Intro
Adam: Hello, welcome to CoRecursive. I’m Adam Gordon Bell.
Have you ever had a moment where everything seemed to fall apart? Maybe you lost your job or faced the unexpected change. You find yourself at a crossroads, unsure what to do next. That’s where I was at the start of the summer because I got laid off.
And finding a new and exciting role wasn’t easy. I started to wonder not just about how to find the role that I was excited about and that I wanted, but how I would even know what it was that I wanted.
During that time, I signed up for a trail race with my brother-in-law Jamie and my friend Malcolm. With no job, I threw myself into running to cope and to try to find some control over my life.
But you had some others who were laid off who were just relaxing. Alex was going to spend the summer gardening, maybe start looking for a job after that, who knows?
And for me, it was like, thank God I had the race because it gave me something to focus on. I could train for the race.
But then I started thinking, like, maybe that’s a problem. So I reached out to someone to talk about this.
Job Hunting
Yoshio:
Yeah, I’m not, I’m not sure if you’ve ever read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl,
Adam:
That’s what it’s about, right? I read it a long, long time ago. Yeah.
Yoshio: Progress is meaning.
Adam:
But I feel like in some ways though, it’s like a to put your focus on, like taking the next step towards whatever the goal is, and then if you reach it or you don’t reach it, you set a new goal. I find that striving to be enjoyable, but it’s almost, my wife would probably say it is a problem where it’s like, like my car is in neutral, and then you never chill.
Yoshio:
So I have multiple goals; one of my goals is to be a great dad, to be a great spouse. I define what that looks like: it’s a certain number of trips from my family per year, where I’m fully present with them.
It’s a feeling of unhurriedness in my family life multiple times per day. So I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive: the taking a rest, and the go, go, go feeling.
Adam: That’s the Yoshio. He was introduced to me as one of the most goal-driven people I’d ever met. He was on a multi-year mission to become the strongest technical co-founder that he could be. And before that, he had a multi-year mission to climb the highest mountain in the world. He’s an expert on setting your mind to something and working hard at it.
So he’s the perfect person to talk to about goals and whether I was pointed in the right direction, or if I was maybe pursuing a goal for the wrong reasons.
So today we’ll share his story, but also his failures and his challenges, and how he figured out what he wanted. He’s pretty focused and content right now, but that wasn’t always the case.
So if you’re like me and always thinking about personal and professional challenges, but sometimes uncertain about what you should be pursuing, you’ll learn a lot from him.
Being A Slacker
Adam:
But, yeah, as I said, Yoshio wasn’t always the master of his own fate back when he was in school. Things were a lot different.
Yoshio:
I’m in my final year at college preparing for my exams, and thinking about how pointless everything I’m studying is, and how I’m just doing it to get through it. But as soon as it’s over, I’m going to set fire to all my previous possessions, and I’ll start working in tech as one of the builders, one of the wizards who can write words and turn it into things on a screen.
I was a bad student. I barely made it through college. There were all these things that I was just not good at and not happy with myself, and I wanted to get better at. So, my default state where I started was definitely someone who was maybe more of a gamer, stoner type of persona.
I didn’t know anyone who had a code. I met one person who was building; it wasn’t Shopify. It was like one of these WordPress shopping plugins. He pointed me in the direction of a subreddit. I think it was “Learn Programming.”
So, I went on there, and for some reason, everyone talked about “Learn Python the Hard Way.” Just bearing in mind, I wanted to learn to make websites. So, “Learn Python the Hard Way” doesn’t really get you to building a website. I mean, by the end of that book, I was building pretty cool text-based adventure RPGs. I didn’t really know how to get a button onto a screen, yeah.
Adam: Yoshio’s idea to learn programming and build websites, along with his frustration with school and his slacker identity, all that actually started a couple years earlier. And it led him to an idea.
Yoshio:
I want to do something whereby when I get to the end of it, I’m going to be unrecognizable to my current self. And I must have been 17 or 18, and a friend of mine in Hong Kong had kind of jokingly brought up, hey, we should climb Everest. And I was like, haha, that’s great. That’s really funny. But that really planted the seed.
And just for a little bit more context, growing up, my dad, one of the things that bonded us was we would go on these two, three-day hikes in Japan, in the Japanese Alps. On one of these hikes, I met the owner of this tea house after the hike. He was around 80, and we were telling him about our climb. He mentioned that he’d climbed Everest before, and I was like, wow, this is the first time I’d ever met anyone who climbed Everest. It really blew my mind.
So that combined with my friend asking me this, and in college, I was looking for a challenge to push myself. At some point, I was just like, oh, it makes sense when I graduate from college, I’m going to try and climb Everest.
Making Everest Real
Adam: At first, climbing Everest was just a fantasy, but Yoshio and his friend kept sharing links and resources back and forth.
