Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Simeon, welcome aboard to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Ori.
Speaker 1:So, first of all, you deserve a very big congratulations. You're about to become a dad for the first time.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. A little anxious, but also very excited. Everyone tells me, you can't be ready for it, so I'm just gonna embrace that and not be ready for it.
Speaker 1:You know, I was I was kind of, like, I don't know, upset or worried because I didn't feel anything towards my first son when he was born. And I was like, is this is this normal? And then there was this moment where his little hand kind of grabbed my pinky and squeezed, and that's it. It was all over. But I thought it would be, like, immediate.
Speaker 1:It wasn't immediate, like, something happened. So it's it's just such a crazy, crazy journey. So I'm really excited for you.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I have a little bit of a cheat code for this one because my sister was born when I was 12 and I remember that moment where she grabbed my finger and also where she kicked my mom's my hand when I was touching my mom's stomach. Of course, I wasn't a parent then, and I didn't have any responsibility. I just got to annoy her as the older brother. But now she can do that with me.
Speaker 1:That's quite an age difference, though. That's amazing. So that is the age difference with my wife and her. And we basically because her parents were working her ass their asses off as immigrants, we raised her younger sister. So we did get to get take quite a bit of responsibility.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:so there's a few, like, there's so many cool things that you've done. I'm so happy that you came on the show. You worked for Apple for many years. I'm gonna disappoint everyone in the audience and say we're not gonna talk about that. So, you know, sorry.
Speaker 1:Thank you. But you're welcome. Look. This show is about interesting stuff, not about what everybody else is talking about. You worked for the, state department.
Speaker 1:You that that is that is gotta be so cool. Like, who has a a career in in diplomacy? Like, how did you even get into that?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I would say out of most of the people in the Bay Area, you're probably right. I like to say that the thing let me actually take it back to this started back when I was deciding where to go to college. So two thousand and eight financial crisis, I graduated high school May 2008. And I had the opportunity to either go to UT Austin, become and study computer engineering top 10 engineering program in state, it was about $10,000 per year, for George Washington University $50,000 per year, international relations. And my I come from a family with five PhDs in science and math.
Speaker 1:You were set up for failure, dude.
Speaker 2:And my dad who's an applied mathematician said Wonderful. Simeon, I think you know what the right answer is because it's very obvious. But I'm going to let you decide on your own. And I of course decided on the engineering path not because I think my heart was in going into international relations. But the practical side of me with the financial crisis looming and not wanting to get a ton of debt was go do the engineering thing.
Speaker 2:But that was always a part of me here. And I think it's probably because I was born in Bulgaria, raised in The US and went across The Atlantic my entire childhood and including today most of my family's in Bulgaria. And so when I thought of where I wanted my career to go, I knew that I'd never be the best engineer in the world. And I knew that because the moment I would finish my engineering labs where I got good grades, I would go and go to the state capital in Downtown Austin and testify for more funding for students, right? I wouldn't go and tinker on science projects.
Speaker 2:And I realized that again, my heart wasn't in being the best engineer, but it was in kind of blending business, really cool technologies like AI and then policy. And so the State Department and the internship I had there before I got my MBA was right like smack in the middle of that, right? I did technology policy in Bulgaria where I was fluent in the language. So it was cool.
Speaker 1:So what's what's the what's the, I don't know, coolest, worst, horrific? What what is the best story you can tell from that time?
Speaker 2:Well, on the record well, let me put it this way. If this was off the record, there would be a story about something that we security detachment one night after fourth of July party, but
Speaker 1:I can't I don't wanna get you into trouble, dude. Let's not go there.
Speaker 2:Well, I wouldn't be in trouble, but maybe they would. And so instead of I'll say Well, if you
Speaker 1:get a marine into trouble, you're kind of in trouble by by proxy.
Speaker 2:Very true. Very true. I I don't want a target pinned on me. But, I would say in the last month, in the last month of my time at the embassy, the ambassador's official translator went on maternity leave. And since I was cleared on the American side and spoke fluent Bulgarian, they tapped me to be that person.
