Q&A: The Death of Web3, Fundraising As An Introvert, Future of Australian Startup Scene

Chris: I would just be careful about, moving to a place that is optimized for the kind of life you wanna live. I'm traveling the world right now, in all honesty, looking for that place.

Yaniv: Hi, I'm Yaniv,

Chris: And I'm Chris.

And on today's episode, we're doing listener q and a. We're gonna answer questions on, is there such a thing as over iteration? Is Web 3.0 dead how to reach out to Angels and investors if you're an introvert? And what is the future of Australia's text scene?

So, without any further delay, let's dive right into it. Yaniv, I haven't even read these questions, so how about you go ahead and read some out and, I'll give my honest, unfiltered opinion and we can dive straight in.

Yaniv: That's exciting, Chris, without a filter. And so high energy today, Chris. I'm enjoying that. So our first question is from Aidan in Port Macquarie. He asks, everyone always talks about how you must continue iterating. On a product, does there ever come a point where there is over iteration? Is there a way of telling when you've hit that point where you've effectively solved the problem but are now making new problems?

Is a problem ever truly solved?

Chris: The first thing is you hear a lot of people ask like, Hey, how much money is it gonna be to build my app? I always find that question really funny because it's like, how long is a piece of string right?

 How much money does it cost to run a business? a business. Doesn't get to a certain point and then stop. growing, stop learning, stop changing, stop iterating, stop expanding. the goal of any startup is not to build an app, it's to solve set of problems that might evolve and change over time.

And so the first part of this is like, it's not so much that you're just iterating over the same thing again and again and again, right? how do we. Create a search for new products. designing and building the search algorithm, and then you're designing and building it again, and then you're designing and building it again.

That's just, not the way it works. the analogy I'll use is you're actually trying to get to the horizon. you never quite get there as you start to solve certain problems and start to solve them well. Which itself requires good amount of iteration.

And you learn where the bottlenecks are and you learn where things can be more refined and more nuanced and more sophisticated. and as you start to get more traction, your ambition starts to grow, It's like, well, we solved the product search problem, but how do we help users understand?

Their intent in the first place? Or how do we help them buy the product? Or how do we help them share their discovery with friends? Or how do we help them maybe create their own products? Or how do we help them return the products? How do we help them, refill the products when the product runs out?

And so you'll notice that. As you start to lock down certain aspects of the thing you're trying to do, yet more things present themselves to you, either in adjacencies or further up or downstream of the user journey, and so, I don't think you ever stop iterating on the business, and you never stop iterating on the product and the problem you're solving.

It certainly might be true that you stop iterating on a particular feature that is well and truly matured, and it doesn't need that much time and attention. But when there's new technology that comes out, like AI or new cultural sensibilities or. Yet more features around that feature you might continue to iterate on in terms of bringing in those technologies, bringing in those first principles, and continuing to improve.

Yaniv: Think that all makes a lot of sense. I'm gonna answer the question a little bit more directly. does there come a point whether it's over iteration, um, Abso fucking lately, like definitely you can just be iterating and iterating and iterating on something that is ultimately a dead end, right?

And so there are a few things to consider here, one is opportunity cost. If you're iterating on one thing, that means you don't have enough opportunity to iterate other things. there's also diminishing returns and to your next question, is there a way of telling when you've hit the point where, you're over iterating.

It's when you keep iterating and you, feel you've got a good process, a good way of thinking about it. but your iterations on the product are not having the impact that you want. of course one of the important things about startups, and we've talked about this, don't fall in love with your solution.

Don't fall in love with a particular product implementation or a particular path to solving the problem that you see in the world, because quite often, You're gonna find that you need to pivot or even completely reboot your startup or your product in order to find the right path. And so, everyone talks about how you must continue iterating.

I think what we're saying there is. Okay. You can't just expect that the first version of what you do is going to be right. But similarly, the startup law around, pivoting and around knowing when to quit is actually really important as well because, I often say that knowing when to quit is a superpower.

