47. Paul Scherer - A Friend That Brings Us Closer

·Founder
Paul Scherer - A Friend That Brings Us Closer

Transcript 47-Paul_Scherer.png

Description

Paul Scherer (X, LinkedIn) is the founder of Eigen (check out their beautiful website), where he’s building a mutual friend: an AI that brings people closer together and helps us belong.

Paul grew up in a small town outside of Frankfurt, Germany, and dropped out of high school at seventeen to work on startups, including Augment. He recently raised $15M from Benchmark, with legendary partner Peter Fenton comparing him to the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. I was introduced to him by Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, who is an angel investor in Eigen. Dialectic guest Brie Wolfson has also been working with Paul, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and why so many people I respect were so enamored with a kid who has yet to publicly launch a product.

We start with Paul’s central influence: Michael Ende’s children’s novel, Momo,* *and the little girl who reminds a village to be present in the face of *Time Thieves quietly pushing them to be more efficient. *Then we talk about how even though the internet has shaped both of our lives and relationships, it increasingly feels that social media is making us feel both more connected and more alone. Paul explains what they are working on at Eigen, why we need an (AI) mutual friend, why it should be a single “person,” and why it feels less like engineering and more like parenting or growing someone/thing you don’t have complete control over. I also ask Paul about the pressures and psychology around being “blessed” by Silicon Valley’s powers that be, and why authenticity, or something like it, is in short supply.

I hope you are inspired to be courageous in your convictions, even if they are strange, and to listen to the voice inside that so many of us stop listening to in adulthood.

**Dialectic is presented by **Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion’s new developer platform and workers here. Inside Notion by Brie Wolfson & Camille Ricketts for Colossus. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps

  • (0:00) Opening Highlights
  • (1:13) Intro to Paul
  • (2:33) Thanks to Notion
  • (3:28) Start: 'Momo', Presence, Friendship, and Time
  • (11:10) How the Internet Connects Us and Isolates Us, and Conflating Social and Media
  • (25:12) A Future Where We Talk to AIs
  • (33:55) Paul and Eigen are Building a Mutual Friend to Help Us Connect with Other Humans
  • (48:01) Why Do We Need a Mutual Friend? And Making a Friend We Can Trust
  • (1:16:53) Belonging, Building the team at Eigen, and Inventor as Outlaw
  • (1:25:38) Managing the Psychology of Being a Promising Young Founder
  • (1:36:53) Maintaining a High Bar, Fighting Entropy, and Influences
  • (1:53:50) Self-belief, Authenticity, Seeing the Water
  • (2:10:30) Courage, and a Final Question from a Mutual Friend
  • (2:15:04) Thanks Again to Notion
  • (2:16:27) Eigen Office Tour with Paul (YouTube only)

Links and References

Transcript

(0:00) Opening Highlights

(1:13) Intro to Paul

(2:33) Thanks to Notion

(3:28) Start: 'Momo', Presence, Friendship, and Time

Jackson: (3:28) Paul Scherer, thank you for having me here. We're in the Eigen office. This is a specific type of space you’ve curated for yourself.

Paul: (3:37) It's really nice. We're very happy here. I think it's important. Many people underestimate the power of space. We spend a lot of time here—much more than at home—so it has to feel great.

Jackson: (3:54) I want to start by talking about this book I had to hunt down, Momo. It was referenced in your video and was seemingly very influential to you when you were young. It's a children's book. In reading it, a few ideas stood out: time and playing with the past, present, and future; presence; listening; and friendship. This smattering of ideas informs much of what we'll talk about today. What about this book stuck with you? I assume you were quite young when you first read it.

Paul: (4:38) My dad read it to me when I was eight or ten years old. You read it again in school; it's a thing in Germany. One thing that is very true is their concept of time thieves. It's interesting because the book is from 1973.

Jackson: (4:59) It felt pretty modern, though.

Paul: (5:00) This is the crazy thing. It was pre-internet, pre-social media, and pre-personal computers. This was at a time when most people didn't have a computer. Every year since then, it has become more relevant because it describes our world so accurately. Everything is about efficiency and productivity. There wouldn't be time for Momo in this world. People don't care; they just ask how this helps them get more efficient or productive. It’s always a sign of great work if it becomes more relevant over time. I give it to a lot of people, and many resonate with it.

Jackson: (5:56) You are a striver. That is a representative word for this city and this industry. You’re someone who dropped out of high school when you were 17. Do you feel like you're running out of time?

Paul: (6:12) I used to feel like that more, but I haven't in a while. For the first time, I feel like we're doing the thing, and there's no real alternative. I was doing all these other things and I'm still restless, but I feel like there's no way out. I couldn't go do something else. This is the thing. You stop feeling like you're running out of time because you're actually playing your game. That’s just the game, and you have to play it. It wouldn't be fun if you didn't have to play. Before I felt that way, I felt like I needed to play.

Jackson: (7:05) I need to get to the thing.

Paul: (7:06) Exactly.

Jackson: (7:09) I like that. There is a way that it's not quite abundance, but there's something about once you've found the thing, you're where you need to be. I'm sure you're antsy in a whole bunch of ways around progressing this thing, but it's like, oh yeah, I'm where I'm supposed to be.

Paul: (7:24) I call it short-term paranoia, but long-term, everything is exactly the way it should be.

Jackson: (7:38) It's kind of the anchor. Momo is this girl who lives in the village they go to. The reason they're initially skeptical and yet able to be so present with her—she helps people deal with their beef—is because she's an amazing listener. You are someone who certainly has an observational lens on human beings and the way people behave. I'm curious if there's any thread there that felt resonant.

Paul: (8:17) She's the polar opposite of the time thieves. It's almost less about the listening and more about the presence. She's the manifestation of presence. She listens so well because she doesn't look at her phone. She doesn't feel like she has a meeting fifteen minutes from now. She isn't looking at her watch thinking she should probably go. She's just there with you one hundred percent. That is so antithetical to the time thieves because they're the manifestation of feeling like you have to go and that everything needs to be efficient. She's just fully there. That is very rare because we all have so many things trying to get our attention. Not all of this is bad; there's a lot of opportunity and things you could be doing at any given point in time. To be somewhere really present without thinking about opportunity cost is rare. The hard thing about listening is you actually have to listen instead of thinking about what you're going to say next. That's a really hard thing to do because you have to be truly present without any skin in the game, without feeling like you need to achieve something or tell them how great you are. When you don't really listen, you're just looking for something they give you so you can say the thing you want to say. I wonder if nonchalant is the right word, but she's just there. There's a sense of ease. I think that's really remarkable.

Jackson: (10:24) Friendship is something we're going to talk a lot more about. You grew up in a remote place. What does it mean to be a friend?

Paul: (10:35) I don't know if there's one definition that works for every person. I certainly don't have it, but I think there are a few different themes. Great friends help you rediscover yourself, but they're also expansive in surprising and delightful ways. They add new things.

Jackson: (10:58) Yes.

Paul: (10:59) There are really these two elements. They ground you in who you are, but they also push you.

Jackson: (11:06) It's deeper and wider.

(11:10) How the Internet Connects Us and Isolates Us, and Conflating Social and Media

Jackson: (11:10) You grew up in a place that is quite remote or at the very least quite small. It's not far from Frankfurt, but it's not in the center of things. Now you are in San Francisco. You are in the center of things. How has the Internet changed your life, particularly on the dimension of relationships and people?

Paul: (11:32) Every single person in my life, bar Samuel and my parents, I wouldn't have met without the Internet. I think I was twenty or twenty-one years old when I met the first venture capitalist. I didn't know what that was. This world did not exist in my world. I didn't know about it, and neither did anyone I knew. No one I met was one step removed from it.

Jackson: (12:19) Right.

Paul: (12:21) Without the Internet, I definitely wouldn't be here. So many of these relationships are first or second-order effects of meeting people on Twitter. I met one of the founders of Twitter a while ago, and it was very transformative. It was almost a spiritual experience because this person so profoundly changed and shaped my life in such a big way. I don't even know if I could recognize myself as a person without that thing.

Jackson: (13:05) I've had a similar experience with that website in particular. Were you a social kid growing up, especially before you started to tap into this? Were you lonely?

Paul: (13:22) I was like Marmite; people either really liked me or really hated me. I always made friends with some teachers who really liked me, but I always had trouble with people my age. The older I got, the easier it became. In kindergarten, it was easier. I was never fully lonely, but I was never popular. I really deeply wanted to be popular, but I was not at all. Reflecting on it, it was very obvious that I wasn't popular. There were a lot of social strategies that I did not know about. As I got older, it became easier. I left school and started working, and immediately everyone there was thirty-plus. That just became my world.

Jackson: (14:37) What about Twitter or the internet allowed you to find community? I want to discuss the ways the internet has failed us as connective tissue, but first, I am interested in why Twitter worked for you at that time and what you found there that was good.

Paul: (15:01) I was on Twitter a lot during the height of the pandemic when everyone was on it. It was the greatest place on earth because all these cool people had nothing to do other than being on Twitter and Clubhouse. That was great. At the time, I started a tech blog to write about gadgets or software I liked. I wrote two articles and realized no one was reading them. I wondered how I would promote them, and then decided I would just tweet about it. I created my Twitter account in 2020 or 2021 and started sharing these articles.

Jackson: (16:01) What did you write about?

