Julien Smith | How to Identify Opportunities for Innovation and Transformation

Srini Rao

Julien, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Julien Smith

Well, thanks for having me, dude.

Srini Rao

It is my pleasure to have you here. You're back here for a third time. I think we had you when we were called Blogcast FM. And much to your credit, I probably am a published author because you turned me on to a very simple habit that has paid off in spades in ways that I never imagined it would. So, you know, as I joke with Mars Dorian, I was like, I should have given him half of my book advance and you the other half, but I'm not gonna do that because I don't have any of it left and I wouldn't have done that anyways. So, but.

Julien Smith

Mmm.

Srini Rao

Before we get into everything that you're up to, I wanna start by asking you something that I didn't before. What did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping and influencing what you've ended up doing with your life and your career?

Julien Smith

Yeah, this is so interesting. I've recently sort of looked back into the context of where I come from. And I think probably a lot of people end up doing this, but it's like, I came from a pretty working class background. My family, my mother's parents were divorced. My father, he came, his marriage with my mom was his second marriage. And...

They were both very, very much older than me by like a huge amount. And he was an executive and career coach, which is one of the reasons that I started a coaching software company recently. And my mother was a secretary and they met, you know, working together and then they ended up getting married as a result of that. But always like, you know, I don't have any doctors in my or lawyers or accountants or any

anybody like that in my family, I would say it's, you know, we're definitely like first generation kind of successful is the way to think about it maybe.

Srini Rao

Did they give you any particular career advice in terms of direction or guidance? And then having parents who are significantly older than you, like I wonder how that influenced the kind of values that you inherited from them.

Julien Smith

Yeah, well, I will say because my dad, like my dad passed away a couple of years ago, he was 92. Okay, so and I'm 42 now. So there's a big gap there. And it means that he was much less, like he flipped out much less about parenthood because he had kids before. And so he mostly I think, whereas to my mother, I was like, you know, the little, the first child, like the little prince type of thing.

to my father was much more like, yeah, take it easy. And because he was a career coach, he very much, I mean, there's an upside and a downside to it. I believe that, I don't know if you come from a parent, a family that is, that try to drive you in a certain direction. I specifically, yeah, that's what I was gonna suggest, right? From my family, they never said, they knew, they wanted me to like, quote, find my passion.

Srini Rao

I'm Indian, of course I did.

Julien Smith

But it also means that they never really pushed me. Like I played three or something instruments when I was a kid, but if I lost interest or stopped practicing, they were just like, fine, drop it. And there's a part of me now that is like, man, I wish I had just, there is one thing, it turned out to be one of my major skillsets. Because I started playing Dungeons and Dragons so long, and I was a dungeon master, the kind of manager of the game for so long.

I became very, very good at oratory skills and really good at storytelling, right? But there was no other major thing that my parents drove me to do or become. And to a wish, to a degree, I wish I had a bit more of like a tiger mom, so to speak, right? Like someone who is just like, fuck you, you're going to work. Like that would have been, to a degree, I think.

I don't know, maybe helpful, but regardless, I got here, so I think I'm okay.

Srini Rao

Well, it's funny you say that, because my parents definitely

they'll deny that they pushed us in any path. My dad's like, oh, we told you to do whatever we wanted to do. It was like, yeah, you told us we could be any kind of doctor, lawyer, engineer we wanted to. But I will say this, like, you know, my roommate, older man, Matt was like, oh, did you get straight A's in high school? I was like, of course I got straight A's in high school, man. I'm like, at my house, that was like a non-negotiable. You got straight A's. But and it's funny because what I realize now was that even though I thought that was ridiculous and a pain in the ass in high school, my parents implicitly taught us the value of intrinsic motivation. They didn't pay us for getting good grades.

Julien Smith

Hmm.

Srini Rao

That's just what you do. And that expectation of high achievement, while it comes with certain pressures and can be pushed to a point of diminishing returns, I think to your point, there are definitely benefits to it.

Julien Smith

Hmm.

Julien Smith

Yeah, I, you know, I just, you know, you always look back, like it's funny, cause we have the deck of cards now that Helen, my fiance, got us for Christmas. And it's like question cards and we asked them over dinner. And it's like, what would you tell your person, your version of yourself from 10 years ago that you've learned? And so it's a lot of really reflective type of questions. To me, I felt that I was given very much free rein, which allowed me to be an entrepreneur and allowed me to kind of try out a bunch of things.

Srini Rao

Mm.

