Brian Schardt

0:00Autopilot

ChristianneBrian, welcome. Let's say you had an eighteen-year-old child today. Would you recommend they go to college?

BrianI think about this a lot. I think it depends on the college. With AI, they could just BS their way through. College isn't built for AI, so right now it's a giant party. You could build an education system made for AI, where you teach people to AI-max. But I think AI-maxing is like what happened with computer engineering, where you keep absorbing skills that are immediately obsolete, and with AI it'll be even faster.

My dad was a computer engineer, and he got worked out of the market really fast. As an adult, he was learning Python after a whole career of other languages from books. Now, for our engineers, it's language agnostic. About ninety-nine percent of our code is written by AI. Our engineers aren't typing code anymore. They prompt in English, read the code, and point at a piece of it and say, do it like this. You have to understand the principles, but you don't need to know the language. It's crazy.

5:47Childhood control

ChristianneTell me about growing up. You were never in one place for long.

BrianI grew up in Northern California, about two hours from the Bay. My dad was a software engineer in San Francisco who commuted two hours a day. He worked more at a laboratory than a software company. He got patents, he'd sleep at the office sometimes. When you grow up with that, it becomes your standard. It was a great example of work ethic.

Then his company was bought out and we moved to Orange County. Where I grew up, nobody focused on wealth. It was lower middle class, family life. In Orange County, right by the beach, the kids at public school were wearing designer clothes. I didn't grow up like that at all.

My mom kept putting me into public school and pulling me out. She wanted to homeschool me, then realized she didn't have the energy, then put me in a different school. She also wanted to control what kind of friends I had, for religious reasons. So I was always the new kid. And at every new school, I'd have a completely different personality. When you start new, you get to decide how you're perceived. I'd try being the shy kid, then the funny kid, then the ambitious sports kid, then the guy known for being great at math. And if it went wrong, I knew I'd be pulled out soon anyway, so it was low risk. Most people worry about saying something and getting a reputation. I learned it didn't matter if people didn't like me, because I'd be removed soon. It made me very comfortable testing things and not being scared of social failure.

Eventually it led to, not depression, but unexcitement. All this work of making friends is for nothing. By sixth or seventh grade I defaulted to not wanting to socialize. Little did I know we'd stay in Orange County for three years.

And my parents put me in activities. They saw an ad for a marathon program after school, which was basically free daycare. I don't think they knew what a marathon was. I definitely didn't. They said, would you want to do a marathon? No. We'll get you donuts. I would do anything for a donut. The calorie conversion was not equal. My brother and I both said yes, and then every Saturday you wake up and run twenty miles. It was called Students Run LA, and they covered all the costs.

I hated it. Every single day. A lot of people loved marathons. For me it was five, six, seven hours of constant pain, and if you slow down, it's just more pain. But it taught me ultimate perseverance. Running Autopilot gets very painful, and quitting never even crosses my mind. When I talk to other founders and things get hard, they actually think about stopping. That thought has never occurred to me. It's always run faster, work harder, put on some music to ignore the pain.

I think I just had a lot of energy. I'd see someone play guitar, mow enough lawns, buy a guitar at a garage sale, and learn it on YouTube, and my parents would ask, where did you get that guitar? I think they just couldn't keep up with how much I was doing, so they thought, if he runs that much, he'll burn it off. And it worked. Instead of ADD medication, put kids on a marathon team.

I always had a massive desire not to be controlled, and I saw money as the solution. At fourteen I rode my bike to Bank of America to open my own account. You have to be eighteen. They asked my birthday, I gave my real one, September 8th, 1994, and they opened it anyway. You can't lie to a bank, but you can count on them not doing the math. But money doesn't really motivate me. It's the freedom.

12:38The violin arbitrage

ChristianneWhen you went to boarding school, you got expelled, but they kept you because your SAT score was so high they needed you to keep the average up. What did that teach you about how they valued you?

BrianI started at St. Michael's in 2008, when the recession hit, and my class went from twenty-three people to eight. Prep schools are ranked on AP classes and scores, and I was at the top of a class of six. So not that impressive, but they needed that one person. I was also student body president, and that's actually why I got expelled. A lot of student body presidents run on promises and nothing happens. I promised my class I'd fight for what we believed in, even if I had to sacrifice myself. I played hardball in ways that really pissed off the administration.

