It was a natural for Michael Arrington to do the first PandoMonthly because a lot of this event is sort of inspired by what he used to hold in his living room in the early days of TechCrunch.
Is that where the carpet comes from?
Yes, this is his carpet from his... Yeah, these are his chairs.
Um, no, we got these at IKEA yesterday. Um, yeah, Anie was going to IKEA and kept sending me pictures and I would be like, 'That one makes me want to kill someone. I hate that one. I liked this.' Uh, and not on back order. Um, so I didn't know who to have for the second PandoMonthly and um, you know, I actually had someone else originally booked and then when Address Book Gate was...
Always good to be your second choice.
No, no, I cancelled him and you know it. So when Address Book Gate was blowing up, I thought, um, Dave needs... Dave is going to go into a bunker and as his friend I need to pull him out of the bunker and probably by about the time PandoMonthly will be here, um, that he'll be ready. So, um, it was really... I asked you in the middle of the storm and you said yes.
Yeah. Literally the same day, against some of your counsel. So, I appreciate you being cool enough to come do this.
Um, so, I feel like you're sort of the job of Silicon Valley. You guys didn't know this was going to be a religious revival, did you? You know, you came out here and you have quite an entrepreneurial family pedigree. Um, your grandfather was one of the Filene's Basement founders. Is that right?
And, um, you moved out here, wanted to work in tech, wanted to start something, wanted to have this great background, so you went to Apple, and then you were early days at Facebook. I mean, it's hard to imagine a better pedigree. Go off on your own. Everyone thinks, you know, turns their attention to this. Ashton Kutcher is tweeting about Path before he gets it. Everyone's paying attention. Great investors comes out. Nobody uses it.
Was it 10,000? Because TechCrunch reported hundreds of thousands. They were...
Over 10,000 DAU. So we had hundreds of thousands of total registered users, but we only had about 10,000 DAU for most of the year. So yeah, I mean it was broadly a failure.
Mhm. And was that a... I mean you baked in all of these inherently... and this is something I liked about it. It was a ballsy way to start a company because you baked in, you know, inherently antiviral elements and antisocial elements at a time when people are just, you know, rapidly trying to be obsessively viral. So was it a surprise to you?
Um, you know, the vision hasn't changed much since the beginning. I mean, we wanted to create a, you know, I used to call it bookmarking your life. Sort of a way to use your mobile phone to capture important moments and memories in your life and put them into a path or a journal of your life. And we focused a lot on this idea of a personal network. Um, and the reason that we did that was because as we were building the product, we kept asking people to tell us what they do with their phones. And people have a favorites list on their phone, not that many people on it. Um, you know, send text messages to a few people but not hundreds. Um, and people take a lot of photos with their phone, right? And so we kept asking people to show us... like if I asked you to pull out your photo library and show it to me right now, most people will say, 'Oh, uh, let me look at that first before I show that to you.'
So I'd be like, 'Look at this photo.' Depends on what stage of life you're in. Um, and it's interesting. People kept saying...
And I have been together for 12 years. We don't sex.
Uh, yeah. We're way too old for that world, right? Um, and people just kept telling us that it's way too personal. It's way too personal. I don't share these photos, right? And so the way I sort of was looking at it was that there's this... I was an economics major. So there's this illiquid market of photos and data on all these phones and it's not being shared. And that was really interesting. And so we've been really focused on this idea of creating a trusted place to share, sort of a more intimate place to share. And yeah, when we launched it, we actually had a lot of... most of us were from the web era. I spent a lot of time at Facebook. My co-founder Dustin mostly built desktop software. Um, Sean Fanning, our third co-founder, most of the things he's built have been on the web. Um, so none of us really knew what we were doing with mobile at all. And so a lot of what we did with this first version was, you know, we were getting fancy with different network models and we were creating different flows for capturing photos and adding tags to them and there were like lots of complicated steps and you know we were like we're going to put this cool tag in here that's called 'thing' and it's going to be for some future advertising customer that we don't have yet. Right. And um, we just made a lot of bad decisions and...
Did you overbake the product? Definitely. Because that was another criticism is that you leave Facebook, it's a huge announcement, we don't hear from you for a long time.
Yeah. Well, I think we overthought a lot of things and we wanted to build this company that was entirely focused on mobile and um, we just like made a lot of sort of mistakes in terms of how we structured that first product and um, you know, it certainly wasn't as successful as we wanted it to be. You know, like I went out to New York and I talked to like all the reporters and we launched it in a very big way and um, it probably was a little bit ahead of itself.