Julien Smith

But I do wish like there were several years when I was younger where I feel like looking back on it, I kind of wasted them. And I like, again, it turned out fine, but I have peers of mine who are very successful. A buddy of mine is the founder of Code Academy. His name is Zach Sims. We chat all the time. And he just sold his company for about 500 million bucks. And he's like 31. And I'm always like,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

Like how does that even happen? And then if you look at it at LinkedIn, I found myself looking at my friend's LinkedIn, I don't know if you've ever done that, but like I look at it and he's been doing it for 11 years. And so he started Y Combinator probably around the age of 18 or 20 or whatever. And so you just have these people that were just driven and pushed in a certain direction for their whole lives. And I just never was one of them.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

So I had another guy here, I think, if I remember his name, he wrote a book called Messy, and I can't remember his last name, his first name was Tim. But we were talking about D&D, and he was a big D&D player. And I'd ask him about misperceptions of people who play D&D. I would not have connected amazing oratory skills to somebody who played a lot of D&D, because I think typically the stereotype is, oh, these are just geeks who sit around on their computers. So explaining to me how that happens,

What misperceptions do we have and how do you develop the skill of oratory and great storytelling from something like D&D?

Julien Smith

Okay, so what happens? So I'm 10 years old and I pick up like, for some people that know the red box. The red box is like the first kind of really slick published Dungeons and Dragons box. And I mean, it's having a resurgence now hugely, right? Like all the, I look at all these podcasts, like both on Spotify and on YouTube. And it's like, this thing is sponsored by D&D Beyond. I was like, man, look how far we've come.

You know, so this is not a popular hobby when I'm 10. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, oh my God, this is so cool. And I find friends that I'm actually, friends that I still play with today. And you wouldn't, you know, it's so interesting. It's like, you might be thinking of certain things that your kid does.

And you think of them as being, let's say, wasted time. So I think that my parents probably saw it as wasted time, if I think on it now. But it taught me an enormous amount about improvisation, because you bring a group of your peers that you're ostensibly like trying to show a good time and impress, and you bring them in a room, and for five hours or whatever, they each, I'm sure, I think most people listening to this probably know how it works,

player plays a single character and then you that quote dungeon master as they say ends up playing literally the rest of the world. So you literally control everything whether a cup falls whether someone attacks whether you what the weather is like you control everything and so the amount of pressure that you put on yourself while doing this

is a crazy amount of pressure and you have to improvise what happens live. And these sessions are not like, they don't last like a minute. They last, like I said, like five hours. And so I think that it teaches you an enormous amount. I actually know a few other successful startup CEOs that are, that have been running D&D games forever. The one who comes to mind right now is one of my investors actually, Rahul Vora.

Julien Smith

who started a company superhuman. And yes, it's just like these people that are, they nonstop are just like imagining, inventing, almost like creating their own world. And so if you put them in front of a room, they just have a natural ability maybe, or at least I learned a natural ability to be able to just speak about any subject.

Srini Rao

Yep, I use superhuman.

Julien Smith

to talk on the fly, to randomly be able to, you know, invent answers to things that you may never have thought of before, just because like every weekend you did this basically nonstop.

Srini Rao

But it makes me think of something Robert Green said when we were here talking about mastery. He said, you know, there's no experience in your life that should be thought of as wasted. And he said the metaphor is biodiversity. So the more species that you have in an ecosystem, the richer that ecosystem is. And that actually largely informed how I chose podcast guests from that point forward and also how I read books. And I've noticed that with a lot of my friends who are highly creative, like you look at Ryan Holiday, I always come back to his newsletter as an example of somebody who is very diverse in terms of the consumption habits.

book. Every book is drawing examples from history from sports from politics from military from philosophy. It's kind of amazing that he, you know, mixes all these diverse inputs. Of course, he's a Robert Green protege. So that's not surprising.

Julien Smith

Yeah, and as I think about Ryan, if I remember correctly, he's constantly reading, constantly trying to absorb information. He's actually like very naturally interested in history and in examples of like leadership or example of whether stoicism or not. And so like, there's a kind of, I don't know, I've come back to this view that, because

I was in before my previous company that I ran, which I ran for quite some time, raised a whole bunch of money for and ran to about 150 or something employees called breather, which I think probably some people have listened to have heard about. There's a fractional real estate technology startup that I started when I was about 33 or something. When I was looking and saying, okay, well, what am I going to do now that I've finished working on this company? We'd hired an outside CEO, blah, blah.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julien Smith

I was like, well, turns out you have to work on things and it takes a really long time to have an impact. When you're young, you really believe it's going to take two years or three years to do something. In actuality, to have a meaningful impact, but you do think that, right? It's crazy, but you think it. To have a meaningful impact, going back to my dude, Zach Sims, he'd been running his company for 11 years before he finally had an outcome, like a liquidity outcome to sell his company for himself.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julien Smith

But the impact that he had, the primary impact was actually at the tail end of those 11 years. Like it wasn't in year one or year two or year three, the majority of the impact around year six, seven, eight, nine, 10. So in my mind, I think, okay, well, what do I care about that I'm gonna care about for a good, at least five or 10 years? And there were actually only a few things that I could come up with. And one of them was games, and another one was personal development, and which is how we ended up coming up with working on a coaching business.

