Andrew Chen Archives

I recently did a podcast with Ryan Hoover, co-founder of Product Hunt and my sister Ada Chen Rekhi, previously SVP Marketing at Survey Monkey – here’s what we talk about:

• The network effects that makes Silicon Valley what it is. The uniqueness of the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem, how network effects conspire to create a “rich get richer” situation for cities, and why new communication tools enabling distributed teams to work together across continents could mean that there will be no “next Silicon Valley.”
• Big companies versus small ones. Ada shares her insights on the contrasting skill sets needed when working at a big company versus a small startup, after having herself gone from a small startup to a huge organization like LinkedIn back to a two-person startup with her husband.
• Personal life OKRs. How to port the concept of OKRs — objectives and key results, a personnel management framework originated by legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove — to your personal life from your business (and why you would want to). We talk about you can use them to help manage your exercise, social life and relationship with your SO.

Of course, we also chat about some of our favorite products, including an app that lets you pop in to a luxury hotel for a few hours to shower or have a nap, a super cool way to greet visitors to your office, and a new app for emailing yourself.

Here it is below as an embed, but if you don’t see it inline, you can listen to the podcast via this link too. If you like the podcast, you can subscribe here. Thanks to Ryan for putting this together, including the transcript!

Some quotes from the episode

“When you’re executing at a small startup, or a small team, or just by yourself, it really comes down to ideating, picking and prioritizing, and then rolling up your sleeves and just getting things done as quickly as possible. It’s a night and day difference from a big company.” — Ada

“If you graph cities, there’s a power law: the biggest cities are really big and there’s this long tail of all these little tiny cities, and the reason for that is that there’s a network effect within cities. These ecosystems emerge because the designers are here, because the engineers are here, because the capital is here, because the marketing people are here, and on and on and on.” — Andrew

“When it comes to working at a large company, it’s much more cerebral and much more about the heart. You’re thinking about how to collaborate and communicate across a cross-functional team to get the initiative done: can you communicate what it’s about; can you motivate people to get it done; can you manage all the working pieces?” — Ada

“Either these network effects will continue to hold and the Bay Area will continue to be strong, or we make big structural shifts in how we organize teams and workforces and the network effects become less strong. But that doesn’t mean some other city becomes the next Silicon Valley, there won’t actually be a “next” Silicon Valley — it either continues or will just be distributed.” — Andrew

“The irony of it is that sometimes when you are working on projects with such large scale, because the skill set is so different, it actually feels like you’re not doing anything at all — you’re merely managing the appendages of the other groups and trying to make sure everyone is staying on track and executing.” — Ada

On joining a venture capital firm: “The idea that I would do the thing I want to do for fun as my full-time job feels like I’ve won an ice cream eating competition, and the prize is more ice cream.” — Andrew

Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode

• Bose — Noise-cancelling earbuds.
• Breather — Peace and quiet, on-demand. Reserve a private space on the go
• Captio — Email yourself with one tap.
• Envoy — Elegantly greet visitors to your office.
• HabitShare — The only habit-tracking app that is social to its core.
• NotaBene — Shortcuts for quickly emailing notes to yourself and others.
• Notejoy — Collaborative notes for your entire team.
• Recharge — Take a nap or shower in a luxury hotel.
• Reddit — r/InternetIsBeautiful, r/bestof and
• r/firstworldanarchists
• Spacious — Flexible, drop-in workspace.
• VIPKID — Teach Chinese children from your home.
• We Are The Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

Transcript

Ryan: Hey everybody, this is Ryan Hoover with Product Hunt Radio and I’m here at Andreessen Horowitz down in Menlo Park with two people I’ve known for a little while now, two brothers and sisters, Andrew Chen and Ada Chen. This is the first brother and sister duo and hopefully the first of many. Thanks for having me over here. First off, Andrew, you joined Andreessen Horowitz, is it six months ago?

Andrew: Yeah, I think I’m on month five. I’m quickly reaching my half year mark, which has gone incredibly fast.

Ryan: Are you completely swamped with meetings and pitches or how has it changed since before Andreessen Horowitz?