But I also had a backup plan. I interned for Tim Busch, who started the Napa Institute, and the abbot, who runs the abbey that runs the school, and I became very close. Tim was also the school's largest donor. The administration didn't know that. So they expelled me rashly, and then the abbot and others said, you can't really expel this kid. The compromise was that I'd commute instead of boarding.

The boarding schedule was completely regimented. Up at six thirty, Mass, breakfast in silence, class from eight to twelve, midday prayers, lunch, class until three thirty, sports until five, fifteen minutes to shower, dinner, art or choir, study, holy hour, more study, and then the power shuts off. Living at home, I suddenly had so much free time.

I was learning the violin and doing calculus. A friend had a twenty-thousand-dollar violin from a famous orchestra in San Diego, and mine was a cheap hundred-dollar one that didn't sound good. So I started buying old violins on eBay and fixing them up, sanding and gluing them, and they'd sound pretty good. I realized people spend a lot of money on violins, but fixing them took me forever. So what if I had them manufactured, and what would make mine different?

In calculus I was learning to maximize and minimize functions. Reviewers always talk about a violin's overtones. My ear wasn't trained enough to hear them, but I had a microphone and recordings, so I could analyze them. So: maximize the pleasant overtones, like the perfect fifth and perfect fourth, and minimize the ones that conflict. I used heat compression to bend the wood, graphed how each bend changed each overtone, and built a function for the theoretical maximum. Then I sent the designs to China. The first violin sucked. I kept repeating until I got one that was really good, and I gave it to my friend, and he said, dude, this is insane. His teachers said the same.

So I built a website on Wix. This was 2011, before Stripe. You could paste PayPal's HTML into a Wix page and people could press Buy Now. That was the whole website. And no one bought anything. I'd post the link on forums and people would trash it.

Influencer marketing wasn't a term yet. But I learned everything on YouTube, and I figured if a violinist I watched every day said something, I'd believe it. So I emailed the ten violinists on YouTube with the most spammy email ever. All caps: FREE VIOLIN, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Two responded, and one was the top one, Lindsey Stirling. She said, I'd love a free violin. I shipped it to Arizona.

I also did something against a lot of advice: free returns for ninety days. These were eighteen-hundred-dollar violins, and you have to hear a violin before you commit. Most violin websites didn't allow returns. But I really didn't want them returned, and a lot of buyers were kids. So I put the buyer's name inside each violin. Every order, I'd ask, who is this for, and how do you spell their name? Your name is the most important word to you. If you're a kid and you get a violin with your name inside, how are you going to return it? Zero returns. The profit was a thousand dollars per violin at the low end, fifteen hundred at the top.

ChristianneHad you ever seen a number that big?

BrianThe first thing I did was divide it by two dollars, the price of a McDonald's burger. That's a lot of burgers.

And it got me thinking about money. Ask people why they want a degree, and it comes down to a job, and the job comes down to money. I felt very liberated: I want to be an entrepreneur, so I don't need college to make money. So I went to Thomas Aquinas College, where you get a degree in philosophy with the equivalent of a minor in mathematics. I loved both. It was a great four years.

20:11Bad advice from failing adults

ChristianneWhat advice did you get when you started selling violins?

BrianI went to the teacher at my high school who was the "entrepreneur teacher." There's always one. Never take advice from that person. They're a teacher for a reason. I wanted to give a free violin to Lindsey Stirling, and he said, Brian, the first thing you learn in business is you never give anything away for free. Get it in writing that she'll post about you. I said, that's not good advice. I'm going to send her a violin, and if she likes it, she'll talk about it, or she won't. She liked it, and she talked about it.

A lot of advice from non-entrepreneurs is about self-protection. Real entrepreneurs say, take the risk and hope for the best. The hardest part is getting in the door. When you're David against Goliath, you have nothing, so say yes and take as many risks as you can.

ChristianneWhat did that teach you about advice from authority figures?

BrianThat a lot of people have bad advice. Growing up, you think adults have it figured out. At St. Michael's I saw that the administration was just winging it. Teachers, coaches, most people are figuring it out. So I stopped asking for advice, and that speeds up the feedback loop. A lot of people won't act until they ask someone, so the feedback loop goes from thirty seconds to two days. A thirty-second loop is: I'll just send her the email. I see she opened it three times. Let me change the message. In a week of not waiting for advice, you've iterated a dozen times. And if you ask enough people, they all disagree, and you end up paralyzed.

