Maddie Hall: A Different Path to the Future

when talking to some investors, I like to tell them, hey, with 10 million acres, we could remove a gigaton of carbon or 2% of the world's emissions. If you could remove the amount of carbon equivalent to hundreds of millions of people, that's amazing. That has future impact, but it's justifiable that the work that you have-- - That's the voice of Maddie Hall, co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon. Living Carbon's tail is unfolding, but Maddie's journey is already significant in what it can teach us. Some founders invent ways to catapult themselves into the future. This is Mike Maple's Jr. floodgate, and it's go time with Maddie Hall. and welcome to the Pattern Breakers Podcast. For we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together we'll learn about the counterintuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome. Naysayers are often a positive signal and movements galvanized misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable. [MUSIC PLAYING] Maddie Hall is the CEO and co-founder of Living Carbon. A biotech start up using genetic engineering to create super trees that grow faster and capture more carbon from the air than regular trees. What's intriguing about her story is how she chose another path to step into the future. Before Living Carbon, Maddie had worked at cloud-based HR platform Xenifits as a product manager. She wanted to start a new company and began by brainstorming ideas, but then she made a wise move. She decided instead to propel herself into radically different futures by working on special projects with Sam Altman at OpenAI. And this mindset made all the difference. Let's talk to her. Maddie Hall, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here. You're kind of new in the landscape of ambitious start-ups. So maybe we should just start out by just what does Living Carbon do in the first place? Yeah, of course. So Living Carbon is a climate change biotech company. And we're on a mission to utilize the inherent power of plants to capture and store more carbon. So what that actually means is that we're developing genetically engineered trees that capture and store more carbon as a solution to climate change. So you genetically modify these trees. What's different about your super trees, if you will, from just normal trees? Yeah. So right now our R&D focuses on two different areas, carbon capture and carbon storage. So carbon capture, the amount of carbon that we're removing from the atmosphere each year and storage, how long we're actually storing that carbon underground. So we focus on photosynthesis enhancement. So there's about 15% of plants out there that are the most efficient at photosynthesis enhancement. They go through what's called C4 carbon fixation. Our goal is to make the other remaining percentage of plants as efficient as those plants. And we've developed a product that's a photosynthesis enhanced hybrid popular tree. And then the other side of it is the durability, right? How long you can store carbon underground. And for that, we're focusing on hyper accumulating metals from the soil. And those metals act as a natural resistance to fungal decay. Decay being one of the biggest factors that results in trees and woody biomass decomposing and that carbon returning to the atmosphere. So then if you take a normal tree and then you take a tree that comes from living carbon, how much more carbon do you hope that it'll take out of the atmosphere per tree, say? That's a great question. So I struggle here to give you a specific number, because I think one lesson for really ambitious companies that are from the future is you don't want to try to oversimplify and make your results seem too on the nose. And so what we've seen, though, with the proper caddy odds required from our greenhouse studies that have spanned really over the past two years, is about a 53% increase in biomass accumulation. And that's basically the amount of tree grown over a given period of time. And then you can connect the dots to say, if there's that much more growth, it can take out that much more carbon. And I suppose you could produce that much more wood. And it could be harder wood so you could have the utility value of the wood itself, but also the carbon take out. Exactly. It's the additional carbon and the more durable products that you get at the end of the process. So what kinds of people are on a startup team for a company like this? If you're doing a software company, you hire-- or you just start it with some of your code slinging buddies. But it seems like you'd have to have a little bit more of a set of expertise for something like this. I think you actually need pretty diverse expertise. You need people like my co-founder, Patrick, who's a paleobiologist and philosopher. And he thinks on geological time scales. And then you also need to couple that philosophy and that perspective with deep technical expertise. So world-class researchers that have spent 25 plus years doing something that's analogous, but maybe not in the market or under the same premise of what we're doing at living carbon. So our chief science officer, human, he spent 20 years at DuPont Pioneer. And you need the type of people that want to apply their technical skills in a very mission-driven way. And maybe have actually thought about doing this before. But not necessarily had the resources or the ability to go start a company in the space. OK. So