Andrew: Yeah, so when I was at Uber I really loved meeting with startups and hearing about new ideas and staying in touch with the tech community, but I can only do it first thing in the morning and on weekends and it quickly filled up my schedule. So I would work at Uber and then I would do that [meet with founders] basically. The idea that I would do the thing that I wanted to do for fun, like as my full time job sort of feels like I’ve won an ice cream eating competition and the prize is more ice cream. I could do as much as I want, which is super awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. And so your, your background, just maybe for those that aren’t super familiar, you were at Uber right before this and then what’s your short version of your history?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah, totally. We were just talking about. So Ada and I, who’s my little sister, by the way, I want to clarify —

Ada: [laughter, eye-rolling and protestation]

Andrew: So we grew up in Seattle, and we both made our way to the Bay Area. Actually, the funny thing is my first job ever was actually in venture capital and was something I did right after college. Then after that I ended up working at a series of startups, I moved to the Bay Area 10 years ago to start my own company. I had actually met Marc and Ben [of Andreesen Horowitz] here and they actually led the seed round for a startup I was working on during the Facebook platform days when everyone was working on crazy viral apps.

Ryan: So that’s around when we met.

Andrew: Yeah, right. Yeah, that’s exactly, that’s right around when we met and they invested out of a Horowitz Andreessen Angel Fund, which was really funny because that would have been like H16N and so different. So, I met them and I worked on that for a while and ended up basically deciding that it’d be better to go to a larger organization, ended up at Uber running various growth teams there. So I spent three years there, like a really, really fun experience —

Ryan: Probably pretty wild too, right?

Andrew: — Yeah, the first 18 months was like really, really incredible startup like hockey stick growth, then the last 18 months were very eventful and everyone’s read about it in the news. So I don’t have to summarize that.

Ryan: Yeah, and Ada, you’ve had a pretty interesting journey at Microsoft, LinkedIn, Survey Monkey, and then a two-person startup with your husband.

Ada: Yeah. Yeah. Actually multiple two person startups as well as, I spent some time in the game space as well at Mochi Media. So, after I graduated from college, I was in Seattle at Microsoft for a year and Microsoft at the time I think was around 80,000-100,000 employees? Very, very structured. Worked in the ad center space and the online advertising space when search marketing was just becoming a thing and exactly 367 days or so later, moved out to the Bay Area in 2007 and so worked at a tiny little startup that had just raised Series A called Mochi Media, which was an online games ad network, and spent multiple years there after it was ultimately acquired by Shanda Games and then actually started my first company which was a contact management app called Connected. It was all about contact management without the work. We raised some funding for that, ultimately sold it to LinkedIn and I had my experience sort of joining LinkedIn as a just as a company that was really maturing at the time. They had just had their IPO. There are about 1700 employees and experienced hyper growth for the first time, focused on things like relaunching Connected as LinkedIn Contacts, growth, learning a lot about subscriptions and consumer SaaS and was recruited out of that to work at Survey Monkey, where I was SVP of Marketing and then recently left a couple of years back to start a new company that’s actually a husband and wife team with Sachin Rekhi and we started a company called Notejoy, which is a collaborative notes app for teams and so we’re really focused on, how do we actually create a fast and focused workspace for teams that gets them out of the noise of chat and email.

Ryan: Yeah, team collaboration and productivity is so important because if you can even improve collaboration and efficiency within a team by like even just 10 percent, it can have such a huge impact on both your productivity but also just like your joy.

Ada: That was actually part of the inspiration behind the name and it’s one of those things where even when you go to a small team like small tight-fitting teams or larger organizations, you see this friction today that still exists when it comes to communication and collaboration and just think about how many decrepit out-of-date Wikis you see and Google Docs that are sort of lost in the ether and then people joining and getting forwarded random emails from way back when because that’s the only place that knowledge lives, we were really thinking about how do we create something that tackles that and productivity has always been a huge space where I’ve been passionate about.

Ryan: This is a really broad question, but what’s it like working at such a big company like LinkedIn and Microsoft and others to now just you and your husband?

Ada: Yeah, I mean it’s hugely different and I think the biggest dimension where I would say working at a large company versus a small startup is different is that effective execution looks completely different. It’s a night and day difference. So when you’re executing at a small startup or a small team or even just by yourself, it really comes down to ideating, picking and prioritizing and then rolling up your sleeves and getting things done as quickly as possible from an execution pace. When it comes to working at a large company, it’s actually much more cerebral, right? And it’s much more in the heart. You’re actually thinking about how do you communicate and collaborate across the cross functional group of teams to get the initiative done. So can you communicate what it’s about? Can you motivate people to get it done? Can you manage all of the pieces?

