Crowdfunding Secrets: Raise Millions in Days | Renji Bijoy DSH #1209

Summary

Digital Social Hour: Renji Bijoy on Crowdfunding Secrets to Raise Millions in Days | DSH #1209

Released on February 28, 2025

Host: Sean Kelly
Guest: Renji Bijoy
Podcast: Digital Social Hour
Episode Title: Crowdfunding Secrets: Raise Millions in Days

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Digital Social Hour, host Sean Kelly engages in an insightful conversation with Renji Bijoy, a trailblazing entrepreneur from Austin. Renji shares his remarkable journey in leveraging crowdfunding to raise over $20 million for his company, Immersed. The discussion delves deep into the nuances of successful crowdfunding, the evolving landscape of venture capital, the pivotal role of social media, and Renji’s visionary outlook on the future of technology, including AR, VR, and humanoid robotics.

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Renji Bijoy's Crowdfunding Success

Renji recounts his strategic approach to crowdfunding, which enabled him to raise substantial capital swiftly. Instead of conventional venture capital avenues, Renji harnessed the power of retail investors—his loyal user base and followers who genuinely believed in his product.

Renji (00:58): “If we wanted to raise more venture capital, probably would have been better to move out to San Francisco or something. But I think for us, because we have sort of this army of retail investors, our users, our followers that really love our product, it's really empowered us to get the word out there.”

He highlights the rapid fundraising milestones:

• $2 million in two days
• $8 million in two weeks
• Over $20 million to date

Renji attributes this success to building a product that users cherished, allowing for organic and enthusiastic financial support.

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Building a Product People Love

A cornerstone of Renji’s crowdfunding triumph was developing a product that resonated deeply with users. Unlike many who pitch mere ideas, Renji focused on delivering a tangible, high-quality product.

Renji (03:28): “I think the main thing is having something of substance. I think a lot of people try to crowdfund with an idea on a napkin, but they haven't proven themselves yet.”

His company, Immersed, stands out in the AR/VR space by offering a highly functional headset designed for productivity, bridging the gap between work and virtual environments.

Renji (19:47): “Our visor is 6 ounces, very, very lightweight and it's higher resolution than Apple's headset. And so that's coming out this year and actually a couple of months here.”

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Timing and Market Conditions

Renji emphasizes the importance of market timing in his crowdfunding success. Initially, entering the VR space was challenging due to the saturation and failures of numerous startups. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the demand towards remote work solutions, positioning Immersed advantageously.

Renji (03:39): “When Covid hit, everyone started working from home. And everyone was like, oh, crap. Well, I can't really bring my computer screens from the office back home. So I found this kind of headset thing. Can I use that for screens? And very quickly, we became one of the top apps.”

This serendipitous alignment between his product offering and market needs catalyzed the viral growth and financial backing from everyday investors.

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Crowdfunding vs. Venture Capital

Renji draws a clear distinction between crowdfunding and venture capital (VC), advocating for the former as a more empowering and less restrictive funding model.

Renji (06:00): “The main thing is you need to have a genuine desire to build a product that people love. And if you don't do that, I wouldn't recommend crowdfunding. It's going to flop.”

He critiques the traditional VC path for often diluting founder control and imposing unfavorable terms, contrasting it with the autonomy and community-driven support inherent in crowdfunding.

Renji (08:35): “I saw this chart. If you ever watch the All In podcast, for example, Chamath, Jason Calacanis, all these guys, they showed this chart that showed that in 2022 is kind of the peak of VC. 2023, it chopped down to like a 10th of what venture capital was able to pull off in previous years, and then 2024 even less.”

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The Shift in the Investment Landscape

Renji discusses the declining influence and viability of traditional venture capital, suggesting a paradigm shift towards more democratized funding sources like crowdfunding.

Renji (08:35): “I really don't think it's the future. I just don't think that these venture capital firms are going to be able to convince high net worth individuals to keep putting money into their funds because the returns are just not making sense.”

He envisions crowdfunding as a catalyst for empowering everyday investors to participate in high-growth opportunities without the barriers previously imposed by VCs.

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The Power of Social Media

A significant factor in Renji’s fundraising and company growth was the strategic use of social media. Platforms like Instagram allowed him to build and engage a dedicated following, crucial for his crowdfunding campaigns.

Renji (14:22): “For us, the vast majority of the $20 million that we raised to date was from Instagram. I had, like, maybe 2,000 followers. When we raised $2 million in two days, it was just people from, like, my high school and then our customers who followed me on Instagram.”

This grassroots support not only facilitated rapid fundraising but also enhanced brand loyalty and viral marketing.

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Operating Lean and Building Long-Term Value

Renji underscores the importance of maintaining a lean operational structure while focusing on building substantial long-term value rather than succumbing to short-term financial pressures.

Renji (18:46): “We could take the Apple approach of build the device for 1500 bucks and then sell it for $2000 more than that. So $3500 bucks for an Apple headset. And then we take the $2,000 profit margin.”

He advocates for reinvesting capital to scale the business sustainably, avoiding the pitfalls of rapid overspending that often doom startups financed by traditional venture capital.

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Future of Technology: AR, VR, Humanoid Robotics, AI

Renji articulates a forward-thinking vision that intertwines AR, VR, and AI to pioneer advancements in humanoid robotics. He believes these technologies will synergize to revolutionize industries and everyday life.

Renji (47:21): “The future is going to be probably like two or three years. But think about Uber, for example, if Tesla Robo taxis end up becoming a thing, what happens to all the Uber drivers?”

He predicts the emergence of remote physical labor jobs facilitated by VR headsets, enabling tasks like construction on Mars to be performed by humanoid robots controlled remotely by humans.

Renji (51:20): “Who’s going to go do all the jobs that no one wants to do? Who wants to go do construction on Mars and things like that? No one wants to risk their life. Send a humanoid robot.”

Renji’s company, Immersed, is positioning itself at the intersection of these technologies to capitalize on the impending advancements and labor market shifts.

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Building Relationships and Game Theory

Renji emphasizes the strategic importance of maintaining strong professional relationships and leveraging game theory to navigate the competitive landscape. He draws parallels with industry giants like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, who exhibited both technical prowess and strategic acumen.

Renji (43:46): “So if you really care about winning in the end, what matters more is the game theory behind essentially swallowing my pride. If my goal is to win in the end, then I need to take some, call it short term losses for the sake of the win in the end.”

He recounts instances where maintaining amicable relationships with former colleagues and competitors facilitated future collaborations and funding opportunities, exemplifying the long-term benefits of strategic humility.

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The Importance of Strategy and Vision

Drawing inspiration from Steve Jobs and other visionary leaders, Renji highlights the critical role of strategic planning and the ability to anticipate market trends.

Renji (35:14): “They invented the whole industry. And it's so crazy. Like even by the time they ended up getting acquired by Amazon for $1 billion, I'm guessing it was a 10x multiples.”

He advocates for orthogonal competition—focusing on niches that incumbents are not incentivized to pursue—and iterating meticulously to build proprietary technology that sets his company apart.

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Closing Thoughts: Authenticity and Future of Content Creation

In concluding the discussion, Renji reflects on the evolving media landscape, emphasizing the significance of authenticity and genuine human connections in content creation.

Renji (57:36): “Forget what everyone else thinks. It's okay if you have your own perspective. Just make sure that, look, we're all here for, you know, max 80 to 100 years, who gives a crap of like what my image looks like? I really need to care about you as an individual and then hopefully you care about what I truly believe too.”

He envisions a future where content creators prioritize real conversations and authentic interactions over artificial intelligence-generated content, fostering deeper connections with their audiences.

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Notable Quotes

• Renji (06:00): “You need to have a genuine desire to build a product that people love. And if you don't do that, I wouldn't recommend crowdfunding. It's going to flop.”
• Renji (08:35): “I really don't think it's the future. I just don't think that these venture capital firms are going to be able to convince high net worth individuals to keep putting money into their funds because the returns are just not making sense.”
• Renji (14:22): “For us, the vast majority of the $20 million that we raised to date was from Instagram. I had, like, maybe 2,000 followers.”
• Renji (35:14): “They invented the whole industry. And it's so crazy. Like even by the time they ended up getting acquired by Amazon for $1 billion...”
• Renji (43:46): “So if you really care about winning in the end, what matters more is the game theory behind essentially swallowing my pride.”
• Renji (57:36): “Forget what everyone else thinks. It's okay if you have your own perspective.”