now someone listening right now might assume therefore that since you've attracted these kinds of people living carbon that you must have had a molecular biology degree and a career in the biotech field, but that doesn't turn out to be the case. So what was your undergraduate degree? My undergraduate degree was in government and clinical psychology, oddly like a more forward thinking degree to get before the 2016 election, but definitely nothing I've used. That's pretty counterintuitive, right? Because even if we look at the sweep of your career, it wasn't at biotech companies, right? It was at companies like Zillow and Zenefits. How does somebody make the leap from the background you started with to now running a company that makes genetically modified trees that it's attracted world-class genetic engineering and paleobiologists who've already been living in future? What's up with that? How do you go from where you started where you're at now? I think there were some undercurrents that persisted throughout my career that make where I am now a kind of natural landing point, but there's, of course, confirmation bias, right? So I think one is just this desire to have a positive impact on the world through whatever sort of company that I founded. My dad's an entrepreneur, my family's super into botany and nature, grew up in the Pacific Northwest. So those undercurrents existed, but more specifically to answer the question that you asked. I realized what I really enjoyed. And that was working with technical teams and learning about new things, right? And actually working in spaces that felt like there were high states. So at Zenefits, I was a product manager when I was like 21 years old working on their life and disability insurance and working with a lot of really technical engineers. And that was so interesting because I really learned how to build a team and unify people within a technical team, even though there was a lot going on externally related to the company, maintaining morale when you're working on something that is related to life and death in this case. And then after that, really wanting to get into understanding what the seed ecosystems look like, right? So working on product at first round and then really wanting to find an area that I was passionate about, where I felt that I could throw my whole heart into it and that I really cared deeply about the mission. And I found that at OpenAI, I was working on an area as important as the development of artificial general intelligence, which will completely transform our world in the coming years. And that was working around very like-minded people who I was able to connect with and really get a taste of what it means to truly live in the future. When you started-- when you approached OpenAI, why did you focus on them? I mean, what is it about this living in the future that resonated with you? Did it resonate with you at the time or was it just you were following your instincts? What-- why OpenAI? I wanted to learn how executive teams operate, right? Teams that are making high stakes decisions. And I thought that there was a lot that I could learn from Sam and the rest of the management team there. I also really wanted to learn about AI research, right? It's like wanting to actually have a high rate of learning, I think, was a large driver there, too. And just the types of conversations that I had with people, even in the process of getting to know the team, I was just really personally interested as well. And so then how did you approach Sam all of them? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I've learned just having been in the startup ecosystem for a while is generally asking for favors early to people that you meet once at a dinner or something like that. It doesn't go a very long way, right? It doesn't actually cultivate a relationship over time. And so I had gotten to know Sam. through being very good friends with one of his brothers, Max, so I worked with his benefits. And I was actually asking him for a startup advice on a very terrible startup idea. And I realized actually that the idea that I had was one, something that wasn't, I wasn't passionate about. Two, I could learn a lot more by being at a fast growing company, like OpenAI. It was working on an ambitious hard science problem. And also just getting exposure to everyone within his ecosystem and the broader OpenAI ecosystem I felt like if there was a place that I was going to come up with an idea that would allow me to be passionate about founding a specific company in that space for 10 years, there was really no better place in the world. And I like to this day, I'm exceptionally grateful for that experience. - Yeah, it's interesting. I met Sam a very long time ago before, I think when he was starting looped. And even though looped was just getting off the ground, I remember there was definitely sort of an over-the-top ambition about him. Not in a selfish way, but just in terms of, you can have a bigger impact than you think you can. Why not think even bigger about this? - Yeah, I think one thing that I learned from Sam, when you're dealing with really ambitious people and successful people, like Sam, a lot of people put them on this pedestal. You've achieved so much greatness in such a short time. You're so amazing, like just defaulting to what they think, right? And I think something that's really helpful for people who want to live in the future is to just remember that everyone's