Speaker 2:And the very interesting experience I had was she had to go outside of Sofia, the capital Bulgaria, about two hours to a military base called Novoselo, because NATO Bulgaria is part of NATO along with The US, of course. There was going to be pressing cameras, as well as the President of Bulgaria, and she needed to know what was being said. Oh, wow. And so we were leaving at 6AM that morning, super early. I had to get up at four.
Speaker 2:I didn't sleep honestly, because it was I was nervous. I mean, I speak like family Bulgarian. I don't speak like politics Bulgarian. So I was like, am I gonna do a good job? And then I had to get up at four, make it to the embassy at 05:30, and then get in the car, right, this convoy to get to the military exercises.
Speaker 2:They put us up in this observation tower and it was one of the coolest things I've seen. First from the observation tower, the president arrives and of course you have the honor guard with the music and everything. And it made me feel proud because
Speaker 1:kind of
Speaker 2:both parts of my cultural identity were there Bulgaria and America. And then you see this M1 Abrams tank just kind of boom right beside the president because that The US had brought those massive tanks with us. Oh, wow. And then you had helicopters coming down because it was training exercise between the two countries, real live ammunition being fired, really loud even with headphones like the ones you're wearing. And the funny part of this was when all was said and done, it came time for the press conference.
Speaker 2:And I was dressed of course with a suit and tie. I wore glasses then. And I'm a tall guy. I'm almost six'three. And the ambassador, she's like four eleven maybe down here.
Speaker 2:And the president's security would not let me anywhere near her because she was standing next to him. And so her translator wasn't there. She was on camera. He was talking. And the subtext was the Bulgarian president was saying, we're not going to invade anybody.
Speaker 2:Just kind of something relevant you should want to know because you have American military presence there. And the screen capture of the video has me in the back being pushed back by his security. But I look like Secret Service because I'm really serious because I feel like I'm failing my job. And my glasses were transitioned so they were shaded like dark lenses. And I was like, very, very serious.
Speaker 2:And you do have one. Do you
Speaker 1:have an image of that? Like, dude, I'll put it on the on the bio. That's that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2:I do. I do. I'm using my camera or my phone for this, but I'll send
Speaker 1:it to you after. I have a
Speaker 2:a scary image of that. Yes.
Speaker 1:That is awesome. What was what happened after once everything was, you know, done? I mean, did you did you have any long term friendships or or people that you kind of still are in contact back from those days?
Speaker 2:Definitely. I will say the immediate aftermath was I didn't get to ride back to Sofia in her car because she was disappointed in me. And she had a much smoother ride in the limo than I did in the follow car. But that's neither here nor there. No, I mean it was a really foundational experience for me because up until that point I had interned at the Texas Senate as a student intern.
Speaker 2:I dabbled in some policy stuff but not actually had a role where I was in that particular case, like on the front line doing something meaningful in the policy domain. And so that really solidified for me that this is important to me, right? And I think I can have an impact here. And if I can be so bold as to say, technology is becoming ever more pervasive in our lives. And the people that are making the policy decisions largely remain the same.
Speaker 2:And I don't mean this in any negative way towards those people, that they tend to be undergrads in economics, business, literature. They go and get a law degree. And then they're applying those skills to tech policy. And I think that that doesn't help us. It also doesn't help them.
Speaker 2:They're not set up for success. So that's where I think I can, you know, uniquely lean in and do a better job.
Speaker 1:So so you you left the Department of State, and you joined the forces of evil. Not for the NBA
Speaker 2:like you have to do.
Speaker 1:The Deloitte. No. No. Them. Look.
Speaker 1:We can talk about that if an NBA is worth it. I do have an NBA. I do think it's a scam. I did pay $200,000 for my NBA, but, no, I was referring to to Deloitte. Did you did you feel like, you know, you left consulting, so I'm assuming you figured that it wasn't for you.
Speaker 1:But tell us the kind of short version of the story. What what did you gain from it, and why did you leave?