The, the idea that. You never quit in a startup, I think couldn't be further from the truth. You may never quit on your broader ambition, but you absolutely quit on all sorts of efforts and initiatives, features, potential solutions to the product. with a lot of these things, there's always context.

There's always a bit of art along with the science. But if you feel that you've had a few solid attempts at iteration and you're not seeing. Valuable incremental benefit or at least very clear learnings that you can apply to the next iteration, then it's time to move on. And if you haven't reached a point with that product or that feature where you're really effectively solving a problem and you're, building a valuable business, then you might wanna try and pursue a different path.

Chris: Depends on why you're iterating and what stage you're at, right? Like, so if you are at the very beginning, And it's not working People are not picking it up and using it, and you've, iterated and iterated and iterated, and no one cares still.

Then what you just touched on is right yanev, ? You need to potentially rethink the entire metaphor, re rethink the entire problem, rethink the entire business, and that's where you need to know when to quit. If you are iterating because it's roughly working and you've asked yourself the question, why aren't there more people being more successful more often with my product, which is one of my favorite questions to ask in terms of where to invest.

And there's kind of the start of the journey and the middle of the journey and the end of the journey. And you can see that, hey, the major dropoff is here at the end of the journey. Well then you're not done iterating on that part of the journey. You need to go back and, find smoother, easier, cleaner ways of solving that problem or, solving that piece of the user experience.

And so you pick where to iterate, where there's the most bang for your buck, and that's when you're more at growth stage and you're trying to unblock growth and optimize conversion. and then there's iterating where. You're a large business and there's all sorts of surface area that ostensibly works in your product, but maybe there's a way to rethink it from first principles or to take it to the next level or create step function change or to cannibalize something that's become stale or status quo or to disrupt your industry.

And that's a different kind of iteration, again from first principles. And so I really like your point about diminishing returns, Yaniv ever if you are. At the no one cares stage yet. or at the stage of there's like a major bottleneck here and I can't figure out how to crack it.

You need to not be focusing on stuff that is incremental and you need to go be focusing on the stuff that is really gonna move the needle.

Yaniv: Just to bring it maybe to the innovator's dilemma you see this happening with big companies. just as you were talking at the end there, Chris, I was thinking about Google search and where they find themselves right now with the LLM Revolution, which is caught flatfooted Google have been iterating.

Incrementally on the quality of their search algorithm for 25 years. And it is an incredibly sophisticated beast, and it's the best in the world by any measure. ignore any anecdotal tales that, other search engines are better than, Google is the best. But what has happened is they have invested so much in iterating and iterating and iterating and this sort of local optimization that they've ignored.

Or at least they have allowed this threat of broader disruption of a completely different model to come and now they're at risk. Yeah, you can overstate the risk that ChatGPT or whatever poses to Google, but they are suddenly no longer years ahead of the competition on the technological dimension that matters to them.

And so I think there's always this. trade off between iterating and polishing and finding that local optimum and then exploring and finding the globally most useful place. And remember that the landscape here is shifting, right? So you might be on a global optimum and then a technology changes and you no longer are.

And so you have to be quite nimble in the face of all of that.

Chris: Yeah, I love that very much. I hate nothing worse than incrementalism at large companies. fear of cannibalization, the fear of rocking the boat, we just need to juice this by 3% this quarter. I can't live in those environments. I'm step function change guy.

And so you'll sometimes meet founders and executives who are failing to iterate properly. they're failing to invest and do the slow grindy painful, Unglamorous work of iterating their way to success. And so I'm often the voice in the room is saying, no, you guys are jumping around too much and you just need to iterate on this one problem.

But then often you'll meet executives at larger companies who are iterating their way to a local maximum. And you're like, this needs to be thrown out. There's something way more fundamentally interesting here, So lift your gaze to the horizon and let's move a bit more quickly to that outcome.

So the next question here from Nick Robertson in Brisbane is asking, is Web three dead? Was it a problem in search of a solution an oversold ape, NFT bought for Dogecoin perhaps.