a person, right? Everyone has different ideas. You should feel just as much agency to share your ideas and your vision of the future. That's actually how everyone continues to grow and learn. And I really appreciated that Sam would often ask everyone around the room for their thoughts and what they think should be done for very high-level strategy. - What was your job description when you were with Sam? Like, what exactly did you do when you were doing special projects at OpenAI? It shifted a lot, but there was a portion of it that was a building trust with the technical team, keeping a pulse on the organization. There was some like special research projects, specifically into climate change and ways in which we could possibly replicate what's been done at OpenAI to have an impact in other industries. And there was also some time that I spent doing work on cultivating a new generation and getting more PhDs to become founders of ambitious hard science companies. And also some work on just making sure that we have diverse backgrounds represented when we're engaging with those founders. And then there was a component also of helping with the narrative of how we communicate really technical and vicious findings to many different types of audiences. If you're trying to explain GPT-3 to someone who has been in politics for 20, 30 years, you have to have a compelling story to make them care. - So you're following, you know, you're at OpenAI. How do you bridge OpenAI with a company that makes genetically modified trees? We haven't really gotten there yet. Like, what's up with that? - Yeah, that's a great question. For me, I got the opportunity to do a lot of research into carbon removal technologies, right? Right when Y-combinator published their first requests for carbon sequestration companies. Really big ideas, right? Is cell-free engineering of enzymes, ideas like flooding deserts, really ambitious climate solutions that could actually remove gigatons of carbon. And I just really became enamored with Holy Cow. Like, we have to do something 10 times as big to what OpenAI is doing for AI, for carbon removal and for climate. And at the time, there were not many people outside of individual research labs trying to scale those solutions or trying to really do anything that was at the gigaton removal scale. And I just felt like my energy, I was ready to go from zero to one. And my energy was better suited, working on something that was earlier stage and that that was actually more of something that would be energy giving for me. How I specifically got to photosynthesis and enhance plants, I was retressing a lot of different step level functions in carbon removal. And the easiest thing to default to is, well, we need to do something now. Why don't we just plant as many treats as we possibly can? And then you start to think about, well, geez, that's a lot of land. And we need a lot of that land for agriculture. And a lot of that land is privately owned. So you can't really have that big of an impact. So coming back from that, okay, what are different markets that exist already that you could deploy new technology in? A timber was one of those for me. And then also, how do you utilize degraded land or land that doesn't have any other purpose now? There are a couple of things you need. You need water and desalination, but you also need biotechnology, right? The ability to do something on this land that is useful. And I read a paper on photosynthesis enhancement in tobacco. And that actually became the inspiration behind thinking about, well, can we do something similar in trees? When I talked to the authors of those papers, and later on, folks that have been working in plant biotechnology for a long time, they said, oh, geez, like there's no theoretical reason as to why this isn't something that's at least worth trying. And then another lab came to me and wanted to do the whole project. These are the people that are kind of on the forefront of this space, and they think this is worthwhile taking on. Patrick was already working on slowing the rate of decomposition of trees, right, and storing carbon underground for longer. And it was just a natural fit. It was kind of the yin to the yang, the different half of carbon flux. And it just became very clear that we were going to try to make this idea and this vision of what we wanted the world to look like into a reality and try as hard as we could. Maybe we should talk a little bit about living in the future, because I think this might be a topic that we've kind of always connected on. A lot of times I get pitched by a startup founder. And the question I ask myself is this from the future? Is this person from the future? And a lot of times what I find is that these founders have an idea about the future, or they have an opinion about the future. But they're not actually living in it, right? And so the future isn't something that you gaze at from a distance with binoculars and say, I have better 2020 vision of the future than other people do. In my experience, the people who've invented these breakthroughs, they're living in the future and building in the future. There are standard deviation different from people living in the present in terms of just their experience in life and what they're working on and who they're working with. Does that resonate with your experience? So far. Totally. I mean, I think there's a big difference between saying what you want the future to look like and