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Conclusion

Renji Bijoy’s segment on Digital Social Hour offers a masterclass in navigating the modern entrepreneurial landscape. Through strategic crowdfunding, unwavering focus on product excellence, and leveraging social media, Renji has not only secured substantial funding but also positioned his company for future technological breakthroughs. His insights into the diminishing role of traditional venture capital, combined with his visionary approach to integrating AR, VR, and AI, provide invaluable guidance for aspiring entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts alike. As the conversation wraps up, Renji’s emphasis on authenticity, strategic relationships, and foresight resonates as a testament to building sustainable and impactful businesses in an ever-evolving world.

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Connect with Renji Bijoy:

• Website: visors.com
• Social Media: Instagram | Twitter

Don’t Miss Out on Renji’s Crowdfunding Campaign:

Support Immersed’s future innovations and be part of the next big leap in technology by participating in their crowdfunding campaign. Visit crowdfund.immersed.com to learn more and invest today.

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This summary is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the podcast episode for those who have not listened to it. For the full experience, tune into Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly.

Transcript

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[Renji]

Podcasts, Quick Buck every month. But then we wouldn't have the opportunity to build a multi billion dollar business. And so I don't want to have Twitch's story. No offense. Great exit. I'd rather have the Call it the Facebook story of the first. Call it two or three years of Facebook. There was no monetization on the Facebook platform. They just built the network of friends of friends, of friends of friends. And as soon as they were like, all right, now we got to figure out monetization.

[Podcast Host]

All right, guys, we got Renji here today from Austin, and man, you might have sold me on Austin. Thanks for coming on.

[Renji]

Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I did not know that many important people were out there.

[Renji]

Yeah, that's a good spot. I think it's kind of the new Silicon Valley.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. How long you been out there for?

[Renji]

Six years.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Renji]

It's a really good spot. Yeah, I think because it has the chill vibe of like, the East Coast. I think more like kind of Atlanta. You can raise a family, chill out there, but also has like a. A tech focus, business focus. You guys like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, the founders of, like, Airbnb, Palantir, a lot of people you don't realize are out there. It's a really good networking spot, especially because it's early.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

I think when you're in a saturated City like New York or San Francisco. It's just hard if you haven't been there for decades.

[Podcast Host]

That's true. Because by then people are kind of shielded with their connections and they have their circles established.

[Renji]

Exactly. Yeah. It's like, hey, sorry, seats taken.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So I know you've raised a ton of money, over 20 million. Right. Was moving to Austin kind of integral to that?

[Renji]

I would say that Austin wasn't integral for that necessarily, because we did actually predominantly crowdfunding online. Right. So if we wanted to raise more venture capital, probably would have been better to move out to San Francisco or something. Right. But I think for us, because we have sort of this army of retail investors, our users, our followers that really love our product, it's really empowered us to get the word out there. It's really sort of a viral mechanism to get more users, more investors. I don't think we would have been able to, especially because we're focused on hardware. We're kind of building this visor type product because of that. It's actually easier to crowdfund and not have to go through all these hoops that venture capitalists want you to, but instead, why don't you just go to the customers who really love the product and get them to fund it? And so very quickly raised like 2 million bucks in two days, 8 million bucks in two weeks. And I was like, man, I've done six month VC roadshows before venture capital roadshows and still come up with nothing. As opposed to you just give your audience, your. Your customers an opportunity to invest in something they believe in. Man, it really just ramps up out of nowhere. And so I'm super thankful for pretty much everyone who's really backed us to date.

[Podcast Host]

I love it and I know crowdfunding. A lot of people attempt it. Right. So what do you think made your campaign so special? Because you might have the record for most.

[Renji]

Yeah, yeah. So I think the main thing is having something of substance. I think a lot of people try to crowdfund with an idea on a napkin, but they haven't proven themselves yet. So for us, because we're the most used app in all of AR VR, mainly because it's kind of a work app.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Renji]

Right on the headset, connects to your laptop, creates multiple. So you have kind of like your workstation with you anywhere you go portably. The main thing is we had a product that users loved. A lot of these other people who tried to crowdfund, they're like, oh, hey, I have this cool idea. Will you Invest in this and then they raise like 5,000 bucks as opposed to $5 million. So it really depends on, do you have something of substance? Do you have. So the question is, okay, well, how do you build something of substance first?

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Renji]

It's. You need to have a genuine desire to build a product that people love. And if you don't do that, I wouldn't recommend crowdfunding. It's going to flop.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Something they love. And also the timing is important, right?

[Renji]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

What? Your space is hot right now.

[Renji]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would say that when I joined, it definitely wasn't hot. So, like, I think in 2014, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, sold the Facebook for $3 billion. Then 2014, 2015, 2016, all these startups were trying to do VR this, VR that. But then by 2017, when I joined the space, because all these startups the past three years had failed, I ended up not being able to raise any VC money at all. So I was really kind of heads down, focused on living off of savings. Went through an accelerator program called techstars, similar to Y Comnader, if you ever heard of that. But what ended up happening was just heads down, focus for about two or three years building this product. Got our first, I don't know, 50 users. But then when Covid hit, everyone started working from home. And everyone was like, oh, crap. Well, I can't really bring my computer screens from the office back home. So I found this kind of headset thing. Can I use that for screens? And very quickly, we became one of the top apps. And so once I realized, wow, like, I've been getting like 70 different texts from 70 different people saying, hey, like, this virtual office stuff now makes sense that we're working from home. Is there a way I can invest in this thing? And then I started googling, crowdfunding. I was like. Mainly because most people texting me were not venture capitalists. They were just regular Joe Schmo, whatever. And ended up raising, yeah, 2 million bucks in two days, 8 million bucks in two weeks. You know, fast forward to today. We've raised just over $20 million. And so not that that's the measure of success is how much you can raise, but what that capital does to really enable you to really get to the next level. Right? We truly want to be, you know, the company that figures out how to build the next generation of computing. Right? Like, if you think about Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, all these tech giants, they're pouring dozens of billions of dollars into what comes after the desktop, then the laptop, then the smartphone, it's glasses. And so we believe that because we have the most used software or app in the space, we'll know how to build the next generation of hardware. Because people know like we know what people actually use the headsets for.

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[Renji]

Candidly, most people, including yourself, I assume you don't want to wear a two pound brick on your head. No, you want to wear something like very, very lightweight. So our visor is 6 ounces, very, very lightweight and it's higher resolution than Apple's headset. And so that's coming out this year and actually a couple of months here. And our goal with that is to make this relevant to regular people. Right. Like I don't want to focus on the niche VR gaming hobbyist world. Nothing against them, it's just I'd rather focus on the world of everyone who uses a computer. Right. So if we can become the next Facebook, the next Apple man, like I'm super happy that we have all of our users who invested in this thing early on because now you're going to have one off random millionaires who never historically had a chance to even do that before crowdfunding really unlocked that for the first time. I think it was like 2016 before. That was literally illegal for you to be able to invest if you weren't already rich and you weren't an accredited investor. You weren't able to actually invest in a startup before. But now finally post 2016, now you can put your money in a startup and if that becomes the next tech giant, well, cool. Like you can be the next person who says, oh, yeah, I had an early check in Facebook and that's why I'm retired.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, because it's really hard to make stupid returns on the stock market.

[Renji]

Exactly. Yes. 7% a year on average if the stock market's doing well, which it hasn't been for the past few years. So that's kind of why the rich has always been getting richer. Because only angel investors, net worth over a million, already were able to invest in these high return tech startups like Facebook and Airbnb and all these companies. I wish I was one of the early, you know, even a $10,000 check in Airbnb, but that wasn't even legal back then, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You had to be accredited and you had to know the right people. A lot of hoops you had to jump through.