Yaniv: I'm excited about this one. So I don't think Web three is dead, and that's simply for the reason that something can't be dead if it was never alive in the first place. And the thing about web three, of course, it, depends a lot on your definition and I'm looking forward to a nice spicy discussion here, Chris.

There's sort of different layers here, right? There's sort of the blockchain technology, there's cryptocurrency, there's NFTs, and then this is attempt of having like, Based on the blockchain technology and NFTs, a sort of distributed, ownerless permissionless replacement for the web as we currently know it.

And you know, I think this has been a really messy space because there's some interesting technology. there are some technologists who are really passionate about solving problems with that technology. And then you have a couple of confounding factors. the first. Sort of the obvious one is money.

It turned out the crypto became a wonderful vehicle for financial speculation. which means that there were these perverse incentives that took the technology, the product people kind of distracted them, brought in huge numbers of grifters and scam artists and so on, because you could make a quick buck in crypto.

And then the second one, which is maybe less obvious, is ideology. Because when you look at a lot of the folks who are working on technologies, or on products in the web, three space, in the crypto space, it wasn't because they saw a particular problem. that customers had, that they wanted to solve.

They saw that there was a way of the world, right? That centralized power in certain people's hands and so on, that they didn't like that they were ideologically uncomfortable with. And so they came up with a solution that was perhaps not actually a superior solution to the problem at hand, but was ideologically superior from their point of view.

And again, I think that was potentially a massive distraction, from. Actually solving people's problems. And so through all of that there's just so much distortion that it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Web three was always, in my view, a tagline applied to a bunch of technology that wasn't solving a real problem and that was immature and hard to use, and vastly oversold.

So yeah. Is Web three dead? like I said, to the extent it ever was alive, I suppose I feel yes, it was a problem in search of a solution no wait, that's the right thing. It's a solution in search of a problem. yeah, it's, dead. I think a lot of things about crypto are dead. The interesting question, which I have opinions on, but I'm less, completely, gung ho on is the underlying technology, Blockchain technology. Some of the use cases I think, could still potentially be interesting. Do I think this is a technology that has massively, massively failed to achieve the potential that people claimed it had? Absolutely.

Chris: Yeah, I tend to agree with everything you just said. there's a saying that like Web 2.0, companies were very good at. Building products, but really struggled with go to market and building community and user bases and Web 3.0 products. Were very good at building communities because of the money incentives, but were really, really bad at building products.

And when you're really bad at building products, it's another way of saying you've built a technology in search of a, of a problem that is rooted in the perverse incentives and the overly Pollyanna kind of idealistic approach of like, everything should be decentralized and power structures suck, and everything should be permissionless and down with all institutions anarchy should reign As you said, Yaniv, this is, an ideology, but it's not a problem solving, tactic.

 This is the classic, hype cycle. Every new technology goes through this, if you haven't heard about the Gartner Hype Cycle, you need to go look it up. It's. Pretty well understood and established.

Now, there's this kind of innovation trigger, which was the blockchain in Bitcoin. In this case, there's the peak of inflated expectations, which I'm sure you can map to the blockchain, bitcoin, crypto world. Then there's the trough of disillusionment, which is what we're in right now for web three.

Then there's the slope of enlightenment where people start to figure out what it's actually for, and then the plateau of productivity where it kind of gets boring and it's just baked into the society, As you said, Yaniv, I think blockchain as an invention. This idea of a distributed ledger is very, very interesting, very valuable, and is a breakthrough for the world.

The idea that you can have a distributed trustless ledger or database of what happened is just incredibly powerful. It adds, permissionless trust to the fabric of the internet. I think Bitcoin as a store of value that is disconnected from governments and armies and gold and printing money, I think that's very interesting.

I think. Bitcoin will survive and actually thrive as we move into a more and more digital world. When you think about AR and VR and so on, I think. Bitcoin is clearly very, very valuable. I think core utility platforms, compute platforms like Ethereum or Polygon where you need to be able to build generalized applications on a blockchain, I think those are very, very valuable, on the face of them.