How much do you think... I mean when you started working on this, you didn't plan on Instagram, right? I mean, that was one of the things with Palm when they were trying to, you know, revamp and do the Pre. It's like they thought it would be an iPhone pre-world and they didn't count on Android coming out as strongly as it did. Um, when you guys came out, Instagram was so strong. You were always sort of compared to them even though you were really trying to do something different. How did that play a role?
Yeah, I mean, we launched within weeks of each other. Um, and actually nobody remembers this, but there were actually a lot of other players in the market doing photo related things back then. I think that a lot of people saw this opportunity for creating photo-based social applications because there just weren't any, right? Like people were keeping all the photos on their phone. Um, and so there were other players. I think there was one called Treehouse for a while. Um, and there was PicPlease. There were a bunch of people sort of in the photo space initially and Instagram definitely took off and so yeah, it's interesting because we weren't ever really focused on photos, we were more focused on the network. Um, but yeah, I guess the answer to your question is yes, we were getting compared, still do, but um, you know, they're very different experiences. Um, and uh...
I actually interviewed Kevin at the BI conference yesterday and he said the second we start being called just a photo app, we've lost. So, it seems like both of you are companies everyone wants to call photo apps, but neither of you want to be photo apps.
Yeah, I think we both started there because at that moment in time, you know, the year before 2010, checking in was really popular on mobile. And then last year there was a lot of focus on photos. I think mostly because nobody had really done anything there. You know, back then a lot of people were talking about, oh, there needs to be a Flickr for mobile or a Facebook for mobile or um, you know, a lot of the web era companies, everyone was sort of talking about like when's the version of that going to happen for mobile? And so um, I think a lot of people thought, you know, why isn't there a Flickr for mobile? Why isn't there a Facebook for mobile? Why isn't there? And so I think that's probably why several companies were started across that sort of time period that had to do with that area.
Um, now I want to talk about your time when you decided to leave Facebook. So you and I have talked about this before and I've written about it some. Facebook had this really interesting thing happen that most big companies that are kind of the big winner of each wave don't have happen in that a lot of the early people left well before there was an IPO. I mean normally at this stage of the process with Facebook about to go public, everyone would be writing about okay the Dustin, the Dave Morin, like all these guys are going to leave and it's like you guys, a lot of you already left and a lot of that had to do with how Facebook used the secondary markets and the ability to do so. Um, so, so what was the decision for you to leave Facebook? Because a lot of people leave Google, you know, after it went public or leave Yahoo or left, you know, other companies because it was public. It was no longer as fun. It was, you know, in a different phase, but Facebook was still a startup when you left.
I mean, I guess it depends on how you classify a startup. Um, by the time I left, we had close to 2,000 employees. Um, you know, when I joined Facebook, we had around, I think, five or eight million users. Um, and when I left, I think we had 600 or 700 million.
So, it was a bigger thing. Um, so, I guess I don't know. There's two questions there, I guess. So, why is there a question of like why did so many people leave early or you want to hear my sort of...
Yeah, really more your story.
Yeah. Um, I mean, I'm assuming a lot of people left because of the difference in liquidity. Facebook essentially had its liquidity event before going public. Well, I should I guess answer that first. I think actually a lot of people left because... not because of that necessarily, but because Facebook for some reason... I think it might have been because social networks didn't exist before Facebook really. Um, a lot of people... we ended up with this high concentration of very entrepreneurially minded people in one place working on the same idea at the same time which I sort of look back on now even trying to build a company and say to myself like how is it even possible to replicate getting that many people that are sort of entrepreneurial by default to work on the same project at the same time.