Ada: And the irony of it is that sometimes when you’re working on projects with large scale, because the skillset is so different, it actually feels like you’re not doing anything at all yourself. You’re actually merely managing the appendages of all the other groups and trying to make sure that everyone’s staying on track and executing. And so as organizations scale, the execution work around how much collaboration it takes gets orders of magnitude greater in terms of how hard it is to get everyone aligned and marching in the same direction versus one person. And so, I really think that that’s one of the biggest differences, like you go to a startup to learn how to do things and maybe not very well and you go to a large company to see how things are done really well, but across a broad range of disciplines and functions and really see how the whole thing comes together as an engine sort of humming smoothly and operating.

Ryan: You mentioned communication is one skill or trait of people in larger companies. And Andrew, you used to blog, I mean you still do, but you used to blog a lot. That’s largely how I think you built a pretty massive following over the past decade or so. How did you even get into writing to begin with?

Andrew: So, first I love writing. That’s kind of the very first thing, and I was always one of these, teenagers where like, I kept a journal and I would like write in it and then delete it and then start a new one and literally I was the only audience. I just like enjoyed it myself. And so before starting my current professional blog, I think I had like three other blogs that I had started over the years. Just basically, just getting going and then deleting them and not really sticking with it over time.

Ryan: Why did you delete the previous blogs?

Andrew: Because you get bored with it, and you’re just kinda like, okay, I’m done, kind of thing. And then like I think on those it was literally, it’s like who’s reading it? It’s like Ada, like my parents, like —

Ada: — Fun fact about Andrew’s early blogs: he would actually forcibly subscribe us to the emails to make sure that we wouldn’t miss anything.

Ryan: That was before some of the ICANN email laws and certainly before GDPR.

Andrew: Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. So I think, don’t tell a 20 year old who they can subscribe to a blog or not. So I really enjoyed that. And then when I moved to the Bay Area 10 years ago, what I basically decided to do was I was like, I’m gonna write down everything that I’m learning and I’m just gonna start, like going out and so the funny thing, I was learning so much in my first year that I was just writing a lot of, like pretty random snippets, some of it would be like a paragraph or two, and I would do it like, maybe twice a week or something like that. So like pretty often and that’s actually how I met Marc Andreessen originally. It turned out that he somehow randomly had stumbled on my blog via Hacker News and then through that, had ended up seeing some of my content and then he cold emailed me and that’s how I met him in 2007. So it was like a pretty random and amazing adventure but at the time, I was an entrepreneur in residence. I was a 24 year old entrepreneur in residence actually across the street from here, which is really funny. And one of the things that my colleagues would tell me is they would say like, why are you wasting your time blogging, you’re giving away all your best ideas? Like, what are you doing? Like, these are the secrets that you’re going to use to understand the thing. And at the time I was like, well, I’m never going to be a venture capitalist so like it doesn’t matter. And so as a result, I’m just going to give away all this stuff and then, and it’s obviously so ironic now that like, so much of the job is, is obviously, sharing your ideas and giving back to the community via Twitter and Medium and writing, writing essays and all that.

Ryan: Now that’s the norm.

Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah. And in fact it was like, it would have been considered very contrarian I think to actually share a bunch. But anyway, so I’ve kept it up and I think, I’m, I’m well into the many, many hundreds of essays, over 10 years and I think at times I’ve taken like a hiatus, I think I took a two year hiatus in the middle. But like I think my goal now is really to publish like regularly, but to do it at the kind of like a high level of quality and to go deeper into ideas and to sort of break new concepts and new kinds of data to the community versus literally the, the early days it was like, it’d be like 500 words, like what did I learn today kind of thing.

Ryan: So I’m going to take a tie into that a little bit. You mentioned a term called, correct me if I’m wrong, but something along the lines of mullet startups, is that correct? Or do you remember that there’s a tweet in a conversation with you and some others around the distributed nature of companies?

Andrew: Oh yeah, okay, mullet, yes.

Ryan: Mullet startups is a catchy term because it’s a trend that we’ve identified. Product Hunt is a mullet startup I guess, we’re headquartered in San Francisco, but we have a distributed team.