And so, and that's turned out well, like we have, you know, Tony Robbins that invested in all these things. So now it's like it's developed its own momentum. But, but that's how I came to these decisions. I thought, well, the things that I care about when I was 10 and that I still care about now that I'm 40, I'm like, this is like inevitably those things will continue. Whereas what are the things that I cared about at 20, but stopped caring about at 30? Well.

Like there's probably a whole bunch of those, but I'm going to guess that there's very few through lines throughout your entire life that lasts for an enormous, just a huge arc of time. And those are probably the things you should be focusing on.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Well, let's actually go back to the beginning, because I mean, I found out about you and connected with you initially because you were a writer blogger who had this wildly popular blog on the Internet. And so I wonder, you know, at what point do you decide that, OK, this part of my career is done? Because I remember you wrote two books, you did, you know, the I think three, actually, if I remember correctly. And then I think the last thing you did was flinch with Seth Godin. But there are two things. I want to bring back a clip from our previous conversation.

Julien Smith

Hmm

Julien Smith

Yeah.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

And then, you know, talk to you about how you think about when you're done with some things. Take a listen.

Julien Smith

Hmm.

Srini Rao

So, you know, I've probably quoted that a thousand times, used it in presentations, used it to inform decisions, but, you know, so I wanna talk about first, when you decide that you're done with something, and then let's get into that whole idea of looking at trends.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, first of all, it's super interesting to listen to myself again from that viewpoint. And I think it's amazing that you're bringing it here. So there is, I view my, I don't know, like I was very informed by this comic. It's called like Saturday morning breakfast cereal, maybe is what it's called. And in, you know how comics like randomly, they'll have like funny things. I'm talking about a web comic.

And they have funny things, but then every little while they'll come out with something like very true. And I actually, I grew up on comics like Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County and like a bunch of other comics from back in the day when you used to open your newspaper and there would be a whole page, right? Maybe there still is, I don't know. And this one was that you can have, you tend to have a career every seven years.

And I thought about this many times and this idea of you can. So first of all, that gives you like this, this really good perspective on your life, which is that you actually have a shot at doing many, many different things. They do. It, it, it follows my view of that 10 year, in this case, I'm saying seven year arc. It gives you a shot at many different things that you find interesting. Uh, at the time at which I had started breather.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julien Smith

I felt as if I had written probably like the best things that I would have ever written and I was starting to feel like writing is more of a marketing and dollar collection exercise than a value generation exercise. And so that actually turned out not to be true because very shortly thereafter someone used a blog post of mine and turned it into a very successful blog.

Srini Rao

Yeah, so I hear.

Julien Smith

which we can, we don't, we don't have to get into that, but it turns out that wasn't quite right. But it was in my mind, I was like, I was like, well, okay. So probably the majority of the stuff that I have until I have a major idea to contribute or a new way to contribute to an old idea, I was like, I will, I've got this idea and it's what I'm talking about in that clip, which was to create a company breather.

I ended up raising, I'd never raised venture capital before. I'd never started a company really. I'd never had an employee really. I ended up with 150 employees, 100, sorry, 250 employees, 150 million raise and literally went from zero to an unbelievable status as a startup. Like in the industry, it even shocks me. Like I was, I was raising around a financing for practice recently. And I got on the phone with a rando dude. And.

I had never heard of him before. It turns out he started a pretty successful company. And he said, you started Breather? I was like, yeah. And he goes, I'm in for two million. That was the whole discussion, just like that. And so it is remarkable to me this idea of how much of an impact you can have in a bunch of different places. But I really felt at the time that I was like, well, okay, probably like maybe there's another book.

that I can do or whatever, but it felt much less like, I really wanna contribute. Like I really wanna make things happen. And often I felt that books, it's not always true. Interviews are actually probably the purest form of contribution because it's many people talking about ideas versus one, but often it's like 201 people teaching 101 ideas to 101 people or 301 people or 401 people.

but nonetheless teaching down the stack. And I didn't like in tech, you don't really have that. In tech what happens is, it's just people are unbelievably driven and smart. And I'm sure it's true in like a lot of places, right? Probably maybe it's true in politics, like I don't know. But something unique happens in tech. And you like, I just recently hired someone on the marketing side for my company, a woman, Eva, but it's true with other people that I've worked with. If she listened to this, she'll be.