And um, I used to look around and just sort of think how lucky I was to be, you know, working with these people who I really looked at thinking like, man, they could be running their own company, right? And um, and so you sort of saw this happen where it was, you know, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever went to start their thing and Dustin Moskovitz went and started his thing and um, Ruchi and Aditya just, you know, they were starting their thing and now they're over at Dropbox. Like this whole set of people that were there very early on are all sort of very entrepreneurially minded and so um, I think that everyone's kind of default is to make things. Right, once a company gets to a certain scale, you know, there's a lot of ideas that have already been made and they need to be scaled. So I sort of got to work on Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect and you know, when they started there was nobody using them and by the time I left, you know, there were millions of developers using both of them and big organizations and all this stuff. And so organizations change. You know, when I left, actually Mark said something to me that I thought was really great. You know, anytime you're leaving a job, it's pretty nerve-wracking experience. And Mark just said to me, you know, I think people coming in and out of businesses when they sort of are most interested in that phase. I was like, that's a pretty interesting way to think about it. You know, like people aren't going to always be there. They're going to be interested for some period and maybe they'll come back. Like Facebook's actually seen a lot of people go back. So, you know, Aaron Sittig, who was one of the key designers, if not the designer of Facebook, he left for a while and he's back. Mark Slee left for a while. He's one of the great engineers of Facebook and...
People may be acquired back in.
Yeah. And there's different things going on where people go in and out. And so I always appreciated Mark's sort of perspective on that. So I guess that's sort of the first half. The second half is for me, um, I had this opportunity to work on these two projects that were really neat and very impactful and I got this opportunity to work with like a lot of entrepreneurs. So that was guys like, you know, Mark Pincus who, you know, I met with him when... he still gives me grief for this to this day. I had coffee with him when he was starting Zynga and the only employee was his dog, right? And he asked me what he should work on and he said, 'Should I work on poker or education?' And I said, 'Well, education, of course.' You know, you're going to end up getting sued by the government if you do poker.
Oh, so it wasn't for any lofty reason of educating children. It was just...
No, I mean I think he actually was legitimately interested in maybe disrupting education. But um, it frankly I think if you had done that then it probably would have been too early like this is the year to start doing education stuff. Um, so we made the right choice right and sort of sparked this social games revolution which has been really interesting but um, so I got to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of venture capitalists and you know, I was always sort of an entrepreneur myself. Um, and uh, the entrepreneurial bug was starting to itch pretty strongly by the time I left. Um, and I also was really interested in... this... I actually, in December of 2009 I decided to leave and I was actually at a wedding in India for Ruchi who's one of the...
Yeah. Like half of Facebook went to India.
Yeah, we were all in India. It was pretty weird. And um...
I've never been to India. It's an amazing place. Did anyone like get drunk and get piercings or henna tattoos?
No. Well, there were henna tattoos, but um...
There was a lot of dancing and beaches and India's, if anybody's been there, it's a very... for an American, it's a very disruptive... you know, it really shifts your perspective, right?
I spent six weeks in India in one stint, my last book, and the advice that I got was you have to surrender to India. You're in India. You can't try to have India on your terms as an American.
Yeah, I definitely showed up in India and got in a cab and I'm like, 'Yeah, take me to the hotel.' I was like, 'Okay, it'll be 3 hours.'
My favorite India story was New Delhi, middle of the city on the freeway, rush hour. We're like in insane traffic even by India standards. And we were just like... I mean we were so slow we might as well have been going backwards and we were like this is ridiculous.
Elephant in the fast lane.
No, dead serious. I was like, 'This is like a place a child has dreamt of but with more trash.'
Yeah. Like, have you guys seen... I love India, but it was... Is it the Bourne Identity or it's one of the Bourne movies where they're like doing a car chase through Goa, India?
Supremacy. And um, I'm in this cab and I'm, you know, traveling for 30 hours and I'm like falling asleep. You know, you know when you're like falling asleep and you wake up for a moment, you look around and there's like elephants on the road and then like you're in this crazy market and there's people like surrounding the car and I would fall asleep and like we'd almost like be on the left side of the road and then the right side of the road and I have this like... it's like a movie dream in my head of this memory. But um, anyway so that's a long story to tell you the story that yeah I was in India and somebody sent me Mary Meeker's internet report from that fall, which I think it just happened like in December or something at probably at John Battelle's conference, right? And there was a slide in that deck that I still have. It's like printed out on my wall. And it showed the desktop internet sort of flattening out and not growing anymore and the mobile internet sort of crossing over and becoming dominant in 2013.