Speaker 2:Sure. So actually, chronologically, I know on LinkedIn, maybe it may come off slightly different. I was at the State Department after Deloitte. I was actually off on sabbatical from Deloitte before
Speaker 1:I went to
Speaker 2:school when I was at the State Department. But why why consulting? Why Deloitte? So at UT and every time I say that I have to do the obligatory hook them or Vivo, well, the ghost of Vivo will spite me. I wanted to stay local in Austin and the only firms that had an office in Austin were Deloitte and Accenture at the time.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to stay in tech but apply myself in a business setting, right? Business technology policy. And I was fortunate to get the job at Deloitte. And I wanted to go into consulting because I was looking for rapid experiences across many different projects, which is what they kind of sell you on in consulting. I didn't get that actually, what I got instead was one project for the two years I was there.
Speaker 2:But it was a really, really exciting project. People probably still know about Obamacare officially called the Affordable Care Act. Yeah, my team and I and we were a large team, have just one person deployed the Kentucky Affordable Care Act local system called Connect KY next, which was the most successful in the country. And regardless of what one might think about the politics of it, we were the we were the product that president Obama spoke about in his, State of the Union address. And he invited our customer, this the governor, the former governor of Kentucky, Bashirs, to the inaugural sorry, to the, State of the Union because we were the highlight product.
Speaker 2:And so as you know, for a tech project, you need it doesn't just happen in three months, right, especially for something of that size and scale. So I was proud to to build that.
Speaker 1:That that's that's quite impressive. I mean, government work, especially health care related. Right? This is not PII. This is like health care information.
Speaker 1:And then you've got the security concerns. And, I mean, this is this is and scale. Right? You're talking large scale here. It's not 500 customers.
Speaker 1:And if, you know, Twitter crashes when it gets, know, 501 customers like it basically did, it's fine. Like, no. You can't have your health care crash. This is a big deal. What did you what were your kind of key insights or learnings after that time?
Speaker 2:Well, would say one of the things I really appreciated about that time is that when when I immigrated to The US, my parents came here at $700 and B. We lived in a trailer park. And while I was a child I remember vaguely some of those things. But since then my parents went on to be academics and very much lived the American dream. Doing this project took me back to my roots because most of the people we were working with were people that didn't get health care from their company, which meant they were lower income.
Speaker 2:Many on benefits like SNAP, special assistance for needy families I think. I forget the acronyms now TANF. Sorry, that's temporary assistance for needy families. SNAP is supplemental nutritional assistance program, I believe. And these are people that are in many cases struggling financially.
Speaker 2:And this is not a project where we sat kind of in a in an ivory tower and developed it without talking to customers. No, we went out to the field and this is unique.
Speaker 1:That's not, let's say, normal. Tell us about that experience. Was it just part of the program that a voice of customer would be integrated into the program, or is this something that kind of came out of the teamwork?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think this was, in the way that Deloitte decided to implement the project in a it's a much more tech forward way than maybe a government is used to doing it. And I was an analyst eventually promoted to consultant on that project. And I was specifically responsible for interfaces. That's the technical interconnect between the federal system and the state system. So imagine and so much so much technical issues here, and I'm sure they still exist, but connecting your your platform to the Social Security Administration to 10 other agencies, each with their own interface, most of which are outdated.
Speaker 2:Another team was working on the user experience, user interface, and customer feedback. And ultimately, they would go and meet with customers for about six months before we'd launch the project and then after for future releases and then funnel their feedback. Because when you enter your SSN and it's saying you don't exist as a citizen in The United No, States
Speaker 1:no, that's a problem.
Speaker 2:That becomes my problem. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think just the gravity of the responsibility that you have, it's not just, oh, we've lost we've churned a customer. This is like, no. You're affecting somebody's life that's in need. I mean, to me, that's a whole different level.
Speaker 1:That's a mission. It's not a job. So I I appreciate that.