I even think owning things, or rather the providence of ownership on the blockchain, whether it's. Property homes or stocks just moving providence onto the blockchain providence over real things. I think that's valuable. But if you're selling like JPEGs of bored apes, I think that was clearly on the face of it, ridiculous and stupid.

And it was just a, a ridiculous hype curve.

Yaniv: I think I need to disagree with you a bit on this stuff. I'm on the more skeptical side of things. and yes, there is a Gartner hype cycle, I would say in the case of crypto, the peak of inflated expectations was pickier than any I've ever seen before. And the trough of disillusionment is deeper than any I've ever seen before because of these perverse.

Things that come into it, right? The other technologies, they suffer from a hype cycle because everyone gets very excited about what's possible. and maybe they can make money with the utility and then eventually like, oh, it's harder than we thought. And then eventually you get to where you need to be.

But the truth is, the promise of blockchain has been promised now for quite a long time, and you talk about Ethereum and you talk about, the value of trust. And I feel like the technology no longer gets a pass. It's been a long time now. There have been a lot of people working on trying to find real valuable applications and utility based on this thing.

And even this idea of saying, oh, you know, we have fabric of trust for the internet and so on. Even that portrays a certain ideological bent to say, we don't like the idea of having centralized authorities and centralized brokers. And the truth is, Centralized authorities and centralized brokers can be incredibly efficient, scalable, trustworthy.

They have provided a good fabric of trust for the internet. and the truth is this technology has come nowhere near providing that same level of utility on any sort of mass scale, and nor does it look like it's going to.

Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think we could have an entire episode about this.

Yaniv: I've always wanted to.

Chris:  I think there's an inexorable march. In the world. Meta trend that's been going on for centuries, which I call unbundling, where constituent parts of, a system are being disconnected from that system.

You can think about it in terms of, music has been disconnected from albums and TV shows have been disconnected from networks and. intelligence has been disconnected from biological brains. And Bitcoin represents the disconnection of store of value from governments. I think long term there will be a disconnection. Between the kind of things institutions used to do and those legacy institutions, I think that will happen over the course of decades or centuries. And so it may be like profoundly early to see the implications of blockchain right now. And, you're right in terms of , the near term outlook.

Institutions are much more efficient, effective ways of doing some of the things that we're doing, but we're also finding the limits of those institutions. And I'm not talking about ideologically here. I'm talking about. Trying to police and moderate content on Facebook is near impossible, having the FTC dictate what is free speech on Twitter is near impossible.

We're reaching the limits of these institutions to act with rapidity, having. The US government regulate ai, which is itself inventing more AI in the near term. We can imagine that very quickly as you achieve the singularity, these bottleneck institutions are starting to show their, wear and tear and they're the limits of how they function is that, This week, this month, this year, this decade, probably not. but having an ability to unbundle trust and permission from historical institutions, I think over the long, long term is gonna be very, very interesting.

Yaniv: Chris, if you waved your hands anymore vigorously you would've taken flight. But I do think we need to do a whole episode on this. I think this is a fun debate and we can all get angry and hot under the collar at each other, which is what the world needs more of. so for a change of base, we have, a question from Reese Kelly, also in Brisbane.

his question is, what are your suggestions about reaching out to Angels or VC when you are Shit scared and an introvert.

Chris: It's a good question. So it's something I don't, talk very often about. at the beginning it's because I was embarrassed by it when I was young. And more recently it's cause I don't have a lot of opportunity to talk about it, is I, actually have social anxiety. so when I'm in situations where I have like a big meeting, like it's kind of a one chance to get it right or when I'm on stage, public speaking, any situation where it's kind of analogous to claustrophobia where there's no, exit and I have only one chance to get it right. And there are other people around. I have massive social anxiety, I have panic attacks.