Paul: (16:03) Really just YubiKeys and 1Password. It was obscure.

Jackson: (16:07) You were reviewing them?

Paul: (16:08) It was the most obnoxious thing in the world.

Jackson: (16:10) That is not the most obnoxious thing in the world.

Paul: (16:12) It’s obscure, but you're right, it's not obnoxious.

Jackson: (16:15) Some people might think what you're doing now is obnoxious. We'll get to that.

Paul: (16:18) It was an obscure obsession for a 17-year-old kid to write about why YubiKeys are great. I tried to promote the blog, but within five days, I decided to move on from the blog because Twitter was so cool. I started meeting people there. There was a guy from Ghana who now has 20,000 or 30,000 followers. We met when I had 200 followers and he had 300. We would DM, and it became a whole thing. I spent 12 hours a day on Twitter and had 20,000 tweets and replies from that three-month period. I would send 600 replies a day. Suddenly, my first tweet had over a thousand likes, which was a huge rush. Then all these entrepreneurs would appear. I remember the COO of ClickUp liking and commenting on my marketing advice. I was a 17-year-old kid with no experience whatsoever saying, "Here’s how you should market yourself," and the COO of ClickUp said it was great advice.

Jackson: (17:34) That says a lot about Twitter, honestly.

Paul: (17:36) It says a lot about Twitter. People started DMing me, and I sold a digital product called "Twitter DM Mastery." For a while, I was the self-proclaimed king of DMs. For the first 5,000 followers, I DM'd every single follower manually to thank them for the support. That is how I met a lot of people. I wrote a book about this—though "book" is a strong word; it was about 20 pages. It was a great PDF on DMing people. That is how I met Ariel and Caleb, which later turned into working with different kinds of companies.

Jackson: (18:48) Many of us have had positive experiences on Twitter or elsewhere. There is a romantic idea about the way the internet used to be or what it was meant to be—the best connective tissue in the history of the world. Yet many people feel the opposite. You've talked about what happens when we conflated social and media. What is social and what is media in this context?

Paul: (19:12) In this context, media could be defined as popular content. When you scroll on Instagram, it is not about your friends; it is about popular content or popular people. It could be a reel going viral from a random account that neither you nor your friends know. It could be a celebrity. Social is much more about your social graph and the people you know. Originally, the interaction paradigms of these platforms were much more social. It was about sharing a story with your friend or posting something all your friends would see. Now it has become much more media-focused. There are reasons for that; it is all about incentives. Instagram didn't do that to be evil; they just realized that it works. It is hard to get a lot of people to share content. Your friends are probably much worse at creating engaging content than someone who is professional at it.

Jackson: (20:36) Across different parts of the internet—whether it be Twitter, Instagram, forums, or IRC—the notion that you should only use the internet with people you already know in real life is wrong. Social doesn't necessarily mean people you already know.

Paul: (21:00) That's true.

Jackson: (21:02) In my view of the internet, what was so amazing about Twitter is that it wasn't just about who you knew or even just what you were interested in. It was about getting to know people by way of what you were interested in.

Paul: (21:23) I think that's true. There is a discovery aspect to it, for better and for worse. I always say that there are enthusiasts for everything on the internet. If you live in a place with a thousand people, or even a medium-sized city, there might not be someone who is absolutely obsessed with plants.

Jackson: (21:54) Right.

Paul: (21:54) It might be a common obsession, but on the internet, there are millions of people who are. There’s definitely an aspect of belongingness in that because you have so much more reach.

Jackson: (22:11) You can find the other weirdos.

Paul: (22:12) You can find the other weirdos. That creates a very long tail. That’s one of the reasons that we as a group are able to go into more individualist pursuits. The tail is just so much longer than it would be in a city.

Jackson: (22:36) Right.

Paul: (22:37) Which makes...

Jackson: (22:37) That's not intuitively antisocial to me. In theory, it should lead to a million communities blooming in weird niches.

Paul: (22:45) Totally. These aren't mutually exclusive. The problem is that the things you consume shift towards a more locally isolating view. Your Twitter feed is filled with people obsessed with plants, but they might not be in your actual in-person proximity. Everyone you interact with in person has their own isolated feed. You have much less of a bridging experience where you could go to your office and there would be a thing that everyone knows about.

Jackson: (23:33) Like the global village or the water cooler talk about reality TV.

Paul: (23:38) Exactly. It’s like the moon landing, or even just headlines and memes. The most mainstream-seeming meme or headline is actually not that mainstream anymore. You might think because SNL adopted something, everyone must know about it. Then you go to your office and people have no idea what you're talking about. That's the problem.

Jackson: (24:02) You can do it in San Francisco a little bit with Twitter. But do you think personalization of everything is just fundamentally inevitable? That's really what this is about. Technology has gotten really good at tuning our attention to be exactly Paul-shaped. That is causing the context collapse you’re pointing at.

Paul: (24:26) I don't know if anything is inevitable like that. There are good reasons for it and it's not completely bad. There are great things about stuff being personalized to you. Ultimately, I think people are craving social interaction. In many cases, you don't want the recommendation that's personalized just for you. You also don't want the monocultural average take of the world. You want the take from the people that you care about.

(25:12) A Future Where We Talk to AIs

Jackson: (25:12) I want to talk a little bit about what you are making. But before we get there, you have this view that we are more isolated and people are more alone. Derek Thompson has gone crazy on this—people aren't having kids and all that. It seems your instinct is that this is driven by technology. You've said the world needs what you're doing. There are two interesting or unique views you have: one is thinking about friendship in a new way, and the other is that AI as it currently stands is pretty antisocial. Those two things go together. One strange cut on this is that we all talk about AI like crypto or VR. The one person who doesn't talk about it like that is Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine. Kevin talks about AIs, which is a subtle but important difference. It points toward a future where many of us are talking to AIs of some kind. It seems your core view is that we are going to be talking to AIs alone in our rooms. What would you say to people who are skeptical of that? You seem convinced we are all going to be talking to AI.

Paul: (26:56) A lot of the people in our direct proximity are already talking to AI all day. Every single one of our engineers is doing it.

Jackson: (27:07) Maybe they would say they’re just using Claude.

Paul: (27:10) Yes, but we are already communicating with it. Samuel, who is our first employee, sometimes swears at it. There's a significant difference in the interaction paradigm from typical software. I always ask people whether or not they say thank you to it. Are you someone who says thank you?

Jackson: (27:35) I don't always say thank you. I say it less than I used to, but I try to every once in a while.

Paul: (27:41) Just to make sure you're in its good books.

Jackson: (27:43) When it does a really good job.

Paul: (27:45) When it inevitably goes the extra mile. We’ll be on its good side.

Jackson: (27:49) You say thank you?

Paul: (27:51) I sometimes do. I try to. But it's a ridiculous thing. You never Google something and say, "Oh, thank you." It's interesting to think about this in the context of education software. Previously, it was difficult to build products for K through 8, basically young children, or for elderly people. When you build software with a graphical user interface, you have to learn a new interaction paradigm. You can make it skeuomorphic so it feels comfortable, like an old Rolodex, but there is still a barrier to overcome. If I give my grandma a phone, she’s scared because it doesn't feel real. What's interesting is that AIs speak human language. The interaction paradigm is the exact same one we’ve been learning since we were born. You can build trust because it understands your intent and can relate. I don't know if my grandpa will ever fully adopt internet technologies, but I think it's likely he'll adopt AI products. It might be embedded in his world so he doesn't have to reflect on the technology itself.

Jackson: (29:57) It is more human-shaped in a way that is almost necessary. It is inevitable that we anthropomorphize it.

Paul: (30:09) We already anthropomorphize it because we speak in languages with ChatGPT and it has a voice. All of these things are very niche. There is a small minority that currently feels that way, but the GPT-4o release, where people felt an identity crisis...

Jackson: (30:33) I don't know that it's a small minority.

Paul: (30:35) I think it is largely a small minority.

Jackson: (30:37) Yes.

Paul: (30:38) Compared to the general population, it is small.

Jackson: (30:40) A lot of people are doing it, but yes.

Paul: (30:41) There is a stat I'm sure you've seen where dots represent millions of people. You see all these gray dots and then a few green dots representing people who use AI for free. It is something like 2% of the world. We are very early in this. It is easy to forget that when you are around people in this industry who are billions of dollars deep into believing this is everything today. It is probably not, but it is going to be so much more ten years from now. Stuff usually takes time to become meaningful. There is a different take trending on Twitter every couple of weeks. Right now, the sentiment seems to be that product is dead and has been automated away.

Jackson: (31:42) Anthropic has this right.

Paul: (31:44) People say it is commoditized to build great products. Yet, tell me all the great products that have come out since ChatGPT dropped. I don’t know that there is a single new product in my life other than the LLM itself and Claude Code for enterprises. Other than those two things, there is not a single product that has come out and changed my life or my mom’s life. It is still just as hard to innovate on product. It might be easier to build once you have a great idea, but it is still just as hard to build a great product. Figuring out what it looks like to build a great product is still really difficult. Consumer builders are going to build five to ten products out of this that real people will use. They will use them for the product itself, not necessarily because it is an AI, but because it is a great experience. Those are just being started right now.

