah. You see something, 'Oh, here it is finally.' And then it's not true, and it's disheartening, and it's just hard. But the thing that was unique about us is we never pivoted. It was always Kalshi. Kalshi is everything in Arabic. We always wanted to build the everything exchange for all these different assets, and we always stayed sort of... because part of it, looking back, when I was thinking about it, we didn't build Kalshi to build a company. We built a company to build Kalshi. It's a bit different.
We were dragged by the idea. I wasn't the type that wanted to be an entrepreneur. I think if you reroll the dice multiple times, I'd probably just be a trader or risk manager. I would not be an entrepreneur.
But the idea was so glaring in front of us that we just had to do it. We felt like we had to do it. And so the whole point of doing this whole thing is the idea.
Okay. So when that's the case, then if you lose the idea, then you know...
A lot of people listening to this are walking through that desert.
And I read this book a long time ago. It was called The Dip. And you're cruising along, you get down the dip, and you don't know if you're about to hit the bottom and come up or if it keeps going.
Everyone thinks you're delusional.
Advice for the CEOs out there walking through the desert. You know the book... is it Ben Horowitz that wrote a lot about the...
Hard thing about hard things.
Yeah. That paragraph that's so good about it, which is the reason why it's hard is not like you're lifting something heavy or whatever. It's that no one can reassure you that it's going to end right. What I firmly believe, and I really do, is the number one risk...
Because you want to give up.
For sure. Every day you wake up, you're like, 'What am I doing?'
And was Lana like, 'No, we're sticking with it'? What's the dynamic?
I mean, we both had our points. Lana was definitely much more stubborn.
Continuously. Lana is just like, 'Yeah, you know, stop being a little [bleep], basically. Life is fine, whatever. Let's move on.'
And what I believe is basically if you give yourself enough of a time horizon, you inevitably win.
Yeah. But I think that's like... I don't think it's a real killer of companies.
You can always extend your runway, and it's not that hard to raise money these days.
And you can pivot with a new idea. It's really the number one risk is giving up, right? But then it's interesting because when I say that, to me the message should not be like, 'Oh, I should do it at all cost.'
I actually see a lot of founders, and they're walking through the desert. I think they should give up, because it's opportunity cost.
You're 35, you're going to spend the next four years walking through the desert.
Start something new.
I think just ask yourself why you're doing it. It goes back to maybe there's a few buckets. There's the idea is something that you're really passionate about. You should keep going, because you're going to regret that. It's hard, maybe you're not, but then there's a second bucket, which is all the things that people believe to be true after you make it. And I think that's a bad reason. Because, you know, it's a career. It doesn't end. You have all sorts of different issues over time. That thing in your gut stays there. It never leaves you. You're always stressed. You have to make sacrifices on your life. Like, entrepreneurs don't have a good life in the traditional sense of the term. You don't get to that oasis that you thought you were going to get to. You actually just get into different deserts, and those deserts get maybe less... there's some water in the desert, but...
Okay, I like this. But maybe the better analogy is like you go from a desert to a storm, and that storm sometimes is like very clean water, sometimes it's a [bleep] storm. Sometimes it's... but it's a different type of craziness. And maybe it's more motivating day-to-day. It's stress, and it's not just depression, but it's not the life that you like, 'Oh, you finally made it, you're successful, you're on the pedestal'...
Okay. So what do people think about what the life of a rocket ship CEO is like versus the reality? What do people have wrong?
It's just like... Is it glamorous?
No. No. I mean, especially if you do... I mean, look, some people, I see it sometimes. It's like when you get to that, and it's finally made, they really go enjoy life, but inevitably then the company kind of goes sideways.
What's your life like?
I work a lot all the time.
Are you married? Do you have kids?
I have a partner. It's been like four years and some...
Um, no, she's honestly great, but it's tough, right? She sacrificed a lot also for me to get here, because she supported me in the hard times. She supported me in the good times, which are also hard.
Right, yeah, yeah. She's the best. I mean, I think... but there's sacrifice on that front. I travel a lot. I wake up basically every day at 7. I'm usually at the office by 8, and I leave the office usually at 10:00. I work a little bit at home. I usually waste time on Instagram for like 30 minutes, and I go to bed.
I usually try to go out for dinner one of Friday or Saturday. Generally Saturday, because Friday I'm so tired, like, I just need to rest. And if I'm not traveling, if I'm basically in the office — Saturday, Sunday — like, I go to the office Saturday. I kind of like being in the office and...
Because everybody — by the way, you're getting... most people, most people like... they're in there.
Yeah. I mean, but it's not forced. It's not like, oh, you know, like the hardcore... We try to do it in a way of like, so no one is ever kind of slapped, or there's no expectation you need to be in the office with these hours. I don't believe in that sort of like, put everyone in the office 24/7 hardcore grind. That's going to... I do believe the founders can do it because we have the most incentive to do it. And if the founders do it, naturally others are motivated. They want to be next to you. They like coming on Saturday because there may be a little bit less people, and they can sit next to you and ideate about a bunch of things. And hopefully you got the right people that would show up, but they don't have to, you know.