The people I do listen to are people who've been there. Don't ask directions from someone who has never been to that place. And advice doesn't cross domains, the same way taste doesn't. Someone can dress really well and have terrible taste in movies. If you're building a venture-scale company, talk to people who've had a venture-scale outcome. If you're opening a coffee shop, don't, because they might have you take risks that could ruin your life.

Also, advice expires. What worked for venture-backed founders ten years ago is from a different world, especially with AI. I think AI has expired a lot of advice. There's a lot I'd do completely differently in engineering now that software is cheap to make.

25:13The Argentina quit

ChristianneWhen you started building Iris, you spent six months building by yourself. This was before vibe coding.

BrianI was already a software engineer. My parents wouldn't let me play video games, so I thought, I'll make my own, and they said, okay, if you can make them. I learned the basics of programming at eight. It probably took me three days to understand a for loop, which is embarrassing, but learning that young shaped my mind toward engineering.

After college I built a crowdfunding site called Catholic Funder to learn programming from the ground up. It raised about three hundred thousand dollars for people. Then I took a job at a company called Parcel Pending to learn to work with other engineers. Then I moved to Arkansas to lead Walmart Labs' AI food initiative, called Eden, for six months. Then New York, leading two projects at PwC for a year. Then Warner Music Group, where I thought I'd combine music and software. I was director of engineering. It was the company that paid the most and the worst place to work as an engineer. Their tech was terrible, and all anyone did was yell at each other.

I was twenty-four, making way too much money for my age, leading a team where the next director of engineering was thirty-five. I grew up frugal. I used to wonder if there'd be food on the table. Now I had friends into the Michelin-star scene, and I was going to Michelin-star restaurants all the time, spending all this money, throwing parties, drinking a lot. And I was the most unhappy I'd ever been. It seemed pointless. I don't actually care about money. I care about freedom, and I felt enslaved to this lifestyle.

Around then I went to a wedding in Argentina, and I saw some of the poorest people I'd ever seen with the most genuine smiles. I'd never seen a smile like that in New York City. That memory stuck with me. So eventually: fuck it, I quit. I quit at the top. People said, you're about to get promoted. I said, I'm done. That was February 2020.

ChristianneTake me to the room where you quit.

BrianIt was more at dinner. My brother loves telling this story. I was with a lot of his friends, who looked up to me, and I said, I'm going to quit, and there's only one option. What's that? Move to Argentina. They thought I was kidding. I think I made the decision right there at the table. The next morning I sent an email: hey, this is my last day. No two weeks.

I didn't understand visas. I'm American, I can go anywhere. So I bought a one-way ticket, got to the gate, and they asked for my visa. You need either a visa or a return ticket within ninety days. I ran off, bought a return ticket, ran back to the gate, and the agent closed it in my face. The guy next to her said, you could actually still open it. She said, no, it's closed. So I flew the next day.

I took Spanish classes, worked out, and went to a bunch of expat groups. In Argentina they treat you like family from day one. Random people took me to their houses for asados. It was probably the most genuinely happy time I've had. I told everyone I'd be there two years. For five dollars you got the best dinner in the world, wine, steak and dessert. With what I'd saved, I could have lived there twenty years.

Then COVID happened. Before it hit, I'd gone to the best hospital in the city to get my throat checked, and it was the most chaotic place. I remember thinking, if there's ever a pandemic, Argentina is fucked. And then there was one, and I was in a country with terrible health care, and I thought, I'm fucked.

Within twenty-four hours, everyone realized how serious it was, and you couldn't get a flight. So I decided to stay in my apartment for two weeks and wait for the Americans to leave. I'd heard Americans were buying out toilet paper, so I bought a ton. A week later there was still toilet paper everywhere, because in Argentina they use bidets. I left packs of it at my Airbnb.

When I finally flew home, there were about three passengers on a massive Delta flight. More employees than passengers. We bought the cheapest tickets, lay down in the first-class seats, and woke up in New York. It was a hundred bucks. Then my parents made me quarantine in a hotel for two weeks before coming home.

38:49Iris fails, finds Nancy Pelosi

BrianBack home, I was living with five of my best friends at my parents' house, and we were all trading in the stock market. Everyone was getting stimulus checks and buying stocks. I was buying put options on the airlines, because I'd just flown on an empty plane that probably cost them a hundred thousand dollars to fly and I'd paid a hundred bucks. I bought calls on Tesla as a hedge. My friends said, show us what to do. And everyone locked inside was going to Reddit and Twitter for stock ideas. I thought, the people you want to hear from are the ones with a long track record of success through different economic environments.