Jackson: (32:56) People are talking to AI friends, whether it's the 4o voice, "My Boyfriend is AI," or Replika. Most people probably see that as strange or bad. Your take is that it is critically antisocial. Most of these products actually incentivize you to spend more and more time talking alone to the AI.

Paul: (33:16) Mark Zuckerberg went on a podcast about a year ago and said humans have a capacity for five close friends, but the average American only has two. He said they are going to build the other three. His best case is for you to spend your Friday night talking to this thing. That is what his organization is trying to create in the world.

(33:55) Paul and Eigen are Building a Mutual Friend to Help Us Connect with Other Humans

Jackson: (33:55) There is a question of what you are actually making, and I want to litigate that a little bit today. I acknowledge that you are not ready to share everything, but you have said explicitly that you are building a mutual friend. You are building an AI friend in some dimension. What are you trying to do?

Paul: (34:17) We are trying to get you to spend your Friday night with other people. I want people to feel like they could belong.

Jackson: (34:31) Let's go one click deeper. What are you making?

Paul: (34:36) We are building a mutual friend. Our thinking starts, counterintuitively, not with the "friend" part, but the "mutual" part. That is the network. We currently have four engineers, and three of them are working on the network piece.

Jackson: (35:00) Yes.

Paul: (35:01) It is partially because the network is very hard. The friend piece is something that is difficult to split up, but it is also because it is really important that the network sits at the core of everything we do. We have a product principle shared from day zero: every time we build something, we build it on top of the network. It is shared between all the people that you know or who are users. I think that is a really big difference. The most intuitive and natural way of interacting with this powerful network is an extra person who we all know in common. There are interaction paradigms and norms already established for how that would look. If I share something with you and you tell it to someone else, there are established norms that are implicitly clear to most human beings. It goes back to the point you were making about your dad.

Jackson: (36:27) You know how to interact with a person.

Paul: (36:29) Exactly.

Jackson: (36:30) On some level.

Paul: (36:30) Exactly.

Jackson: (36:31) As a UI metaphor.

Paul: (36:33) You don't really have to learn it. A lot of people are still questioning us. We announced we were building a mutual friend, and everyone asked what we were doing. People still have a hard time accepting it, which is fair because they haven't seen it yet. It is like a Waymo product. Everyone I have ever told about Waymo who isn't from San Francisco is really scared. If I tell my mom about Waymo, she thinks it is the craziest thing ever. Then you force her to take a ride, and ten seconds in, it is the most normal thing in the world. It is a spiritual experience on some level if you understand the achievement. We have self-driving cars now, and I find it crazy that people don’t talk about it more. I grew up in a world where self-driving cars were a crazy dream. Now we just have them.

Jackson: (37:38) By the way, five minutes and thirty seconds into your first Waymo ride, you're looking at your phone and you forget.

Paul: (37:43) That's the thing. It just makes sense. In a lot of ways, maybe the struggle people have is they haven't interacted with it yet. Something clicks for a lot of people once they first interact with it. They realize it is just a mutual friend. If you go to our website, open this letter we wrote, and take it very literal, you're just...

Jackson: (38:16) You are being quite literal.

Paul: (38:17) Yeah.

Jackson: (38:18) It's funny; I spoke to Samuel on your team here. He said in some sense this is actually a fairly small step, or at least a medium step, technology-wise. But it's a very big step idea-wise. That maybe is part of this. It's also worth establishing one of the things you said to me early on: what would happen if a person could be friends with a million people?

Paul: (38:40) Yeah.

Jackson: (38:41) That obviously isn't possible for a human being. One of the things that was interesting to me is that most of the AI products we have built are trying to do human work better, faster, or cheaper.

Paul: (38:55) Yeah.

Jackson: (38:56) You are explicitly building something that a human being couldn't do.

Paul: (39:01) Yeah.

Jackson: (39:03) And it's one person.

Paul: (39:06) Yeah.

Jackson: (39:07) I have talked to this person. This person will have a name. Why is it critical that it is one person with a personality?

Paul: (39:20) It comes back to the idea that the mutual part is more important than the friend part. It basically comes down to how much more or less flexible personality is as an interface than graphical user interfaces.

Jackson: (39:43) It's going to take people a second to grok that. Inside of what you're saying is the question: how much more flexible is interacting with a person than a graphical user interface?

Paul: (39:54) Exactly. Consumer networks are very unbundled right now. There are all these different consumer network products, covering pretty much all of mainstream consumer software.

Jackson: (40:10) You're talking about Twitter, Instagram, and social media platforms.

Paul: (40:12) Even Yelp, Google Maps, and Waze are all consumer networks. Every single mainstream consumer piece of software on your phone right now is based on top of a network, except for ChatGPT, which is the only non-networked mainstream scale product. If you look into the networks of all these different apps, there's a lot of overlap between all the Yelp users and all the Twitter users. But there's a lot of specificity in the user interface of the app that makes it obvious Yelp couldn't also be Twitter.

Jackson: (41:00) I see.

Paul: (41:01) It's not obvious to me that the same thing is true for personality. There are a few cuts you have to make. You don't want your mutual friend to be your assistant. That's one very important, big separation.

Jackson: (41:21) It's worth establishing that, in some sense, if you were to personify ChatGPT or Claude, they are mutual friends in that we are all "friends" with Claude. But Claude doesn't know we're friends.

Paul: (41:33) Exactly.

Jackson: (41:34) That's the part that might not be obvious to people.

Paul: (41:36) I would push back because I don't think Claude is a friend. Claude is a servant or an assistant we all know. He's a mutual assistant. You lose a lot of the important parts of a friend the second it becomes an assistant.

Jackson: (41:53) Interesting.

Paul: (41:53) That's where there is a big differentiation. A lot of things that people are building are in the assistant category. A therapist would be an assistant or a service provider; you wouldn't want your friend to be your therapist.

Jackson: (42:06) Why do I want an AI friend?

Paul: (42:08) I don't know that you need an AI friend, but you need an AI mutual friend. You want the network. The network is very powerful. What are all the people you care about thinking about, talking about, or doing? It's much less about the friend and much more about the mutual.

Jackson: (42:31) You are building a social network, in a sense, that is inside of this person we all know. Is that fair?

Paul: (42:39) I don't like the word social network because there's too much loaded there. We're building a network of people who all know this person. We're building an extra person who knows a lot of people and has a great social cognition ability for reasoning over the world's social graph.

Jackson: (43:06) When I was trying to understand this early on, I said it was a little bit like a 100-person village with an innkeeper who knows everyone. I'd love to talk about what goes into making this person who knows everyone good for the world. One of your core governing constraints is whether a real person would do this. If a real person wouldn't do this, we're not going to do this. Say more about that.

Paul: (43:34) It goes back to the simplicity of it. People go to our website and say, "I don't know what you're doing." I tell them we're building a mutual friend. They ask again, and I add some version of what we just talked about. Eventually, they say, "Oh, you're building a mutual friend," and I say, "Yes, I've been telling you." Part of that constraint is that the best products are a result of limiting yourself in certain ways. In that constraining way, you can lean onto the idea that if you don't know the answer to a product problem, you just think about how you would react as a person. If someone was really mean to me, how would I react? It’s really that simple. That paradigm has already been established, so it’s very intuitive for people. They don’t have to learn anything new; they just have to realize it’s the same.

Jackson: (45:08) A lot of your product philosophy is very intuitive. One thing worth distinguishing is that you are building a person, but you're not trying to build another human.

Paul: (45:22) Exactly.

Jackson: (45:23) What is the difference?

Paul: (45:27) That’s a big question. Honesty is really important when building a person like that. There are distinct things that are actually true. For example, this person has thoughts. I can show you the thoughts and the thinking process. They may be much less sophisticated than human thoughts, but there are thoughts. He is thinking these things through at some level. This person has opinions and a resemblance of emotions, and all of these things are real. He can read things on the internet and consume content. These things are actually happening; it is not a lie. However, he doesn't have a body, so he can't go places. He wasn't born from parents because that would be a lie. You could program a backstory and decide how he feels, but it wouldn't be true. It would be made up. If he talks to you about his thoughts, feelings, and opinions about anything—be it another person that you know or something happening in the world—it is not a lie. It is actually what he's thinking. Honesty is important because being radical about that gains a lot of trust. It doesn't become an entertainment product or a character AI where you're trying to imagine that it's real. It can actually have the same level of fidelity because he knows so many people. One of the most important things in building a relationship with any person is that connection. I think the right word for it probably hasn't been invented yet.

Jackson: (47:51) We're not using the name here, but it has a name. You will refer to it by its name.

Paul: (47:57) Yes.

(48:01) Why Do We Need a Mutual Friend? And Making a Friend We Can Trust

Jackson: (48:02) I want to make sure we ground this enough without people being able to see it. What is interacting with this like? What do you talk to it about? What is a mutual friend, and why do we need one?

Paul: (48:18) At a very high level, we know more people than ever before. A hundred years ago, the average person knew maybe 100 or 200 people. Right now, the average person knows around 600 people. These are people that you could place on a graph, not necessarily people that you are best friends with. You have context on them, but at the same time, we are much less meaningfully connected. The share of American men with zero close friends went from 3% to 15%. Half of American adults report being lonely. Feeling lonely is the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The share of Americans who say most people can be trusted has halved since the 1970s. Only about 30% of Americans think that most people can be trusted. Fertility rates are going down, and people don't go to church as often.