[Renji]

Exactly. Whereas now with crowdfunding, you go to a website, you put in your dollar amount that you want and then your money's now in the company. And so that's why I feel like I'm starting to see a wave of new companies who realize I don't have to as a founder, jump through hoops of getting venture capitalists to, I guess, be on board with whatever I want to do with my company. Like, I could just do this by myself. I believe in my company, so does my followers, my users and our customers. And we're just going to do this thing whether or not there's some VC who tries to, like, I don't know most venture capitalists, if you don't, if you don't realize, like they're incentivized to plummet your company valuation so that they own more of the company. Right. Like when a lot of people ask me, oh, have you ever like been on Shark Tank? And I'm like, I feel really bad, no offense to Shark Tank, but I feel really bad for the founders who go on that show because you'll get offers like, oh, I'll. For 30% of your company, I'll give you 150k. That means your company's worth only 450k. When this person had Like a million in revenue, right? So it's like you're giving away a 30 year company. If you went just crowdfunding, you can maybe value your company at maybe 5 million, 10 million bucks, give away a smaller percentage, but at the same time, you're giving an opportunity to all these normal retail investors who historically never had even the chance to invest in a company like yours. And if you're going to be, you know, a billion dollar company someday, well, that person's thousand bucks turns into $100,000. And so I'm like, man, I'm very excited about, with this sort of new wave of crowdfunding. And I just, I really, I don't know, I'm thankful that people can do that. I don't even know what the future of venture capital looks like anymore. I saw this chart. If you ever watch the all in podcast, for example, like Chamath, Jason Calacanis, all these guys, they showed this chart that showed that in 2022 is kind of the peak of VC. 2023, it like chopped down to like a 10 10th of what venture capital was able to pull off in previous years, and then 2024 even less. And so there's this chart where it just looks like VC is starting to die. One of the guys who's close to Elon Musk, who also lives in Austin, said to me, he's like, dude, he's actually a vc. He said, dude, I think VC is dead. I say, well, why do you think it's dead? He's just like, at the end of the day, I just feel like we had a really good run for the past 25 years and I just don't think it's the future. I just don't think that these venture capital firms are going to be able to convince high net worth individuals to keep putting money into their funds because the returns are just not making sense. You have these different sort of venture capital firms who are just trying to join the club that another VC joined all that to say, like, there's not much material effective strategy that's happening there. For lack of better terms. It's more of like a, a show off contest, right? And so all I care about is build a good product, build a good company, be able to ultimately give a return to the people who really believed in us. And at the end of the day, man, I'm really excited for how like the, you know, the little guy, so to speak, my friends, my family, our users are now able to have a much sort of bigger return than something they Historically, could only do in the stock market and only get max like 7% per year, if that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. There's a power shift happening in the investing world and in the content world. So now ordinary people, little people like podcasters, are getting more eyeballs in television shows and networks.

[Renji]

Yeah, I think that's something. I mean, even just this election, like, for sure showed that. That, like a. Maybe you could call this the podcast election where Trump won because he went on all these podcasts and you got to really understand who he was. It was very humanizing. Right. I remember a couple of friends who were just very, very anti Trump. And I'm not saying it to be on one side or the other, but if you listen to him talk, you're like, oh, I guess he's a human. He's not just like a freaking demon. He's a human. Look, he has struggles like you and I. He gets angry sometimes, he gets upset sometimes, he doesn't know how to respond sometimes. Sometimes he says things he regrets. He's a human. But who of us here can raise our hand and say that we're perfect? And so when he goes on sort of these podcasts, you can see kind of another side to him. Kind of the. I would say this time around, he was way more soft spoken and even he was a lot more fair than he's ever been before. I feel like he almost learned from his previous election where he was kind of like, you know, just clapping back at Hillary saying, no, you're a puppet, you're a puppet. It's like. It's like some kind of dumb little kid debate. But when it came to the current, like, I remember listening to him on the all in podcast and you could see you just like a lot more fear about. Yeah. You know, there are times that have offended people and I regret it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

And, man, I wish. Imagine if, you know, Kamala ended up going on these different podcasts and you as. As opposed to kind of the very tailored doctored podcasts that were very clearly premeditated. She went on just very organic. Let's just shoot the breeze. Let's just have a conversation. I feel like people would have really. She would have humanized herself and people would not really think she's BSing all the time.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely.

[Renji]

And I feel like she probably would have had a fairer shot.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Podcasts do a great job at humanizing you. And shout out to all in. Cause it's four billionaires. When have you ever had that opportunity to learn from four billionaires on a podcast? I know.

[Renji]

Yeah. And that's why I love living in Austin, because they're there quite a bit. We're kind of in the same sort of poker game there. It's really fun to kind of see how that world is starting to really mix into. It's interesting. Austin, Texas, is kind of like a melting pot, right? You have the far left, you have the far right. You have people in the center, and everyone's like, all right, I don't really care what your background is. Let's just have a relationship. Let's be friends. Let me hear from you. Let me just be okay with the fact that, hey, like, we're a blue city in a red state, as opposed to just far left on or far right in any particular state. One thing that I will say, though, as far as building or kind of building a company, having social media presence, it's been really cool to kind of see how even guys like Elon, right, Like, he uses his X account a lot, right? People say that he kind of saved, what do you call it? Free speech in America, right? And when you look at guys like Zuckerberg, he posts more on Instagram, obviously, and threads. That's his thing. But it's been cool. Like, when have you ever been able to really have access to some of these people, right? Elon will tweet back to just a random Joe Schmo on X. Whereas back in the day, like Steve Jobs, how could you ever really reach him right, from Apple? It's been really cool to kind of see how social media is the great equalizer, right? It allows. It blows my mind that you just started this podcast two years ago. Eleven. Eleven and a half million followers on Instagram. Like, congrats to you.

[Podcast Host]

Thank you.

[Renji]

And I think that, man, this is sort of the new age of what is going to build leverage moving forward. If you want to build a company, if you want to figure out how to get it funded, if you want to figure out how to get your product in front of customers to try it, get feedback, the. I would say the easiest way is social media. Like, for us, the vast majority of the $20 million that we raised to date was from Instagram. I had, like, maybe 2,000 followers. When we raised $2 million in two days, it was just people from, like, my high school and then our customers who followed me on Instagram. And then I ended up, uh, that I guess my follower count grew from 2,000 to, like, 9,000 on Instagram. And then again, these are not big numbers at all. And the 9,000 I guess the new 7,000 people came from they heard about the $2 million round that they missed out on.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

And so a ton of people were DMing me saying, hey, are you gonna open up another round? How do I get in? So I opened up another round that raised $8 million in two weeks from only 9,000 followers. So I was like, man, this is the crazy. I've just never seen anything like this before. And actually, those were world records at the time. We were setting world records for crowdfunding. The most amount of money raised in the shortest amount of time both those times. And we continue to do that. And so I started realizing, man, social media really, really matters because it's humanizing. It gets people away to actually have direct access to you. It allows them to really better understand your heart and, like, your desire for your product, your company. At the same time, like, with great power comes great responsibility. Spider man, whatever. Just the idea that, man, like, you really need to invest in the people that you really trust. If someone follows you and they're like, man, maybe some people say that, like Logan, Paul or Sean or whoever, they. There's some things I don't like. There's some things that I do. It's like, well, the more content you put out there, you have more of an opportunity to kind of state your case.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

And, man, it's been really cool to kind of see how there's this new wave of social media that really, I guess the older generation really underestimates. I think the election is a manifestation of that. Absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

Yes. You were used to operating lean. What was it like just taking in all that money? Because that's where a lot of companies fail too, right? Just cause you raise money doesn't mean you're gonna be successful.

[Renji]

Exactly. What's funny, I don't wanna name names, but there's a startup that I found out raised 40 million do and they burned through all of it. And now they had to do, like, a recapitalization. They're struggling to raise even one or two million bucks. I'm like, that sucks, man. What'd you do with 40 million bucks? Turns out there was a couple of kids who were just very, very young, didn't know what to do with it. They had the cool, sexy office, all of that. They just never ended up building anything of substance. So my recommendation is build something of substance first. Build a product that users love. And when it comes to raising capital, that should only amplify what you've already been doing. Um, and so that's Kind of the hard part, I would say is like for most people, like, if you don't have an actual product that users love, then don't raise people. Don't, don't raise money from people. Like, you're just stealing. I would say, like you're risky. Exactly, it's risky. It's, it's, it's almost like a guaranteed failure for us. Being very lean to begin with. Like, again, like the first two years, I didn't even take a paycheck. And then when I did take a paycheck, I was paying myself 45k a year, which was actually, I don't know that very many people know this. Fresh out of Undergrad was what, 21 at the time? Actually, my first job, I was a software engineer, right. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, but I quit med school. I didn't go to med school. I did, well, my, my, my MCATs, but I just didn't really feel like I was passionate about being a doctor. So I was like, all right, well, I love coding, I love building products. Let me just do that. So my first job was only getting paid 60k. My parents, my parents are very upset with me, but, you know, because doctors can make hundreds of thousands of dollars but just after a couple of years going from job to job to job, kind of getting a higher level position elsewhere, by the time I was 23, I was getting paid 360k a year.

[Podcast Host]

Damn.