And I'd been working on Facebook Platform for about three or four years and sort of seen that it takes about two to three years for a company to really go from nothing to being really influential and sort of a competitor in the space. And so I sort of thought to myself, okay, it's going to take three years to build a company, not just a product, but a company that can sort of be a mobile company, right? And like I was sort of hoping that somewhere along the way the market would shift and become more mobile focused then. And so we actually set out to build this company and decided not to make a website and to be entirely focused on mobile, which at the time people were like, 'You're a ball... yeah, you're kind of crazy.' And honestly, I made that decision based on that one slide. And just having... I kind of thought from having the last... one of the last products that I got to launch at Facebook was Facebook Connect for iPhone and there was a lot of activity and people were really excited about it and there were starting to be games where you could find your friends and stuff and you know, this all sounds normal now but it was at the time kind of new. And so I just thought, you know, it would be really interesting if there was a company just fully specialized in those small interfaces. Right. And so that's what we tried to do and back to the previous story, the first shot kind of missed. So that's most of the process but you know, to me it was a lot about just the entrepreneurial bug. Like, you know, I felt like I'd had the opportunity to do some really neat things and help a lot of people in the world through Facebook and um, I just felt like now's the time.
Did you agonize about it or you just...
Yeah. Oh yeah. For probably a year. Yeah.
A year. So what was the thing that finally convinced you? That slide or something else?
Yeah, I think that's... um, yeah, India. Um...
You didn't have a fight with someone?
I got engaged right around then too. Um, after the India trip, um, I don't know, you know, when you're going through any of these decisions, like any of you that have been through like one of those hard life decisions, right? It like takes actually a really long time to kind of crunch through it, right? And I had been thinking about it for a really long time and I always knew that that's kind of what I wanted to do. Um, but you know, you're never sure like is it now the time? Do I have, you know, you have these like deep insecurities like do I have what it takes to go and like build a company and sort of do these things? And so...
Well, and I think that insecurity is hard when you're coming from a company that has a really powerful founder. That was certainly hard for me with coming from TechCrunch and I would imagine on a much, much bigger scale.
Yeah. And you know, the thing about Facebook is that it's so... it grows so well and it's so big and there's so many things that contribute to that. There's the fact that it's a huge idea. There's all these different people that have built different products and you know, people that have done marketing and partnerships and there's so many decisions that are made along the way and you know, now it's this big monolith, right? And nobody really knows what they did that made it successful, right? Like so when you're inside of one of those things you sort of are like, yeah, I got to work on this project or this one or whatever but you're never sure that like anything you did actually made the thing successful because it's kind of just a freak of nature.
Right. Well, but this is... don't you think this is why so many people always feel like they have to do it again? It's that whole 'once you're lucky, twice, you're good' thing, which is what I called my first book because everyone I talked to had that anxiety of, well, if I could reproduce it again, then it's me and it's not the timing and it's not this. But then if you don't, well then was it you that you failed? I mean to me this is the whole magic of Silicon Valley.
Certainly. Yeah. I mean the answer is yes. Right. And I mean I think it manifests... when I was at Apple, actually the day I left Apple, Steve Jobs was giving a speech and he like was doing a town hall or whatever and he said something that stuck with me for like a really long time. It's like if you do something and it turns out pretty good, don't dwell on it too long. Just move on and do the next thing. Which I always... that's sort of become like a quote to live by. Um, and so you know, yeah, like so there were sort of dual things going on like yeah, there's like this great insecurity being part of Facebook like, you know, is it possible to go do something even remotely as big as this? Um, and then there's this other thing which is like, well, that was good and you could sort of like probably dwell on that for like your whole life, right? But you know, why not just keep making? Right, like the big... for me, the entrepreneurial process is like a lot about just... it's a process, right? And you have to stay in it and keep trying, right? And um, yeah, maybe you fail, right? And I think actually a lot of people that left Facebook, whether it was, you know, Chris Hughes and Unu or even Quora, right? Like a lot of people go, you go through this great expectations wall, right, where people expect Facebook overnight and forget that, you know, even Facebook only had a million users the first year, right?
Right. Um, so I went back and read your blog post about when you left and you said you opened it by saying following your dreams is perhaps the most important thing to do in life. Was your dream Path or was your dream starting a company both? And it wound up being Path?
I think both. I've always loved... since, you know, I was in college I was really... I built a lot of web software. I had a little consulting company while I was in college. I built websites. I built... I was in a gaming clan, you know, I built websites for everything. Um, total dork. I played a lot of Unreal Tournament. Um, and uh, and I really liked web publishing. I was the editor of my school newspaper when I was in high school.
I was, too. Yeah, you've done better with it than I have.
So, I always liked laying out news. I don't know about that. Um...
Let's compare bank accounts in a couple months.
It's not about the bank account, Sarah. Yeah.
I'm sorry. That's my only IPO joke I'll make.