My portfolio did pretty well. I think I have a business mindset and I react quickly. But it takes a lot of time and thinking, and if I'm playing music or in Argentina, I don't want to be thinking about the stock market. Could I find someone else for that?

Sowhat if people could connect their Robinhood accounts, and we mined their last ten years of data against the S&P 500 to find who consistently outperforms, in downturns and upturns? Even if you find two or five of those people, you've created a whole new category. We called it Iris, for the eye, so you could see into other people's portfolios. Read-only, with dollar amounts hidden and only percentages shown. Today you could build it in a day. It took me six months: reverse engineering the Robinhood API, the mobile app, the backend, the App Store.

My friends were obsessed with it. There was a leaderboard of the five of us. Then other people started finding it, about a hundred, crowding an app I'd built for my friends. I thought, there could be a business here. My brother joined, and my college roommate, and a friend of a friend named Chris messaged me on LinkedIn and joined. We raised a little money.

Then GameStop happened, right as the app was taking off. We had about fifty thousand users, and you saw every one of them buying GameStop. Then Robinhood shut off the buy button, and on our app, everyone sold immediately. The internet was saying don't sell, but on our app you could see people actually selling. We did the analysis, and our users made a lot of money because they sold at the top.

We had moderate success, but we made a lot of startup mistakes. Iris was a social app for your friend group, like Strava. And Chris did something brilliant. He asked, what's my marketing budget? I said zero, we're spending it all on engineers, figure it out. So he became a TikToker. He posted about a lot of things, but the videos that always went viral were about politicians trading in the market.

People would come from his TikToks, download the app, and type "Nancy Pelosi" into the post bar, which looked like a search bar. Whenever Chris went viral, the feed was a hundred posts of "Nancy Pelosi." I told Chris, stop talking about Nancy Pelosi. The app isn't made for this. I was romanticizing the business. A lot of founders turn away attention because it's not the attention they want. But it became so clear. I tried to push people away and they came back stronger and made fun of me. Fine. Let's give people Nancy Pelosi. We made a profile called the Nancy Pelosi Tracker on the app.

We'd always planned that the final evolution was automating what good investors do, so we built a little feature called Autopilot that you could pre-order for five bucks. We were getting desperate. We were running out of money, nothing was working, and we couldn't raise another round. We met with Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit. He was about to invest and then ghosted us.

And then, this gets sad, my dad passed away. When it rains, it pours. In one week, the stock market was crashing, an investor threatened to sue us, my relationship ended, my dad passed away, and something happened with my faith. Every pillar holding me up collapsed. The best description I have is eating a ghost pepper. The only thing that takes the burn away is pouring water in your mouth, and the moment you stop, it comes right back. That pain was all over my body, constantly, and the only way I didn't feel it was praying the rosary. It didn't even feel good. It was just water in my mouth. The second I stopped, it came back: physical pain, emotional pain, every kind of pain.

And I think that gave me the confidence to take time off, at the exact moment the investors and my co-founders needed me there. I said, here's what we're going to do. We fire everybody. It's just us co-founders. We stop burning cash, get back to basics and cut features. I'm taking three months off, and I'm lowering my salary to zero.

I think a lot of people would feel guilty doing that. I didn't. And I'd say every founder should take time off at inflection points. You don't build muscle while you're working out. You build it while you rest. I'd run the company for two years without a break, and in those three months I subconsciously built a lot of muscle.

56:01Deleting the entire app

BrianIn the third month, I had time to reflect on lessons I'd missed, and one of them was what I call transitive messaging. It's winning the game of telephone. The product wasn't growing, and when we talked about it on social media it didn't go viral, because everyone described it differently. You can't get word of mouth if people don't say the same thing. And if you're not going to spend millions on marketing, you need word of mouth.

So we literally played telephone with the different parts of the app. "Follow your friends" came through, but flat. And when someone said, "invest like Nancy Pelosi," everyone got excited. And everyone on the team kind of cringed. That's not what we're going to do, right? I said, that's exactly what we're going to do. I was the same person who'd told Chris to stop.