Yoshio: And at one point, we were like, we should, we need to learn how to ice climb, and we found a week-long ice climbing course in New Zealand, and we agreed that we’d go together. That was really, you know, once I put in the credit card details and clicked buy, I was in. So yeah, I ended up going to New Zealand a couple months later, and learning how to ice climb on Fox Glacier.
Adam:
And like you said, oh, I wanted to be a different person on the other side of it. But back when you were planning all this, like what? you have anything more specific in mind that you would get out of this, that it would accomplish?
Yoshio:
I think I was, I was also really looking for adventure. I wanted to do something interesting, and the default path was I graduate and I go straight into the working world. Climbing Everest takes probably two months out of your year to travel there, to be on the mountain, summit, and come back down.
So I was like, when am I ever going to have two months of time to do something like this? So I figured now’s as good a time as any to go on an adventure. I think the desire to be better, to be unrecognizable, was also born out of just me not being very happy with who I was. I think a common theme throughout my journey of the past two decades has just been not being fully happy with who I am.
And that’s really only changed in the past couple of years, where I finally feel like what I tell my wife was I’m just trying to get to the stage where I’m like a real human and he was like a very vague thing, but just like someone I can be proud of.
And a big part of that discomfort with who I was was because I was someone who didn’t have my shit together.
Physical Training and Preparation
Adam: Step one of getting your shit together and climbing Everest is to get in shape.
Yoshio:
Yeah, so I had a year where I started to take physical training very seriously. For a whole year, I was training like a professional athlete.
So, I was around 120, not super in shape, and I ended up putting on about 30 pounds of muscle over those two years. One of the prerequisites for climbing Everest with this outfit was having climbed a few other high altitude mountains. I climbed a mountain called Aconcagua and another mountain called Kilimanjaro, which is the tallest mountain in South America before Everest. While I was doing that, I realized that the degree I chose in college, which was management, and the path, my default path, which was to go into banking or consulting, wasn’t what I really wanted.
And one of the benefits of having studied some economics was I knew all about the sunk cost fallacy. So, I was like, I’m young. I know I’ve invested all this time, but there’s no reason I can’t try and change the path I’m on right now.
So, I realized that coding was kind of like magic and that everything that I wanted to do required coding.
Coding Journey
Adam: Yosha wanted to be a maker, a creator, an entrepreneur, someone who could build valuable and useful things using just his mind. Yes, learning to code is hard; but so is training for Everest. Learning to code is like a little mental Everest, but in many ways, it’s much easier.
Yoshio:
I mean, it really, I really feel like coding is magic because you’re just typing some prose or words, and then bam, you know, you refresh the page and there’s something on your screen. And when I started actually doing it, it really felt that way. I was just getting, I mean, the feedback loop is so addictive.
That tight feedback loop is such a dopamine rush from, hey, I want to build this UI, and an hour later, you have something that kind of resembles what you had in your brain versus I was doing a lot of physical training at the same time where I’d say, hey, let me tweak these variables in my training, and maybe three weeks from now, I’ll see what actually has happened. So that’s a little bit of a slower feedback loop.
Lukla Airport
Adam: After two years of prep and discovering his love of coding, Yoshio finished school. And then he heads off to Nepal.
Yoshio:
I mean, the climb to Everest is amazing. You fly into this airport called Lukla, and it’s known as the deadliest airport in the world.
There’s a plane wreckage on the side where planes have crashed. And because it’s hard to get off the mountain, they just drag it to the side and the other planes land on that runway. Is it in a shed or something? Right, drag it out of the… well, you know, they’re probably just like, “Hey, the wood’s hard to get up.” I’m not sure, but they tell you before you get on a plane, “Hey, we only get one shot at landing.” Because if the pilot needs to bail, he’s not going to have enough lift to pull the plane up. So you’re going to hit the mountain. So it’s like, it’s a terrifying experience, but also thrilling.
Adam: After the landing is the hike into base camp.
Yoshio:
You, you meet all kinds of people. Just learning about why people are climbing there is its own fun little quest.
Yeah. It’s like, “Hey, what do you do during non-climbing season?” I’ll be like, “Oh, you know, I have like a herd of yaks that I tend to, or I work in the school here.” Because during climbing season, there are these little villages that spring up, like a ski resort-type village.
And you kind of sit around at base camp, acclimating, waiting for things to happen. So I brought a bunch of programming books, a ThinkPad, because I was like, “I’m gonna have a lot of off time; I’m gonna try and continue this coding journey at Basecamp.”
It’s very difficult. The altitude does stuff to your brain that is hard to comprehend. So I’m on the mountain, kind of continuing to try to build these text-based RPGs and just be like, “I can’t think.” And you know, everything else is interesting, so I don’t really want to sit in my tent doing this. So I’m I kind of give up after a couple days; we do some climbs to other nearby peaks to get the elevation, so our bodies get used to the altitude.