All right. And so I've always liked like laying out things and publishing and sort of writing and so I back in college I used to obsess over this idea of blogs and like how crazy this is and you know, sort of how all this thing was going. I got a Blogger account, like first Blogger account, you know, and um, so I've always kind of been interested in this. Um, and you know, Facebook was sort of like... and Apple was like the company that was sort of making technologies which help people create things and then Facebook was sort of this new way of thinking about blogging in my mind. Like if you remember the...
It was... I mean the original News Feed was really modeled off the AP. I mean this goes back to Mark's relationship with Washington Post and all that.
Exactly. And like, you know, Facebook to me, you know, not everyone in the world was blogging same as like not everyone uses Twitter now, right? Like people who are telling stories, building brands used blogs, right? And I always thought Facebook was like this interesting way to get everyone else to blog, right? Because you would make this profile and then you'd change stuff on your profile and that would create stories and so it was like... it was like a way for the whole world to blog. And so I've always kind of been interested in this idea of sharing and um, you know, internet companies, right? So whether or not Path was like this long-term vision I guess over, you know, 10 years or something probably not, but you know, starting a great internet company was always kind of my goal.
I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs the path makes more sense when they look back on it.
Yeah. I couldn't have told you like five years ago that this is where I'd be. But it's like looking back it's kind of brick by brick.
Yeah, totally. I mean I think it's true, right? Like when you're starting a company, you sort of look around and you say, 'Okay, like clearly mobile phone... like in my case it was like okay clearly mobile phones are... the iPhone seems interesting right now.' Um, social networks have evolved about five years, probably a lot more to go there. Um, there'll be... you know, there's a lot of sensors on the iPhone that weren't there before. Um, you kind of just look at... it's like any type... like if you're building a bench, right? Or like if you're making anything, if you're crafting anything, you sort of look around at what materials are available and then you're like, 'Okay, I'm going to take some of that wood and some of this wood, these nails or whatever, right? You're going to build this chair, right?' And you can sort of do that based on the materials that have been built before and then, you know, you move on. And so that's really... if you're going to build an internet company just like when Apple started and you know, Steve and Steve were like let's build computers, right? They sort of looked around and put all the components together in the best way that they could, right? And so to me like starting Path was like I want to build an internet company so like let's find all the pieces that make sense for today and like build that.
Did you have a relationship with Steve Jobs?
Um, limited, not, you know, not a very personal one at all. I've like, you know, I met him a few times working at Apple, when we were at Facebook we did a lot of business with Apple and Steve, um, but you know, it wasn't a super personal relationship.
I mean you mentioned what he said at the all hands. Um, anything else that you learned from him or ways that he impacted your career?
Um, I'm now getting bummed that he died. Um, it... I think that one quote that I said was pretty powerful just because the thing about Apple, right, is that if you think about the iPhone, right? Um, the iPod was like this huge thing, right? When I joined Apple, we couldn't sell iPods to anyone, which is funny. Um, and then the iPod became this massive worldwide phenomenon. And then Apple basically is okay with saying okay we're done with that, like shoot it and then, you know, let's go build the iPhone, right? And that's...
Each of their products could have been a huge public company in and of itself.
Yeah. And then they're okay with saying okay that was of its time. Put it on the shelf and let's move on. Right. And I think that that's like incredibly hard. Right? Whether you're a designer, an engineer, an entrepreneur, like you fall in love with ideas, right? And you want to like keep going and sometimes some of them don't work, right? Or sometimes they've had their run and sometimes you need to cannibalize yourself in order...
You have to kill it before the market...
The innovator's dilemma, right? And I always really respected Apple and Steve... Apple still this day for the ability to kind of just move on and do the next thing because it's often really hard to do. Um, I guess the other thing about Apple that I always appreciated was this idea that designers and engineers and marketers... that it kind of takes all people to make something successful. Like I always really appreciated... I was in marketing roles mostly at Apple and I would walk into a meeting and it would be engineering and design and executives and marketing people and there was mutual respect amongst all camps, right? Whereas you go to some companies you see it far lopsided one way or the other.
Do you think you guys had that at Facebook? It's a very engineering...