Speaker 2:So just real quick, I would go back to I initially was a little bitter that I got put on one project for my entire two years. But by the end of it, I really, I really felt like, again, I was one of many, but I made a real difference in people's lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I love that. I don't get to feel that every day.
Speaker 1:No. I no. I I haven't really felt that since I left the military and then worked for Celebrite. You know, I I will never forget the story about how the product that I basically invented with the other founders, you know, there's this one story from the Met Police where we basically caught a pedophile because we were able to reverse engineer a video of, you know, him in the act, which he deleted, but our our hardware was able to. So, I mean, those kind of companies that you get to work for that that you're working on a mission that's more than just dollars.
Speaker 1:And it's a whole different ballgame in my mind. So I dearly appreciate that.
Speaker 2:I resonate with that. Yes.
Speaker 1:So so we're we're going to skip Apple, but but a a company that I am really excited about, but I don't know if a lot of people know about, is Lambda. Tell us a little bit about Lambda because I think it's it's brilliant.
Speaker 2:So Lambda look. I I do briefly have to mention Apple just to give context on Lambda. I was one of the leaders responsible for AI infrastructure and platform at Apple. And in that context is when I got a Slack message from the VP of Revenue at Lambda saying, hey, you should consider Lambda for compute. And I think he probably wasn't very successful at that message with many people.
Speaker 2:But maybe I shouldn't say this. I read every LinkedIn message I get. I'm sorry if I don't respond to all of them, but I happened to respond to his. And one thing led to another. And I like to say they didn't end up selling me compute.
Speaker 2:They ended up buying me instead. And I went over to Lambda. And the pitch was and Apple, part of my responsibility was to help design the strategy for how the machine learning platform would be developed inside of the company. And Lambda had kind of fallen into this GPU cloud business, right? They were originally an ocular company then around the time of Google Glass.
Speaker 2:Then they moved into hardware, right? They made the vector machine, the desktop, the laptop. And that was largely because Stephen, one of the co founder CEOs, felt personal pain as an ML engineer for how he would get compute is so expensive. And so he built his own machines to do it and then found a business in that. And then when the order of magnitude of compute you needed scaled exponentially with LLMs, they kind of fell into the cloud business, similar to how CoreWeave started as a crypto miner and then fell into the cloud business.
Speaker 2:And they had been doing the cloud for about a year and a half, two years when I kind of we kind of connected paths. And what I told Stephen was I think that if you only try to go wide on scale and deploy GPUs, that's playing defense. You have to do that regardless. You also have to vertically integrate and play offense. Otherwise, what's your moat?
Speaker 2:What's your differentiation? And so I joined
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a very dangerous discussion you're going down because I have a great passion for strategy, and I see so many companies doing it wrong or giving away the the farm. So we we could go into strategy. That would be a fun fun discussion. How was that taken? So you you made that quite a deep insight on the strategic level.
Speaker 1:What was the response?
Speaker 2:So as with anything, I mean, I like to say that the only thing constant is life and life is change, right?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Change is constant. And I'll tell you the first hour of every morning and my partner sees me do this because I wake up next to him and I'm already on my phone reading the news of what happened while I was sleeping. In the last thirty minutes of my day, do the thing. And even with an hour and a half, I can't stay up to date on everything that's happening in just a single day, let alone devise a multi quarter year strategy for one of the leading Neo clouds. Right?
Speaker 2:With that said, I think he hired me, which means it was I think received well. And then I got to work directly with the board and the board was very involved with working through the strategy. And part of, of course, there was natural resistance in some pockets of the company. But overall, I joined late October twenty three. We had an off-site in January or February, I can't remember exactly when, the following year, and we rolled out that strategy to So the
Speaker 1:this is not this is okay. So there's a few things you're glancing over it as if it was easy. That is not true. So I'm gonna make a few educated guesses here. You keep me honest.
Speaker 1:There was a risk of cannibalization here or no?
Speaker 2:I don't think there was risk. No.
Speaker 1:Okay. What was this a pivot or no from the current kind of resource allocation planning?