actually having hypotheses about what will be the most important technologies developed and utilized in the future, right? So for example, like a founder could come to you and be like, I envision a future where you can get coffee delivered to you instantaneously. And it's the best coffee in the world and it comes in less than 10 minutes, right? Like that's the future for me. And when I hear that, I'm like, really, when you think of what the world is going to be like 10, 20 years from now, a concern of yours is how quickly your coffee is delivered. It's bottom up versus top down. Instead, I like to focus on, okay, well, what are going to be the most impactful technologies that could occur and be developed within my lifetime? And then backing out from what that future would look like, right? To advance as a civilization, we have to continue to harness the energy from our sun and the energy that we have on our planet. And I think a way to do that is three things like fusion and broad adoption of renewable energy, hydrogen economy, even those ideas are more products, right? What we need to do as a civilization is harness our energy quickly and do so in a way that's renewable. - But what's also interesting is if you think about living carbon and kind of what you were saying earlier, some people were already working on the ideas that you described, right? There were people who maybe were blocked somehow or had barriers to being able to implement the system, the way you envision implementing it. But isn't that the case that some of the people on your early team had already been, whether it was writing white papers or tinkering with the technology or just exploring it in some way? The future was already here. It was just they were already working in that future when maybe the rest of us weren't yet. - Yeah, definitely. I think like a human specifically had worked on some photosynthesis engineering before, but in a context where you don't have the agency at a large company. That large company isn't working in, they're living in the future in the same way that's that startups are able to live in the future. You know, there are a lot of people that will tell you your technology is never going to work. People said reuse a rocket, that's impossible. I think you have to self-select for the folks that are technically attached to the ideas and they know the potential that those technical ideas can have and want to be in an ecosystem where there's an opportunity to actually bring those things to market and have those things deployed in the real world. That's very different than doing just basic research. - I like that you got out of the present, right? So people often say, if you want to have a good startup, get out of the building. And of course, there's a place for that, right? You want to be able to understand the needs of your customers and you want to have a set of hypotheses that you validate or invalidate. But what I want to say is, But I like about what you've done and what resonates with me with other breakthroughs I've been involved with is this idea of getting out of the present. And what I've seen is that traditional startup advice is, okay, too many people just build a product and ship it and hope they get customers. So what you need to do is become a problem expert, not just a product expert. But what they end up doing is they orient themselves in the present and they talk to customers in the present and look for problems that exist in the present. And so they end up solving a problem that is not a breakthrough because it doesn't break free from the present. Whereas what you did that I really like so far is you found people who are living in the future and who are already attempting to build what was missing in that future. And when you do that, your intuition is far more likely to be right because you're building in a different environment than normal people are building in. And you're doing it with people who already are there for its own sake, right? You already had a curiosity and it gone down the rabbit hole of trying to figure this stuff out. Did you naturally get there or did you have some type of an opinion that that was the way to go about it when you got started? I tried to really tune in to my energy and what conversations I would have with people that would get me excited and felt like they were energy giving versus conversations that felt energy draining. I think one of my weaknesses is that I'm not very good at working on things I don't care deeply about. I find that work is incredibly taxing. And so I think with OpenAI and all of the people that I met, that was really the thing that was the most compelling to me. A big part of putting yourself in a place you can live in the future is surrounding yourself by people that are thinking on those same timescales. I like the statistic of you are like 30% of your partner's personality. Who do you spend the second most time with outside of your partner's that people you work with? I think that is really, really critical. How do you know the difference between someone living in the future and someone who is it? That's a really good question. The egoist answer that pops to mind is like I would be bored in conversations. I don't think that's actually the full story. I think it depends on how quickly they're learning. I find that people that have a really short feedback loop and are always growing and iterating and learning about themselves are people that I learned from