Season 1: What We Learned

Thanks for joining us for season one of the Leap Forward Podcast. When you start a project, you never really know where it's going to lead you. And in the first season of this show, I found it really interesting to learn not just about the stories of individual startups, but also how connected they were.

And Paul, one night, we were out at dinner, and I think we were walking home, and he was like, oh, fuck it. Let's just start our own thing.

From the moment on a sidewalk that launched Y Combinator to the 15-minute interview with Paul Graham that launched Airbnb.

Two minutes into the interview, it goes off the rails. Paul Graham was like, What? You know, strangers staying in other people's houses? Like, that's crazy.

To the job at Airbnb that launched an infant formula company.

There's a lot of similarities, and my gosh, did I very much learn community at scale at Airbnb.

We also tackled some of the big questions that every founder faces. Like how to find an idea that actually matters to people.

Visions are worthless. When it's like four people in an apartment and you're trying to find product market fit, it's like the world could care less what you think about how the world should operate.

When to keep going and when to pivot. For whatever reason, we had a good team and we didn't want to die. I don't know that if you unpack most successful startups, there isn't a strain of that.

And how to reinvent a company again and again as it scales.

Yeah, like we had had basically a decade of growth. And then the pandemic starts to happen. But more than any of that, we explored how it feels to be a founder. And our business drops 80%.

Going through the intense ups and downs and often isolating experiences of building a company.

It was really scary when like the floor drops out from underneath you and you are sitting on $3 billion of other people's money that you suddenly have to give out.

Her big secret is she like you know, she's a big deal in the startup world. And like secretly, she still worries that she's a nobody and that everybody overlooks her, which at least makes her nice and modest, unlike most big deals in the venture business. But it's not really accurate, is it?

We'll be going on a short break for the summer, but we have more exciting episodes queued up for the fall. Here's a sneak peek of some of what we have in store for season two.

Our mother got a computer very early on, and she was working on this book, and this book had been years in the making, and then David is, you know, messing around with computers. At some point, um, he manages to wipe the whole thing.

So I'm sitting there in the middle of the night just waiting for my mother to wake up, uh, because I was gonna have to tell her. Then I had deleted the hard drive containing her doctoral thesis, which was mostly done. And then I I had somehow figured out that the files were still there.

And somehow manages to painstakingly reconstruct the whole book. And I always remember him telling me, Ari, don't worry about breaking anything. It's software. You can do anything with software.

He just knocked on the door. And I believe he was wearing sandals, which I thought was kind of cool. Shorts that were inappropriately short. Yeah, he looked like he just walked out of the woods from somewhere. Hey, you you you need to hire me.

Sounds a little cringe, but I I heard his TED talk. Um, and so that resonated with me.

I mean, I'm in it to actually fix climate change. I know that's not very fashionable anymore. It's absolutely possible and it would create us a better world.

And that's core to what we're trying to do at Copper. Is one of the best ways to drive down the cost of electricity is to get more batteries out on the grid.

I could spend 40 hours a week with that guy's brain and just love it. It's uh it's a beautiful thing. I'm glad you came by.

See you this fall.

I'm like a glass one tenth full optimist. I'm so optimistic, I'm just I don't know. Even the bad scenarios seem kind of fine. Not fine, no, they they they're really bad, but but then we just work through them.