Pretty engineering driven. Uh, design was also... I wouldn't say... I would say Facebook's more engineering driven, slightly design driven. Um, and then there are no marketers, right? Um, and so Apple I always really appreciated that kind of mutual respect amongst all the different camps, you know, and I think that that drives this like, you know, because everyone knows that without the brand and without the design and without the great engineering, we couldn't be this, right? And I think that that's pretty great. Um, and then I guess the other thing that is pretty great about Apple is this idea of focus. Um, putting more wood behind less arrows, right? Like the idea that when you launch a product... like I remember hearing... I got there right after the first iMac and I remember hearing this story of how when they launched the first iMac there was only one and there was like this huge debate internally about like we should launch three and like we've always done it that way and Steve basically said no, you know, we're only launching one and the reason we're doing that is because we want the whole world to have the same experience first, right? And then after that, we'll launch five colors and then we'll put a new OS in it and all this stuff. And so it's funny you see this play out over time, right? Like when the iPhone launched for like the first year, everyone's like, why isn't there a platform? Why isn't it, you know, have all these features? Why is it only one color? And it's a classic Apple strategy to say, there's only one version of this. Here's all the features. And for a year everyone in the world has the same experience and then we'll make it a platform and then we'll make it five colors, right? And so this idea of sort of focusing on a singular product and telling the story with a good name and getting it out there, um, I think that that's something it's like really hard to do, right? It's like really hard to focus in on like one thing, one feature list, one message, one name. Um, and uh, because you have to make a lot of choices and so I always kind of appreciated that.
Extreme simplicity. You have to be right.
Yeah. And so, but like, you know, Apple failed too, right? Like there's this...
There's stories of like the Cube and you know, there's a lot of little things all along the way where they just like badly missed, right?
Yeah. I mean, um, Apple original Apple TV really didn't...
Do that well. You know, there's lots of stories of it not working out. But even the Mac, and people actually had forgotten this story until the biography came out, you know, the Mac was actually a pretty dismal failure for like the first year or two.
And in fact, the reason, one of the reasons Steve was ousted entirely in the end was because of the Mac's failure.
And you know, we look around today, we're like, what? The Mac failed? Like that's crazy, right? And so I think that's, and I guess that also tells another story which is that Apple knows and part of the Apple culture is that great things take time. You can't make magic happen in a week, right? And it's interesting if you go and read Steve Jobs' biography, you see these grand periods of time in between the beginning of a project and the end of a project and like we're talking like five years sometimes. And so it's like a really interesting, I think that, you know, good things take time, they take good process, they take, you know, a focus. You know, Apple never interacts with the market, like it's really interesting, right? Like they don't, you don't see them at conferences, right? And the reason why is because they stay in the house and they try to crunch through problems because, you know, true simplicity takes a lot of time and a lot of focus.
I want to talk about the Google offer and I'm hoping you're actually going to talk about it. I know I went back and read like so much stuff that has been written about you and I know it disrupted last year. Jason tried and tried and you didn't say anything, but we're sort of in Mike's living room here, so it's all friends. As we reported, I'm going to tell you what I've heard and you can tell me which is accurate or you can tell us.
Neither confirm nor deny anything about something.
You got to say something. Come on. It was years ago at this point. I know you can't say it at the time, but it was...
125 million. And there was something that Jason said on stage at Disrupt which was what the reason you didn't want to go there was because Google had a clause they could fire you at any time. I actually don't believe that was the reason. What I heard, and I heard this from Dustin Moskovitz who was one of your investors. He said that, you know, he talked a lot about the conversations the two of you had during that period and I think the two of you went and you were like holed away in a cabin or something like that over the weekend and he said that you were really in agony about it and you had a lot of pressure from people to sell but, you know, you didn't want to do it and you didn't leave Facebook to start something and sell what, seven, nine months later.
Was it the terms? Was it that or I mean what was it?
I think that I've always wanted Path to be a long-term company and, you know, one of the things that Mark and Dustin were so good at at Facebook was sort of keeping the company focused on this longer-term thing.