And right before we were meant to push to Camp 1, past the Khumbu Icefall, which is a large stretch of essentially ice towers, and it’s also the most deadly part of climbing Everest on the Nepal side, right before we went to do that push, our advanced team, the day before, goes up.
And as they’re going up, a massive ice avalanche gets triggered, and it kills 16 people, including three of our advanced team. So the Sherpas who were there to help us prepare our camp for the next day. So yeah, that was intense. That was my first experience with the visceral feeling of death. I had spoken to some of these people before on a previous climb. And they’re young, fit, and full of life. And to kind of learn that they didn’t make it that day was really jarring.
Adam: What did that feel like? Were you upset? Were you confused?
Yoshio:
It’s funny because, up until that moment, the training and the summit and everything were the most important thing in my life. And then as soon as that happened, I just completely forgot about any of that even mattering. These are small personal goals I set for myself, but it’s nothing in comparison to what happened to the, our advanced team.
Seeing how the community is not very big, so seeing the impact that had on them, I said, I like immediately switched to, okay, what can I do to help? It feels like I’m there for completely frivolous reasons at that point. It’s just, I’m there to, for a personal physical challenge.
Yoshio:
So, did you help? What happened?
So they turned our camp into a walk-in for people who were not injured so badly that they could still walk; they walked to our camp. And for the seriously injured people there who had been dug out, I mean, you have to bear in mind that with an ice avalanche, one cubic meter of ice is a ton.
So when you have an avalanche, it’s really hard to survive. But they managed to cut a few people out of the ice. And there was on hand a very skilled helicopter pilot. So she was airlifting people from the disaster area back to base camp.
And yeah, I mean like, I, at one point I remember helping carry someone on a stretcher. But just, I was way over my head. I was probably getting in the way more than I was actually helping.
I was, and then I realized that maybe the only thing I could really do was just be emotional support for some of the people I’d gotten to know on the climb who were more skilled.
So I’d gotten to know our camp doctor. I remember seeing her, and she had been down at the site of all the bodies had been dug up, and she was covered in blood. Yeah, I just remember giving her a hug and trying to like talk to her, console her. But yeah, there wasn’t really anything I could do.
I just didn’t have the skillset to do anything.
Lessons from the Avalanche
Adam: And so, I don’t know. What’s the lesson? What
Yoshio:
Yeah, so what’s interesting is that year, so I got back from Everest, and that year just seemed to be full of death. My best friend took his life a few months after I got back from Everest, and then a few of my other close friends had passed away in unrelated things. I just got, it was like I got a quadruple dose of just, oh wow, this is short. You have to cherish every moment.
I mean, I think the biggest thing I learned from that was just how you could die. That’s something that I really internalized on that day, and I’ve kind of, it’s been one of the primary things driving everything I do. This idea that not to take things for granted. Because you could be on top of the world one moment, and the next, everything’s gone.
Yoshio eventually used this experience to create a eulogy for the person he hoped to be when he died. But before that, back in Hong Kong, after Everest, he found ways to use his coding skills.
So most of what I built around that period was things that kind of helped you visualize how short life was.
So, Tim Urban from the Wait But Why blog, he has this great blog post on your life in weeks, and I just became obsessed with that.
Adam:
The point of the wait, but why post, is simple. Life is short. If you count your life in weeks, you get about 4,000 of them—maybe 5,000 if you live to 98; but that’s not a lot, and we often waste weeks without realizing. Yoshio wants to make sure he doesn’t.
Yoshio:
So, I, the first app I remember building was you’d put in your birthday, you put in your where you were born, and it would hit, I believe it was the WHO. They had an API on life expectancy. So it would say, okay, you’re male in Hong Kong, so you’re gonna live on average to 83. You know, you’re born this month of this year, so it would just generate that for you.
And I started turning it into a little bit of a journal. So, you could click into the little boxes and say, Oh, this week I did this thing, and I actually built, I think, two or three versions of that. I was so obsessed with that visual.
Adam: This realization made him realize that life was too short for the usual business management path, and so he joined a web dev bootcamp. With some fellow students, he then started an agency.
Yoshio:
We were like, hey, we can get other people to pay us to continue learning.
We did that, quickly pivoted into a TaskRabbit clone startup. Then I attended a Peter Thiel lecture, maybe three months into us starting this TaskRabbit clone. He’s doing a book tour for Zero to One. He says this line about how if you’re young and you don’t have many commitments and you want to be the best at anything in the world, you have to surround yourself with the best people.
And no, no offense to the Hong Kong startup scene, but it’s not Silicon Valley. If you want to build the best Chinese restaurant in the world, you don’t do it in Calcutta.
I think one or two weeks later, I buy a one-way ticket to San Francisco.