[Renji]

It was really, really good for my age. So I was able to save quite a bit of money. And then I quit that job because I realized, man, I don't think that I just want to be a corporate worker. So I quit that job. I just want to build something on my own. Quit that job. And I had a couple of years, I could live off of savings. But you know, even fast forward to today, I don't even pay myself even a third of what I got to get. I was getting paid back then. It's mainly because the equity of what I own in the company is worth, you know, by God's grace, over a quarter billion dollars at this point, right? So for me, if we get to, lord willing, sell the company someday or go public or something, for me it's not, oh, I didn't, I wasn't able to get the paycheck that I wanted, but rather it was, I got to build a lot of equity value in the company. And so when you look at the tech giants that price our company and are thinking about, okay, well if we acquire immersed, how much we Want to acquire it for? Well, I could look back and be like, oh, it was for sure worth the past seven or eight years by me not focusing on just maximizing my monthly salary or whatever, my monthly paycheck.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

But instead focusing on how do I build? You hear all the time, the way you build actual generational wealth, so to speak, is build a company, own something, and then build and amplify that. And the way you can build a company is by offering something that people actually want.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

So for us to raise 8 million bucks, we were only like maybe 8 people at the time or 10 people at the time.

[Podcast Host]

How much revenue did you have at that time?

[Renji]

So for us, we've always been a tech IP company or an intellectual property company, meaning. So there's a couple of different types of companies you can build. You can build a services based business. Right. So pay me some money and then I'll do a service for you. And then I'll just scrape some off the top so we can keep running the business for operations and stuff. Then you have a company that kind of sells a subscription. Then you have a type of company that builds very deep tech. If you think about Oculus, for example, when they got acquired for $3 billion, they had only something like 10 million revenue, which is a 300x multiple. That's not common at all. Like, typically companies, tech companies get acquired for 10x services. Businesses or, you know, consulting companies get acquired for like 2x revenue. And so the fact that he sold for 300x is very clear. Clearly, Facebook didn't give a crap about the 10 million bucks. They had all the money they needed in the world they cared about. We need that technology. Immerse is very similar for us. The reason why we're the most used app in the world is because we built very difficult technology to pull off what we can or what we're able to. And for us, like, our revenue has never really gotten to the point where it's been tens of millions yet. I think that that changes this year because we're now coming out with our own headset. Yeah, candidly, it's been very difficult to monetize. We're a productivity app subscription model on a historically gaming Oculus store. So to get children to pay for a. It's just not a good tough sell. Yeah, it's a very tough sell. And it's been very difficult for us. Like, as we've been trying to take Meta's headsets and sell it directly to enterprise companies, the main feedback we would get is I don't want to wear this big brick thing on my head.

[Podcast Host]

I got one of those Oculus, right?

[Renji]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And it's. It's like a head workout.

[Renji]

Yeah, exactly.

[Podcast Host]

Wear it for like, 30 minutes.

[Renji]

Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

Sweating.

[Renji]

Exactly. So that's why I'm like, man, there needs to be a paradigm shift. We had to build something new. So if you go to visor.com, v I s o r, like, you know, visor, visor.com, you'll see the headset that we built. Every time I show that to someone, they're like, holy crap. That's actually like a full, Full featured headset. But, yeah, I mean, we mainly focused on what core components do we actually need in a headset for regular people. Like, gaming is one thing. Let Meta do that. Because, candidly, the type of gaming I care about is like, on my Xbox, for example. Right. Not necessarily like in VR. And I want to focus on how do I make augmented reality really, like, glasses someday really compelling to everyday people. So for me, it's more, how do I build a device that's very thin and sleek, very lightweight? It's something that I just really. It's a device that I and my friends and family have always wanted. And so because of that, you know, some of our partners are projecting that Vysor could actually sell about a million devices in the first year. At about $1,000 per headset, it's about a billion in revenue. Wow. That's more revenue we've ever seen in the company's history. And so for me, it was more spending seven years building the software, the really difficult technological stuff. Actually, Meta has actually paid us nearly a million dollars to help them with some of their technology. So I'm like. So we did some consulting for them, whatever, and then they build sort of like a clone app of ours, which is great. Whatever. They have a lot of ad dollars spent towards kind of market marketing their competition of our product, and it sends us users because people don't like their product nearly as much as ours, and they end up landing on ours. So anyways, what we realized is seven years of just heads down, focusing on really understanding a problem, building very difficult technology, and then now being able to almost like open up the floodgates, build this product that we can finally sell on our own. It's almost like trying to think of examples of this. Like, there's some companies, like, think about Twitch, for example, right? Yeah. For the first four years, they didn't know what the crap they were doing. It Was called Justin tv. If you remember that way back when, there's a guy who's a guy named Justin Khan who's just like, I guess, vlogging himself way before logging was a thing. Live stream 24 7. And then they realized, wait, why don't we just build this for everyone else to do it on their own? Because we don't know what people want to watch. So they ended up building this technology, which ended up being Twitch streaming. They invented the whole industry. And it's so crazy. Like, even by the time they ended up getting acquired by Amazon for $1 billion, I'm guessing it was a 10x multiples. Maybe the revenue was like 100 million or something. What's so funny is people don't know this Emmett Shear, I guess the most recent CEO of Twitch, who obviously sold it to Amazon, he said after Amazon bought it. First off, think about how much Amazon helped Twitch. Like, nothing. Amazon doesn't like, promote Twitch on, like, their Amazon Store or Amazon Web Services or anything. Like, last time use Amazon apps. When's the last time you've heard about Twitch on there? Never. And so he said, after we got acquired by Amazon for $1 billion, I managed, I and my team alone managed to 100x our revenue without Amazon's help. So he was like, man, what if I didn't sell to Amazon? What if I kept holding on to Twitch and 100x the revenue without their help, we could have sold for $50 billion rather than one.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Renji]

And so that shows you, man, if you really build a core technology intellectual property, that at some point you really, really kind of strategically pick your, your, your, your moment and that, that thing can fly. And so Twitch, though it was a good success, it was a positive outcome. The, you know, the four founders, you know, Michael Sibel is another founder. He ran the Y Combinator program. Trying to think who else you might know anyways. Oh, yeah, one of the guys who is the founder of, like, Cruise Automation, some of these AI companies, he ended up. They ended up building a cool technology, sold for a billion bucks, you know, great. But kind of the regret was, dang, we left a lot of money on the table because we were able to have 100x our revenue after we got acquired without any of Amazon's help. And so that started making me think, well, should we sell immersed now or should we, you know, just try to continue building up our revenue, only forget about building all this, you know, deep technology. Let's just like, do whatever it takes to make a quick buck. And there Are times, honestly, honestly, in the company's history where we're like, all right, let's just try this type of subscription. Let's just see if people want to buy it. And then, like, it does. Like, okay. And it's like, man. And then, like, more people on the team would say, maybe we could try this type of approach or this type of approach. And it's like, man, I think that we're missing the heart of what we're trying to build here. We're trying to build the future of computing. When did Steve Jobs for Apple ever make a monthly subscription for their computers? Never. And so when it came to now our visor headset, we could take the Apple approach of build the device for 1500 bucks and then sell it for $2000 more than that. So 3500 bucks for an Apple headset. And then we take the $2,000 profit margin or and then Meta does a different version of that, which is build the headset for 500 bucks, sell it for 300, and, you know, take a $200 hit on every headset. Because we make all our money from Facebook ads. For us, our approach was, okay, our headset, we could sell it for 1000 bucks, and then that's all the money we'll ever see from that headset. Or let's try to figure out this model where we actually make it less expensive upfront. But a person could pay a monthly subscription to continue to have access to different features on the headset, mainly because we want this to be sold to professionals, want this to be sold to enterprise customers, all that type of stuff. How do we get office workers to wear headsets? Whether or not you're working from home or if you're in the office, how do we give everyone the same uniform experience? And if everyone has their computer in their glasses? Well, I think there's a world in which this could become the next Facebook or whatever. So instead of prematurely focusing on these different business models, why don't we just really, really build really, really good hardware and then have people realize, well, I do want to use this thing for work, but I'm not going to buy a Meta headset because it's like a toy. I'm not gonna buy an Apple headset. Cause after taxes, like $4,000, I can't buy that for all my team. When it comes to the visor product, it's higher resolution than Apple's headset. It's 70% lighter weight, and it actually looks like a cool pair of sunglasses. That's the Type of technology that people actually now want to buy. And that's why Qualcomm and some of our partners, like, dude, you guys are onto something crazy here. This is the headset that we believe is going to have its iPhone moment. And that's why some of the internal projections are showing a billion revenue in the first year. Obviously, I'm trying to be more conservative, so only publicly, you know, in our filings and things like that, I'll say our goal is 70 million.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

So it's, you know, a 20th of what we believe we can hit. But, you know, in the back of my mind, and my team's my, we're like, if we can blow through that and hit a billion the first year, we're going to do it.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