too. Where I come away from a conversation thinking about something that somebody said after that conversation. It's like, wow, that's a really interesting idea. I'm going to update my thinking on XYZ. I think that's a really good way to sort of determine whether or not you're getting energy from those people and then continuing to invest in those circles and those relationships. Because those are the people who, if they weren't working at a company like OpenAI or if I hadn't started living carbon, they probably have a couple other ideas that they're pottering within the back of their head or at least hypotheses or interests or where they're spending their time reading. The people that reach out to me and they're like, wow, I'm really interested in reading your paper. Can I ask you a couple questions or would you spend an afternoon teaching me about climate change? Those are the people that are already living in the future. Part of what you're saying that really resonates with me is this idea and you alluded to it earlier that people living in the future aren't very transactional. If you're talking to somebody who's living in the future and you ask them for conventional favors or you're looking to get something from them, it kind of kills the buzz. Exactly. I think a lot of people that are living in the future, people that have experienced conventional success, whether that's through accruing power or accruing money. You get to a place where they're no longer playing in that game. They're playing in a different game, which is how do you have the most impact, positive impact on the world with what it is that you've done and what it is that you've built? If you ask somebody for a favor, it can kind of pull them back to that game that they don't want to be playing. I think it's hard to be authentic when you're doing transactional things. If you are truly living in the future and you don't want to do that transactional thing, I think this is something that I struggled with a lot is I was like, sure, let me give you feedback on this idea that I really could care less about. I would say that I would do those things and either I wouldn't follow through in a way that I liked or it would just be so energy draining. Don't get me wrong, I want to help. I want to give as much back as I've gotten from the climate tech community and all of our early investors, but I want to do it in a way that doesn't feel energy draining. There's some people though. I do think that you can live in the future and be really good at cultivating community. I think there are a lot of VCs that actually do that very well and it is energy giving for them, but I think it's rare. Let's talk a little bit about then what is a good conversation, right? I suppose you kind of mentioned earlier that people living in the future want to learn, they get energy from learning, especially about things that are going to have an impact on the world. Would it be fair to say that part of this is when you're talking to somebody in the future, you want to help them by adding to their body of knowledge about the future where they feel like, "Oh, that was a great use of my time. That was a good conversation." The pie got bigger as a result of talking to this person. Yeah. I mean, I think it's people that ask good questions that show that they've thought really intentionally about what it is they're asking, that utilize people's time well, that feel like they could go be good executors and are thinking on the same wavelength. I think there are a lot of different books about this idea that if you think about the multiverse, right, there are all of these different versions of reality that are only millimeters away from our current version of reality. It's people that are thinking on that scale on like what are the different versions of reality that could exist out there and the step back from the hubris associated with their own idea. The photosynthesis enhancement don't get me wrong, it's incredibly important. But actually what I've learned over working on living carbon is photosynthesis enhancement is not as important as the durability of stored carbon. It was something that was hard for me to admit, but I don't want to be caught up in my own delusions connected to my idea that sometimes can be contrary to the type of future and actually as you update your vision of the future and as you continue to live in the future, you have to have a feedback loop into what you're actually doing day to day. I get pitched all the time by founders. And a lot of the pitches follow sort of this conventional model of I need to go find pain that people are experiencing and then go build a product that addresses that pain, find a big total available market and off we go. I find myself asking actually a different question. I find myself asking, is this from the future? You know, very often when I look at it that way and then I ask questions of the founder, they have ideas about the future, they have opinions about the future. But they're not living in it. Like, for example, when you started living carbon, you started it with people who are already doing research in this area who are already getting their hands dirty in the technologies that were involved in the future that you wanted to design. But then when I say that to people, you're not in the future, they say, that's easy for you to say. What would your response to be to that? Like you think anybody can get out of the present or only just a