Speaker 2:It was not a pivot, but it was a realignment of resources more. You have to take you have only a limited pot of money, right? So if most of was going over here, kind of had to cut the pie slightly Were
Speaker 1:there a bunch of people saying no, this is stupid?
Speaker 2:I wouldn't say there were a bunch of people. There were a few important people that, felt that it wasn't the right time. Not that it was the wrong strategy, but it was the wrong it wasn't the right time.
Speaker 1:Okay. Talk us through that discussion where you are trying to have a strategic negotiation about the eventual outcomes through different strategic lenses. I mean, I feel like this is a level of discussion too many CEOs don't think at, and yet you have a beautiful example of it. So bring us into the room. What did that look, sound, feel like?
Speaker 1:What was the moments that you and and they experienced?
Speaker 2:And of course, as you might appreciate, I I have to gloss over some elements, because the strategy is still being played out right now. Mhmm. For parts of our
Speaker 1:Fair Fair enough.
Speaker 2:But I can say that, look, someone much smarter than me said when there's two people in a room, there's politics, right? And now, if we have 100 people in a room, there's a lot more politics or 100,000 like at Apple. But I would say that I was the new kid on the block, right? I just joined. And I had been given, I think, a pretty sizable task in addition to other things that I was responsible for.
Speaker 2:And some people know that Lambda is the CEO is Steven and the CTO is his twin brother, Michael. And so there's a dynamic there. And then you had Mitesh who's since gone on to be CEO of Positron who was the COO, right? And so you had this leadership team of people that have been together basically in the womb all the way and then Mitesh basically was a founder of Lambda. He joined just one or two years after it started, if memory serves.
Speaker 2:So this group of three had been working for a long time together. And now you're introducing a fourth element that's bringing in some ideas that, Steven resonated with. But I had to bring the others along for the ride. And of course, I don't know everything. And we also had the board.
Speaker 2:The board chair, Robert Young Johns, is very, very esteemed and iconic. He was part of the original team at Sun Microsystems and used to lead Microsoft North America, etcetera, etcetera, right? And so it was a you had to build consensus while also pushing your point of view forward. And I think the big unlock for me at least was when we went to Vermont and rented a small house and just closed ourselves in to that house, like six of us, and hashed it out over a few days. I will just say on that trip, because I was late, my plane was you know, my plane was delayed.
Speaker 2:I think it was winter and there was snow and all of this. And then at the rental car agency, they gave me minivan with no snow tires.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:then the Airbnb was at the bottom of a dirt road that was covered in ice. I actually crashed the car into a tree stump.
Speaker 1:Yeah,
Speaker 2:and showed up to this off-site that way, which wasn't the best. Oh,
Speaker 1:my Lord, what would you like?
Speaker 2:They were very understandable. I was fine. They were very understandable. If someone hears this with car rental agency, I'm a safe driver. I've never had anything on my record.
Speaker 2:It's like a freak accident.
Speaker 1:Oh my lord. You know what? I sure. I mean, it's okay to get excited about not Tesla and Apple, but it's the companies like, you know, Lambda and I'll I'll mention Rackspace. The I get really excited about those kind of companies.
Speaker 1:I I think the stuff that happened there and the it's just such a wild journey that there's some amazing stories that, I think more people should learn about. Did this feel a little bit like a hostage negotiation or, you know, with the company being the hostage?
Speaker 2:No. That's an interesting frame of mind. I would say that there if you look at if you draw a line in the sand of and I'll use CoreWeek because the numbers are public since they're a public company now. I think two and a half years ago, the revenue was like low double digits, millions. Last year, it was low triple digit millions.
Speaker 2:Now it's like 2,000,000,000, right? So draw the line in the sand of you just went from kind of pivoted the company and you're kind of still pivoting the company from hardware manufacturing, right? Because Lambda had a manufacturing site here in San Jose, right? Into cloud. You don't necessarily have all the same kind of talent doing one that are relevant for the other.