Even if we hit only 500 million of that, we want to do it. So, sure, we could have gone different paths just for the sake of making a quick buck every month, but then we wouldn't have the opportunity to build a multibillion dollar business. And so I don't want to have Twitch's story. No offense. Great exit. I'd rather have the call it the Facebook story of the first, Call it two or three years of Facebook. There was no monetization on the Facebook platform. They just built the network of friends of friends of friends of friends. And as soon as they were like, all right, now we got to figure out monetization, they realized they had an insane ads platform. They're like, dude, if we have all the eyeballs in the world, we can actually have a better business model than any of these, know, TV commercial companies or these billboards that are out there. We have everyone's attention. People are spending four hours a day on this thing, and there are hundreds of millions of people at the time doing it. And so as soon as they turn on ads, they were one of the world's top most revenue, revenue generating companies in the world. And so good thing that Facebook didn't say early on, actually, you know what? You know, this is year one of Facebook. We have to shove some sort of monetization model into our business. So let's like, charge people $3 a month upfront to have a Facebook account. Imagine what would have happened to Facebook if they did. That would have failed. That would have failed. It would not be what it was today. It would be the next friends, Friendster in MySpace, whatever. Someone else would have figured it out. No, just get them on your platform. Wait, on the monetization side of things, and when the timing is right, get the monetization in place.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

And the fact that they ended up being able to make billions of revenue immediately, that shows you that they figured out their moments. They had a brilliant team to do that. That's the way that we want to kind of take that approach. So, for me, look, there's a world in which we never even get the opportunity to really see our revenue potential to its max because some company might want to make a good offer to buy us for a quarter billion, half a billion, whatever it is, and then the offer makes sense for our investors. We sell the company and then we go build the next thing. But in a world in which we go down, I would say the IPO route, I for sure want to maximize that. And so I don't want to prematurely just shove something out there and then kind of be the Facebook that charged a buck a month or whatever up front and then never had the large user base that then became, you know, the giant that it is today.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you got to play the long game. And it's uncomfortable too, because you're.

[Renji]

Because you have a lot of stakeholders. You have a lot of people who are applying pressure. Even customers apply pressure, investors apply pressure, your team applies pressure. I would say that's the most difficult part about building a company is you're trying to make everyone happy. You're trying to, I guess, sort of thread the needle of this triple Venn diagram. You know, like, how do I make sure this group, this group, and this group are all still happy? And ultimately the hard part is, no matter what, if someone's on the other side of that argument, someone's going to be unhappy. And so you kind of just need to bite the bullet and be like, look, in the end, everyone will be happy. My job is to not make you happy. My job is to make you money. And I love that line from the movie Ready Player One is funny. You know, the kind of. The antagonist in that movie says that. And I think that's something that, I don't know, a lot of companies struggle to do. They struggle to build long term value. And there's nothing. There's nothing wrong with that. Like, again, the Twitch founders selling the company for a billion bucks, their investors made a great return. It's better to sell early than to sell too late.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Renji]

Right. Or not at all. Or not at all. And so I think for us, yeah, I'm more open to it than I've ever been in our company's history. That doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to do crowdfunding rounds, right? Like, I still want the retail investor to have a good return. So we're doing one right now. So I'll continue to do that to make sure that the little guy, so to speak, or even just all the people, friends and family who've loved and support us all throughout the years get a good return, not just the VCs who've also invested in our company. So I think when it comes to building companies, it's not an easy thing at all. I think if I look back on what I know now, had I known all of this and thought, okay, should I start a company? I would for sure say no. It's so difficult. I think you need to have a level of naivety and delusion, so to speak, of like, man, I can be the next Elon Musk without realizing what you're actually asking for. The level of depression, anxiety, the war that he has in his head, having done it for 35 years, you know, it's a difficult thing to do. And even at the expense of work, life balance, or good relationships with your friends and family, it sucks. But, you know, people would argue he's had an insane impact, right? So the question is, what type of life do you want to live? And, you know, there's some people who, you know, I think maybe some guys who, like, you know, have a lot of money and are very happy in life, so to speak. You know, maybe guys like Grant Cardone and some of those guys, like, they kind of figured out a way, kind of do half of that. It took a long time, you know, Lord willing that we get to sell our company. I will have been. I'm 33 now. I feel like this is a very fairly young age to be able to, you know, I think Elon, when he sold one of his larger, his big, bigger exits, PayPal to eBay, he made $180 million out of that. And he was 34.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Renji]

So he's a year older than I was, than I am, and he's had 20 more years of success. And so my hope is that I can continue building companies. I do someday probably want to get into humanoid robotics like the movie Irobot or whatever. I think technology has gotten to a point with ChatGPT and all these things, to the point where these technologies are now possible that weren't before. So we'll see. I mean, I think that what we build thus far is compelling enough if you know the space at all. It's so cool that your. I forgot your Tyus. Yeah, Ty Yeah, he is one of our users, right? Yeah. He was actually trying to pre order the visor who we were talking about outside and he was like, oh, are you the. Are you is immersive. You work for company? I was like, yeah, I found it. Wait, what? I've used the product. It was so cool to. It's so cool to see it's Life Flex. It's so cool to see it in the wild where I was sharing with him before that. I was playing basketball one time and like at LA Fitness or something, and some guy was just like, man, I just bought a quest headset for Christmas. And did you guys know you can, like, work in it? You could have screens, you could have your coworkers in there. I was like, oh, yeah, tell me more, man. He had no idea who I was. After, like five minutes of this guy pitching us and all. All of us buying headsets, I was like, by the way, I'm the founder of. He was like, oh, dude, I use your app all the time. It's so cool to see it finally in the wild. I was listening to a podcast of the Fitbit founder saying the first time it dawned on him that he's built something pretty crazy is when he was at a gas station and he saw a person checking their Fitbit. He's like, oh, my. That was the first time he saw it in the wild. And so think about that moment of like, when I'm sure for you, when you, like, go to the airport, whatever, people are like, oh, hey, whatever, take a picture, whatever. As you start building products and stuff and you start seeing people organically use it just because they want to, not because you asked them to, just because they found it on their own and they want to. It almost like makes you extremely proud. You're like, dang, I built that. And that's like, my baby for sure. And, like, you love it for sure. One last thing I want to add before maybe we could change topic, is I remember I was listening to, like a quarterly earnings call with, like, for Tesla, and they were having a vote of whether or not to fire Elon.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Renji]

And you think about this. 95% of people said, no, no, keep him there. What? He's. He's the reason why it still exists. But 5% of people there were making the pitch, we should fire Elon because he is dangerous for Tesla. Think about this. That 5% of people love Tesla so much, to the point where they feel like they should remove the founder and protect Tesla from him. It's like, dang that's, that's some kind of love right there, right? Like, they love Tesla that much that they think it's dangerous for Elon to still be there.

[Podcast Host]

Nuts.

[Renji]

So it shows you that he built something of such value that these people love it so much to the point where they even want him fired now, right? It's like, cool, dang, I built something of value.

[Podcast Host]

Was that after he smoked marijuana on Joe Rogan?

[Renji]

Yeah, probably. I have no idea. I have no idea.

[Podcast Host]

But I mean, look how they did Steve Jobs, right?

[Renji]

I know. That's, that's crazy. Yeah, I know. It's so, so funny. It's, I, I, there's this YouTube playlist of, I think it's like 200 of Steve Jobs, different keynotes and talks that he did. And over the course of like three or four months, I literally every day, morning, and I would watch one of them.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Renji]

And not. Cause I, you know, his great storytelling ability. I don't care as much about that as far as what my learnings would be. I wanted to learn more about the tech strategy. Why did he do what he did? As you look at it, you're like, man, this guy was brilliant. As far as his approach to competing orthogonally or perpendicularly. Think about this. If Steve Jobs back in the late 1970s was going to directly compete with IBM in this parallel foot race, IBM has way more money. They're going to crush them. So he started thinking, how do I build something differently that IBM is not incentivized to compete in? And then eventually, you know, they're going to have, Apple's going to have enough money to be able to compete with IBM, who's now copying them. And so for anyone who's building a company that has large tech giant incumbents, well, you need to compete in a way that's orthogonal to them. So think about this. The first three years of me building my company, 2017-2020, I was constantly banging down meta Store, Facebook store at the time, please let us be an app on your store. Please let's be an app on your Oculus store. And they would say, no, it's just a gaming store. We don't do like productivity. Like, it's just a gaming store. But then 2020 hit and, you know, Covid hit and everyone started working from home. And that's when meta said, okay, well, we'll give it a shot. You'll be the first non gaming app on the Oculus store, you know, but, you know, make sure you do a good job. And so by, you know, By God's grace, our. Our apps are just flying with numbers as far as numbers, you, number of users and the amount of usage. And then you fast forward to today. Now, Meta says one of the main use cases for their headset is to have screens in VR. I'm like, man, you guys were calling me an idiot back then for even doing this. But now you guys is one of your main kind of verticals.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

