#45 - Drones Washing Windows, Airpod Guided Tours & Mario Kart VR with Furqan Rydhan

**Sam** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot, but I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are going to happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.

**Shaan** (0:36)
Furqan is here in the house.

**Furqan Rydhan** (0:37)
How's it going, guys?

**Sam** (0:38)
What's up?

**Shaan** (0:40)
Background, who's Furqan? Furqan is my co-founder, CTO at Bebo before we sold, and we've been working together, I don't know, five, six years now, maybe six, seven years.

**Furqan Rydhan** (0:49)
Yeah, it's getting towards seven, I think.

**Shaan** (0:50)
It's one of those things where you just keep saying five years, you know, no matter how long it's been.

**Sam** (0:54)
But he has an interesting background before that.

**Shaan** (0:56)
Very good background. You want to give us like the...
Give the highlights.

**Furqan Rydhan** (1:00)
All right, the highlights. I grew up here in the Bay Area. I got started just programming as a kid, and so I had a unique experience where I worked at a.com when I was 15
And that was kind of like...

**Shaan** (1:11)
Were you going to high school at the time or did you drop out?

**Furqan Rydhan** (1:14)
I was going to high school. I had just finished my sophomore year and I was really into computers. And my dad was like, hey, I know this guy. They need to hire some people. They're looking to make like a website at the time.
They had a router for hotels. So it was like hotels wanted to put in DSL and kind of like good internet. And they're like, oh, you got to... We needed this interface, like the Linksys interface for your router now.

**Shaan** (1:34)
Just the HTML side of things.

**Furqan Rydhan** (1:35)
Yeah. And HTML at the time was really nothing. It was like you could put some stuff. And I showed my dad how to make a menu and he was like, wow, this is like groundbreaking. There's no JavaScript.

**Shaan** (1:44)
How much were you getting paid at 15 to do this?

**Furqan Rydhan** (1:47)
If I had worked the whole year, it would have been about 120K.
Pretty ridiculous. So this is.com boom ..com boom, probably because they're hiring 15 year olds.

**Shaan** (1:56)
And then that happens, then you did an e-commerce thing.

**Furqan Rydhan** (1:59)
Yeah. So that company didn't work out, obviously, you know, spending money.

**Shaan** (2:03)
Paying 15 year olds 120K.

**Furqan Rydhan** (2:05)
Exactly. And so I kind of was back at high school and then I'm bored and I'm really into computers and gaming. And, you know, I had this idea that like, hey, people like to kind of trick out their cars. Like they like to put lights and, you know, fun things in their car. Like, why don't people do this with the computers? People are really passionate about it. And so I looked it up and I found some forums online and people were doing this. It's just there was nowhere to buy things. There's nowhere to do things, especially here in the US. So I started an e-commerce store kind of accidentally. I was like, oh, like these things are really expensive. If I buy them in bulk, I just get them cheaper. I'll sell off some. I'll have some more cash on the side. And I think we started 800 bucks of stuff in the corner of my garage. And then within the first year, we did a million dollars of revenue.

**Sam** (2:42)
Wow.

**Furqan Rydhan** (2:43)
And it was like, how old were you? I was 17

**Sam** (2:45)
Holy shit.

**Furqan Rydhan** (2:46)
I was in high school at the time. And so that was pretty crazy because it went from, you know, one corner of the garage to full three car garage to living room, family room, like those boxes everywhere. My parents were super supportive of this, obviously.
And so that was kind of like the early days, I would say.

**Shaan** (3:02)
And then we'll fast forward because there's a lot more to the story, but we'll do the highlights. So if I'm listening to this, you know, whenever I ask people with their background, really what I'm trying to say is give people a sense of who you are. And also, it's kind of just like credibility. It's like, why should you be interested in what I have to share?