Julien Smith

probably chuffed, right? Like just people that are super talented and you're like, wow, what a privilege to work with people like this. Like it is so amazing. And so the view is different because I don't know about you, like when I publish media, I was quote unquote talent for a long time in media. And I was very, I enjoyed having written.

more than I enjoyed writing, which is ironic because the thing that you talk about that you got advice from me about, about writing a thousand words a day, I still do it. So that kind of writing, which is a personal type of writing that I do myself, for myself, I got up this morning and yesterday and the day before and I wrote a thousand words a day and I've been doing it for, I think, probably over 20 years. But that's a different type of writing than writing for an audience, which is like a whole other thing. Anyway, it's a very complex subject, ultimately.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I think I'm probably about 13.

Julien Smith

In short, I felt that I had a bigger, it's not that I felt I was losing contribution, it felt that I could contribute more faster. And it turns out that my talents, or at least some of them, are very applicable in technology, and I didn't realize that. I think I'm a much better CEO and operator and creator of businesses than I am a writer, and I thought I was a pretty good writer, right? So it's nice to find that.

Srini Rao

It's funny you say that because we know I went through the whole book writing thing I got my book deal largely because the habit that you taught me to develop and Funny enough, you know to after two books I mean, I wasn't you know I'm Mark Manson who was the person who basically capitalized on your idea and I think after that the entire publishing industry lost their Mind and thought putting fuck in the title of every book was the key to like, you know billion dollar books But we'll go back to that but one thing that I thought about was

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

after reading two books, I thought, okay, well, we raised around a venture funding. Where's the payoff going to be bigger? And where's the contribution going to be bigger? I'm like, all right, if I get another six figure book contract, that'll give me a windfall that lasts me two years. If we grow unmistakable, sell it, provide a return to our investors, that will set me up for life. And I'm like, okay. So it's that thing 50 Cent and Robert Green talk about, immediate payoff versus long-term potential.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

and really looking at that. So one thing that I am curious about, you mentioned going from being a writer and a creator and talent to being the CEO. And as you and I were talking about before we hit record, that is a bizarre transition to make. I mean, even I have found it like, okay, wow, this is a, because it's a totally different skill set, but I will tell you what I did learn from writing books that I feel like will serve me for the rest of my life. And that is that.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

I can take anything that is a vague idea and see it to completion. And I was like, that's a skill you can apply to damn near anything.

Julien Smith

Mmm.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. And you're not and most people in the The book space is like not completely separate from the marketing space. They are distinct to a degree, but definitely people in that world are not completists by nature. They're more like they're like, oh, I'll go here and there and like they have a like a lot of unfinished things that they do.

But once you figure out, you're like, okay, I got to write this book. You're never going to hit deadline, but regardless, like I'm going to write this book, I'm going to publish it. It's going to go out. It's like, I did something and it's on the shelf, you know? And so there's something about that even today. Like, like, I mean, I'm sure I know what happens to you. It's different than a company. I'm happy that my company had, you know, millions of people use breather and, and I had a hopefully positive experience, mostly did, and I know a lot of people read the books that I wrote. I'm very.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

proud of that. But it's like, the book is on the shelf. And there's something about on the shelf that is special. Whereas a company even though it's out there, people use it or it's software, it's real world or whatever. There's I don't know, I've had a reverence for books, I still have it. Which I am so to me, it's special.

Srini Rao

Well, I think to me, I think the way I think about it is I never want to be defined by any one thing for the rest of my life.

Julien Smith

Hmm. Yeah, I don't think I do either, but I suspect that probably one thing that I end up doing will dwarf everything else. And actually, you know, to tell you the truth, even though hundreds of thousands of people have read that book flinch that we were talking about a second ago, even though trust agents was in New York Times, Vassal, et cetera, et cetera, by far, breather was more successful just from.

I mean, obviously from a revenue standpoint, that's true, but it was much more successful from a cultural impact standpoint than any of my books were, which is like, again, it's a funny thing to talk to you. You and I have longer context. We have 15 almost years of context between one another. And the fact that you and I can talk about that arc, not a lot of people can do it.

Julien Smith

being a writer to being a CEO or a tech entrepreneur in a strict sense, such as venture backed and all those things is because, probably because I'm really good at coming up with ideas, but also because I'm enough driven by fear that I was so afraid my first company would fail that I would have to succeed. But I didn't know.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julien Smith

It's the same as you. Like you don't know how to run a company until you start doing it, right? It's not exactly a job you learn from someone else.

Srini Rao

Yeah, and it's a pain in the ass. And it's honestly a job you want either. It's like the most thankless job in the world up until it's not. You know, one thing that is interesting, you talked about a breather dwarfed, you know, everything else. And there's I don't know if you remember in a Valravikant's podcast, How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, which is literally probably the only podcast I was to where he talked about Sam Altman, who said, you know, basically he wants whatever he does next to make whatever he did previously look like a footnote in his career.