Andrew: So The Economist’s cover for this week is Peak Valley, is, is it over in Silicon Valley?

Ryan: Right.

Andrew: So then I think there’s been, there’s been a lot of like really interesting dialogue around that. I think, and obviously a lot of it has to do with like housing and the Bay Area and there’s so much to unpack there, right? But I think that one of the reactions to it has been that we see many companies, with their leadership and their executives in the Bay Area, but when it comes to hiring engineers and designers and all sorts of other folks, then they’re much more likely to distribute the team, anywhere.

Ryan: Right.

Andrew: And so, yeah, to your point, this is sort of the mullet, because it’s sort of business in the front and party in the back kind of thing. AndI think it’s fascinating because it is actually just the reverse of one of the models that we’ve seen over the years where, for example, you’ll have a really strong technical team out of Paris or out of Israel or out of Singapore and they’ll get started, they’ll get funded and then they’ll realize, okay, hey, all of our customers are in the US, let’s move the CEO and the sales and marketing function to the Bay Area. And so you end up with the, the mullet, but just like kind of, but now you do it in reverse. Right. So I think that’s like a pretty interesting, reverse mullet, which is kind of an interesting trend these days.

Ryan: Yeah. So it’s just you two right now Ada at Notejoy, but if you were to, let’s say you needed to hire 10 people tomorrow, how would you approach it? Would you hire in the Bay Area or would you go remote?

Ada: Yeah, I mean that’s actually a fascinating question because it’s something that we’ve debated and thought about because things have changed so much. Not only from the costs, but then also, what is the ability for you to access and interact with people at scale, if they’re located in other places. We actually talked to this close friend of mine who’s a founder who, built his company and scaled it to revenue, pretty substantial revenue in the Bay Area. And he basically said to us, if I were to do it again, I believe that Silicon Valley is the worst place to self-fund a company or to start a company or even to have funding and try to build a team. And the biggest challenge that he was having was actually access to talent. I think it would really depend. I think on one hand I think we have really strong networks within the Bay Area and so it would be possible to kind of peel people off and that’s really how many startups start with their founding team. They pull people that they respect, that they work with, that have shared belief in to kind of create that initial nucleus of a team and that gets you to your first couple of headcount. So maybe we can get to 10 that way, but I do think that now when it’s coming to scale, like yeah, we would definitely be looking very closely at could we build a remote team and create a really distributed workforce for Notejoy.

Andrew: I think one of the distinctions is do you hire a lot of folks who are doing the kind of individual contributor work versus the managers because I do think that it ends up being really hard once you want to find the engineering director that’s managed 200 engineers to find that elsewhere, versus it being, kind of a main thing. So, so there’s a really interesting thing about cities, right? Which is like if you graph the population of cities and sort of like, stack rank them, you’ll see that there’s a power law in it. And like the biggest cities are really, really, really big and then there’s this like there’s this long tail of all these like little tiny cities. And the reason for that is that there’s really like a network effect within cities, right? Like, whether it’s show business in LA or it’s, finance in New York, like these ecosystems that emerge happen because, you end up with the designers who are here because the engineers are here because the marketing people are here because the capital is here because and on and on and on and all in one place. And so one of my colleagues here at Andreessen Horowitz, Darcy, had mentioned, he tweeted the idea that, one of two things will happen, right? Either these network effects continue to hold, meaning that then, actually the Bay Area will just continue to be what it is, right? Or, we actually make really interesting structural shifts in how we organize teams and workforces and all that stuff. In which case the network effects become less strong. But what that means is not that then all of a sudden, some other city like becomes a quote unquote the next Silicon Valley. It actually just means that everyone just lives where they want to live and eat and that’s that. And so, so if you believe that thesis, then you’d actually say there is no quote unquote next Silicon Valley. It either just continues or it’ll just be distributed. Right. I think that’s like a pretty interesting —

Ada: — I think you see that already emerging even within online communities. So when you think about where the discourse actually taking place, right, it’s taking place on Medium, it’s taking place on Twitter, it’s taking place on Product Hunt. We went through the experience of launching on Product Hunt and we were really amazed by how international the community was in contrast to the earlier startup Connected that we’d done several years before that. It may not be as important in the future for everyone to be physically co-located in the same space.