San Francisco
Adam: And San Francisco, he joined another coding bootcamp with this clear goal of becoming a very strong technical co-founder because life is short. But, if you can build a company, if you can build a tech startup with your own coding skills, you can affect so many people’s lives. But, yeah, San Francisco was a big change.
I’d never been around a culture of people that were so comfortable with just leaning so heavily into their weirdness and being like, I understand that my obsession with, I don’t know, brass coins from the 1210s is really strange, but I’m gonna own it.
Yoshio:
I’m gonna live that life. I remember when Bitcoin first started becoming big. I mean, this was maybe the second wave. I’m working at a job. One of my colleagues, we’re talking over lunch, and he’s like, “Yeah, every single dollar I make, I turn into Bitcoin straight away.” We become friends. I go to his house, and he has three boxes full of The Internet of Money. So, yeah, he just has these books to hand out to people. When I like a book, I might buy three or four to give to friends. He has three boxes of these books.
So it’s experiences like that which I just really loved. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a San Francisco house party, but I feel like you always end up in a corner talking to someone like this. That’s why I think San Francisco has such a high density of people building projects. It’s really crazy on the edge of tech companies. But yeah, it was such a breath of fresh air to be surrounded by people who didn’t care that much about how they appeared externally but were so into the things that they were building or doing.
I remember probably one or two weeks in, I was like, “This is the right place.” Because if you have this level of innate curiosity, and a desire, and people aren’t being held back by external things, the external world isn’t driving your curiosity as much, or what you focus on as much, it’s just a winning combination.
Radius
Adam: So then the coding bootcamp starts wrapping up and it’s time to start job hunting.
Yoshio: Everyone keeps throwing these words around. I don’t really, you know, I had to learn all the tech bro lingo. But everyone’s like, “You have to get on a rocket ship.” When someone tells you to join the rocket ship, you don’t say which seat; you just get on. So I’m like, I gotta look for a rocket ship.
So I look for websites that have rocket ship startups, and there’s, I can’t remember the name of the website anymore, but it’s essentially a list of these are the best startups, a young, ambitious person can join. And I learn about a company called Radius. I find out I had a friend there, so I applied to this company.
Adam: What did their office look like? So you go in for the interview and it’s like they have a keg. I assume. And yeah.
Yoshio:
Two ping pong tables. It’s in the heart of the financial district. It’s just really snazzy; all the offices and all the meeting rooms have funny names. I think they’re named after different coffee shops.
We were in the same building as Twitch, so when you’re a person who’s come in from across the world to be surrounded by the best people in the world, and suddenly you’re in the same building rubbing shoulders with Twitch, it’s hard to beat that leader.
Adam:
So like, tell me about the work. What did you learn?
Yoshio:
Yeah, there were a lot of really good programmers. Most of the other people had CS degrees, and I was coming in for a bootcamp. So, I started to get exposure to different ways of thinking. As with a lot of these bigger companies, we would do things like read papers together and have a weekly meeting. We had a paper group meeting. That really helped. And then I was exposed to a lot of different ways of programming. I’ve started getting good PR reviews. So I started, I definitely started leveling up as a software engineer while I was there.
But I also learned a lot of what not to do on the business front. Even now, when I think back, the burn rate they had, given their revenue, just seemed untenable. I remember working on features for months with other engineers. So, I remember one feature in particular. Maybe we spent 10 developer months on it, and I don’t think anyone ended up using it at all. So that was the kind of thing that I learned. Hey, this is… there has to be a better way.
Adam:
So, Yosha, with leaves, his life is short, right? And he needs to find places where he has impact, and where he’s improving. He tries a couple small places and eventually finds his way to a small crypto startup.
Yoshio: So we were in a tiny, 200 square foot office in Mountain View above a coffee shop. And it was just we were packed into this room, like sardines in a can. And it’s a fun startup office. We’re just all independently working on things to move the business forward. So there’s a lot of trust that, hey, this person is going to figure out the right way to do this thing. And that person, Will, is an expert at this thing, and he has this kind of thinking. So we’re going to put him on this feature, and he’s going to crush it.
At one point, we had a tomato plant in the office, and the tomato plant starts getting mite. So I figured out we could buy ladybugs on Amazon for like six bucks. So I think it’s a great idea to bring some ladybugs into the office to fight these mites, and anyways, how many ladybugs did it end up being, like 40,000 ladybugs?
It’s a lot. It was at least a couple hundred. Yeah, no, I mean, not a great idea. We had ladybugs in our, in like the fluorescent lights of our workstations at one point, just dropping out. And they didn’t really solve the mite issue either, but it’s a fun story.
Adam: Working with this small tight-knit team was a huge learning experience. It felt like a finishing school for a technical co-founder.
Yoshio:
We were trying to find a venture-backed business in the crypto world. This is around 2017. And we pivoted, I think, four or five times. We launched so many times I’ve lost count. But the mindset was just so focused on finding, without overbuilding things, a business. You know, early days that really taught me, hey, the business model is the product early on. The founder of that business, she—I mean, she’s just so fast.