Julien Smith

Right. Yeah.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm, I do.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

stayed with me and to your point, like I know for a fact, I'm a far better interviewer than I am a writer. And I know this based on the numbers, far more people listen to our podcast than read my writing.

Julien Smith

Right.

Srini Rao

So one other thing that you said, you were talking about coming up with ideas. There's something you said in our previous conversation that I pulled that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to do a deeper dive into. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

So that has always stayed with me because I think ever since that conversation, every time I see a new app, new tool, my default question is not, how do I use this to grow my audience? It's always, how can I make something that I couldn't before using this?

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

And it was largely to deal, like I look at every new piece of technology. I'm like, yeah, that's my default question is, okay, what can I make using this? Um, but you know, speaking of Django blocks, I, this was the example I used in a talk I gave to business school based on this conversation, you know, and I, of course cited breather as an example of how you have like these intersections of different technologies and, uh, how you're basically in the early nineties, you had the combination of the intersection of the commercial web browser, um, the ability to process credit cards, which was a contribution of the porn industry.

know that. And then, you know, e commerce, as you know, it is born by the intersection of those two technologies. And then you fast forward to like Web 2.0. And then you get to, you know, mobile devices, like you talked about in GPS, and then you know, you get another billion dollars in innovation. Personally, I think the next batch of these built like the next device that's going to enable the level of innovation the iPhone did is the Oculus, but I'm curious, like from where you're standing now. One, what does it look like to you? And more importantly, people listening to this, how do you

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Srini Rao

how do they identify those kinds of opportunities, both whether to further their careers or to start things?

Julien Smith

Yeah.

Julien Smith

Okay, so it's very, first of all, it's very challenging. This is a super long subject, but it's a subject that I'm super fascinated with because I've started a number of companies. And because I was first in the forefront of a number of technologies, podcasting being one of them, as you know, because you were there too, right? And so what happens if I think about it, and I'm sort of riffing a little bit in terms of the way that I talk about it, is that there are meaningful changes in value that occur.

as a result of often important cultural change, an important technological change or vice versa. And actually there's a Ray Dalio has a book, Principles of what's the recent one that would just recently came out. Yeah, yeah, Principles of Changing World Orders. Yeah, yeah, and then my audio books, so same, yeah. So that book.

Srini Rao

Yep. Yeah, changing the changing world order. It's literally on my desk.

Julien Smith

Will give you some sort of global ways that major changes could occur. But if you think back on things that could happen and what happens in these. In these spaces is actually there's a number of companies that could be started and that there are usually transformations that occur in every industry. And so we were talking a moment ago about electronic locks and actually before that you use the quote about uber.

And so I'm really fascinated right now by the reduction in, and this is like pretty edge case, but for those people that are interested in it, it's super fascinating. The reduction in cost per square feet of commercial real estate, because of the fact that office space is just like, like to a degree, like obliterated by COVID, right? And how some portion of that is being taken up by cloud kitchens.

which in case you don't know is basically like, it's like a shadow kitchen that's sitting inside of shitty office space and that people use effectively only for takeout for things like DoorDash and UberEats. And what you may or may not know, depending on how close you are to tech, is that Travis Kalanick, they call him TK, so I'll call him that from now on, who was one of the founders of Uber, then started a company, Cloud Kitchens, dedicated to this phenomenon and it's worth like $15 billion, even though nobody has heard of it.

right now, right? And so you've got this. So here's another set of examples. Here's an example. This example is the average revenue is gonna be about the same for a meal, but they don't need to pay for the retail storefront of that meal. Excuse me, you don't have to pay for the retail storefront of that space, that restaurant anymore, because more and more people are eating out. And of course, COVID like obliterated a lot of that.

way that we consume food in a lot of circumstances. And so now it's like, well, the economics are transformed. And so similarly, Breather had a similar situation, which was what happens if you could rent office space for any length of time, an hour, four hours, a day, two days, and you basically disconnect the lease from.

Julien Smith

the ability to have the office space. So it turns out you could make a lot of margin on that. So once again, the value of the square foot is like transformed there. So now let's get out of real estate. And so you look at a situation where the majority of companies that produce value these days and that are growing tend to be technology companies. And there's an enormous amount of venture capital going into them. And the majority of the power that is happening inside of these companies happens through founders.

As a result, coaching, which is why I, one of the reasons I started a coaching company, becomes this super huge increasing phenomenon. And everyone all of a sudden has an executive coach that supports them in their ability to be CEO, which in the eighties and the nineties was not true at all. And so there's always these like waves of things that occur and they occur either like generationally or they occur.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

You know in small little places where some people don't notice I think Oculus probably is one of them recently someone said that there were more sales of I think the most recent Oculus device in over PS5s. And so it's becoming a more and more popular gaming device as a result it's probably true and so like there's just there's a ton of this stuff that's occurring at every level.