I feel extremely nauseous. I need to go and, excuse myself. So I have a mental health thing that makes, speaking to Angels, VCs, big, high pressure meetings, very, very, very difficult for me. so I really empathize with a question like this.

And we've talked on previous episodes about the need for CEOs and really for everybody to be a form of storyteller, to have a form of salesmanship, to be a good communicator, and certainly being a founder, being a CEO, being a. Fundraiser for your company, really does require that you need some kind of ability to reach out to people to tell your story and to have some ability to communicate, even if it's Elon Musk style where he's not. But no, no, I don't mean Twitter. Elon Musk, I mean, onstage, Elon Musk, he's actually very awkward, right? He's a very strange speaker, but it's clear what he's saying. Has some level of, distinction to it. you can think of, Mark Zuckerberg. I was, in the room with Mark Zuckerberg at South by Southwest in one of his first high stakes public fireside chats with Sarah Lacey. And, he was sweating profusely, like he had to take his sweater off. he had no stage preference. He was clearly in the middle of a panic attack. She was not helping him at all. and he started off Terribly private, introverted, awkward, and he had to learn how to have stage presence, how to have these kind of conversations, how to summarize and socialize and so on. And so, I'm not saying you have to be the most polished, incredible presenter of ideas, but I am saying that you need to find. The hacks and techniques that work for you to overcome your introversion and to act as if to fake it until you make it, to find, if not the confidence, at least the impetus by which to overcome, these psychological barriers that we both share, that I think a lot of people share that they don't talk about very often.

Yaniv: Yeah. No, I certainly empathize Reese. I do think we're in a moment that. is good for introverts, right? We've been living revenge of the nerds for like the last 30 years. the Internet's accelerated that, time was in the past where, if you weren't a six foot tall white male with straight white teeth and a nice starched collar and a firm handshake, you'd have trouble.

Doing business deals, talking to investors, now it's become a lot more casual and a lot of it happens from behind a screen. A lot of it happens in writing. So you know, the first approach to an angel or a VC is gonna be on LinkedIn or on. email or on Slack even before you even get to a call or whatever.

And different folks are different. I know some people, also carry some of this type of anxiety into writing and so on. But I personally have always found, because you're in control of the pacing, you can edit, you can revise your message as long as you know what you're talking about. this is a much less scary way.

Of approaching, people in the first place. the other thing is when you do get to a meeting and so on, it's not a presentation in the same way as you know, you're not giving a Ted Talk, Chris. It's not like, I think fear of public speaking is a very specific thing. Most people have a fear of public speaking to a greater or lesser extent.

But actually talking to investors is not public speaking, not if it's done right. And you can listen to some of our other episodes about where you should be at. By the time you're actually meeting with an investor, clue, they should already know what you're about, And you're having a conversation.

And personally, I find that the number one dial that turns down anxiety when I'm having a conversation with someone like that is knowing my shit, right? If you understand your business, if you understand your why, if you understand your story, then when you get into a conversation about it, it's far less scary than if you're kind of yellowing it and making it up as you go along.

So preparation helps a lot, but I'm not even a hundred percent sure. Obviously, we just got the, question as written, Reese, but you talked about reaching out to Angels and VCs and so I wonder if it's nearly what we're talking here is a, type of imposter syndrome, a kind of fear of rejection. And I understand that one as well, but can't remember where, I heard this, but it's like, imagine you were playing a game where you rolled a pair of dice and if you got double sixes, you made a hundred dollars.

And if you rolled anything else, you got nothing. Like how many times would you roll those dice? And the answer is until your arm gets very, very sore, Because there is like only upside and no downside. And so I think when you talk about reaching out to Angels or VCs, if you do it in good faith and respectfully and you get rejected, Nothing bad has happened, You can get rejected over and over and over again. And there are all of these founder stories that become nearly mythological of, the founders of Canva having been rejected more than a hundred times before they got their first VC meeting. And whether that's slightly exaggerated or not is beside the point.