So I remember one weekend, we’re logging off for work, and it’s Friday. And a report comes out saying that something like only 10 out of around 80 exchanges have any true crypto trading volume. So 70 plus exchanges are faking it, so the trading volume of the crypto market as a whole is grossly inflated.
Adam: Yen, the founder, updated the code to reflect the true crypto volume. Then, she wrote a blog post about it, and that made them part of the news cycle.
Yoshio:
And we get back on Monday, and I think we had 1,000 views on that Monday, and it’s because her blog posts had just blown up. And it was that kind of thinking where I was like, wow. I would have probably in the past just started some kind of meeting to discuss it first and then wireframed it, and maybe we would ship something two weeks later.
Yeah, so it was just like that speed. And that’s just one example, one of many examples where I, and to this day I’m still trying to internalize that lesson because I’m such a planner. When I see that and I see it done at such a… there’s a little, there’s this intuition that you have to develop around, okay, I can be fast around certain things, but maybe not so fast around other things. But she had such a good intuition around, this is the thing that I have to double down on immediately.
Pandemic
Adam: Despite moving fast after years of searching for a successful business model for a crypto startup, things just weren’t working out. And so, a pivot to a whole new industry was called for.
Yoshio:
The founder returned all the money and was like, “Hey, I’ve been talking to the investors and this idea is something that they would fund.” I think it’s just an execution idea.
All we have to do is just build. And we’re building basically a better Carta, a better version of Carta.
Adam: Carta is software for tracking your cap table, basically who owns what portion of your company?
Yoshio: A lot of the problems, like the technical challenges, are not so interesting anymore because it’s just you’re building essentially a CRUD app. I mean, there still are interesting challenges, but I’m also not the most senior engineer on the team, so all the interesting technical problems get given to the more senior engineers. I’m also not super excited about the mission, so, at that point, the main reasons for me to work there are I love my team and the financial incentives.
And as soon as the pandemic hit, the closeness of my team started to fray for everyone.
Adam: What does that look like?
Yoshio:
It’s kind of the invisible part of remote team working. It’s just so hard to maintain team culture. If most of your interactions are just status updates or questions on Slack, the attempts to create team cohesion are just very long Zoom calls that are actually kind of draining.
You Can’t Hurt Me
Adam:
There’s another problem with this as well, or maybe the pandemic just highlighted it. But if you’re searching for a business model, there’s sort of no center to your business. It’s hard to have a connection to a business that’s a hundred percent opportunistically driven. Right?
It’s changing pivot by pivot. And yeah, life is short, and you all know how quickly things can change.
And then around this time, he picked up this book, Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins, the former Navy SEAL.
Yoshio: There’s a part of my brain that is always kind of—I’m not sure if it’s like intellectual elitism, but I’ve always been like, “Oh, this stuff, this is such a—so meathead-y.” But somehow, that period of the pandemic, I was perfectly ready to receive this message of, “Hey, if I triple down on suffering, and I just tried to embrace suffering as much as possible, I might change my brain in a way that’s like completely astounding to me.”
Adam:
Can’t Hurt Me is a memoir, and kind of a self-help book.
Goggins was bullied and mistreated. He had a troubled childhood, but eventually, he becomes the person he wants to be. I listened to the audiobook, and I really enjoyed it.
But Goggins turned his life around in part using kind of harsh self-criticism, using the past torments that were thrown at him to kind of motivate himself. For Yoshio, this resonates with his own experiences in a British boarding school.
Yoshio: There was a person who bullied me at school as well. I won’t mention his name, but you know, it’s when you’re in boarding school, it’s relentless. You’ve got to sleep, and that person might be in the same room as you; you wake up there, they might be in the same room as you go down to class, they might be, and it’s just non-stop. The philosophy of the boarding school I went to was that being bullied was character building.
I, uh, Joss Whedon, the director, went to my boarding school for a little bit of time. He talks a little bit about that experience, and he says, “I realized very quickly that to make it here was a matter of survival.” But yeah, it was relentless. And then, you know, my housemaster definitely, I don’t think, handled it the best. He definitely contributed to the feeling of isolation that I experienced.
Adam: That’s fucked up.
Yoshio:
Yeah.
Adam: It doesn’t sound good.
Yoshio: But it’s helpful. I actually, I really appreciate it now. I would, yeah, I mean, I would not take back any of it now because I’m really happy with who I am now.
Adam: Wow. I mean, that’s surprising. Is that because of the Goggins thing, of leaning into it? Or is it something else?
Yoshio:
Yeah, I think if I didn’t have those experiences, I’m not sure I would have the capacity I have to suffer and achieve the things I want to achieve in my life. So I’m really appreciative of it now. And yeah, it took something like Goggins for me to truly leverage it and transform it into something better.