And what I think is super fascinating about this space, just in general, the way that tech is developing, is that there's gigantic amounts of capital that you can start businesses with this way. Because everyone is looking at it going like, what's the next thing? Like, is it Bitcoin? Like, is it DeFi? Is it decentralized finance? Like, NFTs? What is that? Like, and they have the ability to deploy money or effectively treat it like a giant poker table such that...

we can find advances and efficiencies that didn't exist before, right? And of course there's like cultural consequences and blah, all these things, yada, yada. But the point is, is the opportunities are everywhere but you look in basically in terms of what are the new things that someone can do that they couldn't do before. And the most, most of the things that people are looking at these days are creator economy related things.

Srini Rao

Totally.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

which is just like everyone can have a business and everyone can start being a creator, not just a consumer of media on the internet. Well, what's the impact of that? And so every, and similarly, Substack is like everyone can start a newsletter. Like it just goes on and on. And more and more the way that one thinks about it is it's really about democratization of access to some technology such that everyone can receive it. So the very beginning,

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

is a consumer and you are a, you, the very few, the 1% are producers. And typically the gigantic outcomes occur when it goes from 1% are creators and 99% are consumers to pushing to a level where 100% as much as possible are consumers, excuse me, are creators. And the more that you do that, the more you produce like gigantic outcomes.

Srini Rao

Hmm. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Okay, so we'll go back to that in a bit more detail. Speaking of Oculus and things that it made possible, you and I were talking about the fact that we shopped around the idea for a TV show I wanted to do a David Letterman style Netflix type thing. And I realized when I got inside of the Oculus, for some reason, I was like, wait a minute, I can host a guest, like you and I, if you had an Oculus could be having this conversation in VR and I could invite every single person listening to this who has an Oculus. So we literally could create a live show and make people feel like they're there. That wasn't possible even three years ago.

Julien Smith

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Srini Rao

suddenly like even something like putting on a conference, which used to be astronomically expensive, which I've tried to do before. And especially trying to get the people like my guests will get paid to speak to be like, Hey, would you come and do this thing for free? Even I wouldn't do that now. But suddenly it's like, Hey, you know, you don't have to leave your home. You just put this thing on for 45 minutes and talk. It totally changes everything. But you know, we're speaking the creator economy, you talked about the fact that it democratizes access. Cal Newport and I were having this conversation when I was

access doesn't change the dynamics of winner takes all. And I have seen a lot when it comes to this creator economy thing I think that there's a level of optimism at times that I think is delusional because it's like yes everybody can do this but you of all people know that just because you can it doesn't mean you're gonna succeed because if you're competing against that much noise what you create is better be fucking good.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it has to be super good and the production value has to increase over time. There is a period in time and I think you and I have seen many of those things. Substack is probably, I'm very close to all those people because a lot of those companies tend to be funded by Anderson Horowitz and so is my current company. And so, Substack, there was a phase where anyone could become one without an existing audience beforehand and could become like very big on Substack. And some of my buddies like Lenny Ritchitsky and a few others.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julien Smith

or have very meaningful substact and packing McCormack have very meaningful substact newsletters. And then you have a set another phase and this was true in podcasting where you had randos who became hugely successful. And, and it was true on YouTube. Same thing, right? When there was no production value, but all that it took is just to be able to create something and have the impetus to do it. Now over time, it is definitely true that winner takes all or winner takes most.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Julien Smith

but it is also true that the pie is getting bigger over time. And the amount of consumption that is occurring, even if we include all those things together, we include Maven peer-to-peer, sorry, cohort-based courses, we include sub stacks, and we include YouTube videos, we include time on Clubhouse for those that do that. We include like all of these media consumption patterns, for example. And we just say, well, actually the pie of

Srini Rao

Mmm, yeah.

Julien Smith

This type of democratized media is increasing, and the amount of the pie of traditional media, which is more one to many and much more centrally controlled, is decreasing. Now, some people that are creating media in this many to many democratized technology sort of enabled format are complete idiots, but let's put that to the side for the moment.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

The reality is, is whoever, whether they're stupid or not, it's still an inevitable continuous pattern of from centralized one-to-many to many-to-many. And over time, the more you bet on the many-to-many category, and this includes maybe probably things like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and like all these other ways for transactions to occur.

then you end up in a place where you're probably long-term, your bets will be correct. But that doesn't change the fact that your timing might be off. And when your timing is off, that's when things really get fucked up. So often the most common thing that you talk about with someone in technology is they're like, oh yeah, I did Twitter before Twitter or something. And it'd be like, well, that's not fucking Twitter then, is it?