We had so little cash that we had to say no to ninety-nine percent of things. The entire application would be "invest like Nancy Pelosi." We shut off the social app and deleted it from the App Store. We rebranded as Autopilot, and the whole onboarding was: connect your brokerage, see the Nancy Pelosi portfolio, invest like her. If you want automatic rebalancing, so when she trades you trade, it's a hundred bucks a year. That was the entire app. We launched the Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, it went viral immediately, and Chris grew those accounts to millions of followers.

The goal was number one in the App Store. You do that by setting the app to pre-order, because when you launch, every pre-order downloads at once and it looks like tens of thousands of downloads in one day. VCs have bots that watch for new apps hitting number one. We had eight months of cash left. Our target was sixty thousand pre-orders, and we hit it. On TestFlight, about eighty percent of people we shared it with paid. We weren't even asking. No one was complaining.

We launched, hit number one in the App Store, and made two hundred thousand dollars in one day. Then Craft Ventures, David Sacks's firm, a tier-one Silicon Valley fund that was early in SpaceX and xAI, wrote us a check for a million dollars. All our other fundraising had been so hard, and they just said, here's the money. I think they also liked the mission. Not that they hated Nancy Pelosi, but they hated the injustice.

ChristianneBefore you knew it would work, what was it like to just go ahead and do the cringe thing?

BrianIt was the highest-conviction idea I had. Not super high in absolute terms. But if anything was going to work, it was this, and it was far above the next idea, and we had one shot. So put everything into one message, one moment. Picture ten magnifying glasses stacked in a line. If they're all aligned, the beam at the end doesn't just burn paper, it lights wood on fire. The only way to compete with big companies with small resources is to be so focused on something so niche that in that tiny category, no one can compete with you.

I came back from those three months transformed. I didn't give a shit what anyone thought. My team cussed me out. Chris, who ran the Pelosi tracker, cussed me out and said, this is ridiculous, you're not focused. I said, Chris, I'm the most focused I've ever been. We had two hundred fifty thousand users on the social app, and people said, you're crazy. But once the team saw the payments, the followers and the pre-orders, they started believing. Conversion dropped to about forty percent at launch, but forty percent of sixty thousand is significant.

And we'd built it to find anybody, not just her. Four months after we launched Pelosi, GPT-3.5 came out, and everyone wondered, what if GPT could invest for you? Within two weeks, we launched the first GPT portfolio. OpenAI sent us a cease and desist and took our domain. I didn't know you could lose a domain. But because the Pelosi accounts were so big, we could market the GPT portfolio through them. We were around five hundred thousand in revenue, and within a few weeks we hit a million. Three years of Iris, then a million in revenue within six months of launching. It took all those lessons: failing, overcomplicating, getting advice and filtering it. Then a small team can execute very efficiently.

1:04:43Your dad's belief

ChristianneYour dad isn't here to see what Autopilot has become. If he were, what would you want him to know?

BrianThere's a memory that kept me going through all the disbelief. I was in bed in college, typing out a business plan for Uber for Wi-Fi, where you could share your Wi-Fi and get paid for it. Dumb idea. I sent it to my dad, and he said, "Brian, I've watched your whole life. This is not it, but there's no doubt in my mind you will change the world."

When I graduated, I purposely didn't get a job for a while. A lot of my friends did, and out of college, if you don't have a job, you're kind of a loser. My dad never made me feel less than. I lived at home, I didn't pay rent, and he never asked when I was getting a job. It was always, I know you're going to be successful. How can I support you? Whenever someone didn't believe in me, I knew in the back of my mind that I believe in myself, because my dad does.

ChristianneI have a voice note for you.

BrianI remember that conversation. I don't have a photographic memory, but it's very visual. Memory and imagination use similar parts of the brain, and I have a hard time telling imagination from reality. It's why I can't watch horror movies. If I close my eyes, it's like a movie, with colors and faces and sounds. I can daydream for hours and it's very pleasant. But I can also get very terrified.

1:12:01Net benefit philosophy

ChristianneThere's a running thread here of not doing what people want you to do. Not people pleasing.

BrianWhen you don't please someone, usually that person is going to be pissed. But if there's a greater benefit, I'll do it every time. When I was young, I had this weird notion of net benefit. If something cost me thirty dollars but saved my mom or dad a hundred, I'd take the hit, because the net benefit is seventy. I think a lot of people are more self-interested. If they lose something and the group wins more, they wouldn't choose it.