Ryan: Yeah. I’m super fascinated by this space and I’m actually committed to investing in a company that’s rethinking how people communicate with a distributed and remote team by video because we have a lot of different tools out there like Zoom and Google Hangouts and others and they are all kind of utilities in that they’re not much different from each other. It’s just like a big screen with your face on it and they’re rethinking, in a world where everyone is distributed or a group of people are distributed and another group of people are working from their home, how do you communicate more effectively? Yeah, I find it an interesting trend. I think one observation too is that the mullet strategy can work really well if your home base is where your customers are. So like you said Andrew earlier, like if you’re building an entertainment company, it’s probably good to have connections and live in LA so that you can be around those people and that can create a lot of serendipity in business partnerships and so on, but you don’t necessarily need your entire team there. You can also have them around the world. If you can build a culture that can facilitate working effectively remote. I’m pro-remote, if it makes sense for your company. Just saying, I’m slightly biased. It’s been five years now with Product Hunt running distributed.

Andrew: I think what’s hard is that basically there’s a whole class of interactions were being in person is actually better. And so if you’re meeting people for the first time in a partnership type scenario or a sales kind of scenario or in investing kind of scenario, like you do want to go old school, you do want to see the other person. and so I think in those cases, that’s where, that’s actually, I think where the network effects actually kick it right where then it’s like, okay, yeah, let’s get everyone clustered together, in those cases.

Ryan: SF in particular, is so dense. I mean, granted I’m driving down to Menlo Park, but it’s a small, short trip. Whereas LA and New York as well, it’s actually hard to have a lot of meetings within a five hour period because everyone is distributed across different locations. I’m curious to hear from an investing side, are you actively looking at sort of the future of work or distributed teams and looking to invest in companies building for that?

Andrew: Totally. I mean I think, I think there’s a couple different angles on the future of work that are, that are worth mentioning. So I think one is, I learned a ton of really, really interesting lessons at Uber, but I think one of the most important ones is that there are 80 million hourly workers in America. Right? And so these are folks that are often working multiple part time jobs, they don’t have steady sources of income, and what they’re often doing is they are driving Uber kind of between their other things, right. And so I think when you look at that, you’re like, wow, like the future of work has to encompass that industry, which is what are all the other kinds of interesting work that can actually happen? So like just to call out a couple really interesting ones: there’s a company called VIPKID which caters to — the consumer side is basically kids in China and then the supply side of the market is basically often like Midwestern like ex-teachers, stay at home moms, that kind of thing and they’re spending time on video together and they’re getting this whole experience around teaching and tutoring. And this is something that you can do from your home. Like super interesting. Right? There’s obviously lots of really interesting things happening in real estate. Our portfolio company, Airbnb obviously provides a lot of really important, supplemental income —

Ryan: If your HOA will actually allow it. I’m speaking from experience. They will not allow me, unfortunately to rent my place out. But it’s pretty typical, right?

Andrew: I mean, I think within all these different kinds of work, there’s obviously different rules that need to be be in place and that’s true for rideshare and that’s true for many other things as well. But I think that’s kind of one notion of a future of work that I think is important for us to consider even though it’s sort of outside the tech bubble a little bit, but it’s a really huge market. I think the flip side is, I’ve been an on again off again advisor to Dropbox for many years and I’ve known that team for a while and when you look at what these horizontal products are trying to do, it’s sort of like, we’re in a world where, if we can get all of these professional white collar workers — just make their jobs better, right? And just like make all these workflows, these really complicated workflows that you know for the most part are still being managed in spreadsheets and docs and chat and sort of like streamline all that. There’s tons and tons of opportunity across many different dimensions.

Ryan: So let’s talk about some apps or products you guys love. Ada, what’s on your home screen that people need to know about or is there a product you use maybe every day, every week that is bettering your life, changing your life?

Ada: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I am a huge fan of personal productivity and so, every year I make my New Year’s resolutions and one of my resolutions for example, was get to a point where I was working out three times a week and the challenge that I always had was the accountability, right? And tracking. And so this is probably not a particularly popular app, but one of my favorite apps for that is actually this iOS app called HabitShare. And it basically lets you share accountability, like share your to do list, like check I did it today and set a goal and make sure that you’re keeping track of how accountable you are against it. I’m a huge fan of that. And then I think Andrew actually introduced me to this, but I love this app called Captio as well and it’s a very quick way to email yourself and you wouldn’t think that it’s that many taps to email yourself to remember a quick idea. But after you experienced it, it’s pretty mind-blowing.