You know, the reality is, is it needed to occur at a certain time with certain advantages. Luck was a contributing factor. So you can put as much as you can kind of on your side, but the reality is, is that you still, there still has to be a certain amount that you definitely cannot control and you cannot really control timing.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, when I started the podcast, I think it was, what, 2009, 2010, people said podcasts were dead. I just was very, you know, I'm the beneficiary of being 10 years ahead of, you know, a massive cultural trend.

Julien Smith

Yeah. And I will say you're one of the few that kept going. There were so many people, and by the way, you deserve enormous credit for this because most people that started podcast, like I started in 2004 when it was literally invented, but what does that matter? Because over all of that time, it's the people with the staying power or the people with gigantic audiences from elsewhere, that really were able to keep.

Srini Rao

the

Julien Smith

growing and build a business off of it and succeed. I will say that was definitely one of the weaknesses of my game, so to speak, back then, is that I did create a lot of media and I was very, I participated on a lot of different things, but a lot of people were smarter than me because they had businesses behind it. And I, at that time, did not have a lot of business behind what I was doing, because I was like, eh, I was very like, I don't know.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Julien Smith

I was reticent about it. Actually, I would say like, I had a view a little bit then that business was dirty. And obviously, that's completely changed around, turned around now. But it's the people that have the staying power to be able to stay in the space and really care about the space that really ultimately make a difference, not only for others, but like for themselves and their life.

Srini Rao

Well, I mean, even, you know, we were talking earlier about long-term perspective. I mean, Sam Altman in his Y Combinator Startup School podcast, he actually said, you know, a lot of founders come in, they think, Hey, I'm going to do this thing for three years, get rich, count my cash on the beach. He said he defined a long-term perspective as 10 years.

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm. He's completely right. I've actually seen it occur many times now. Like, Breather was created in 2012-13. It's a 10-year arc. It was sold during COVID, like, seven years in, maybe? Right? I know that my arc with practice is going to be around 10 years. What I will say that I do have a good feeling about is that once you have seen many 10-year arcs,

You're like, oh yeah, yeah. Like you go away from this feeling of this is my baby. Oh my God, it must like, the stress goes away because a few of your 10 or seven to 10 year arcs have occurred. And you're like, this is my current one. I really care about it, but like, I'm not gonna throw myself off a bridge if my timing was off, right? For example.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that makes a perfect segue to revisiting something else that you said in our last conversation. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

So, um.

Well, let's talk about a couple of things here in terms of both risk aversion, managing psychology, stick to it, I mean, you've seen multiple tenure arcs. I think I realized throughout this, there's definitely been times when I'm like, what the hell am I doing? Why am I not where I wanna be? I'm on year 11 now and I'm like, okay, I'm nowhere near a $500 million exit. And sometimes I think my parents are questioning my sanity. I still have days when I'm just like, okay, how am I gonna make ends meet at times?

Julien Smith

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

not what it was six, seven years ago, but it's still stressful, far from perfect. So I wonder how you think about, I mean, I think that's like a perfect thing to talk about in the context of a coaching company, um, you know, risk managing psychology and also, you know, having the audacity to stick with it. I mean, to me, my, my reason for sticking with it is like, ah, I don't have an alternative, nobody's going to hire me to do anything cause I can't keep a job.

Julien Smith

Of course.

Julien Smith

Yeah, but there's some comfort in that, right? There's some comfort in saying, it's never gonna be someone else, so it's gotta be me, which results in you having to make something work. And so that risk tolerance that I'm talking about in that clip, and by the way, this is an amazing format to do something that had never occurred to me, but it's actually amazing that you've done it, is that risk tolerance.

is a way of talking about asymmetric upside versus downside. Like in venture often people will say, well, I can only lose one times my money. Like if I put a hundred thousand dollars into something as an example, it'd be like, I can only lose a hundred thousand dollars. But if I've done my job well, I can make five, 10, a hundred or whatever times my money if I am really smart about it. So.

that risk tolerance is a way of understanding asymmetric upside versus downside. One thing that is definitely true is that when you are younger, you have less and less and less and less to lose. You have sometimes nothing to lose, which is actually incredible. Looking at it now from someone who's meaningfully older, I see why people become risk tolerant, but there is something amazing about entrepreneurship where you're just like, you know what, fuck it. And it's almost like...

It's also like not caring about failure as much. I think the previous version of me had a fear of public failure. Whereas now I actually, it depends on the space. It's not true in academia. It's not true in, you know, probably like a fortune 500 or wherever some fair amount of people work. But in the spaces where entrepreneurs put themselves.

by and large, unless you're out there creating fire festival or something, right? Something like inherently scammy and unethical, then you're probably like even your failures are experiments and eventually a success will occur like we're saying, dude, that completely overwhelms all the previous things that you did and all the failures that you had. And so like the view now is take

Julien Smith

as many shots on goal as you can that have good access to upside and a limited downside. So it's like the downside is like, I tried to start my company. Like there's so many people talking back to things that you did when you were young and the way you were brought up when you were young. So many entrepreneurs that I know were like, yeah, yeah. Like I was an eBay power seller when I was a kid. I would buy Nintendo games and garage sales. I'm making this up. But like.