subset of people can, you know, like a normal person listening to this right now. What can they do to get out of the present? I think the first thing that you can do is start by being more mindful, adding intention to your time, reading books like super intelligence or science fiction like Ministry of the Future or Termination Shock, just to name a couple. Those things anchor you in a different version of the world and they provide a good comp for you to then start thinking about what would life look like on Mars, right? What would a world look like 100 years from now? When people ask that question in a free-formed way, it's like, well, geez, I don't really know. But I think once you have a couple of examples, it's a little bit easier to do that. You know, I don't want to say reading science fiction, but I think that's part of it. And then also just reading some of the writing that other people who you're confident living in the future, who are living in the future, are thinking about, right? What are the topics that they're caring about? Following them on Twitter, reading their blogs, asking for book recommendations from people who you think are living in the future, then trying to surround yourself by those people. Meeting ambitious founders, asking them questions, reading papers and figuring out, okay, people generally want to talk about themselves. So if you email a researcher who published a really exciting piece of work that's gotten not only maybe a lot of traction, but has captivated your vision of the future, asking them about it, generally they'll talk about it. People who are living in the future also want to help other people do the same. And so if there's a founder that has something or an idea that I think is really high impact, or could be high impact, or even wants to have a high impact, I will spend as much time as I can with them, helping them start, update, nurture their idea into a business. There's another part to this that I think might be true as well. Having sympathy for people who live in the future is also valuable. live in the future a lot of times or misfits or they seem to be that way. And I find that the world sometimes is not as sympathetic as it could be, you know, the present fights back a lot of times. Yeah, I think you do get feedback. People don't believe you or they get caught up in the potential downsides and not even just being specific in questions or feedback, but just general like doom and gloom, right? I think the pessimism of the future, it's like people ask me all the time, like what about all the unintended consequences of the work that you're doing, which is a fine conversation that will engage in. But think of specific things, right? Don't just bring nervous energy. We can talk through what we're doing, what we're thinking, the intentionality behind it, the whole philosophy, which is very ecosystem centric at living carbon. But I like to level set people who try to give me feedback that pulls me into an anxious headspace or sometimes can be defensive. And I try not to get defensive, but you really have to level set people around a shared philosophy and a shared motivation to even sort of anchor their mental headspace so that they can ask better questions. What was fundraising like in the early days? Was it was it fairly straightforward because your mission was really compelling or was it difficult? What was it like to be a political science person, a product manager to tech startups now all of a sudden raising money for genetically modified trees? It was interesting. I think especially when it was just me and an idea. And then Patrick came along and we raised our first round, but raising a larger seed round to actually develop a proof of concept was harder than subsequent capital raised because it seems like in this case, right? In the case of living in the future, the ideas are so out there and you really want to judge entrepreneurs on their progress towards making that future reality. If you haven't had a lot of time to make progress on the idea, it's hard to know really what to judge them on. I think people judge a lot on the individuals. That round was not straightforward. I talked to about a hundred different people and ended up having about a 50% close rate, which I think is pretty good. But I wanted this to be like a buy the people for the people type of project. I didn't want it to just be billionaires building genetically engineered trees. I wanted to take checks that were $2,500 and multiple millions of dollars. And I'm really happy that we actually did that strategy. But there were a lot of people that said no. Not a lot of market comparable for companies living in the future. What have you experienced there? I think people tried to fit us in like the DuPont Pioneer category in the warehouse or timber category in the Ginkgo Bioworks category. We can't necessarily try to copy every single company that already exists, right? That's kind of living in the present. I can't say I want to be the Tesla of trees, right? Because the way in which you vertically integrate car manufacturing is very different than how you scale seedling production and supply. I think you have to have confidence that the science can work. And if you believe that and you say, okay, you know, if we were to do this, it would be not only just a better tree, right? Not only just a better car, but a tree that captured more carbon, a car that was 100% electric. I think you have to pass the Mr. Burns