But, uh, yeah, now I’ve kind of, I know how to harness it.
Adam:
Goggins’ approach relies on somewhat harsh self-talk, being brutally honest with yourself about your flaws, thinking about the hurtful things that people said, finding the truth in them, and then using those truths to drive yourself. He also talks about something he calls the cookie jar.
The Cookie Jar
Yoshio:
So yeah, he would say you write down all the bad things, and those are cookies that you draw on when you need help. And I found that extremely helpful. A lot of what I drew from was the bad things or the things that bothered me.
For a long time, I had nightmares about boarding school because of the feeling of being trapped in a different country, far away from your family. So I would go on these extreme workouts, and just when I wanted to give up, I would dunk my hand into the cookie jar and pull out a memory. That would keep me going. That was really helpful.
Yoshio:
I’d put on like a 65-pound ruck, like a backpack, and go on the Stairmaster, and I’d climb two Eiffel Tower worth of stairs. And you know, the first time I did it, I thought I was gonna die. I did that every day for, I think, a month first. I remember just being like, I’m not getting off these stairs until it doesn’t matter how slow the Stairmaster’s going; I’m gonna make it to that height.
Were you doing this at a gym or?
Yeah, I’m in my apartment building gym. So I’m also that weird guy in the gym who’s sweating all over the Stairmaster and making ungodly sounds.
Yeah, just being that weirdo. Because we were working so much at this company, sometimes I’d stop work at 10 PM or 9 PM. And I realized, “Oh, I have to run 12 miles right now.” I’m like, “Well, I committed to this,” so I’d get my running shoes on and run through to the Golden Gate Bridge and back.
And this is because it was the heart of the pandemic; SF would be completely empty. And it was just that; that was actually a lot of fun. I was very tired quite a lot of the time, but it was a lot of fun to just think about it.
Adam: No, I mean, it sounds beautiful, running through empty San Francisco across the bridge. And yeah.
Yoshio: I also had this. I developed a guilty pleasure of listening to audiobooks written by preppers. There’s this entire world of prepper fiction that’s hilarious and also kind of fun. But you know, if you’re running through an abandoned city or a city that feels abandoned at night and you’re listening to this, it’s, it really feels so immersive.
Start-up Disillusionment
Adam: Well, Yoshio’s unusual quest for self-improvement is making them feel good. Work-life balance is kind of another story.
Yoshio: Everything I’m doing at this company is a push. It’s just a slug to get the features out; there’s just nothing exciting or fun about it anymore. And I’m also not feeling the joy of improving because everything I’m working on is just the same old type of problem.
Adam: Meanwhile, Yoshio discovers that self-improvement, which he once thought of as nonsense, can really improve his life. So he starts to lean into that.
Yoshio:
So that’s also when I start to think about what does the ideal life I want to live look like, so I start writing out what do I want to do? Combined with all the Goggins stuff really gives me the, gave me the conviction to say, “Hey, I’m going to take a year out at least, and I’m going to work on something I’m interested in, which is operationalizing or systematizing self improvement.”
I’m like, so into just leveling up myself; this is fun for me. So why don’t I see if I can find a business in here? So I leave Pulley, and I’m like, open world RPG. I could do anything. I’m like, well, I know that one of the first things that I wanted, I was desperately craving in my last couple of months at Pulley, was leveling up my skills.
So I wrote down all the skills I wanted to get better at. I wanted to have some rudimentary product data skills so that I could understand when people talk about retention and all these things—fancy numbers—I had no idea what that meant. So I was like, I want to be able to be in a conversation and get that stuff. I wanted to know how to design stuff, do UI, so I was like, okay, given that I want to learn all these things, I should really get better at learning.
Ultra Speaking
Yoshio:
So I pick up a book, called Ultra Learning, which I know you’ve read as well. And that’s also where I first heard about Tristan and Michael.
Adam:
The book is great. It’s about diving headfirst into a learning project, hitting it with intensity, and the author, Scott Young, tests these ideas out on Tristan, who wants to become a better public speaker. Tristan finds Michael, who is a speaking coach. Tristan goes from being terrified of public speaking to winning the Toastmasters Best Speaker in North America award.
But it’s a real-world example, showing that with enough effort and planning, you can master any skill on an accelerated timeline.
Yoshio:
And, uh, read that book, and I read about Tristan and Michael, and I Google them, and I find out they have an online course. Cohort Three of Ultra Speaking, and it’s priced really low, I’m like surprised at how affordable it is.
So, Anders Ericsson with his deliberate practice in Peak, he always talks about using a flight simulator, how jet fighter pilots would use flight simulators to simulate the hardest parts of dogfights or what have you. And that’s how they got so much better. And I remember thinking about how do I apply this to programming or how do I apply this to any of my other skills?