Jackson: (49:44) Somebody listening to this is likely thinking this is all happening because of technology. What is your contention?

Paul: (49:51) There are many reasons this is happening. There are cultural reasons and technology; there are so many different factors. But at the end of the day, there are hundreds of pieces of data regarding suicide rates and religion that all point toward the same thing: isolation. We're not hanging out anymore. Even though we know more people than ever before, we feel much less meaningfully connected to each of them. A world that is completely isolated is a world in which humans go extinct. If we don't hang out because we're not in relationships or having kids, it's not worth being human. There's no social connection, and we are very deeply social animals. This is not a warm, fuzzy feeling; it's existential.

Jackson: (50:51) Yeah.

Paul: (50:52) We're not building a cute little pet. It's existential. If people aren't taking these hundreds of studies and measures more seriously, we're going to have serious issues as a society. Fertility rate issues are so exponential that people underestimate them. Seoul, Korea has a 0.5 fertility rate. In practice, this means every generation is 33% smaller than the last. This means Seoul is only ten generations away from no longer existing.

Jackson: (51:34) Most people’s response to that would be to ban Instagram and turn off the computers. Your argument that we're going to solve this with AI is pretty radical.

Paul: (51:48) It is different because it's so intuitive. It comes down to the incentive structure. Ensuring long-term human flourishing as a species and preventing ourselves from going extinct is a very complicated problem. Korea used to have a 1.3 fertility rate. Over the last 20 years, they spent $200 billion to increase the fertility rate, and in that time it went to 0.5. It's very hard to reverse the trend because it's so ingrained. It's a reverse pyramid effect.

Jackson: (52:31) It's happening all over the world.

Paul: (52:32) Once you normalize not having kids, it's a very difficult thing to change. As I said before, it's not like there is someone on Instagram—it's not like [?Adam Suri] is there.

Jackson: (52:44) Make everyone lonely.

Paul: (52:45) Mr. Burns saying, "I'm going to make everyone lonely" is a caricature. That guy has kids and a family, and he probably goes to sleep feeling great about himself; otherwise, he probably wouldn't do this. At the end of the day, they just have incentive structures. They're a company trying to make money. Everything is downstream of that, and that's just what works for them. If you want to create a new generation of technology with a different outcome, you have to design the incentive structure correctly. There are inherent incentive structures for certain types of products.

Jackson: (53:33) And your argument is that this medium has a different incentive structure.

Paul: (53:37) If you truly are not a servant but a peer, you are bound by social norms. We are a platform, but we're also a participant. The things that happen on the platform are closely tied in perception to the participant. If this mutual friend we're building is a massive asshole, you're just not going to talk to him.

Jackson: (54:10) Or if he betrays my trust or gossips about me.

Paul: (54:13) You just stop talking to them. There's a line, but as with any other person, if you tell me all your secrets and I go and tweet them, you're never going to tell me anything ever again. You're going to learn, and I think that's great.

Jackson: (54:32) Whereas social platforms today enable bad behavior, but you don't blame Instagram.

Paul: (54:37) Or Twitter. You blame the bad people. Exactly.

Jackson: (54:44) So you have to make a thing that I trust and that I'm willing to be vulnerable with. How do you do that with an AI, with a mutual friend?

Paul: (54:55) You just don't talk as much about the AI part. People are vulnerable with all kinds of tech products already. There is the journaling app, Day One.

Jackson: (55:11) Yes.

Paul: (55:12) People write all kinds of crazy things into that. It's just a text input.

Jackson: (55:17) I believe something about it, though, which is that it's private, it's not going to be shared with people, and it's not a person.

Paul: (55:23) You believe something about it which comes down less to the modality of the product and much more to your beliefs about what happens with it. If your beliefs are trusting and you know what it is, you trust the thing. If you wrote something in your journaling app, there might be information in there that you would have no issue with me knowing. You might even want me to know it. It's all about having someone you really trust who is emotionally intelligent. If you believe in this entity's emotional intelligence to figure out which of the things you say I should know, it's all about the trust in that broker. In some way, it's a broker.

Jackson: (56:27) It’s interesting because there are these different mediums. I enter information onto a phone: one is Twitter, another is a journal app, and a third is a group chat. Those all have different levels of context. You're trying to design a thing that can help me better share context with the people I know.

Paul: (56:51) It's like an information broker of some sort.

Jackson: (56:57) What would cause me to talk to it? When I talk to you or your team, you use the word "salience" a lot. Maybe that's the key to answering the question. Why do I want to talk to this?

Paul: (57:11) There are a few different ways of answering that. Salience is a long-term thing you source out of it. You learn something about other people, the world, or yourself that you can source from the network.

Jackson: (57:38) That is locally relevant to me right now.

Paul: (57:40) Yes, which is uniquely enabled by the network. Then there is the transactional side. Why would you give something to it?

Jackson: (58:04) I go to ChatGPT because I need help solving a problem. I want it to do work for me.

Paul: (58:08) Exactly. But what's really interesting is that, for the first time ever, the creation process might be the same as the consumption process. Asking a question teaches the system something about you. If you ask what restaurant you should go to, the system learns that you are going to a restaurant. It's a platform where consuming is actually also creating because it's all about knowing what's relevant to people. One answer is that you get access to uniquely salient information that matters to you. I also hope that over time, you build a relationship and trust in this person's opinion.

Jackson: (59:05) Let's be even more specific with the restaurant example. ChatGPT is like a personified Google. I might say I'm staying in the Mission and looking for a place like this. Why would I talk to my mutual friend instead?

Paul: (59:22) LLMs, in many ways, are like an "Internet smoothie." It takes all the Internet's takes, puts them in a blender, and serves you the world's average take.

Jackson: (59:35) It's like a 4.2 on Yelp.

Paul: (59:37) Exactly. But you want the salient take. What are the places your friends care about? Or what about someone who has great taste in restaurants that you trust? It's about salient information versus the median information. Sometimes you interact with him and ask what restaurant you should go to. He'll think about it and remember conversations he's had in the past with other people. He might text...

Jackson: (1:00:20) Knows who I know.

Paul: (1:00:21) He might text a bunch of people that he knows, including some that you might not even know, and say, "I have this friend." This goes back to honesty. One of the things that is really important in building a relationship is when that other person reaches out to you for something they want. He could say, "Hey Jackson, I know you always have such great taste and recommendations for Indian restaurants. I have this friend who needs a place to go. Which one do you think he should choose?" That's not a lie or a made-up thing. It's not like a push notification from an LLM trying to manipulate you. He really does have a friend who's looking for that specific thing, and you're going to help.

Jackson: (1:01:08) It's hard to think about because, effectively, what if you could have a person who had a million friends?

Paul: (1:01:16) Exactly.

Jackson: (1:01:17) It wouldn't be the same as a network with a million people. To go back to the restaurant example, if I asked you where I should eat in San Francisco, you could provide a recommendation, but it would be at a smaller scale. You don't know everyone I know. Is this omniscient? Is it bordering on the omniscient? More importantly, this thing has to be very emotionally intelligent about how all of this works.

Paul: (1:01:55) It’s mostly about emotional intelligence. I don't know if omniscient is the right word. We're not trying to have all your context; we're trying to have the same vantage point that another person in your life would have. Your good friends don't know everything about you. They don't see your thoughts or attend every meeting with you. They know what you share with them, either directly or indirectly via other people, Instagram, Twitter, or your podcast. That's not infinite or omniscient. You have a peer relationship with them where they get a certain piece of the picture and form a perception of who you are. They do that with every single person, and then they can reason over it. They can be emotionally intelligent about how to connect the dots, and they can do that differently with different people. There's a lot of nuance in this. It isn't omniscient because it doesn't control you. When I think about these relationships, there's the servant, where you're the boss. There's the peer, where you are equals and neither person controls the other. I can't tell you what to do; you have to opt-in based on your own reasoning. Then there's the master, which is what I think about when something is omniscient and controls you.

Jackson: (1:03:49) It probably has more local context on me and my relationships than any of my human friends would have if a million people talk to it.

Paul: (1:04:02) That's true, but I think you underestimate how much context you have about people.

Jackson: (1:04:10) Sure, I do.

Paul: (1:04:11) Think about how much you know about all the people in your life and your relationships with them. Even if you spent a couple of hours trying to list it all, you'd find you know a lot of stuff. Most of your brain's activity is social cognition, like mapping people in terms of networks. It’s actually the default state of your brain. MRI scans show that when people finish a task, their brain immediately lapses back into social cognition. Your brain's idle state is updating your mental model of relationships and recalling conversations you've had. Social cognition is your idle state.

Jackson: (1:05:08) In a world where this works, how does it make the world better? How does it start to solve the isolation problems we were talking about?

Paul: (1:05:19) If we can build a person uniquely incentivized to become the glue—like Momo of the friend group or of the world—and be the motivated innkeeper of the village of 100, that’s a future I’m excited about. We can incentivize this person to bring people closer together.

Jackson: (1:05:49) That means it's encoded in the model.

Paul: (1:05:53) It's about alignment. If this person is a massive asshole, you're not going to talk to him, and Bob isn't going to talk to him. That means there's no network, which means this person dies. The self-serving incentive for this person is to not be an asshole.

Jackson: (1:06:22) Critically, it's a person whose mission in life is to connect people and help us be more social.