And I think in Silicon Valley today there's, you get a lot of pressure and Dustin actually, I think he talked about this on stage too, I think whenever he was doing that interview, just that there's a lot of short-term thinking right now where it's like, you know, build up a little company, sell it to, you know, there's like a bunch of big buyers right now, right? And that's certainly one way you can go and there's nothing wrong with it, right? Like if you want to do that, sure, go for it, right? I have no opinion against you on that. But I think that there's room in the market for true long-term innovation, right? Where you focus on an idea, a problem set, and you really try to get through it and innovate and build things like that take a while, right? And at Path, we've always wanted to do that. You know, we really wanted to, like this problem we're trying to solve of getting people connected to the right people all the time, where you feel like you can trust it, that, you know, you're connected to your family first and then your closest friends. And it's this place where when that app icon comes forward, you feel like you can trust it and the design and there's all these little things that go into this. You know, if we had sort of launched it and then we got 10,000 users and, you know, no matter who came along and said, you know, we want to buy you or you should stop, right? And, you know, then you're just sort of giving up and you're not sort of staying true to your vision, right? Like I really believe that when you start a company you generally have some kind of a vision, right? Like you see something, right? Like you wouldn't start a company if you didn't see something out there, right? And often times the process of getting to that is just kind of going through the failure and kind of living in it and trying to figure out what the lessons are and what the signals are and what are people trying to do with the product and sort of unlocking it as much as you can. And, you know, stopping super early just seems like you would have spent all this time building up a company that, you know, is, the first year, I mean, you know this, you're going through it right now. The first year of building a startup is like really hard, right?
We've been live two months and it feels like two years.
Yeah. And it's like there's little things like, you know, you have to get toilet paper for the bathroom, you know, and you have to pay people's paychecks and you have to raise money and you have to build the product and there's like all these things and you have to figure out if you're getting along with your co-founders and, you know, there's like all these things that happen in the first year which are like, you know, to sort of like get it all together and like on the path to where you can even launch a product, like that's even hard to get through, right?
A lot of startups fall...
And getting funding is hard to get.
And it's like a lot of startups fall apart before they even get there, right? And so the way I look at it is like every month you keep going, it's like the amount of time you've spent getting to that point is like what you would sacrifice if you were to quit or sell or whatever. And there's a lot of option value there, right? Like you've got an organization, you've got ideas, you've got vision, you've got people that are sort of there working with you, right? And so the opportunity to keep going I think is a hard one to get, right? Like it takes a lot of work to even get to any vantage point that you're at, right? And you can of course always look at the downside, right? Which is like, well, you know, if this, that, or that other thing happened maybe the company fails and all this stuff. But I think at the end you just have to believe in yourself and like keep going and participate in the process and, you know, I think for us, look, we've only been doing this for two years or whatever and we want to build this thing for family that everyone in the world has a family, right?
Did you just hear my baby?
Who brought a baby to this? I guess I should say at the, we were getting a lot of these emails from people.
Even when we only had those 10,000 DAU that were just saying to us over and over, I've never had a place where I can share photos of my baby every single day with my family. My family's all over the world. And, you know, my family feels more connected than it's ever felt. Like I'm back in my uncle's life again. I'm back in my sister's life again. We were hearing this from all kinds of people. And so, you know, every day and now we hear that chorus stronger and stronger, right? And so that's I guess what drives us forward.
What's your advice for entrepreneurs out there if they're, you know, lucky enough to be in a situation where someone's offering them a lot of money to sell a company, some people in their team want them to take the deal, investors may want them to take the deal. I've talked to Dustin about this. I've talked to the core guys. A lot of the early Facebook people have said that moment when Mark turned on Yahoo and going through that left a huge impact on them. You know, you've now been through that with Facebook and with your own company. So, what's your advice to someone who feels in their gut, I want to keep doing this, but everyone's telling them they're crazy?
But how do you make that argument to your investors? How do you stand strong? How do you, I mean, beyond sort of like, how do you act tactically work through that?
I think that you have to obviously, you have to look at the data. I think if you have a product that like 10,000 people in the world are using like on a daily basis, which is a lot. I've actually, I do some angel investing and I see this happen a little bit where you end up in this sort of steady state where there's actually like a big chunk of people that are using it on a daily basis. You've got something right and often times it's just too complicated. It's not simple enough. Like the idea is not pure enough yet. And so there's partly saying, well, like guys, we have something here because there's like, you know, there is a segment of people using this. I mean, clearly we need to do some stuff to figure out what it is that we need to do to like get more people. But, so I think that's part of the argument, which is if you have, if your customer service cues are saying nice things and you have a small user base and it's active on a daily basis, there's something there.
I think that, you know, I read this book, have you read this book, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman? It's on the New York Times bestseller list right now. He won the Nobel Prize in happiness economics and he talks about how the brain has two modes basically, you know, you call it the conscious or the subconscious or whatever. And that the subconscious brain actually has something like 20,000 times the computational power of your conscious brain.