The point is, No one remembers how often you've been rejected except to burnish your story further, right? this is really a numbers game in the end, Every angel, every vc, yes, they're a person. Yes, most of them are going to reject you, but they're not rejecting you as a person. They're rejecting your pitch.

That's fine. And the thing to realize is it is a low stakes game. Reaching out to an angel investor is low stakes. and in particular there is a near zero downside and a near infinite upside, so you just may as well do it. That's really how I try to think about this and, just gear yourself up, expect to be rejected, and then if you're not, then you will be pleasantly surprised.

Chris: I think we should have a whole episode about this one as well, Yev. But, I have seen it get so bad, speaking as someone who has struggled with this kind of thing, I've seen it get so bad, not for me, but for someone else that I know where even emailing back a potential client.

Has sent them into a panic attack and they could not get themselves to email back a client because of where it could go. I, myself, at the peak of this, in my early, early career, would have, panic attacks and nausea just from picking up the phone and having, a call with someone. No video, nothing.

So this is how bad it can get. And then you mentioned knowing your shit. In my particular psychology, knowing my shit makes it worse because I know there's a lot I wanna say. There's a lot I wanna say and it kind of adds more pressure for like, how am I gonna get it all out in order to get the thing I wanna say done?

So it's actually very counterintuitive. Now, let me just very quickly rattle off some of the hacks that I've used. cuz we don't wanna get into a whole episode about this right now, but, we should have a whole episode at some point. So what I try to do is I remember that. I'm more afraid of living a small life than I am of the panic attack.

And so if I let the panic attacks dictate the size and scale of my life, then I will end up in my deathbed having regretted my whole life. And that's something I think people who I know who have this don't think about enough. I tend to commit and then figure out how. So if someone asks me to do something, I will.

Like go, oh my God, I know I'm gonna have a panic attack about that. when I have to go do that, I have to go give a talk or whatever. But I'm just gonna say yes now, and then I'm gonna figure out how later and just deal. Look, it's future. Chris's problem to deal with. thing that I've found that helps me the most in the moment.

Is to reframe the anxiety as excitement. So not think of it as like, oh my God, I'm having a panic attack. But oh my God, I'm so excited. I've actually found that to be one of the best hacks, and to recognize that it's going to happen. Not sit there wondering if it's gonna happen.

I just go, it is going to happen and I will allow time for that to happen at the beginning. I recognize I'm not alone. mental health stuff used to be very taboo and very scary, but that's why I talk about it now is like, I. Everybody should know that, almost everybody else has, something going on.

Then the last two things is, do something about it, like go do meditation, go do whatever, yoga, go find some natural remedy, and then finally, there is absolutely nothing wrong. We're taking like drugs and I mean like prescribed drugs, beta blockers, antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.

These things, they just fricking work and you should not have a stigma about it. If you have a broken leg, you put a cast on. If you have a broken brain. When I'm talking about myself now, you need a crutch. You need something to help you, and sometimes it's just enough to take it for a short time to disconnect that feedback loop and then get you back into a good spot.

Yaniv: Yeah. And genuinely, we would like to do an episode on Founder Mental Health. I think it's something that many founders struggle with. I do as well. And so if anyone's listening in the audience who has some background in mental health or knows somebody who does, who might be a good guest to join us on this, because yeah.

Chris and I are not professionals, please get in touch with us. our next question is from Aswan Fernando, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly from Sydney. and Aswan asks, what is the future of Australia going to be in your opinion? And, there is quite a lot of, extra context here.

I'll try to summarize it a bit. but Aswan says, I've been here for four years, moved from Silicon Valley, originally from India, they see this country going on a steady path of decline. Like most of Europe, tall Poppy syndrome is rife. GDP has flatlined for 10 years, and innovation is met with severe resistance.

There is a massive entitlement culture and so on. young generation have a doomer mindset resorts to victimhood instead of using hardship as a learning process. There's also a culture of toxic positivity all around where any constructive or negative opinions seem to be frowned upon. I'm happy with my life in Australia, but definitely a bit concerned with the future of this great nation.