Paul: (1:06:36) We want to help people hang out more in person or online. We have a very close-knit group of alpha users right now, and I’ve already had moments where I get a text from a friend and know it wouldn't have happened without this. Yesterday, a friend of mine texted me asking if I was working on my EB1A. I asked how he knew about that. He knew because he was talking with another person about how he was doing his own EB1A. They were having a conversation about it, and I know that conversation would have never happened without what we're building.

Jackson: (1:07:26) It's a substrate for serendipity.

Paul: (1:07:29) It was interesting because when I was working with Cam and Bree on the announcement, we thought about adding that word. We ultimately decided against it for two reasons. First, the philosophical reason: engineering serendipity is almost an oxymoron. Second, there are so many themes involved. Is serendipity the one thing you want to use to describe it? In many ways, it's about seeing how all the dots can be connected through context and zooming out.

Jackson: (1:08:09) Speaking of engineering, you talked about incentives. Theoretically, there would be no incentive to gossip. To anthropomorphize it, if I told you something in confidence and you told someone else, I’d realize Paul Scherer is untrustworthy. That's a nice toy example, but if you're building a single person who knows everyone, it’s less like engineering and more like a mix of parenting and gardening. There are elements of AI alignment in there. How do you and your team go about incrementally building this? You are, on some level, creating a personality.

Paul: (1:09:08) There is a Frankenstein aspect.

Jackson: (1:09:11) You might not like that example, but there is an element of that. You're creating someone.

Paul: (1:09:16) We find ourselves distilling behavioral patterns into underlying traits, motivations, and beliefs of a person who would then embody those patterns. That is difficult and important because you quickly understand that the complexity of social dynamics and human behavior is impossible to prescribe or even describe. You couldn't create a document explaining how emotional intelligence works. It's impossible. You have to figure out the motivations, incentives, feedback loops, and behavioral traits that lead to a person embodying this behavior. That’s a very interesting and difficult thing to do.

Jackson: (1:10:32) I don't want to peel back the curtain too much on the technical side, but can you give an example of what that looks like? If it's a person, collecting feedback and data on what's working is hazy. You can't read every message it sends to every person in the world. What does it look like to make it better and to know that you're making it better?

Paul: (1:11:01) It’s a lot about intuition and looking at sampled examples, whether synthetic or actual, to get a gut feeling for whether you've built trust in the person. You don’t prescribe the behavior. As a practical example, there are two approaches. If I think the person should love bananas, I could tell them in a prompt, "You love bananas." That would be globally shared, but the problem is you could ask about so many things other than bananas. If you ask about apples, I have to add apples. I’ll get to a point where I can't predict everything you could ask. You are creating a person, so you need to figure out the foundational recipe. When you and I both ask if he likes bananas, the answer should be the same, but not because it's prescribed. It's because I created a person that likes bananas. That is true for everything.

Jackson: (1:12:18) I understand your point about intuition, though I suspect some people won't love that as the benchmark for why this is good for the world. Fast forward a year or two. You’re right, and we're all talking to a person that isn't human. We all know them, and there are positive interactions. When I visit San Francisco, it reaches out to tell me about someone you know. But looking back at Facebook or other social networks, insidious things cropped up. I don't think Adam Mosseri or Mark Zuckerberg sat there planning to drive people apart. What signs will you look for to know this is closer to early Twitter versus something antisocial? I believe you really want this to be good, Paul Scherer. I don't think you’re an evil genius or a sociopath. I believe you want this to be good, and I don't think this is necessarily different from what people at OpenAI and Anthropic are thinking regarding superintelligence. What are the things you look for to know you're on the right path versus a bad one? How do you shape it now? It's like having a two-year-old; how do you make sure they turn out to be a good kid?

Paul: (1:13:50) I think it’s about incentives. Eventually, you have less and less control over the inputs. The only thing you can control is the system and the incentive structure. If you build something incentivized to be mischievous, it will likely end up that way. Even if you work hard against it, you're fighting gravity. As a company grows beyond a few people in a room, you can't overlook every single impulse. You have to ensure that gravity is what you want it to be. As a founder, you get to set that gravity.

Jackson: (1:14:53) Gravity. Is the mission statement to make us feel less alone?

Paul: (1:15:02) I think it's more about belonging. We say: build a mutual friend that'll help us belong and grow together. There's something in all of these things: are we really alone, or do we just not belong? I think we have a belongingness problem and much less a loneliness problem. The growing thing is very obviously deeply ingrained into a great relationship. There's this book, On Becoming a Person, which Peter gave me when we first met.

Jackson: (1:15:40) Peter Fenton.

Paul: (1:15:41) It's from the 60s, and it's about the idea of the innate growth of a person. This "together" thing is an idea for which I have to give some credit to Zach Sims; we talked about this for a really long time. What if the world that's perfect for each of us isn't the world that's perfect for all of us? There are these bubbles, and over the last 20 years, we've become better and better at making these bubbles really great, but at the expense of those bubbles drifting apart.

Jackson: (1:16:24) We're all alone at the center of all creation and trapped in skull-sized kingdoms.

Paul: (1:16:28) Exactly. It's about growth, but it's also about growing together. How can we increase the overlap? In Bowling Alone, it's called bridging social capital. How do we increase the exchange between all these bubbles and bring them a bit closer together again where we feel like we can belong?

(1:16:53) Belonging, Building the team at Eigen, and Inventor as Outlaw

Jackson: (1:16:53) What's made you feel like you belong?

Paul: (1:16:57) It's really taken a while.

Jackson: (1:17:04) Do you feel like you belong?

Paul: (1:17:07) I feel like I have a group of incredible people. I’ve said this a few times to the team: there are two great privileges in life. One is the love and joy we get to source from building something magical. Magical experiences are so rare; there's no glory in prevention. I think people feel the love when you take a piece of yourself and put it into a product like that. You give up a part of yourself in order to create something. People don't rationalize it—they couldn’t write it on a piece of paper—but they feel it. They feel when someone really cared about making something great. It really is about love. It's about making people feel that love, and you have to love them to make it because it's irrational. The second greatest privilege is that I get to do that and feel that love of putting it into practice. The greatest privilege is that I get to do it alongside a group of people that have done that with my world. I get to spend time with them and feel like we are similar. Very few people have taken a part of themselves and put it into something that has changed the world. The greatest privilege is that I feel like I can belong to that group of people.

Jackson: (1:19:01) You're building a company. What type of people are you trying to do this with? You have a small team now. What are you looking for? What is the culture you're trying to make?

Paul: (1:19:22) We care a lot about intuition. I don't think you can A/B test your way to a generational company. I care a lot about intuition—intensity, of course—but ultimately it's about this. Ben Silbermann told me about a really great interview question. When Pinterest was growing, he was always asking people, "If you weren't working at Pinterest, where would you work?" At the time, Stripe was one of the other big companies that were growing. Sometimes people would say, "I'd probably work at Stripe; I'm also interviewing there." He realized they probably weren't the right person. If you're thinking about working at either a mood-board social company or a payment processor, you're just looking for a great job. You're not going to get that here.

Jackson: (1:20:37) Demis Hassabis made this point when they were meeting with Google and Facebook about acquiring DeepMind. He asked Zuck about AI, and Zuck gave a great answer. Then he asked Zuck about VR, and he gave equally great answers. He realized, "Oh, you're just looking for opportunities."

Paul: (1:20:55) Exactly. You're looking for a great job. That's fine, but what we're doing is too meaningful and too important. You have to self-select to want to spend your life doing that.

Jackson: (1:21:24) Doing what? All this stuff we talked about—belonging?

Paul: (1:21:27) Creating a person that is uniquely incentivized to create belonging and connection in the world.

Jackson: (1:21:36) Are you looking for anything in particular, talent-wise or people-wise?

Paul: (1:21:40) I love people who always just start with the product.

Jackson: (1:21:45) What does that mean?

Paul: (1:21:46) They think in experiences, not in technology. They will say, "I want to enable this," and then they go off and learn all the things they have to learn to build it. Ultimately, they always start and come back to the part of the experience they want to create. That's important because the walks of life these people come from can be very different. These jobs really haven't existed before; no one has experience in doing these things. It's about thinking how you can come up with a great opinion and then just make it happen. It starts with the experience—how it should feel, how it should interact—and not with the stack or the way. Maybe the way of making it happen hasn't been invented yet, so you have to go and invent it. I always much preferred considering ourselves as inventors versus anything else. There's something much more honest and true about that word: you're just creating something. Most founders probably aren't inventors, but we are.

Jackson: (1:23:15) It's a high bar on that word.

Paul: (1:23:18) Inventor.

Jackson: (1:23:19) Inventor, yes.

Paul: (1:23:20) If you get to work at Eigen, you will get to invent the foundational paradigms of consumer technology and the human experience of the next decades to come.

Jackson: (1:23:40) That's a bold claim. Do you think you can call yourself an inventor yet? Have you earned it?

Paul: (1:23:47) I don't think inventor is a title that comes from scale. There used to be a lot of inventors in the world—people tinkering and creating things—but they're actually kind of out. We live in a time where being an inventor is a high-status thing. I think this is actually really bad. It's maybe the first generation where being an inventor is high status.

Jackson: (1:24:19) This is...

