#180 with Furqan Rydhan - What it's Like Co-founding a $20B Company, Hardware for Mind Control & Vertical Farming

**Sam** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's Podcast Network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Furqan Rydhan** (1:02)
Anyway, I got one more in a different space that I think Sam will love. But you know, Shaan, I told you about this book I read about vertical farming and, you know, basically like I read this book.

**Sam** (1:13)
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You guys just were talking about crypto stuff and then he just said, I've got something I think Sam will like, farming.
Yeah, wait a minute, I like it too.

**Shaan** (1:37)
All right, we have a special guest on the pod today. Furqan is here. He's my old co-founder, probably the smartest guy I know, especially tech-wise. So we talked about a bunch of things ranging from his last company, AppLovin, which just went public at a 20, 30 billion dollar valuation. So we talked about the humble beginnings of that and all the way to a massive IPO.
What he's doing with his money. So you win the lottery, what are you going to do? And he talks about his new project that he's building out. And then we talked about a bunch of cool things that he shows me. So every week, I do a call with him called the cool shit hour. I just sit there on video and I just say, hey, show me cool shit that you're interested in because he's like a total tech nut. He's on the bleeding edge of everything. And so that's my hack to learn a bunch of things before they go mainstream.
And so he talks about some hardware stuff that he's really interested in, like a brain wave measuring device that he's wearing. He talks about crypto.
And then we talk about vertical farming and the future of that. So a bunch of cool topics on that side. I would say there's some part of the crypto stuff that might be over your head. So too many terms, acronyms, stuff you don't know about.
Here's my advice.
Two ways you could still get value even if you don't fully get it because, hey, I only have get it.
Furqan is usually 10 steps ahead of me. And so what I've learned in knowing Furqan for like almost a decade now is when he thinks something's interesting, instead of just saying, I don't understand that, that's weird, lean in. I can go Google it later, look it up. If I had just followed a bunch of the things he was interested in, I would have made a killing investment wise over the last decade. And I've learned the hard way that that's what I should do. The second thing is he shared a bunch of general advice about how he went about his career, college dropout, choosing jobs that weren't the highest paying job and why he chose it, what he kind of optimizes for. I thought there was some good stuff in there. So if you are not subscribed to this podcast, if you're just listening to this podcast, maybe your friend told you about it, you know what you need to do. Open up the podcast app, Apple, the iTunes app, or open up Spotify. On Spotify, you click follow. On the Apple Podcast app, you're going to click subscribe. We are climbing the charts. I think we're number 12 in maybe business or investing category. And we are breaking into that top 10 and we're not leaving when we get there. So how do we do that?