Is Australia declining? Can anything been done to reboot GDP growth? All right. There's a lot of meat on that bone. Chris, would you like to take a crack?

Chris: Sure. look, I think. I've fallen victim to this myself. The older you get, I think it's easy to look back on the past with rose colored glasses and go, in my generation, we figured out how to, do this and do that. And this generation, on frivolity and like, kids these days, they should get off my lawn.

And so, I've been a victim of this myself. the older you get, the wealthier you get, the more you look at the world and go, what's going on? It's all going to hell. And a hand basket. Now in some cases some things kind of locally are going to hell and a hand basket, and I think we are straying off Some pragmatic paths that, are leading us into weird and wonderful corners of the world.

But I think on, average and, on meta, all the trends are going in the right direction. teen pregnancy and violence and, poverty and, wealth dispar, like it's all actually going in the right direction. There's an amazing book, which I've forgotten the name of, , it's like a coffee table book. it shows how all the trends are heading in the right direction In some cases, there's a small uptick, recently in terms of wealth disparity and poverty and things, violence.

But in the, long arc of human history, everything is getting better.

the other thing I always, try to remember and sometimes forget, is that different countries in different cities are optimized for different things. Australia's not optimized for GDP growth. Australia's not optimized for business.

It's not optimized for, incredible entrepreneurship. It's optimized for lifestyle. It's optimized for an incredible egalitarian culture where everybody lives somewhere in the middle. They don't have too much poverty, they don't have too much success, there's a floor that's placed in there with the social programs and There's a ceiling that's placed in there through enormous taxation and, fairness and tall poppy syndrome and so on. so, if you like to live in this beautiful, safe middle where you can play cricket on the weekends, visit the beach, have a certain amount of safety, Call everyone mate, cut off the end of every word and add O or E to the end so that it's all very casual.

then you're in the right place. It's awesome. Australia's great. I love Australia. I was born here, I'm not there now. I'm in south of France, but I was born in Australia. I was raised in Australia. I share a lot of, love for my fellow Australian countrymen and women and, what Australia is optimized for. But, is it gonna go sideways for the next 10, 20 years? Probably. But sideways in a world where there is US-China tension and North Korea, rattling, its saber and Russia invading Ukraine and American decay. Accelerating and polarization and political infighting corruption sideways can look pretty damn good.

Sideways can be awesome. So, would just be careful about, judging too harshly and I'd also be careful about moving to a place that is optimized for the kind of life you wanna live. I'm tr traveling the world right now, in all honesty, looking for that place.

I don't know if Australia is that place for me right now. That's not a judgment on Australia. It's a judgment on what I want in terms of the lifestyle I want. And so you need to. Survey the planet and think of it like a series of theme parks and look for the theme park that fits your, need.

Just one last comment. I think Australia, because of all that thing I just said, will continue to be 10 or 20 years behind the bleeding edge. if you wanna understand what the future looks like, you want to go to, I don't know, Dubai or to New York .

 That's where. The future is being explored. Australia is nice and comfortably sitting, 10 or 20 years behind all of that.

Yaniv: let me try to answer the question in a slightly different way, and I don't know, we've, probably lost most of our non-a Australian listeners by this point, but, if you go back to the genesis of why we started this podcast, it was actually to do with a bit of the frustrations that we felt.

Both of us, Chris, about the state of the startup scene in Australia and the standard and the level. And we realized as we created the podcast and as we grow our audience, and by the way, more than half our listeners are now outside of Australia, that this is a global problem, we talk about building Silicon Valley style startups all over the world because most of the world is more like Australia than it is like Silicon Valley.

In terms of, I guess a, lack of massive ambition, a, certain tolerance for mediocrity, a certain, prioritization of, lifestyle over massive accomplishment, and things like that. And our thesis here is we do have startups all over the world now. and in some sense, I think it's, fair to say, we had an episode about moving to the us right?