Speaker 2:And then you've actually gotten hockey stick like growth in your first year and a half. And now you have some new person from Apple coming in saying, maybe we should do even more in this other direction, While what you're currently doing seems to be working very well, right? So I wouldn't say it was a hostage, it was definitely I do commend Stephen for giving me the opportunity to join and push this forward. And so I hope they continue to do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's brilliant. I I mean, you know, when I was when I was building Celebrite, right, and we were pivoting away from the whole phone stuff and going into forensic, we didn't know that we were building a unicorn back in the day. It was we were just doing our thing. Did did you have that sense that, you know, the stuff that they were doing or the stuff you were doing would have or could have such a huge impact? And I'm talking about any company right now, not necessarily.
Speaker 1:What's it feel like when you're kind of in this craziness?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean, I listened to one of your other podcasts where I think the opening question was, I'm going to just ask you yes or no. And the first question was, forgive me if I get it wrong, but something like
Speaker 1:I remember
Speaker 2:that is being an entrepreneur the hardest thing you've ever done? And the answer was an immediate yes, right? And my answer is also yes. And so whether it was and by the way, you can be an entrepreneur inside of a large company, right? Entrepreneurship something in and of itself.
Speaker 2:And I would say that the AI team at Apple when I joined versus when I left, went through some pretty hockey stick like growth. And it is different when in my current company, I'm co founder CEO, and, you know, decisions, a lot of decisions do end with me, right? And if someone else doesn't do their job, it kind of falls back on me, right? In a bigger company, there's systems in place for that not to not to happen, right? But yeah, I would say that the feeling that I had when I was in the Connect project right at Deloitte of actually helping people, I felt that at Lambda in part because Lambda gets to work
Speaker 1:on the actual physical stuff, right?
Speaker 2:You go into a data center and you touch the thing, right? And your end customers, ultimately if we think of the AI stack, you may be slightly removed from your grandmother who might use ChatGPT. But without you, that wouldn't be possible. So I started to feel a similar sense.
Speaker 1:I love that. It's I've said this many times, you know, electing to be an entrepreneur, at least from my experience, is electing to have a mental illness. And specifically, it's bipolar because, you know, one day you're on the top of the world and and the next, you know, the the the sky is falling and chicken little is all around. But sometimes it happens in the same day. Same day.
Speaker 1:You got it. Sometimes it's in the same day, sometimes the same hour. I remember, you know, from my own stories, I was I I actually got rejected from Techstars. And then, you know, I was like, I can't believe it. I was kind of mopey.
Speaker 1:And then, like, a company dropped out last minute, and it turns out I was second in line. So, you know, 11:11PM at night, Lila Partridge calls me up, the managing director, and she's like, alright. We're starting next week. You want to get in? And I'm watching TV with my wife, and I'm like,
Speaker 2:who is this?
Speaker 1:Lila. And I'm like, Lila who? Because I was so out of it. She's like, Lila Partridge, managing director, Techstars. And I was like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is just like so it's, you know, it's these you know, that same day I was like, you know, fuck. Like, there's so many things were falling apart. And then just a couple hours later, like, the whole world changed for us. It was just crazy. So I deeply empathize with that, you know, journey.
Speaker 1:Would you regret becoming an entrepreneur, at any stage or are you still still on the high?
Speaker 2:No, but I would say so. Something that I feel deep in my in my core is, the earlier you're exposed to something you're not that's not considered normal for you, the more normalized it becomes. And what do I mean by that? My grandfather started the first Bulgarian airline in Bulgaria after the fall of communism. He was like an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:Oh, you should. But his partners cheated him and he ended up with almost nothing. Right? But a lot of battle scars and stories. My aunt, his youngest daughter, my mom's the middle child sorry, his daughter, my aunt.
Speaker 2:I saw her start and fail multiple businesses like a child like selling children's toys out of the garage basement of the apartment. Then she found her knack and is the most successful travel agency in Bulgaria, for example, right? I saw that but I saw it from a distance because I lived in The US. I remember going to UT and again, I did student government, I did residence hall stuff. And I remember within the first two weeks I run into this other freshman that started his first business when he was like 12.