And so what that shows you, shows you is in the early days, Meta wasn't incentivized to create that type of product, but now they are. And so every time that you're trying to build something that's innovative or new, but you have incumbents that are. They have millions of dollars, billions of dollars to compete against you don't be worried about their thing because you need to find your sort of niche or your twist that they're not really incentivized to copy. I love that you look at guys like, the hard part with Steve Jobs was he knew why he was doing what he was doing, but the other people around him, like his board of directors, didn't know why. And so because of that, he got fired twice, right? Or not fired twice, but, like, fired the first time, the second time, obviously, you know, life, he had cancer and stuff. And so, you know, he was ousted that way. And so the hard part was, even when, think about this, when he created the ipod, no one really knew that the ipod not only would be a good product in and of itself, but itunes was the real reason why the ipod did so well. Right? So his people always talk about, oh, Steve Jobs was this genius product builder. It's like, yes, but he was also a genius marketer and genius strategist, right? So when he realized that things like LimeWire, FrostWire, because all this Napster, all this kind of illegal music sharing stuff, he knew there's a gap here. If the government is cracking down on this stuff, someone's got to create a music payment system, a music marketplace. So he's like, that's Apple. Apple's gonna create itunes. We're gonna be the legal alternative to all this other stuff. And so when these other apps like Kazaa and frostwire, Limewire get shut down, everyone's gonna be forced to use itunes. So very quickly, they ended up becoming the app that had 150 million users on it with credit cards attached. So they were making crazy revenue, and not necessarily even just for themselves, but also for all the music labels out there. But who's the best in the world now to Take over the flash player, mp3 player market, it's Apple. So when they came out with the ipod and then lo and behold, that was the predecessor to the iPhone. Because they had years of iteration of miniaturizing all this technology, they then were able to build the iPhone. So it's crazy. He was competing in a way that Microsoft at the time, who had 96% market share, Apple had 4. He didn't compete directly with Microsoft. Microsoft would continue to just crush them in this parallel foot race. But when you realize, you know, let me start with pop culture, let me start with music, then music player, then iPhone, and then let me start talking about how computing is important and plugs all that together, this whole ecosystem. Then by 2010, they overtook Microsoft's market cap, even though Microsoft was 25x the size literally just 10 years earlier. So it really shows you, man, like some of these founders, people don't really give them enough credit. They don't realize the amount of strategy and IQ that goes into and just cleverness that goes into really becoming the world's best. The fact that people critique Elon and Zuckerberg, like say what you will about those guys, but there's something crazy clever, not just building such difficult technology, but also even the business side and the pr, management, or handling press and all that type of stuff, or handling users and customers, investors. It's this multi variable problem. No one when it comes to building a company, no one ever said was going to be a single variable problem. It's going to be this crazy complex thing. It's funny, I'm. Someday I'm gonna create a shirt that says I just wanted to be a coder. Like all the crap I had to deal with in the history of the company. Legal, hiring, finance, fundraising, marketing, like all these things. I was a coder, dude. Like when it came to investor relations, like when it came to building this company and all the things necessary, you know this as building this kind of podcast and then now wanting to build a larger company.

[Podcast Host]

You gotta wear a lot of hots.

[Renji]

Yeah. You're gonna do a lot more than just talk. You have so many hats. And in the end you might be like, I just wanted to be a podcast.

[Podcast Host]

Talk to people, doing emails. Yeah, eventually. Investor relations. Yeah. It's a full encompassing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that vision that you just described with Jobs, man, to think that far ahead is impressive.

[Renji]

Yeah, it's hard. Yeah. I think that like even guys like Elon, like, it's funny, he, he, he and Bezos, that's another Thing when people talk about how, oh, Bezos copied SpaceX with Blue Origin, it's like Elon, I think Elon one time, one time said in like a fireside chase, he's like, I'm pretty sure Bezos was talking about space before I was. It's so crazy. Like, Bezos was talking about space back in, when he was in high school.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Renji]

He, Amazon was like a good business. It did very, very well. And it afforded him the build, the ability to build Blue Origin, which is the SpaceX competitor. Right. And. But all the while, Bezos, Bezos, he was obsessed with space and fast forward today, it's actually really cool how him and Elon have become friends really, just in the past couple of weeks, you know, post Trump and all this stuff. The US Space race, we're trying to get us on Mars and all of that. When you think about guys like Bezos, it's like, man, the level of complexity to pull off what he has, the level of complexity with Elon to pull off what he has. People don't realize there's a whole backstory to this thing. Like PayPal or Elon had, even before PayPal had Zip2 and some of these other things when I think about us as a company, like, for me, my backstory, like, for me, I was pre med in undergrad. My parents wanted me to be a doctor. I did math, computer science in undergrad for myself. Because I grew up, I loved Halo. I was actually kind of like a Halo semi pro growing up. And when I was 12, I really loved gaming and technology, but my parents really wanted me to be a doctor. Immigrant mentality, right? My parents moved here 45 years ago from India. So for them the pinnacle of success is be a doctor. So when I ended up doing math, computer science for myself, I ended up thinking, man, I'm just gonna be a coder. Man, I don't think I'm gonna go to med school. And in hindsight, I'm glad I didn't. And I realized that everything I learned in kind of the coding world, building products actually on the side, so to speak. I ended up doing sort of a PhD focused in computer vision and machine learning. After about four years, I realized I'm not an academic. I don't like writing research papers. I only do it like, I don't want to, like, add a leaf to the tree of knowledge. I want to, like, build a whole new tree. I ended up quitting that, settled for the master's degree, didn't finish the PhD and then started building immersed And I started realizing, man, if the future of what Zuckerberg at the time was talking about, you know, by 2020, we're all going to be using glasses instead of iPhones. Obviously didn't happen. Still, you know, 2025 still hasn't happened yet. I was thinking, man, if that's really where the next generation computing is going to be, I need to get involved. I need to figure out how do I get ahead of it. There was, this was a hockey, Wayne Gretzky, hockey player, talked about, I don't skate to where the puck is now. I skate to where the puck is going to be.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

That's why guys like Elon and Bezos and others, they get ahead of it. Elon, back in his early days, he really just cared about electrification of not just cars, but like batteries and stuff. And he didn't start with Tesla in his 20s. He started Tesla when he was like mid-30s. He was thinking, man, this Internet thing is blowing up. I got to focus on Internet technology first. And I'll come back to this car stuff and electric space stuff, whatever. Let me go build this company, let me sell it and whatever. So if you think about what's your longer term strategy, how do I get to what my ultimate goal is? Sometimes it's a little bit of a detour, but at the end of the day, like, you start realizing that there's a way to enjoy the process all along the way. I'm not saying that Elon hated PayPal. I think he actually built really, really good relationships. Another actual funny story is, it's funny. I listen to a lot of these podcasts. I start piecing together different stories from different people. You know, David Sacks, crypto czar. I think one time in the all in podcast, he talked about how in the early days of PayPal, actually him, Peter Thiel and some of the PayPal mafia they call them, they were actually kind of plotting a way to get Elon fired out of PayPal.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Renji]

So Elon was actually fired from PayPal. He wasn't around when PayPal got acquired by ebay. People don't realize this. Oh, you don't know this, but he.

[Podcast Host]

Still had his shares, though.

[Renji]

He had his shares. And so anyways, David Sachs and Peter Thiel and some of these guys who were running PayPal got. They spoke to the board and when Elon came back from a vacation or something, which Elon rarely did, they ended up getting him fired. And so Elon's like, like, obviously they had a lot of fights and arguments. All of that he ended up realizing, okay, this is long term game theory. I just need to have a good relationship with them. It's not going to help me just to clap back at them. So he ended up just saying, thanks so much for the years of work and I'm going to go work on something else. And obviously, Peter Thiel and David Sacks are brilliant guys. They ended up getting PayPal sold to eBay for 1.8 billion, or whatever the number was. Elon had 10% of that. Elon got 180 million out of it. And what was so crazy is Elon then put, I think it was like 80 or 90 million in Tesla and like 100 million in SpaceX. And both those companies were bleeding money. Cause it's expensive to do that type of stuff, right? And when he needed more money, he ended up going to David Sachs, Peter Thiel, all those guys who got him fired and they agreed to fund him.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Renji]

Because he kept the relationship. They're like, elon's brilliant. He made some crazy progress. We know what he's capable of. He's gonna get us a good return. And look, I mean, we got him fired and he's still on good terms with us. And so they gave him money and they're the people who saved SpaceX. Dude, that's crazy.