test, right? Even if this wasn't good for the environment, would people still buy it? What's it like to run a company that lives in the future? And how is it different from maybe what you thought it would be? One thing that we were really intentional about with living carbon was not sharing our research progress until we thought that it was ready for the present. You also have to exist in the real world, right? In a world where you are a business and you have investors and fiduciary duties. And that can be hard. So we actually stayed relatively quiet in stealth until we shared some of our photosynthesis enhancement research, the first of many projects that we're working on right now. And we waited for a really long time until we had expert credibility that could vouch for what we're doing. Now that we're actually running an organization that is in the public eye, you have a lot of other considerations to think about. Think about deployment timelines, commercialization, who are the partners that we want to loop into our full vision of the future? And who do we benefit from only sharing like the surface level results? Because not every company that's buying carbon credits, not every organization that wants to purchase our trees for XYZ purpose, they're not necessarily all living in the future. And you can't, you can be somewhat selective, but it's hard to make sure that all of the other players in which your organization interacts are going to be in the same dimension of reality that you're in. Yeah, well, and it's also, I like to say that there's an impedance mismatch between the future and the present, right? Like people living in the future think folks live in the present don't get it. People live in the present thing. People in the future are kind of wacky and off the reservation. And so resolving that impedance mismatch is one of the fundamental parts of the job description, right? If you're going to, if you're going to do a breakthrough, at least. Totally. And I think you can develop like some hooks to pull people into the future by framing like the impact of what you're doing. What I mean by this is when talking to some investors, I like to tell them, hey, with 10 million acres, we could remove a gigaton of carbon or 2% of the world's emissions. That has future impact, but it's justifiable that the work that you have to do on that has to start today. What helps me be okay with coming back to the present is I think about the long-term impact that I want living carbon to have, right? The gigaton scale carbon removal that we need. And that is a reinforcing motivation of, oh my gosh, if we remove the gigaton of CO2, this has to scale. The only way for this to scale is with capital and the ability for this to be a business, right? We have an economic system in which we operate. For me, that's really motivating to spend time in the present, making sure that that long-term future is possible. Now that you've had some time to experience being a founder, what do you think best prepared you to be a founder? And what experiences do you wish you'd had? I think being a product manager helped me a lot, especially at a company like Xenifits, because I learned that actually an area where I get energy is solving hard problems. And like in times that feel not necessarily like crisis, but where you have a big problem that you have to solve, right? That's the life of a founder and being able to think creatively. Also with OpenAI, getting buy-in from different stakeholders who had different views, creating a balance between an R&D first culture and still making people that are in what people refer to as non-technical roles feel valued. There's so much that I learned from each one of my experiences. I think people have to be really intentional about their growth, right? And this is a little bit later stage, but not to try to compare yourself to other companies. Even other companies that are living in the future too, you want to be paranoid about competition, but also still stay focused. When you're getting feedback from people, you don't necessarily need to update your model of reality or what you need to be doing right away. You need to synthesize it and realize that you are one of the people that has the most context on what it is you're doing. I wish there was an actual checklist of what are the things that you have to do when you're starting a company. Just day-to-day stuff. I think why a combination is a good idea, because a decent job of this seed stage funds do as well, like floodgate, but I think the more that you can surround yourself with people that have done part of what you're doing before. If you're working on an ambitious idea in the future, the higher likelihood you are to be successful. Sorry if I was a bit too long. My brain is still recovering from the launch and everything. So I need to get a full seven, eight hours of sleep. I am highly confident that this is going to be very well received by people. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Mike. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Pattern Breakers podcast. You can follow me on X at M2JR, and I encourage you to check out our newsletter, Patternbreakers.substac.com. I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you could leave us a review. And tell our paths cross again. I hope you embrace the power of thinking and acting beyond the conventional boundaries. It's the people who dare to be different, who true. truly make a difference.