Speaker 2:It's still happening now when he was 18. He's making a few $100,000 a year. I'm like, I'm barely able to pay for college. And you're making a few $100,000 a year. And I said, oh, I can't do that.
Speaker 2:Like, don't know where to start. I can't do that. And then I went to Japan after business school, right? I'm jumping ahead. But I went to Japan for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 2:And that exposure to hey, I could succeed in this entirely foreign country where I don't speak the language fluently. I was like, Okay, well, why don't I join a startup? And I joined a startup. And it went well. And I'm like, Okay, well, why don't I do one myself?
Speaker 2:And then now I'm on my third one, right? And it's I guess that's successive exposure or opening the aperture that Yeah. That and I wish I had gotten that earlier.
Speaker 1:I I don't know. I don't know if I would wish that upon you. I sold my first company when I was 15. So I had this I had this, you know, perception that, you know, building and selling companies is easy. It's not.
Speaker 1:So I, the problem is after that, I had yet another exit right after that. So I was I was sure. And, you know, and then I got slapped in the face quite a few times. So, you know, I think coming into it with a healthy, you know, perception of the good, the bad and the ugly is is important and valuable. I'll tell you what was hard for me.
Speaker 1:Right? If you, you know, this this thing, right, that we say, it took me ten years to become an overnight success. In those ten years leading up, you're a failure. You're a failure every day. And, you know, if you fail with one of your companies, you shut it down, you're a failure to the outside, to yourself, you know, and when you have that coveted exit, you know, you're a success for whatever twenty four hours or or until you start the next thing.
Speaker 1:It was hard for me to kind of wrap my head around that that, no, I don't need to fail about I don't need to fear or feel bad about the failures, and I don't need to give a shit about what other people feel. But it took me a while to get to that stage. And I think the other thing that was incredibly difficult, and keep me honest here because any entrepreneur that didn't have a bunch of failures is basically lying because everybody has had a bunch of failures. And the other thing that was that was difficult is to to figure out when something is a bad idea and to either not start it or kill it fast. That was a that was a hard learning as well.
Speaker 2:If I can, I just want to hit on three things? You said once you exit your success for twenty four hours, I would say people still judge you based on the company even if you no longer run it. If you start it, they still judge you based on how it's doing today. And we can look at Uber as an example. We can look at WeWork as an example, etcetera.
Speaker 2:Second thing maybe to say is when I when I think about failure, the first company I started, which was in Japan, it was the first AI AI research lab in Japan. So think of an AI but in Japan, I wouldn't say it fully failed, but it failed to meet my expectations. And I'm not there anymore, in part because COVID locked me on this side of the border on one week when I was in in The US 03/15/2020. And kind of COVID shut the borders down, right. And so absolutely everyone's gone through failures.
Speaker 2:I went through failures at Lambda, big ones. I won't talk about them here just for time. And then maybe on the last point, because of what you said, I resonate so much with that because I intentionally didn't want to raise more money, than I needed to ship the product. And for my current company, we don't really share how much we raised in part because in AI, there's this measuring contest. It seems like you didn't raise triple digit millions with no product.
Speaker 2:A silicon value
Speaker 1:thing, though. It's not.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah, but but this is where majority of AI stuff is happening. Whereas my approach is to run a lean startup, right? And I raised three times more than I think it would take me to launch the product in six months. And so we launched the product, you know, four months ago, and we still have runway for twelve to eighteen months, as opposed to having runway for twenty months, or two years or sorry, or five years.
Speaker 2:I I just I think, overraising is is unnecessary.
Speaker 1:Oh, man. We we won't get too financially technical on the show, but I'll just mention the the fundamental truth about overraising. When the amount of money that you raise is in essence the size of the expectation that you have put on the table, that's what it is. Right? And if your expectations are massive, then you need to hit massive expectations so that that is incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 1:And I'm not even going to talk about, you know, dilution and how VCs work and all that crap.