[Podcast Host]

That's a crazy full circle moment.

[Renji]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Podcast Host]

Don't burn bridges is the moral.

[Renji]

Exactly. 100%. It's so funny. Like, even with this story is like maybe three or four years old. But even when dealing with Meta, in the early days, Meta has had a pattern of just trying to own the AR VR market. And people don't know this, but they've created clone apps of some of the most popular apps on their store. Kind of like how Amazon would create clone products of other products that are successful and then they would run ads towards their things versus other people's products and then create this monopoly. And so there are a couple of other, I'm not gonna name names, but a couple of other apps that have been like going on this Twitter smear campaign and now Meta has blacklisted them. Those apps don't get access to early next generation hardware, all of that. But for us, we're still on good terms with Meta. Even though in my head I was like, this is kind of jacked that Meta's creating like a clone app of ours. But whatever. I was like, handicap, whatever. I'm gonna, I just need to build the best product. Even if Meta is putting tens of millions of dollars behind it, I need to build the best product and fast forward today we have way better reviews than them. No offense to Meta, but like, Meta's just not focused on work as much as we are. We're full time focused on the work application for VR. Meta is not. And so obviously we're gonna have a better product and so. But at the same time, Meta's still on good terms with us and so they've helped us in a lot of ways. Meta pushes Immersed our app in Japan more than we do at all. Like, more than they push their own app. Like in all these different Meta conferences and stuff that they do in Japan, they always show off our app and I'm thankful for that. When Meta ended up having this partnership with Best Buy, I think it was like 2022. They're working on this big headset, black headset called the Meta Quest Pro is like a bigger, bulkier ones, like 1500 bucks at the time. And they actually had Meta employees at all the Best Buys all around the US to actually do demos for customers who walk in the door. And the demo that they were showing was the Immersed app. Wow. So we got to partner with Meta on a grand scale sort of thing. And at the end of the day, it showed me what showed me or what that showed me or what I learned was if I really care about winning in the end, what matters more is the game theory behind essentially swallowing my pride. If my goal is to win in the end, then I need to take some, call it short term losses for the sake of the win in the end. Right. Game theory really matters. Like if you care more about your pride and ego, you're going to get cut off and you're not going to have the relationship to begin with. Think about Elon. If he were to fight with David Sacks and Peter Thiel in the early days, he would not have been able to ultimately build what ended up being SpaceX and Tesla. That wouldn't exist today.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I love, I like what you said about the hockey puck. It reminds me of the AI space. All the top guys in that space, they were working on AI for 5, 10, 20 years before it blew up, right?

[Renji]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that so crazy this whole chatgpt moment. If you even think about Sam Altman's, the founder of OpenAI, his whole story behind that. They were working on AI for seven years before this chat GPT moment. And what's so crazy is even the early days of this ChatGPT moment, no one really knew how to use it. You know, think about ChatGPT. Two years ago your friends would say, yeah, like how to create a poem for me. Like no one uses it for that today. But today everyone uses it to help it, help them do their work and get things done faster. But the point is that even Sam Altman had to figure out like his moment, right? Like they did this whole thing where they had it ultimately beat all of the players in Dota and all that type of stuff, like some weird AI things. What's so crazy is people don't realize that AI doesn't have to be something that like puts you out of a job. It's something that you can leverage to make your job easier.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

It can free you up for all the monotonous daily tasks and something that can help you focus on the creative. I think that people have a, almost like a naive fear of it. If you really understand how to leverage it, it's actually something that turns you into a superhuman. So when it comes to my team, every single employee on my team, I encourage them cheat in your work. Like have ChatGPT do as much of your work as possible. So it frees you up for the actual difficult critical thinking parts.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I did want to end off with one thing. You mentioned humanoid robots earlier.

[Renji]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I was at ces, there was a humanoid girlfriend robot.

[Renji]

I saw that.

[Podcast Host]

It seems like that's going to be an emerging trend, huh?

[Renji]

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Like I think that the reason why humanoids matter is because the world was shaped for humans. Meaning it was built kind of all the infrastructure that we have is like kind of human shape. Doorknobs are kind of at your arms height. This table or like, you know, these microphones, everything is kind of built to kind of fit humans. And instead of having these one off single purpose robots building millions of them to do, you know, we have like two arms that make you coffee, but it can't do your laundry. It can't like, you know, go drive your car and go get the mail or something. You need something that's more shaped like you. And finally things like ChatGPT. Some of these types of AIs are now able to plug in the intelligence into these formerly dumb humanoid robots. If you look at some of the Boston Dynamics robots that were doing parkour and stuff, but it couldn't really do anything else because they didn't know what to do. And so now you plug something like ChatGPT or Google DeepMind into it, now it knows how to do stuff for you. Wow. And so you're going to see people talk about the future all the time and like, say, oh, we're gonna have humanoid robots in like, you know, 20 years. Like, no, dude, it's actually gonna be probably like two or three years.

[Podcast Host]

Damn.

[Renji]

Tesla's working on their Optimus bot. So if you haven't looked at. Look that up, look it up. Another company called Figure. Another company actually based in Austin called Apptronic. These are companies who are really, you know, Google put in a ton of money into Apptronic. Google DeepMind's working with them. OpenAI is working with figure. Tesla obviously has XAI. So all these companies, they're trying to work on sort of this iRobot future, not for the sake of some weird, like, singularity moments of creepy stuff. Whatever. It's more so because half of all of the world's gdp, the all the world's revenue, market cap, whatever, is human labor. And as time progresses, less kids want to become, you know, tomorrow's astronaut. They instead want to be tomorrow's tiktoker. I think, as Tiktokers is just. No, kids want to, like, start off as a busboy and then like, you know, being a waiter and then, you know, doing car sales or whatever. They want to just make revenue on their phone. And because of that, there's going to be a huge. And still and currently is a huge labor shortage. Who's going to go do all the jobs that no one wants to do? Who wants to. Who wants to go do construction on Mars and things like that? No one wants to risk their life. Send a humanoid robot.

[Podcast Host]

Smart.

[Renji]

And so even before the AI side of things can even plug into that, there's, I believe there's actually going to be like physical labor, remote jobs where you put on a VR headset, you are embodying a humanoid on Mars and you're helping build the different pieces on there. Wow. Remotely cool. So that's kind of what I'm interested in getting into next. That's why I feel like I'm really kind of working in the VR space is because how it directly plugs into humanoid robotics.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

And that's why we kind of were doing this crowdfunding campaign that sort of funds the AI side of our company. So my master's is in AI, but I haven't really touched AI for like 10 years or eight years. And so that's kind of like Elon didn't really touch electric cars for like 10 years. He mainly focused on Internet. I mainly focused on VR because I know that Meta and Apple, all of them are pouring dozens of billions of dollars into AR VR. And at the end of the day, because AR VR is going to be kind of the next step to humanoid robotics. And that's the world I want to get into. I already have the background in AI. I already understand kind of a lot how a lot of this kind of mechanical components work on humanoid robotics. Now we're building our own headset. All that stuff's going to really plug into people who not only have office jobs that are remote, but now even physical labor jobs that are remote. Construction worker, dishwasher at a restaurant, all these things. What that does is it actually enables people to train the neural networks on how to let humanoid robots autonomously operate on their own. Kind of like how Tesla self driving cars started off with people driving the cars and then Elon ultimately figured out how to get full self driving because people were training his neural nets. Now you have Teslas are completely driving themselves on the road.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

Same way physical labor jobs are going to be the precursor to humanoids being completely autonomous by themselves.

[Podcast Host]

Too crazy. When people say AI is going to replace their jobs, I think they think they have more time than they really do. You're saying two to three years for these?

[Renji]

Yeah. Because right now Tesla and figure at all those companies they're working on like factory jobs, like how do I sort of take this car hood and put it onto the actual car? Things like that, like stuff that you just never really would see. It's actually highly dangerous for a human to do. So mainly focusing on jobs that people don't want to do and dangerous jobs.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Renji]

Like building infrastructure on Mars. Don't send humans do that. Have human robots do that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

So I think that we have two to three years before we see it be more common. Maybe not two to three years before a lot of those jobs are taken. I'd say maybe that's more like five to 10 years. But think about Uber, for example, if Tesla Robo taxis end up becoming a thing, what happens to all the Uber drivers? Right. That's why. And also Uber is partnering with Waymo for them to do self driving. And what happens to all the Uber drivers? I was talking to a, actually an Uber driver here in town.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

And I was telling, I was asking, what's your perspective on this? You like, dude, I don't know what I'm gonna do for a job.