Srini Rao

No.

Julien Smith

Well, part of it is true, true of someone I know, but I would buy a garage sale video games and then sell them on eBay for five times as much or whatever, right? I never had that background, but those are perfect like usable things where the downside is basically zero, but the upside from a learning and also from a cash perspective are actually kind of infinite. And so the many, so you throw yourself as many things like that as you possibly can,

and you're just continuously getting better. I was recently reminiscing on this idea of being a CEO and how I'm coming on probably my eighth or ninth year of being a startup CEO in a couple of companies. And the anxiety that I felt over it then and how little I knew about what I was doing, even though I was able to grow the company like pretty big versus now.

and you just know how to start like a business. You just know, you're like, okay, this is the next step. Okay, this is the like, and everything is, it's not, it being understandable doesn't mean it's a guaranteed success, but it definitely means that you 100%, like it's unbelievable. Like I know how to build a sales team. I know how to raise money. I know how to get, be able to gather smart teammates.

I know how to do marketing. I know how to do fucking branding. I know how to build an engineering team. I know how to build a product. I know how to listen to custom. Like the amount of things that you learn in a short period of time, when you put yourself in those situations is really absurd and vastly outweighs the downside and also vastly overwhelms what the average person learns in a day. And by the way, like I'm doing this like remote now as many people are today, right? And...

And the access is still to access to learning is still unbefucking livable. So my view on what I said then is more nuanced, but still true, which is. Look at moments where there are, there are transformations that occur and then back those transformations with energy and time and learning, and then take a shot. And.

Julien Smith

the doesn't shot doesn't work. It actually doesn't matter because nobody's gonna remember. And then like, they don't. And then like take another shot. Like just be like, huh. And this other thing is interesting. I would just say that the one thing that's tough is that people tend to start things when they're in the popular consciousness. And when they're in the popular consciousness tends to be when they're too popular. And that's the one thing.

Srini Rao

hahahaha yeah, I can, I can

Srini Rao

Yep. Hehehehe.

Srini Rao

Yep, totally.

Julien Smith

is being able to look in like a little corners where nobody's paying attention and being like, this is interesting. That's how you start a company ahead of the game, minimizing the amount of competition you're.

Srini Rao

Totally. I always say you want to start trends and I'll follow them.

Julien Smith

Okay.

Srini Rao

Well, let's wrap this up. I got two final questions for you. I mean, you've had, you know, by most people's, you know, measure quite a degree of success. How has your personal definition of success evolved with each iteration of your career?

Julien Smith

I will say it's much more now about a happy life. It's true that there is still a part of me that measures myself by my public perception, like how people think of me, but I've done enough successful, at least-ish, things that I feel like I've had a good run in my past. And the fact that I've had that...

Now I'm like much more like I'm gonna build something that I really care about and it's gonna help a lot of people. But it's much less driven by and that lots of people are gonna know about. Now I'm like, I just want it to be cool for the people that find it, for which it helps them. And I wanna work with cool, smart people. It's the company that I practice, which I just recently, I started about two years ago, we just raised.

finished a $10 million raise these past couple months. That company was started literally because I had some people from Breather. We were all like we all really liked and respected one another. And we said, let's do something else again together. And it was based in the people, the quality of the people, and it still is based, even though we're probably 15 to 20 people now. It's still based in bring in really smart people, because that's what's really exciting about that kind of work.

Srini Rao

Yeah, wow. Well, I have one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews. What do you think it is to make somebody or something unmistakable?

Julien Smith

I think you have to be authentically yourself, probably. It has to be some natural version of you, right? The same way that people light up when you ask them, if they're like guitar dudes and you ask them about that and they just light up completely, that's when you see the real them, that's when they recognize themselves. So if they can be that person, like the majority of their time, then that's like unmistakable, right?

and

Then f-

Julien Smith

It's probably about...

just being willing to express that as much as you can. Like having the courage and having the willingness to really put it out there.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with our listeners. I was really thrilled to be able to have this conversation and reconnect after such a long time. Where can people find out more about you, your work and everything you're up to today?

Julien Smith

Yeah, I mean, I'm, it's, it's pretty easy to find me in a lot of places. So, uh, Twitter would be Julian Smith. Sorry, it would be twitter.com slash Julian. I spelled the French way because that's where I come from. Uh, my company is at practice.do D O. Uh, and I mean, I'm all over the place. Blog podcasts is anywhere, uh, always accessible to.

be able to help others and to try and make a difference.

Srini Rao

Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.