Andrew: Can we just go on a quick tangent about Ada’s goal setting strategy?

Ryan: Yes. This is one of the reasons why we had brothers and sisters on the show.

Andrew: Yeah. So one of the things that’s impressive, but also a little bit scary is the the level of — she actually uses OKRs, objectives and key results. There’s a whole book about it. In order to handle her goals, but this is the best part. Her husband also does the same, Sachin also does the same and they actually will score each other on the OKRs. Do you want to talk about this a little?

Ada: True story. So, both my husband and I love productivity. I mean, this is why we’ve been spending all of our time working on Notejoy, but I spent probably a decade of my life at this point thinking about productivity apps and so OKRs is actually something that we’ve adopted as a process from LinkedIn, which originally came from Google, which originally came from another company before that. It’s widely adopted.

Ryan: John Doerr actually wrote a book about it recently.

Ada: Yeah, that’s right. And so with objectives and key results, we actually found that it was a really good way of establishing goals that are both measurable as well as very distinct specific. And so we actually do annual OKRs is on a personal level, whether it’s around like personal infrastructure, like fitness or how to relate to your life —

Andrew: — You have like a KR that’s like hanging out with friends three times per month.

Ada: Yeah. So I actually had a reconnection OKR at one point where I basically made a list of people, 50 people that brought me joy that I was really engaged with, always wanted to get to know better, the bar was basically just interesting and that I hadn’t spoken to in four to six months and then the goal was basically to take a one month period and meet with half of them and it was actually one of the most energizing and transforming goals that I’d had because it was a great way to kind of have a focused effort at reconnecting with people and building relationships. And yeah, we score each other on it so we actually have business OKRs in terms of managing the business that we do on a quarterly basis and then I have annual OKRs around some of my goals such as like learning a new skill or whatever else. Thanks for bringing that up.

Andrew: I do not use OKRs to score anything in my life. Do you?

Ryan: Not really. I mean, that is extremely nerdy but also I’m kind of inspired because the beauty of OKRs is when you craft the right OKRs it’s binary, like you pass it or you didn’t and a lot of people they set goals like New Year’s resolutions and they’re like, I want to work out more and that’s their goal. And they end up not actually pursuing it oftentimes in part because it’s not specific. It’s like, well does that mean you need to work out three times a week, minimum, for the rest of the year, and what are your goals and what are your outcomes and expectations out of that?

Ada: Right. Yes. I actually tapped into this HabitShare app in addition to that and specifically with the fitness goal, it was actually, Q1 was like, okay, get to once a week, twice a week, Q3, is at three times a week. And so that’s actually how I’ve been tracking and achieving it.

Ryan: Love it.

Andrew: Okay. So one of my favorite things on Twitter is I, I tried to do this at least once a year where I will just screenshot my, my homescreen and then I’ll just ask everybody else to just do the same and then like reply and it’s really cool. First of all it’s a very personal thing what your home screen is and so I always have to look at it and be like, is there anything like weird on here I don’t want, a stealth beta company —

Ryan: — Right, right, exactly. Yeah, stuff like that.

Andrew: Exactly. And then, and then similarly like looking at other people’s homescreens are really interesting. Like occasionally you’ll see people where they’ll, they’ll like sort their homescreen by like color and that’s how they organize everything and I’m just like, that’s insane. Anyway, so I was going to mention some of the apps that are like on my home screen these days. So I think one, as Ada mentioned, there’s an app called Captio which is great but this morning actually you had tweeted something that the Fin team had come out with a new app called Nota Bene, which is sort of like Captio on steroids. So I actually just installed, I put it on my home screen, I’m actually really excited to try it.

Ryan: Yeah. What, what does it allow you to do for those that aren’t familiar with Kaptio?