It’s just, it’s not super clear. And we started off speaking. And they start these games. And they put you in these really uncomfortable positions, off the bat. And it’s whoa, this is really hard. And I instantly think about Anders Ericsson and the flight simulators. And I’m like, wow, this is just like that.
And I’m like, okay, but let’s really see how useful this is. And about halfway through the cohort, I’m kind of nervous the whole time whenever they ask for volunteers in the main room, so speaking in front of 20 other people. And whenever they ask for volunteers, I want to raise my hand, but I can’t, like my body won’t move. And at one point, I get mad at myself and my hand shoots up. And I’m like, ah crap, and it’s too late.
I’m committed at that point. It’s around, I believe, a round of rapid-fire analogies. And I go, a motorcycle is like building a business, because it’s fast and thrilling. Meeting your friends is like blue cheese, because it’s delicious. You just say these words off within two-second timers.
And when I finish, I feel great. And I remember just feeling for the first time like, wow, I don’t need to go into conversations having prepped everything. I can start with a rough idea, and my brain will fill in the blanks. And that for me was one of my first activation points where I was like, wow, speaking is freeing, and this just unlocked me.
And for a lot of the course, I’m thinking, hey, this could be, there are so many things that could be improved here. This is my first time experiencing a learning style that is so practical, so experiential, so applied. And I remember kind of hoping that we can work together.
You know, I’m like, I have all these other plans. So I’m like, okay, I’ll shelve that idea and maybe revisit it after I finished my learning. But one week after I finished the cohort, I get an email in my inbox from Michael asking if I know any software engineers. I’m like, this is perfect. This is a sign from the universe.
So I respond, being like, yeah, I, you know, I’m a software engineer. I think Michael knew I was a software engineer because I had mentioned it in one of my reps during the cohort. We started working on some projects together.
And I mean, at the same time, I’m not fully committed at this point. I still want to go through my learning journey. I still, I’m still thinking about building a startup to systematize self-improvement. But the more I work with them, the more I realize, hey, there really is something here.
And there’s really something unique about the way Tristan and Michael think that I think could be really powerful. If we combine our three brains, I think there could be something here that’s world-changing. I know that sounds really, really, uh, But, you know, I’m at this phase where I’m exploring my next phase of life where I want to do something that’s really high leverage.
Adam: You need your next Everest or.
Yoshio: Yeah, exactly.
Founder Mode
Adam:
Yoshio is the classic startup grind, from his time in San Francisco, right? Working long weeks on the next big thing, pivoting until you find success, but Tristin and Michael are different. Tristin is a surfer.
Yoshio:
And you can tell from a mile away that he’s a surfer just from his hair and his beard and the way he walks, his demeanor. It’s very laid back, very calm. He’s like a Labrador, so supportive, so full of ideas. Everything is exciting. Michael’s a little bit more like a cat. He’s a little bit more reserved, but just as loving. Michael and Tristan have such a funny, beautiful dynamic where they’re already basically a married couple.
And I’ll never forget, when we decided to start taking things more seriously, this is really when I realized that “Hey, this is not your stereotypical Silicon Valley. This is in Tristan’s house in Los Angeles.” In the middle of the pandemic, I hadn’t really had any social interactions until that moment. I’m sitting in a sauna, a two-person steam sauna, sandwiched between them.
Adam: Why was it in the sauna? Like, why was that the?
Yoshio:
I mean, we’re also very into kind of sauna, plungy type things. So, and Tristan had it, and we were, I think the meetup was just to get to know each other and maybe to work on one project together, just to get a feel for how it could work if we were to really commit to each other. Sauna is as good a place as any to hang out.
And, uh, they’re asking me what my intentions are. It’s almost like I’m asking them, for their hand in marriage.
Adam:
Remember, Yosha has goals since Hong Kong, maybe even since Everest training, to be the strongest technical co-founder.
He could be. He has all this valley startup experience that he’s built up over time. And now he’s joining ultra speaking as their third founder. But there’s a big difference between his crypto startup and ultra speaking. Tristan and Michael weren’t out there hunting for the business to create. They had their goal to teach people how to communicate. And this is perfect for Yosha, who wanted to operationalize self-improvement.
This is totally something that aligns with his deep values in a way that the crypto startup or the cap table tracker probably never will.
But also, because of his learning and his leveling up, he brings a lot of ideas to the table. User research, responding to feedback, the stuff that he learned through countless pivots at the last place; they can be really valuable when you have a core mission that you care deeply about. It just takes them some time to convince Michael interest and of this.
Yoshio:
People say that a co-founder relationship is like a marriage. And some say that if you take kids out of the equations, it’s arguably more intense. And I really believe that to be true. We’ve definitely had a lot of our classic married couple disagreements and arguments. The equivalent of arguing over the finances for us would be arguing over marketing copy, for example.