Speaker 2:There was one last thing I forgot to mention because, you know, startups in stress, I would say we hit on it a bit, know, I'm gonna have twins later this year. And I would say having a roof to put them under, right, which is not necessarily what my parents had when they came here, right? They found a trailer and were living dollar to dollar. But having been at a large tech company and gotten a little bit of a cushion, not a huge cushion, a little bit of a cushion does make me able to take more risk, and I recognize that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the the traditional thing is like, oh, when you're 18, you have no risk. So that's the good time. And then the other one is like when you're 50 and you're all set and like, there's no risk. Right?
Speaker 1:Your mortgage is paid off. The kids are whatever out. So, so those are the traditional ones, for that reason. Exactly. Right?
Speaker 1:It's all about the risk. Okay. So again, congratulations. There is never a birth that hasn't doesn't have a scare associated to it like it's it's bananas. My son had a big head.
Speaker 1:The last one, we I have three. He had a big head, so it was like, oh, this must be some terrible disease. So so I'll I'll say
Speaker 2:take a take
Speaker 1:a deep breath. Everything's gonna be okay. So that's the first thing I'll tell you. This this last question, is personal, and that's why I brought up the kids and the family first. If you had to go back to any age, usually and this is the only scripted question that we have on the show, but I'll make it any age.
Speaker 1:Usually, ask, hey. You go back to 20, you know, Simeon. What would you tell him? I wanna ask a different question. If you had to go to any one of your biggest failures of your of your roughest points in life, and as entrepreneurs we we we get to deal with with some painful stuff, What was that point and what would you tell yourself?
Speaker 2:So I would say that, the roughest point in life as an entrepreneur or in life in general.
Speaker 1:Any point in your life that you want to choose the pick the most painful point that you can recall.
Speaker 2:Well, most painful point was around the time when my parents divorced, I was eight, my parents divorced, I was assaulted and a few other things happened all within the span of the year. And I went into a deep depression that I basically blame myself for everything and I told it wasn't until so from '8 to '26, it wasn't until '26 that I came out the other side of that and to be candid, it's something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. But the amount of impact it has on me diminishes every day in part because I was finally able to accept that it wasn't my fault and that I should love who I am. And if I could go back and tell my eight year old self it would be something similar to the lines of what you just told me around fatherhood. It's going to be Okay.
Speaker 2:Love yourself and be proud of who you are, not who what you think other people think of you because of these things that were not in your control that happened. And so maybe that's deeper than we wanted to go. But I want to be honest, right? And that was the darkest part of my life. And I haven't had a chance to mention my partner apart from saying I sleep next to them.
Speaker 2:But he was a huge part of why I was able to come out of that in a positive way at 26. And I want to recognize that the highs and lows that we talk about entrepreneurs facing their families face those with them too.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. One Oh, man, there's there. Just This is dangerous because we have no time. The next guest is in the waiting room. They're early, so they're not they're not coming in.
Speaker 1:But, the problem with that statement is that it opens such a can of worms that we need to dive into. So I'll I'll I'll make I'll give you an invite to come back to the show sometime soon.
Speaker 2:Come oh, come back. Happy to. Simeon. Ari, thank you for the opportunity. This was fun.
Speaker 2:As you said, it would
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I have yet to disappoint. It might happen one day, but I've yet to disappoint. Simeon, thank you so much for joining the show today. It's been an absolute delight.
Speaker 1:We didn't even get to talk about what you're doing today, which I think is equally exciting. So we'll have you back, and we'll talk more.
Speaker 2:Well, all I'll say is, if, what I talked about at Lambda seemed appealing, look me up, and, I'll say thank you, Ari. Really enjoyed the conversation. And, I'm maybe someday I'll join you in the three kids club, but not for
Speaker 1:This all this white hair is the last one.
Speaker 2:I already have some already.
Speaker 1:They're wild. Yeah. Alright. Wonderful evening. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.