00:15:54 · Markie Wagner
[00:15:54] S1: For me, I don't know if the Hamster website was by any means top trending, although it is extremely entertaining. For me, that moment kind of came in middle school. I think it was seventh grade. I was a big enjoyer of charades, bit of a theater kid at the time. And there was no charades game on the app store that I thought was really great. So I ended up going into my rabbit hole into my childhood bedroom, closing the door for a week and building one of the first charades game on the app store back in middle school. I don't know what year that would be now. I think seventh grade. Yeah, I was very happily built. Most of the screens were all built in Photoshop and kind of Frankenstein together. I was looking at different online guides to app development. And I had finally built this fairly functional, but unquestionably built app. I got it out the door. And I put on the app store, posted it all around the different internet forums, and it kind of blew up much more so than anything that I had built before. And got tens of thousands of users pretty quickly actively using it. And I was getting emails and reviews from people using it in countries that I had never even heard of at that point, right? They'd say, I'm playing this with my family over Christmas. And I play this in line at Disneyland. And can you add this feature? And it was just so crazy to me as these emails would come in. And I love people. I love talking to people. And these people would ask me for things, tell me what they liked about it. And I'm just in my childhood bedroom, just typing away at my computer, very excited about it. It was this very discontinuous moment for me where I realized that in a very short amount of time, could make something that was widely used and made people happy and was something that people wanted to use. Even though I was young, it didn't matter because I could build what people wanted. And so that was a very important moment in my life and kind of a realization that I was never really able to unseat.
00:17:48 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:17:48] S0: The idea that you could build something that had impact at a level that you never really understood. Like, do you think that that moment kind of influences a little bit of what you do today?
00:18:00 · Markie Wagner
[00:18:00] S1: Yeah, I think it does. And I think the important part of that moment is what happened after. So for me, you know, I'd add features, I talked to the users. This was so fun. But as the chaos of that became a little bit less crazy, I took a step back. And I spent a lot of time thinking about, okay, this was people like this and I made it pretty quickly. What products have people built throughout history that ended up mattering in this kind of large scheme of things? What does it look like to build something that so many people want and is useful to so many people and kind of changes the game in some way? And so I started to read about the greats of technology, right? I read the job as biography cover to cover more times than I could even count. Soft War, the story of Larry and Oracle, how Bill built Microsoft. And it became really clear to me during this several month period of just single focus on understanding the great legends of technology that during this kind of time that we're alive, so there's a very small handful of institutions that enter the canon that really pull us into the future, move forward some kind of technological, cultural, social, economic movement that wouldn't have really happened had that institution not come into play at that time. And perhaps uncharitably, everything else in a way is functionally economic noise relative to those couple of institutions that happened during our lifetimes. That became very clear to me while reading about those who built those institutions and what these products look like and what they did to how people, how they changed humanity basically. From there, I remember there was a stack of books just like chronicling all of these very epic journeys. It became very clear to me that the most meaningful thing that I could do in my life would be to build one of these institutions. And personally, not normatively, that is what matters. And that's how you kind of contribute to the canon. And so that is what led to the Good Quest framework essentially, and is very much how I think about life now.
00:20:10 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:20:10] S0: Yeah, I love that. I love that. What I'm hearing from you is that early age, you saw the impact that your work and the technology could have and your reaction and in fact, we haven't really talked about money or fame. So, was actually interesting that you had all of these sort of wins, but you kept on thinking about, hey, these are all ways that I could impact society, the world, people's lives. And you're like, wow, I can have much more of an impact if I think long term and I think about what was durable. Then when reading some of these biographies, you started seeing that well before there was an economic gain, there was this sort of founder mentality around how do I really change the system? How do I really kind of think long term? I talk a lot about this for career as well. I think that jobs are sort of short term, but careers are long term. And what you really want is a very powerful, fulfilling, maximized career for yourself and for your impact on the world. And I think that that sort of other piece of the story, maybe I'll ask you directly, is that when you wrote this note on good quest, which we'll link to the show notes, which I really found compelling, it talked a little bit about how not only the importance of having a good quest, which was long term impactful and impacts the canon using your language, but that there's also bad quests. And that in many ways, your point that I really connected with was the default that people have today tends to be more bad than good. And maybe you could talk a little bit about, like, what's the difference between a bad and a good quest, and why have we fallen into sort of bad quest by default as opposed to good quests?
00:21:57 · Markie Wagner
[00:21:57] S1: The GoodQuest article really is about the problem that a lot of the top operators, exited founders, powerful investors of tech, and kind of broadly, are almost all on bad quests. For example, someone exiting their startup just to go work in venture capital and fight their peers for allocation in a hot deal is not a good quest. A lot of people do a lot of really boring things like being a public intellectual or being a Twitter personality or just starting a business that is essentially a commodity business where there's already lots of competitors providing that same service is easier than working on a good quest because a lot of good quests are really hard. In a good quest, we, Trey and I, this idea comes from an essay that Trey Stevens and I ended up writing and publishing in Pirate Wires. Kind of in the simple terms, a good quest makes the future better than it looks today, while a bad quest doesn't improve the world much at all or even makes it worse. And so I think making the future look distinctly better than it is today is a very hard, risky endeavor. Whereas providing more capital or doing a copycat startup that you already know has some fit in the market, but you just want to compete on it anyways is easier and often less risky. That's kind of how we thought about it.
00:23:17 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:23:17] S0: Why the language of quest? There's a lot of vernacular around, hey, one should be long term focused or focused on the sort of the world as opposed to oneself. But I think the reason why I think the article really connected to me was the language themselves felt almost game like, And that you almost have to think about your both career decisions and your company decisions very much like it's a game. Why did you choose the quest framing as the way to explain this concept?