A lot of relationships that work involve couples who are married and are polar opposites. And I feel like that’s very true for us. A lot of the stuff that we cleared up early on in those sauna-type interviews was figuring out if our core values aligned. If we wanted the same things. I think because we have that as a basis for our relationship,
I’ve learned a lot from both of them. There are times where my approach is terrible, and I have to take a step back and just let things go how they’re going to be. That’s actually the best path.
I think when I first started working with my friends Tristan and Michael, I was maybe too framework-focused or too rigid with, ‘Oh, this is the best practices.’ This is how you should do things, and realizing that there are lots of ways to skin a cat.
Growing Your Motivations
Adam: And then another thing changed, between meeting, trust in Michael, getting married, planning for fatherhood, and then eventually having a baby. The Goggin style of negative experiences motivating himself that way started to become less important, because Yoshio found something else.
Yoshio:
I did notice that my fuel source started to change a little bit as I went on this journey, where it started off primarily through anger and evolved into more of a mixed, a hybrid engine where I’d still use some of those angry ideas, but then I started introducing like an alter ego.
I started thinking about, Well, I was like, what would my, our future kid want me to be like? I should do this for them.
Like you said at the beginning that you were finally happy or willing to admit that you were a human or something like this—becoming a human.
Adam: Yeah, I mean, now with the full context of the story, cause I didn’t understand what you meant. Maybe you could explain.
Yoshio:
I mean, maybe it’s, I got that idea of wanting to become a human from a Japanese book, and a lot of Japanese poetry and writing is kind of vague. Read between the lines. For me, it’s about taking life seriously. And I say it’s becoming a human because you’re doing the things that you should be doing. You should be taking care of yourself, you should be trying to help other people who are less fortunate than yourself, and you should be striving to improve. You should also be striving for the betterment of society.
And maybe becoming a human is also just this idea of becoming a human, because a lot of the idea came from me preparing for fatherhood. It was just becoming a good role model is really what it is. It’s okay, can I become someone who I’m proud of, who I would want my kid to emulate?
And instead of saying becoming a phenomenal human or becoming a great human, I think it’s just becoming a human because this should be our natural state.
What Matters?
Adam: So now to go back to my trail racing question. I guess what I was trying to ask was really: how do I know if the goal of getting better at running was a good goal or just a distraction? How do I know if I’m pursuing the right thing?
Now, Yoshio, who’s happily a co-founder, who’s happily a father, and a husband, and not taking his life for granted, really has an answer for this.
Yoshio: Given our limited time, figure out what brings you meaning, and that could be anything, and work backwards from your ultimate vision for what you want to accomplish with your life. Then, kind of set near-term challenges to force yourself to learn if you’re on the right path, if your vision even makes sense. I actually like to time constrain them. So, Everest was a couple of years at Puli; I had set around a three-year timeline of, ‘Hey, I want to reassess after three years.’ Set time-constrained goals, and when you get there, take a step back, and have a look around and see, hey, is this right?
And what’s my next step? I think for me, the lesson is to take life seriously. You don’t have that much time here.
Outro
Adam: That was the show, reflecting on Yoshio’s story.
I realized how the process I was going through after losing my job was natural. I had had this goal for multiple years, and then things changed. It was a natural time for me to reassess. If you constantly are reassessing, you know, you won’t get anywhere. But I think it makes sense, like Yoshio did, to pick an interesting and valuable direction and commit to it for years. But then, occasionally, you step back and think about things. He was a planner.
I don’t think that’s my strength. I like the doing, and so running was a welcome distraction when I was trying to do this reflection. But I have had time to reflect, and I have had time to decide what makes sense for me.
And so, relatedly, I’m happy to report that I’m starting a new job. Uh, I’ll be teaching people how to do infrastructure as code. And maybe it’s not operationalizing self-improvement, like Yoshio’s latest goal, but I’m excited about it, and it aligns with me. So, yeah, thanks to everyone who pointed me towards various job offers or people to talk to.
I got to meet a lot of interesting people before accepting this role.
And thanks to Yoshio for sharing your journey. I talked about Ultra Speaking on Twitter before; it’s really a transformative experience. I was part of a cohort just like he was, and I highly recommend it. I understand what he saw in it that he wanted to dedicate himself towards.
So, yeah, you should check it out.
And thank you, as always, to the Patreon supporters of the podcast. Uh, that’s been super helpful, especially when you get laid off. I would recommend to everybody out there to set aside some money, or have a plan, or a second source of income in case layoffs or other bumps in the road hit you.
So thank you to all of you.
Thank you to the people who pointed out opportunities to me, or introduced people to me during this downtime, or just reached out and said they appreciated what I do. Never be afraid to reach out or say hi, or mention opportunities to me. I try to get back to everybody. I probably occasionally failed at that, but I always appreciate it.
And until next time, thank you so much for listening.
Sticher
Overcast
Oct 02, 2024
50
min