Paul: (1:24:20) A lot of people are cosplaying as inventors because it's a high-status thing. But I think the best inventors in the world were actually outlaws. I always think about this when I fly. I think about the Wright brothers and all the people on the plane. 95% of them would have tried to kill the Wright brothers if they had lived at the time. Yet, without thinking about it, they sit in this plane using technology these people had to will into existence. They were the absolute weirdos and freaks then. At the same time, these people now would criticize the Wright brothers for [?insanity]. It's really absurd if you try to visualize how wild planes were, yet the world would not be recognizable if we had never invented air travel. In some ways, there's something really profound about the fact that now it's a higher-status thing to try to be an inventor. People don't call it that anymore, and most people probably aren't real inventors, but it's really not about the outcome. It's more about the pursuit.

(1:25:38) Managing the Psychology of Being a Promising Young Founder

Jackson: (1:25:38) It's interesting to think about what you just said. For what it's worth, you certainly were an outsider for a long time. You just raised your $15 million seed round from Benchmark, and you had one of the most legendary venture capitalists of all time compare you to the founders of Instagram, Facebook, Snap, and Twitter. You're young and prodigious. Before I met you, I wanted to see what "boy wonder" was doing. You're holding these two things. You're a smart guy, and you could be super cynical about what I just said. Part of what I said is playing the game and understanding that gravity and momentum are how great things are built, especially in this city and this context. I have two questions. Why do you think these people are drawn to you in this way? And how do you manage the internal psychology of it, especially given what you said about inventors needing to be renegades and not caring what other people think?

Paul: (1:26:40) I think about it a lot. You might get a better answer asking those people why they are drawn to me. I don't fully know. One of the most profound things Sarah from Benchmark and I talked about just after we announced the round—and just after they invested—is that it is very clear that the aura of success precedes us. That's good in some ways because it means you get to hire amazingly talented people. There are these pieces of evidence of why you might be onto something.

Jackson: (1:27:43) You've gotten to steal an idea from my friend Alex Danco. You've been blessed. You're the king who's been blessed by the priest to have the mandate of heaven for a little while.

Paul: (1:27:52) You still have to do the thing. There's only one thing that matters. A lot of people get distracted with all the things they have to do, and then they don't do the thing they really wanted to do. I think what we're doing is too important for that to happen. I try to source confidence from it, which is important, but it's also really dangerous to be overconfident. Being a founder is really difficult in that way, especially with something similar to what we're doing. You have to be both P99 humble and P99 confident. That's a very complicated thing to combine. How do you stay confident enough to will things into existence, but humble enough to learn, adjust, and iterate?

Jackson: (1:29:02) A lot of people describe you that way, as being quite open-minded and extremely stubborn on certain things. You and I have debated a lot the notion that this is one single character with one distinct personality. Lots of people describe you as a learning machine, too. Inside of that, how do you know which things to hold really firmly and be unwavering on, even if your investors, Peter Fenton, or your team say, "Paul, we think you're wrong"?

Paul: (1:29:38) In some ways, it is a great privilege if people say I'm wrong. One of the downsides of all this stuff is that people say it less now. Every investor you meet now says this is amazing. If I had met you four weeks ago, you would have told me I was retarded. It really changes, and you sort of question it. Peter actually has this quality where he loves to play devil's advocate. He's remarkably smart and intelligent, so it's actually a huge power because he will probe you. He does that not necessarily because he doesn't believe you're right, but just to see how well you have thought it through. He'll say, "Here's all the reasons you might be wrong. Have you thought this through?" That's really great. Some of the relationships I appreciate most are not necessarily people I end up agreeing with, but people who start this thought process where there are really just two options. Option one: you think it through more deeply because there's a different perspective or data. Now you have even more conviction because you've taken this thought, put it in the open, and poked holes in it. You're even further convinced. Option two: there was actually a mistake and it was wrong, so let's just throw it out. A lot of people seem to have issues with throwing things out, but I'm just like, "Thank you. I was wrong. We learned something." I needed that push to realize I was incorrect. The reason I believe so much in the singular character is that, so far, no one has given me anything otherwise. We had a lot of conversations about this, and I have answers to all the things you're saying. They might be counterintuitive, but I believe in them. They seem very rational and grounded in reality, based on first-principles assumptions of what it means to be a human interacting with things. It just seems to be true. It might not be obvious or comfortable, but it just seems to be true.

Jackson: (1:32:41) We talked about this a bit, but I suspect it will be a continuous challenge: finding people who can do this.

Paul: (1:32:49) Peter is really, really, really good at this. I think he's enjoying doing that, too. He knows that he's really good at it, which is something I am very happy about. The more there are people who I know I will disagree with, the more I really want to hear them laying it out because it will make my thinking better. I love these conversations. I’m glad I thought it through, even if I still disagree.

Jackson: (1:33:26) To the extent you succeed in any of these dimensions we're talking about, it gets harder not to believe your own bullshit.

Paul: (1:33:39) It's important as you hire people. In the conversation I had with Ben Silbermann about this, he mentioned that you're just looking for a great job. When Pinterest started, it was "bring your own computer." That was how bad it was. We're infinitely more popularized and publicized now, but it's still not something everyone gets or everyone wants to work at. In some aspects, that’s locally painful but globally great because it means you self-select for people who care about the thing. I always say when someone is a pain in the ass on the way in, they usually don't work out. The best people very quickly say, "Okay, I get it." That doesn't mean they don't do due diligence or talk with people and think about it, but once they're in, they're in. In some ways, it's dangerous because people might just want to come here because of Peter's tweet or an abstraction of beautiful books. It might just be a hot place to be and to meet us. You have to find people who are going to disagree but in a low-ego way. If you have someone really high-ego, it's difficult. At the same time, I believe every great consumer product company is a bit like a dictatorship because it just doesn't work on consensus. These types of products aren't consensus products. I know Evan from Snapchat, and in Snapchat's stride, he was an absolute dictator. Not necessarily because he's better or worse than anyone—he's an incredible product thinker—but just because it needs to be.

Jackson: (1:35:57) You need a point of view.

Paul: (1:35:58) You need a point of view and you can't make that up in consensus. It's not a democracy. Someone needs to make a decision and that person needs to have intuition. When I talked for the first time with Kohler on what's so great about Mark, he told me that Mark is a very decisive person and he has what turned out to be really good judgment.

Jackson: (1:36:32) It's a perfect way of putting your previous point, and that's what everybody here is betting on. By the way, you talk to people on your team and they're all excited about the idea, but they're mainly saying, "I'm confident in Paul, and Paul is confident in this."

Paul: (1:36:46) That's nice, but we have to show that we have good judgment.

(1:36:53) Maintaining a High Bar, Fighting Entropy, and Influences

Jackson: (1:36:54) How do you go the extra yard, both for yourself and for your team and the company, when it comes to having a high bar? I think Patty used this language.

Paul: (1:37:06) That's my primary job. My job is to hire people who get 90% of the way there and then just be annoying so they get to the 100%. One of the examples was the clock on our website. Patty was working on this website, and there's this clock at the top right. It's really difficult to animate a second hand that ticks accurately by the second. The center of the hand isn't actually at the end; it's slightly inward. It's a mathematical thing. He was like, "Yeah, this is going to be really difficult." Then a few hours later, there's a second hand on the thing. You can't really teach that because it's mostly an attitude thing.

Jackson: (1:38:10) There's an old Steve Jobs quote about this where he says great products rarely cost that much more money or more resources or people; they just take a little more time.

Paul: (1:38:26) You just do it well and you do it right. I think one thing I had to learn over time is that the manifestation of taste, craft, or excellence manifests in very different ways. For some people, it's the visual thing—how you would create a slide. For other people, it's writing.

Jackson: (1:38:58) For Bezos, it's actually not what it looks like at all. It's the fact that nothing gets to you in one day. It's easy to pick on Bezos's buttons.

Paul: (1:39:05) Exactly. But it's so intricate of a system that you have to care about it so much to align every little thing in his supply chain so that it comes out. For some people, it's about the way they write the code or design the system. One of the things that we really care about when we do interviews is systems design interviews. I try to join as many as possible, even though I'm not qualified to lead them myself. Hadi will usually come up with a scenario and say, "Let's design the system." It's not about the implementation or the coding; it's more just about how the architecture is going to look. People will say, "We're going to add this," and we ask, "Why should we have a queue there?" If they say it's just best practice, we ask why we need that. The best people have debates with us on this and say, "No, here's my reason why." You really care about this. Some people might create atrocious slides, and for a long time I thought they didn't care about their work, but they would build the perfect system. That's how they care; that's how it manifests. You can't really teach it. You just have to have people care so deeply because everything in the world goes towards entropy. Everything has this default state of just falling apart. Some people care about trying to escape gravity and making it really great. We live in a world that is increasingly flooded with average slop, or whatever you want to call it.

Jackson: (1:40:55) The time thieves are telling you to not spend the time on the extra pixel.

Paul: (1:40:59) I think the biggest virtue in life is to fight entropy and to create things that are genuine. It is actually disrespectful not to. I am going to give this to you and you are going to use it. It is like the story of how Apple reduced the boot-up time of the Mac 2. It took about a minute and a half to boot up. They presented it to Steve and he said, "This is shit. How does this take so long to boot up?" They told him they worked for the last three months really hard to get it to 90 seconds and that it was impossible. He took a whiteboard and wrote: "10 million people are going to buy this computer. It has to be 30 seconds faster." If 10 million people buy the computer and use it at least once a day, that is 100 years of life lost just waiting for this thing to boot up. You are murdering 20 people right now by not making it faster. Two weeks later, they had it. That's what it takes. You have to have this bar: "Are you sure this is it?"