Maybe it was team sports. I played football in high school, on the line. You don't get the glory. You hit this guy and it sucks, and your team scores a touchdown, and you're net up. I'd rather win the game. And it can be selfish too. If someone loses thirty and I gain a hundred, I'll choose that every time.

The investor who wanted to sue us just wanted his money back because the market was crashing. My hope was, don't worry, it'll be net greater. As soon as we hit the App Store, he messaged: this is why I invested in you, do you need more money? Not from you.

And at boarding school, the net benefit I was aiming for was removing the administration. There were two new deans and a headmaster who were ruining what made the school special. That was the campaign I ran on. I gave a speech to the entire congregation about what made the school special and how they were ruining it. After I graduated, the headmaster and both deans were gone. My plan worked. I thought I was going to martyr myself. Your last six months of senior year at a boarding school are the best six months, and I knew I'd lose them. But I did it because it would benefit everybody else. It's not that I want to displease people. It's that sometimes it's a necessary step to make a change that's orders of magnitude better.

1:25:20The tyranny problem

ChristianneYour whole college education was first principles. Original texts, no shortcuts. Descartes: never accept anything as true that you don't clearly know to be such. And then you built a product that tells people to copy someone richer. How do you square those?

BrianWhat you learn at a school like that is that there are a lot of smart people in the world. Einstein, Descartes, Aristotle. There are minds capable of things we're not. You appreciate them by going through the difficulty of getting where they got, reading their actual words instead of a textbook that simplifies them. Descartes looked at problems so complex they'd fill ten sheets of paper, saw the patterns, and boiled them down to something like the quadratic formula. And at school you also see how much other people struggle with the same material.

With Autopilot, the goal is to find the Einstein of the stock market and surface those minds so you can follow their thesis. Not blindly. With Nancy Pelosi, the thesis is potentially insider information, and I can't do that myself. Someone like Peter Wolf reads and synthesizes information faster than most people and acts promptly. You relinquish some agency over investment decisions while still understanding the thesis.

ChristianneAs a kid, you didn't control a lot of your life, and now you listen to no one and make all the decisions. Is that the reflex of a kid who got to decide nothing?

BrianAs a kid, I didn't get to decide the important things. Am I being pulled out of this school? And I'd think, this is kind of a dumb decision, there's another option here, but I don't get to make it. So I put myself in control of whatever I could, learning an instrument, opening a bank account, and the decisions got bigger, with the end goal of complete control of my life.

And now I have that, but I feel like the biggest slave to Autopilot, which is a painful feeling. I don't have children, but it's a relationship of sacrifice and love. I'd do anything to make it succeed. And some nights I go to bed thinking, man, this sucks.

The painful part is that I know there's an opportunity for a trillion-dollar company. With what's happening in AI and energy, I think the global economy will be ten times bigger in twenty to thirty years, and current asset managers are so costly and ineffective that someone new can transform asset management. I think that's Autopilot. At that point I think the revenue could be thirty or forty million dollars a day. So every day we're not there, that's a thirty-million-dollar opportunity cost. Every goal we miss by a week, that's two hundred million dollars lost. That's how I feel it. And the painful part is asking, am I the one to get us there? What qualities do I lack?

ChristianneIs that what you're running toward?

BrianAnother fear I had as a kid, I was talking to my brother about this yesterday, was being martyred, or drafted and dying in the military. Your life completely out of your control. But I've come to see that something greater can come out of it. So I think what I'm running toward is martyrdom in some way, whether for the faith or for a company that does asymmetric good in the world.

As more of our lives become digital, more of our rights live with companies, not governments. The CEO runs the company, the board picks the CEO, and the shareholders elect the board. But if you look at who actually votes, the winning fifty-one percent of the vote at every S&P 500 company is determined by about ten companies. Ten people. That's wild, and it's recent, from the last twenty or thirty years.

There's a world where that becomes a tyranny, an oligopoly. Historically, every tyranny is overthrown when the people convince the military. But with AI, humanoid robots and satellites, you could have a robotic military connected to the internet, and no way to overthrow it. Not a fifty-year tyranny but a perpetual one. It's not Star Wars, where there's a rebellion. It's game over.

And those ten firms don't really own the shares. We do. It's our pension funds, ETFs and mutual funds, and they vote on our behalf. So the goal with Autopilot is to democratize the vote, either through our own funds with democratic voting, or by letting you set preferences so Autopilot votes the stocks you own. There's no money in that. It's just good for the world. The revenue comes from becoming the world's largest asset manager. But that's in the back of my mind as why I'm racing. I think we have ten to twenty years.