Andrew: Right. So, basically both of these apps they allow you to, you basically open up the app, there’s a blank text screen, you type in whatever you want and then you just hit send and then it emails you. So that’s Captio. And then what Nota Bene does is it has a couple more aliases. It has things like, this is something that like I actually really want and need which is sending to my work email versus my home email. And then I might do like work email plus like admin, is a thing. And so I think that’s Fin’s hook to try to get you into the workflow, that way. But yeah. So, I think that that one I use all the time. I was mentioning that, for my first year on the job at Andreessen Horowitz, I moved down to downtown Palo Alto but I’m spending two days a week in the city and so one of the things that I’m finding is that, I’m trying different kinds of like, solutions for like, oh, if I want a place to hang out and do email, like what should I use? And so one of the things that I’ve been trying out over over the last couple months now has been Breather, which lets you rent , basically like a conference room that’s been built out and kind of doing meetings there. Another one is Spacious, which just got launched actually I think in the last couple of weeks. It’s a really cool concept. So what they do is they basically, you have these really high end restaurants, right? And like they have a very nice interior and all that stuff, but they’re basically closed the entire day all the way until like 5:00 PM. And so the idea is between nine to five or eight to five or whatever the hours are, can they actually just literally put like one person there and just have like coffee and water and then you use the interior of this beautiful restaurant. So one of the places in SF is the Press Club, right? Which is this great —

Ryan: — Yeah, great spot.

Andrew: It’s tons of space and so, you can basically just hang out in the press club during the day and it’s basically completely empty and it’s like —

Ryan: — How much does it cost typically?

Andrew: It’s like a membership basis. I think it’s like 90 bucks a month or something like that. And they have spots in Cole Valley and Hayes Valley and the Castro and a bunch of other places. Another one that’s kind of like this, it’s pretty interesting I think when I first heard this idea I like laughed because I thought it was so funny, but, but now I actually have like used it like in a real way which is a company called Recharge and that it lets you rent hotels by the minute. And so you’re kind of like, what is the use case for that? The actual use case is, you need a place to make a phone call. Right. And so in the same way that like Breather or Spacious, it’s like, it’s sort of like, oh well you have all this built-in inventory and like maybe you hold out a room —

Ryan: — Or maybe just a shower. Some people are traveling, flying. I just need in between meetings to have a shower.

Andrew: Right, right. And then you can pay like one fourth the price of a hotel, and like that actually is like kind of useful. So anyway, those are fun. I think I’m now up to, I’m trying one of these like kind of almost on a weekly basis which has been pretty cool.

Andrew: We’re going to talk about Reddit a little bit? Yeah, because I’m like a daily active user. I don’t check it all the time, like I’d probably check it not as often as Twitter, but it’s like, it’s like my default late night read, when I want to just like chill out,

Ryan: You can just turn your brain off. It’s different than Twitter, it’s different from any other community. I actually got a book, a pre-release book by Christine. She’s been writing about this for years now, about the history of Reddit. It’s about 400-500 pages long. You would enjoy it.

Andrew: Well, I just bought a Alexis’s book that he had written a couple years ago, so yeah. I’ve been into Reddit for like several years now, but it’s funny, one of my good friends, Noah Kagan was literally like, you need to go to your favorite subreddits and sign up and follow and actually set up your Reddit and then it’s amazing.

Ryan: Kind of like Twitter.

Andrew: Exactly. Right. Right. And I think I didn’t get it because I would go to the homepage and I would kind of be like, well this is kinda fun, is this like another cat memes website or whatever? I think the one that I want to recommend that folks start out with is actually if you just go to the /bestof subreddit. So it’s like reddit.com/r/bestof. Then it basically just links to some of the best comments on Reddit over the last 24 hours and then you can actually sort it by the last month or something like that. So I think anyway, that that’s a good one. But yeah, I follow a ton of different subreddits at this point. The other one I really like is r/firstworldanarchists and that’s basically, when you have like a sign that’s like don’t step here and then someone takes a photo, like they’re stepping in the grass or whatever, that’s like my kind of like rule breaking. Anyway. So yeah, so there’s that. And then the one, one, one last thing I’ll mention is Bose Quiet Comfort — the wireless noise canceling things as I’ve been commuting from SF and Palo Alto are like amazing. And so they actually have an app that lets you like adjust, how much noise cancellation you want so I use it all the time.

Ryan: These are the ones that just go in your ear, right? Kinda like Airpods?

Andrew: Right. The battery actually hangs on your neck and then they go into your ear. So they’re not over-ear, they’re the ones that go in. But I actually, I have both and yeah, I prefer this one the most and I like bring it with me everywhere at this point.