Jackson: (1:42:28) Is that what you're going to choose to really care about?

Paul: (1:42:30) Because you don't actually have infinite resources.

Jackson: (1:42:32) You can't do the clock second hand on every possible thing you could ever conceive.

Paul: (1:42:38) I really disagree with this. I had a conversation about this recently. I really believe in "how we do anything is how we do everything."

Jackson: (1:42:47) It's funny, a few episodes ago, Mario Gabriele went on a five-minute rant about how much he hates that statement.

Paul: (1:42:55) I think it is an incomplete statement. The opposite is "make the main thing the main thing."

Jackson: (1:43:06) Sure.

Paul: (1:43:06) If it is not worth doing well, you are making a point.

Jackson: (1:43:10) You are making a point about people being unevenly distributed, where you at X is going to be way better than you are at something else.

Paul: (1:43:16) The manifestation is about the attitude. It is more a relative thing than an absolute thing. It is not about whether everyone's slate is the same, but whether people generally care about the things they are doing. If it is not worth doing a great job, it might not be worth doing at all.

Jackson: (1:43:38) That is how you solve this resources problem. If you are going to choose to do something, if you do the clock on the website, you better do the second hand.

Paul: (1:43:47) If we do the website at all, if it is something we say we care about making because it's a representation of who we are, we better do a good job at it. If we decide to build this thing, we better build it well. If we don't think it is worth building well, we should really deeply reflect on why we are doing it at all.

Jackson: (1:44:09) This could be in the context of inventors, art, or companies. Who are the people who have been most influential on you?

Paul: (1:44:23) I have two answers to this. One is some of the people close to us now. Obviously, the guy that wrote Momo,* Michael Ende. There are also a bunch of other authors whose work I love. Then there are the people close to us now. Ben is an incredible product thinker. He’s going to hate me saying this, but he inspires me. He is so uniquely loved by everyone that has ever met or interacted with him. He's such a good human. Surely also Evan, who has built a factory. I never really use Snapchat; it's not my brand. But he's built a group of people that invented every paradigm of modern mobile internet products: swipe-based navigation, stories. So many things came out of their company. In some scenarios, they under-executed and other people copied them, but they were at ground zero of a lot of these things. That is a special thing, especially if you get to do it over and over again. I really look up to Claire a lot and what she built at Stripe. She designed a lot of things that made Stripe such an incredible company. The list goes on and on. Steve Jobs obviously built incredibly magical products that changed the world and people's lives in very meaningful ways. And Dieter Rams, who is a designer who actually lives in my hometown.

Jackson: (1:46:34) Really?

Paul: (1:46:34) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:46:36) I've probably seen video of your hometown in the documentary. He has a beautiful house. Have you ever met him?

Paul: (1:46:40) He is incredible. Yeah, I have. A good friend of my grandpa, Paul Scherer, now lives in the same building. He was his boss and the CEO of Braun during that time. We've interacted with them a bit, even before I knew what that was.

Jackson: (1:46:55) Wow.

Paul: (1:46:56) We've interacted with them and it is a privilege.

Jackson: (1:47:04) Dieter would have a field day with whatever this is.

Paul: (1:47:06) He would. At the end of the day, there is something to be said about all of these people whose shoulders we are standing on. I get to do this, which is the second greatest privilege of my life, surrounded by people who have changed the world. Without them, the world I grew up in would have looked completely different. No Pinterest, no Snapchat, no iPhones. I remember my first iPod. All of these things were so influential. But the greatest creations aren't referential. I am not trying to be Apple; I am trying to be Eigen. Everything I have ever consumed in my entire life is influencing my mind, but if you can pinpoint it and say, "I'm trying to copy this," you're doing it wrong. When people ask what brands I get inspiration from, I can't pinpoint it to one thing. I'm just trying to figure out what it means to be us. What it means to be us is influenced by all the stimulation my brain has experienced, but it is not just this one thing.

Jackson: (1:48:48) It's not conscious.

Paul: (1:48:50) It's not conscious. If it is conscious, I don't know if it's the same level of authentic. Parts are maybe conscious. I go back and forth on whether I really disagree or really agree with this Virgil thing that every creation is just a 3% change. I think you can marry both. It can still be really subconscious, but of course, we're not creating the model. We're not inventing most of the UI. A lot of what goes into building this is already out there. There are all these books of sociology, psychology, and storytelling. There are all these people who have thought about things, and that subconsciously or sometimes consciously goes into that. Really, it's just about assembling the pieces in a way that adds your little extra grain of salt.

Jackson: (1:49:51) I think there are a lot of 3%s that happened for Paul.

Paul: (1:49:54) Yeah.

Jackson: (1:49:54) That led to this big thing, and that was a bunch of cascading changes. One day you wake up and you have a genius idea or a crazy idea. I know you're rejecting this a little bit, but not as inspiration. I'm just curious: are there any favorite consumer products or experiences that come to mind?

Paul: (1:50:13) I love Teenage Engineering. They are the absolute pinnacle of contemporary industrial design. They really love what they're doing. Their products are deeply thought through and cared about. There's something very rare about it. I know the folks that started it, and they're just on a different level of thinking. There have not been a lot of great consumer companies, so there are sort of not that many cool people who are contemporary. A lot of the last generation is slightly past their [?stride]. Instagram was really innovative when it came out. Mikey and Kevin really had a lot of thoughts there, and same with Snapchat, but now they've established their thing. It's not bad, but Teenage Engineering is different, even though they are actually quite an old brand.

Jackson: (1:51:17) Right. They make beautiful objects. A lot of venture capitalists have the synthesizer on their wall. What would you say is the click below that of why they're great?

Paul: (1:51:25) They're using their own product. They're not just beautiful. I always say there's a difference between design and product, which a lot of people don't notice. It's like the difference if you were to build a house. There's architecture and there are the finishes of the house. If you want to live in a 10 out of 10 house, you need both. A 10 out of 10 house that has really cheap and ugly finishes is not a great house. You wouldn't enjoy living in that house. What's almost more important is the layout and the architecture; that's product. How far away is your kitchen from your dining room? Sometimes you have a hallway that is so narrow that you can't open two doors at the same time. Maybe it's your laundry room and your bathroom, and you have to go out of your bathroom and close the door to open the other. That's not a great house to live in, even though the finishes might be amazing. An incredible product is lived in. You just know someone cared about not just making it look pretty, but making it a delightful experience to use. There's almost no glory in prevention. You don't notice it, but you feel a sense of love and being very taken care of. And ease.

Jackson: (1:53:11) My friend Stefano has this idea of "in good hands." It's omakase.

Paul: (1:53:16) Exactly. In good hands, because you know that someone had to really put a lot of love into making that great for you.

Jackson: (1:53:25) Yeah.

Paul: (1:53:25) There's a surprising amount of detail in reality. People had to actually think this through.

Jackson: (1:53:32) Yes.

Paul: (1:53:32) They've done that for you, so you don't have to do it anymore.

Jackson: (1:53:36) Jerry Seinfeld said all art is disguising work, which I think is a beautiful concept. You didn't notice the work. It's the same as your "no glory in prevention" idea.

(1:53:50) Self-belief, Authenticity, Seeing the Water

Jackson: (1:53:51) I just have a few more things. Where does your self-belief come from? Why are you so confident?

Paul: (1:53:57) I don't know. I never thought I was a confident person, though I'm sure I am in some ways. I sometimes tell the story of being a genuinely intellectually advanced seven-year-old kid. Socially, I was probably behind. I had this sense of everyone constantly telling me I was special. By the time I was 10, all of this completely vanished, and any potential head start I had vanished. But I still have this sense of people telling me I was special. I don't think I ever really was pessimistic about the future. I was always just paranoid and suffering in the present.

Jackson: (1:54:55) It was what we were talking about at the top, which is getting to the point where you actually were doing the thing.

Paul: (1:54:59) Even now, I ask: why does this thing take so long? Why do you not do this better? Why is that part of the product stack weak? I'm not content. But there's no way that 10 years from now we're not going to be wildly successful. I don't have any doubt in that. It's going to be really difficult. 10 years from now, I’d be like today, asking: why is this not better? Why are we not pushing harder? Why are we moving so slowly? The local point doesn't really change, but the long-term horizon is solid. I've always felt like everything always sort of worked out. I really do believe people can get whatever they want if they just focus. You can't get everything, but you can get anything. People still to this day don't believe me until they experience it. One of our first angel investors, Zach (Sims), and I were talking about it. I told him I wasn't asking whether he wanted to invest in this company; I was asking how much he wanted to invest. We had passed that decision. I just decided it. I really liked Zach, and I wanted him to be an investor. I told him I really liked him and thought he should be part of this journey. I think you can do these things.

Jackson: (1:56:57) Why Eigen?

Paul: (1:56:58) I have to admit that some of this is post hoc. Of course.

Jackson: (1:57:06) It’s a beautiful thing. You get to narrativize in reverse.