During COVID, almost every S&P 500 company mandated the vaccine. Whatever you think of the vaccine, there wasn't anything close to that consensus among Americans. If CEOs feared the people who own their stock, they wouldn't have done that. If Mark Zuckerberg could be voted out for removing posts half the country cared about, he'd think twice. But you have ten people, all on one side of the political spectrum, voting for every CEO in the S&P 500. That blows my mind.

ChristianneYou said you want to run the maximally honorable version of Autopilot. Are you there yet?

BrianI think that would be the maximally honorable version. From a marketing perspective, honor helps you rage-bait, and rage bait gets views. Tie an honorable message to a provocative one, and that's when viral marketing gets special. A dishonorable message might get attention, but it won't have the long-term effect you want with customers.

1:38:37The vision pulls me

BrianWhen I close my eyes, I see a lot of possible futures where the world is not good, very clearly. I could tell you what I've imagined this future tyranny looks like, and it terrifies me, and I want to do everything I can to prevent it. But I can also take someone else's vision and imagine the greatest possible version of it. At every company I worked for, like Walmart Labs with its intelligent food system, I'd picture the success, families benefiting, and think, we have to do this as soon as possible, because every day we don't, someone doesn't get it. That's hard to live with. I don't think most people think that way.

ChristianneI love talking to your brother, because the relationship between you two is so apparent. He thinks the world of you. Do you know that?

BrianI think I do. I think it's mutual. He was very early in his engineering career, and I tried to get him to quit about every month. You're not there yet. I'm the opposite of nepotism. My friends and family should not work for me, because their lives are harder. I expect more of the people closest to me. Scott is the one person I've met with maximum perseverance. Imagine your boss saying, you'd better quit, and purposely making your life miserable. Most people would quit. Maybe it's different because we're brothers.

The Autopilot feature wasn't the main feature, but Scott was most excited about it, and as the most junior person on the team, he built the first version. Without that, before AI coding, we wouldn't have had time to pivot. We onboarded the first users on a video call. There was no UI, it was all back end. We'd say, are you ready? Your Robinhood account is about to trade, three, two, and press a button, and they'd see push notifications on their phones: bought this stock, bought this stock. Everyone said, this is so fucking cool. We asked if they'd pay, and ten out of ten bought it. The first time we launched something everybody loved. That's what gave me the confidence to tell the team, this is the thing.

Now Scott is the main builder, and it handles 1.7 billion dollars. His engineering has grown past a lot of people I've worked with at the top of big companies, given how fast he's had to learn and the scale he operates at. I tried to push him out. He pushed himself to get better.

ChristianneAre there entrepreneurs or stories you think of when times are tough?

BrianThe best advice I've ever gotten is from Bill Ackman. Early in his career he shorted Herbalife, calling it a pyramid scheme, and Carl Icahn, who had much more money, pumped the stock just to destroy him. He lost billions, and his wife divorced him. He said, don't look at the mountain of where you were. That will destroy you. Just put one foot in front of the other. Do the minimum amount of work that day. Don't stop, because if you stop you're dead. Get out of bed, respond to a couple of emails. I've been through a lot of tough times, and that's the most effective thing. One step at a time, and it always gets better. When you're at a low, there's only up.

And Steve Jobs, for simplicity and beauty. Computers used to be ugly gray boxes. He loved calligraphy and brought fonts and the mouse to the mainstream, and the graphical interface, which Microsoft copied. He went to Paris, met the head of Louis Vuitton, and said, I'm jealous of you, because luxury will always be there, but in technology you always have to innovate. His dream was to open an Apple store next to Louis Vuitton. The rainbow Apple logo was there to show the Mac could do color.

Financial products are objectively ugly and overwhelm you with data. One reason people like Autopilot is that it's a beautiful app. People ask why we spend so much time on things that don't move our KPIs, and I say, it just looks better. My dream is to open an Autopilot store on Fifth Avenue by Louis Vuitton. No mobile app company has ever done that. I don't know how we'll make it make sense, but one day.

ChristianneAnything else you want someone to know before I let you go?

BrianI think this was probably the best podcast I've done. A lot of them stay surface level. You really went deep, which is good.

ChristianneToo deep?

BrianNo, there's no such thing as too deep.