[Podcast Host]

Damn.

[Renji]

And I was like, well, at least you have a two or three year, two or three year window where the Tesla can drive the Car for you. It costs maybe like 200, 300 bucks a month to lease a Tesla. It could drive the car for you. Start, let the car do your Uber drives for you. Just you racking the cash while you're doing another job on your phone.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, right.

[Renji]

While you're in the driver's seat. And so I was like, but it's just a two, two or three year window after that. Hopefully within two or three years you could figure out what to do next. And at least the car made you some revenue for two or three years that you haven't do any of the work. So it's really interesting to see how the world's going have to shift. People are talking about like a universal basic income where the US government gives you like 10,000 bucks a year to like make sure you at least have food.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

But I think at the end of the day, people need to leverage things like chatgpt to learn things. I was sharing with the guy out here earlier that if you pick up ChatGPT actually it literally makes you smarter. Like I can literally ask it the things I don't know or don't understand and it will explain it to me in a way that I can understand. I remember in all the grade school, you know, I was too afraid to raise my hand and ask your question. Well, now you could just have a private tutor at all times just by yourself. It doesn't have to be ChatGPT. You can use Google, Gemini or you know, Microsoft was it copilot, whatever. But the point is now information has been completely democratized and it's global. Right. There's 6 billion smartphones on the planet now. 6 billion people have access to infinite knowledge. So nothing is really stopping anyone from staying ahead of the curve. So that robots don't automate their jobs, but they figure out a new job. Right. Think about like even back in the day when people would like light lamp stands like on the kind of the road. But now we have light lamp, essentially the light poles.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

Well, it put them out of a job, but then they had new jobs. Right. Or like people who used to, you know, ride horses and like pull carriages. Well then they became like taxi cab drivers or you know, that's going to get automated. Now you get free to do something else. So I creates new jobs. Also Twitch streaming wasn't a thing like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Podcaster wasn't even a thing by the way. I don't know if you know this podcasting came from ipod. They were the first ones. Yeah, they were the first ones to do free live shows on itunes. And so, like, NBC and all these companies would have podcasts, the first ones on itunes. And so I didn't realize podcasting actually came from the ipod in the early 2000s. And then Joe Rogan and others started doing it for, like, 10 years or whatever. And now it's every. It's everything that everyone does now. Right. And so important. But all I have to say, it created a new job. That technology didn't put people on a job because it was so democratized. Yeah. Maybe it, like, displaced it from, like, NBC and CNN or whatever to now. You guys are really the voices out there. And honestly, you guys are the voices that will be incentivized to give the audience what they want. Right. You're not necessarily a monopoly. If you want to be able to captivate the heart and minds of the audience, you have to deliver what they actually want to them. And so I feel like it's going to be a better, more refined version of what existed in the 90s with CNBC and all these other whatever.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. The White House just opened up applications for alternative media to start hacking these, which is exciting. But, yeah, basically what I'm getting from you is proactive versus reactive. And even myself as a podcaster, dude, there's some pretty advanced AI podcasts. It's actually scary. So I'm thinking of ways on how to differentiate the show already.

[Renji]

Yeah, that's another thing. Like, another thing people to realize is maybe think about this analogy. If there was like, a. An AI robot versus AI robot basketball game, that's gonna be the most boring thing in the world. I care about. How does Kyrie Irving versus, like, Steph Curry? How do they, like, creatively find ways to get the ball into the hole versus, like, robot versus robot? Playing basketball is the most boring thing I can think of. So, like, I don't really care about that. I think what humans are really gonna be freed up to do is to do creative, entertaining things as opposed to robots are more so there to, you know, essentially hold down the fort for necessities. How do you make sure that, like, the water pipeline system is still working and we have fresh running water? Most humans don't really care about that, how that even works. They just want water to make sure it comes out of the faucet. What I care about is how, like, what is Sean's perspective on things versus what does chatgpt Tell me about this thing? Like, I want to know your take so as you get your audience to Care more about your opinion, who you are. When it comes to podcasting. Yeah, there are informational AI podcasts, but when it comes to, like an actual person that I want to get to know, that's one thing that robots really suck at is relationship love. Like, for now.

[Podcast Host]

For now?

[Renji]

Yeah, for now, I guess. Yeah, I guess this. This humanoid looking robots that like, look like humans. But I guess my point is that as people. I guess the movie her, right. It was like an AI that like. Or you saw that? Yeah, with Megan Fox. No, that was. That's a different movie. That's. I forgot that was called.

[Podcast Host]

That was a new one.

[Renji]

That's the newer one. Her was a movie where a guy was falling in love with his phone AI. There's another. You seen Blade Runner 2049 with Ryan Gosling? He had his AI wife or whatever, girlfriend. And then you see towards the end of the movie, oh, she was just an AI that like, is tailored towards you and learns you. But as soon as that's crushed, well, now she resets and now your wife doesn't exist anymore. So it's kind of like a sad sort of dark future. I'm not a huge advocate of that because I think that human to human relationships really, really matter.

[Podcast Host]

Agree.

[Renji]

And so at the end of the day, like, in my mind, it's like, yo, if you're out there listening, watching back the real people who are building real stuff, I'm really excited to even brainstorm with you about, like, what's the future of this podcast look like or your business looks like? Because I think at the end of the day, like, if you actually figure out where is the puck going and you really strategically kind of like, angle yourself to make sure that you're the one who gets ahead of it. Like, even Joe Rogan, for example, talks about how he just kind of stumbled upon podcasts. He didn't think it would ever blow up, except for the first time he did. Like, he actually talked about his podcast during his standup. He's like, I had no idea that many people even listened to me. It's like, oh, crap, this actually a business. I should really, really focus on this thing. Likewise, you and I myself, like, we're all going to figure out, wow, the stuff that we've been building coincidentally fits really well into where the world's headed. Because the fact that fact of matter is we're staying ahead of the curve.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Renji]

And that's why, look, not everyone needs to build a business, but if you're not actually building a business yourself, Align yourself with people who are. And as long as you're in that same environment, you'll, you'll, you'll be fine.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. It's been awesome. We'll link your crowdfunding campaign and, and your socials below. Anything else you want to close off with.

[Renji]

Man, I think kind of the main thing that I've been really excited about is what does, what do thought leaders in today's new world? What's that going to look like? Like kind of in this post Trump world, most thought leaders historically have sort of just been, for lack of better terms, this wayward kind of fair weather friendly type person who only says what everyone else is saying. I care about the current thing. It's like, yeah, but you weren't talking about that a year ago, two years ago, and then tomorrow you're still not going to talk about that. You're just talking about right now because everyone else is where. Who are you really? Right. Like, that's why I really appreciate very straightforward type people like Joe Rogan, guys who aren't afraid to say the hard thing, like Lex Friedman, some of these other guys, yourself finding authentic voices who really care about what they truly believe in as opposed to what do people think about me? I'm very, very excited about sort of the future moving forward because as savage as guys like Trump or Elon are, they sort of set a precedence for hey, guess what, now you could just say what you really think and we don't have to play a guessing game here. We don't have to be afraid of being canceled kind of the woke mind virus stuff. It's like, forget all of that. Who are you really? What do you really believe? And can we just have a real conversation? It's okay to disagree. It's okay if you're far left, it's okay if you're far right. Doesn't matter. I love you as an individual, as a human, how do I connect with you? How do we move forward as an in house family debate, not an enemy behind the line sort of thing. So I'm really excited about what content creation looks like moving forward of real podcasts. And my main encouragement to you and even the audience is forget what everyone else thinks. It's okay if you have your own perspective. Just make sure that, look, we're all here for, you know, max 80 to 100 years, who gives a crap of like what my image looks like? I really need to care about you as an individual and then hopefully you care about what I truly believe too, because we just want to build a better world for each other.

[Podcast Host]

I love that.

[Renji]

So I'm really excited moving forward. Like, man, building a platform, building podcasts, doing more podcasts, talking about ideation around how do we build a better future? I don't know if you saw like Elon was saying, let's just stop build, let's stop creating pennies because it costs three pennies to make a penny. It's a like 170 million dollar loss every year. Let's just stop doing that. People, you know, four or five years ago would say, don't you ever say that. This is a historical thing.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Renji]

But he's just like, well, it doesn't make financial sense. Right? And so literally. And so now people get to just say what's on their mind.

[Podcast Host]

Feels good.

[Renji]

Anyways.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I can't wait for that new area.

[Renji]

Yeah, man.

[Podcast Host]

Thanks for coming on, man.

[Renji]

Yeah, thanks for having me up.

[Podcast Host]

Check them out, guys. See you next time.

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