Founders should pursue what they know and are interested in rather than chasing what's hot or following crowd sentiment

1:41the end of the day like that's the boom, that's the bust. Like these things sort of happen over and over again. >> So, at the time did it feel high status to work in tech or on startups? >> Not at all. I mean, you know, it sort of lost to the sands of time, but um I was still excited about tech though. Um you know, I had done a lot of web

2:00programming and then one of my regrets actually was um I was sort of chasing what was hot instead of what was clearly the thing I knew. Mark Zuckerberg was probably doing Facemash um around then around 2003 and then Facebook didn't even exist yet um and I was getting out of web programming at exactly the wrong time. >> Because it felt like that was the smart thing to do.

2:24>> Yeah, it was smart and you know, I mean this is true now. Um you know, in in front of all these people at Startup School, uh you know, I sort of started this don't LARP >> Right. >> um meme. >> I saw that. >> Uh but I think like that's that's embedded in this idea that like you should just be earnest >> Yeah. >> and then you shouldn't follow what the

2:45crowd is saying, right? Like at that moment people said the web was dead, but that was sort of the perfect time to work on web and social and things like that. Um and you know, I didn't do it. I I ran off and said like "Oh, well, the next hot thing will be mobile." So I wanted to work at Windows Mobile, which was true, but um why I

3:06give up like the thing that could have been the next thing. >> What I love about what you're saying though is often when we hear earnest, we think naive, but actually what it sounds like you're saying is there's like earnestness is a sort of result of maturity and courage. >> Courage is actually I think the right thing. >> Yes. >> Like if you know something that's sort

3:25of if someone just like comes and contradicts you or even if like a blog post or like someone on Twitter uh contradicts you, >> Yeah. >> you're like, well, I I don't I don't agree with that because I believe my own direct experience. >> Yes. >> I know that I'm not a time traveler because if I was a time traveler, I would have I would have sent a message

3:45back to myself and said, "Just stay on working on web stuff." Like you literally have um 5 years of experience on top of everyone else. Like you could do an end run around everyone. Like you could have built like any kind of social software. >> Yes. >> But instead I was, um, you know, I was 22. So I was like being whipped around by, uh, whatever I could read in The

4:06Wall Street Journal. And, you know, I the the classic question I'm sure you get that, you know, all investors get all the time is, "What's hot and what should I work on?" >> Right. >> And that's the wrong question to ask. Like the right question is like, "What are you interested in? What do you know uniquely?" And so I was that's like, you know, one of a great many mistakes I