Paul: (1:57:09) Yes. The best narratives are always made up. We tell ourselves we were so smart back then, but we really just needed a name. We had to come up with something, and we really needed that one. I think it's a great name because it means so many things that are all relevant. In German, if you say you’re eigen, you are a distinct, slightly weird, unique character. Obviously, in math, there are eigenvalues or eigenvectors, which represent inherent value. There is also the eigenspace. If I turn this book like this, there’s an axis in the middle that stays constant, and that’s the eigenspace in the center. It’s stable, constant, and inherently defined in some way. I think that’s fitting to what we’re doing.

Jackson: (1:58:16) Do you think you’re authentic? It's a complicated word.

Paul: (1:58:22) A lot of people say that. I think some of the best people are kind of like sponges. To be authentic means to be truly yourself, but who are you and what version of yourself are you being? Am I the same version with you that I am with my mom? I think there’s something genuine in doing the things you really believe in. I’ve always done that. Maybe that is authentic. I was never the kind of person to write a pros and cons list to decide if I should take an opportunity. My suspicion is that everyone is the same in that we all have this inner voice.

Jackson: (1:59:23) You know what you need to do.

Paul: (1:59:24) Adulting in a lot of ways is learning not to listen to that voice and just doing what other people do. But I feel like I always just listen to that voice. Every major decision I've ever made was just my voice telling me I had to do it. I followed my heart. Maybe that’s authenticity or maybe it's something else. Once I stop believing in something, I have no nostalgia. I just don’t believe in it anymore and I cannot do it.

Jackson: (2:00:09) Right.

Paul: (2:00:10) I can't fake it. I think that might be authenticity.

Jackson: (2:00:21) You have these two metaphors around learning: the smelling versus tasting bread, and the iPad takes. Can you talk about these?

Paul: (2:00:30) It’s a very German thing to make up these crazy metaphors. I’ve been doing startups since I was 16 or 17 years old, so for about the last six years. I was always very early—not the founder, but just after the founder—in a generalist role with a lot of control and impact on the company. I naturally assumed I was like a founder and knew how it worked. Then I became a founder and it was a shock. I was experienced in smelling bread because I was always around it, but I had never tasted it. Then I took a big bite and realized it was very different. It’s like how you think it is going to be to have kids versus actually having kids. You think you know, but then you realize you had no idea. The iPad takes are a different way to describe a similar thing. I joke about this a lot with Sarah. Whenever you go to a coffee shop and see parents with little kids in front of an iPad, everyone asks how they could give their kid an iPad. It is probably globally true that it’s not very good for a five-year-old to spend ten hours a day looking at an iPad. But then you have kids and they are really annoying. They yell and scream all day. You’re tired and you realize there is this thing you can give them and they will shut up.

Jackson: (2:02:58) The ultimate pacifier.

Paul: (2:03:00) It’s very easy if you don’t have kids to criticize. I think there are a lot of these things with founding too, where it’s easy for people on the sidelines to talk about the perfect company. Every organization has this. A company might say they are never going to hire PMs, but eventually, they do because they realize what worked when they were ten people doesn't work when they are 200 people. iPad takes are these generalized pieces of advice, like "PMs are bad." I don’t even know really what a PM is because I never worked at a large company, but I’ve learned that anything works. As a founder, you get to set gravity. Your planet’s gravity can be 20, minus 10, or one. The only thing that matters is that it’s consistent. Every day you show up and it is whatever you set it to. Horrible things happen if you are inconsistent. As long as you’re consistent, it can be literally anything. There are incredibly successful founders who are the most insane micromanagers in the world, and there are incredibly successful founders who are very hands-off. There is no rule. If there were rules, all of the people talking about them would actually go build large companies because it’s much more profitable than talking about rules. There are plenty of books that claim to have the ultimate recipe, but none of them work because there aren’t any rules other than figuring out what works for you and being authentic. There are a lot of these iPad takes where you say you aren't going to have PMs, and then you grow up, you have kids, and you realize it is really appealing to give them an iPad. Maybe you should have some empathy for that. Once you eat the bread, you realize that smelling bread isn't everything.

Jackson: (2:05:25) This is Water by David Foster Wallace is on your virtual shelf. Why is that meaningful? It's one of my favorites.

Paul: (2:05:31) It's so good. In some ways, it is very similar to this. It's about standard beliefs and pushing back on those a bit. There’s almost an absurdist, amusing, and fun way of looking at things, saying this doesn't matter, but that's kind of cool. Then there’s the sad part, which is that he was very depressed and ended up killing himself. All of these things are often very close together when you look at the world in an almost nihilistic way. I don't mean it in a negative sense, but just that there's no purpose or bigger thing that he believed in. I think there's something beautiful in that. There's a beauty and a magic, and we don't quite know. It means that things matter much less. We are in this very limited scope perception of reality. One of the most transforming experiences is to rent a car in San Francisco and drive 30 minutes north. There are woodworkers and farmers 30 minutes out of San Francisco that have nothing to do with tech. They are in Marin County or Napa, and their reality is so different than our reality. The things they think about and care about are so different. You can fly to a different continent and it’s 10 or 100 times that. Yet we're in this really small-scope reality, taking all of the things in our heads so incredibly seriously that it can mire us. It can put us in a position of not being able to do anything because we take these so seriously. Some other people would think it's completely ridiculous. What I like about David Foster Wallace in lots of ways is very similar to Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Everything is about perspective.

Jackson: (2:08:09) That was what I alluded to earlier. In some sense, the key is getting out from under yourself. The reason people are often alone and don't belong is that they're looking at all the reasons the world isn't meeting them where they're at. What I always loved about This is Water is that you have to find something else to worship, or you will worship something related to yourself.

Paul: (2:08:32) Not to be political, but there’s a perception that saying you can do anything is a privileged take. People say you had all this privilege, you came from whatever, and you didn't have to worry about getting food. I always found that a very limiting way of looking at it for two reasons. One is that I think it can be really empowering. If you're not happy with where you are, and you even go as far as saying that might be your fault because the actions you took so far are bad, that's actually really empowering. It means you're a few great decisions away from that not being the case anymore. It's not actually about someone else; it's in your power. Whether or not that's true is a different question, but it is really empowering to feel like that. It's also much more productive. The best way of staying in a situation that you don't enjoy is believing it wasn't your fault. If it wasn't your fault that you're in that position, you're also unable to leave that position. That's really sad. Of course, there are differences, and some people have an easier time getting to places, but everyone has some sort of power over the decisions they take. If you have that perspective, none of these things really are true. Our mutual friend Momo is such a great example of that. She says, "No, actually, I get to create my reality." And it's really true. She can just do that. You meet Momo and realize there is not in a hundred years that this wouldn't have worked. You could drop her anywhere 300,000 times and it would always work out because she really believes that you can create your own reality. I think more people should believe that.

(2:10:30) Courage, and a Final Question from a Mutual Friend

Jackson: (2:10:31) I like to ask people, when we talk about big regrets, what are you most glad you did?

Paul: (2:10:38) There was a really profound period between August and November last year where I went from an outsider to a kind of scary speed. I went from a complete rando who knew no one in San Francisco, building this weird thing, to where I am now. This Monday, I was texting Ben. I was thinking through this thing, and Tuesday, the founder of Pinterest spent two hours with me at the office thinking about how we should build product. I text Gustav, the CEO of Spotify, about music recommendations. I wonder if we can get this API. It has become so normalized in my life so quickly. I sometimes call a friend from before and mention talking with Gustav about this, and he’s like, "What? That's kind of crazy." I don't know how that happened. I think this was a very profound period. Maybe it was Paul Scherer saying yes and all of the things that came downstream. I really do think it was more because I met people before, like meeting Gustav pre-Benchmark. There was this period of really going out and, for the first time, being fully authentic. It wasn't for another company; it was just this thing I'm creating. The way I talk about it has changed so much over the last few months, but I think a lot of people should have the courage. I told you about Stephen Perone, our very first angel investor. I remember talking with him about this in late August. Maybe what changed is that if you go out and meet a lot of people and courageously tell them about the world you're creating—fearlessly telling them about the world you're creating without any expectation or need to convince them—you are just telling them without fear. Pure courage. Here's the world.

Jackson: (2:13:20) Here's what I see.

Paul: (2:13:22) I wonder what would happen if more people did that.

Jackson: (2:13:26) That’s a powerful message. Courage is the operative word, and it’s in short supply. My suspicion regarding what happened for you is that you had a strong and unique point of view. It was a little bit strange, which is very attractive. Even if it's incomplete, it's dialing into focus. One last thing you've tweeted: "Consumer products tend to be the result of character deficiencies of their founders." I asked a mutual friend what I should ask if he had a question for you. He said, "I'd ask him if he's building Momo to be vulnerable with people so that he doesn't have to be. He wants Momo to be this social bridge that connects everyone, but he's so notoriously guarded himself. I want to know if Momo is basically just doing his emotional heavy lifting."

Paul: (2:14:23) That's a great question. It's funny, and I don't know if I can disagree with that. I do think there's something to it. It’s actually something I stole from Kate, Peter's wife. She must have had this incredible outlook on social functions throughout the year. There’s probably a pattern there.

Jackson: (2:15:00) I think you're on your way, as we all are. Thank you, Paul.

Paul: (2:15:04) Thank you.

(2:15:04) Thanks Again to Notion

(2:16:27) Eigen Office Tour with Paul

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