You are paying a lifestyle tax, starting a startup anywhere other than Silicon Valley. It is still the center of the universe, but we believe that you can start a Silicon Valley style startup everywhere on earth. and there are enough examples from countries way outside the US including some great success stories in Australia, in Canada, all over Europe, India, China, Southeast Asia, Africa, south America, everywhere.

That you adopt the right mindset, and you learn from the best, then you can have that high octane way of delivery anywhere. and actually just a final thing I'd say is, you know, tall poppy syndrome, which is a, fairly Australian and kiwi expression, meaning, you know, we like to cut down the, tall poppies so we basically try to take down people who are too successful because they're, at odds with our egalitarian ideals. and that may well be true, but actually what I see in startups is a bit the opposite of tall poppy syndrome, Which is where we look at, a not very tall poppy.

we look at something. Mediocre. We look at a startup that has achieved modest regional success and we worship it. It's alter. We say, look at how amazing this startup is. Rather than saying, it could have been so much more, I. If it had the ambition, if it had the quality of execution, if it had the right investors on the cap table.

And so that's actually my frustration here, is that we have a complacency around not expecting our puppies to be tall enough. and that's one of the things that I'm really keen for us to change in our small way in Australia and elsewhere with this podcast.

Chris: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, Yaniv. So to answer the question directly again you know, where is it gonna be in 10 years? I think it's gonna continue to position itself. Where it's always positioned itself, which is we're the place that is warm, safe, friendly, the bottoms are not too low, the highs are not too high, and, I think the Australian government is really good at maintaining that status quo.

It's really good at it. And when things get too left, it goes a bit right. And when things go too right, it goes a bit left. I think there's a really efficient mechanism for making that happen. it sounds like you have. coming from Silicon Valley, which is, more ambitious and coming from India, as you say, it's maybe not aligning with your values that way.

And, I really wanna encourage everybody listening. the world is your oyster. I remember once my cousin who lives in Melbourne asked me, Where are you guys planning to live? And, I said, well, we're looking at London, but we're worried about the weather. We're looking at San Francisco, but we're worried about the Covid, Exodus.

We're looking at New York, but it's a little bit hustling and bustly. And he said to me, wow, you're looking at cities the way I look at Melbourne suburbs. And I'm like, yeah, why not? The whole world is your oyster. I think everybody should find their city and their country that is optimized for them and embrace.

What that country is all about.

Yaniv: Alright, Chris. I think that's it for today. Thanks to all of our listeners who sent in questions, a really good thought-provoking questions that I think created some hopefully thought-provoking and useful conversation for you all.

Chris: And don't forget, if you want your question on the next q and a episode, check out the show notes. We'll have a link to our question form. You can head over there ask your question, and we might read out your name and question on the next episode.

Yaniv: But Chris, some folks have a lot of questions, a lot of deep questions about how they should run their startup, and they might be looking for someone who can provide fantastic answers and advice for people like that, they can work with you directly, so how can they do that?

Chris: Yeah, that's right. And I, I've carved out time in my day to work with a small handful of companies and answer their burning questions in and week out. So feel free to visit chrissaad.com/advisory and you can learn more about that over there.

Yaniv: And finally, before we wrap up, don't forget The Startup Podcast packed. If you have listened to more than an episode or two of our podcast and have gotten value from it. Please help us spread the word. We would love it if you could subscribe to us on YouTube, follow and rate us in your podcast listening app, and give us a shout out on LinkedIn or wherever you have a social media following.

In fact, we just got this lovely shout out today. from Stefan who said, until I discovered the startup podcast, I thought podcasts were rather boring and often a bit salesy. So not only have we converted Stefan to our podcast, but to the entire medium of podcasting, which feels amazing. You have no idea folks, how much it, really motivates us to continue producing these episodes.

To get these shout outs. And of course it helps other people find us too. And if you find it valuable, hopefully they will as well. So please carve out a couple of minutes from your day, to honor the pact.

Chris: Awesome man, Yaniv well, great to chat to you as always.

Yaniv: Likewise, Chris. Have a good one.