Ryan: Do you live on, on Reddit at all Ada?

Ada: I’m probably a weekly active user. I check it in and I just like to see r/bestof and see what people are talking about. But you’re right. I mean it’s such a, it’s such a passive way to kind of see a lot of interesting content stream by.

Ryan: What’s also nice about Reddit in a world where content is delivered by algorithms and people you follow and things like that, like on Twitter and Facebook and so on. It’s kind of refreshing to go to a place like Reddit where you can get out of your bubble and you can explore the weirdest stuff if you really want to. It’s not socially curated, it’s not personally curated necessarily to like everything that Reddit knows about you, but it’s really a community of people geeking out about this stuff. One of my favorite subreddits, I don’t visit Reddit all that often, I try to actually avoid it because it’s kind of a rabbit hole, but one subreddit I love is called r/internetisbeautiful and we’ll find there’s actually a lot of really weird projects and websites and little hacks that people are building and it’s almost always delightful. You go there and find something weird, just some crazy website that someone created and the name, r/internetisbeautiful is just such a wonderful feeling. It’s really, really well crafted subreddit. Cool. Thanks for having me over here. By the way, is there anything else you’d like to to plug — anything in the portfolio maybe Andrew? Or anything at Notejoy, Ada?

Andrew: We were talking about how when when you were just signing in at Andreessen Horowitz, I was like, oh, you should install the Envoy app. Yeah. Because it makes it so much easier. You literally get a photo of your face on it and you just tap on it and then like, and you go in and it works over Bluetooth. So anyway, so I always like to plug Envoy, it’s one of our portfolio companies.

Ryan: I mentioned this earlier, but we didn’t get into it. Envoy is such an interesting company. I’m fascinated by social graphs and when you look at the uniqueness of a social graph like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and, and I think some of the most interesting ones that are less talked about is one, like Slack is very interesting, like the people that are in your Slack team or the people that you actually work with, no one else has access to that sort of graph right now. And Envoy is also really fascinating. It’s like a graph of the people and business partners and people that you’re meeting at your company. No one else has that.

Andrew: Well, I mean I think it wouldn’t surprise you to know that the CEO, Larry, was actually really early employee at Twitter. Right. And so a lot of the sort of thinking around both the product experience and just like how nice it is. I think we’ve gotten to, to this whole trend now where your office and your office experience is this extension of your brand. And so now people like really care about it. So they don’t want like this kind of kludgy pen and paper thing. And that product experience is so important. But to your point on the graph is, totally agree — I think that’s also one of the reasons why it’s like, Envoy’s pretty special in sort of the pantheon of these like B2B companies in that it actually grows virally. Like the way that the company grows is that people experience it and they’re like wow, this is really nice. And then as soon as they go back to their office they’re like we should have one. And there’s really not that many products that grow that way. Dropbox grows that way, Slack grows that way. It’s like a viral B2B thing. And so I think, in, in the same way it’s like that, that graph means that not only is it spreading virally and enables that spread, but then the other part I think is wow, okay, cool, you get a list of all the people that are visiting and who they’re visiting and then that can then feed into like all your other like, offline data.

Ryan: Or CRM.

Andrew: Yeah, so you take your offline data and turn it into online stuff and it’s another touchpoint which is super important.

Ryan: You don’t have Envoy at the headquarters, Ada?

Ada: No.

Andrew: I think she has a doorbell.

Ryan: Old school doorbell. So yeah, what’s down the pipe?

Ada: What’s new on the pipe is that we’ve actually been doing a ton of mobile enhancements and so we’re actually bringing Android very soon in terms of bringing it out as an app. It’s interesting now because the bar for consumer and business apps is so much higher than it used to be, right? Like it’s actually really important to be fully multi-platform, so we’ve always had Mac and PC and then the browser and we’ve had iOS but it’s really exciting to actually bring that to Android because that’s been a big factor for a lot of teams that are trying to adopt Notejoy as an overall group and so yeah, just cranking and hard at work.

Ryan: Cool. Awesome. Well thanks for coming on. This will be the first of hopefully many brother-sister Product Hunt Radio shows.

Andrew: Awesome. Thanks for having us.

Ada: Thanks.

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