This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Robby Wade: I run a startup now where people ask, “How do you take on all this stress?” Running a shift on Friday night and trying to keep the drive-through clear is the most intense shit you could ever go through in your entire life.
Intro#
James: Hello and welcome to Graduate Theory. Today’s guest is a former banking manager who’s on a mission to revolutionise the industry of chat.
He’s a former CEO of Vid and a founding partner at asset management group Nebula Ventures. He’s now the CEO and co-founder of ThisApp, an all-in-one chat platform that makes it easy to connect with anyone and organise anything. Please welcome to the show today, Robby.
Robby Wade: James, thanks for the kind intro. I appreciate you preparing that.
Robby’s Journey from NAB to Silicon Valley#
James: I’d love to wind back the clock to when you left university and started working. You used to work at NAB, and now you’re a CEO in Silicon Valley—it’s quite a unique trajectory. What happened after you left NAB and began trying other things? How did that story start?
Robby Wade: I’ll go back a little to offer more context. My parents had a small business while we were growing up. We grew up in their factory, driving around in forklifts. They sold gas and wood heaters in winter, and solar hot-water systems in summer.
I quickly realised that I never wanted to run a business. We would be there seven days a week, working with them and helping unload trucks. I went to university and studied economics and finance for three years, but didn’t graduate.
I had about four or five subjects to go and I was working as a teller at NAB at the time and got offered a job in the private bank. That required a degree to get into that job. I ended up in this weird position where I had a job that required a degree, but I didn’t have a degree yet.
I kept getting promoted and progressing through my career. It reached a point where I thought, “I don’t know what I need the degree for,” because I’d already got the job. A degree is supposed to get you your first job, but once you have a job that requires one, no one asks for it again.
I spent a lot of money and didn’t end up with the piece of paper. I did a lot of work. I wasn’t one of those romantic uni dropouts. I worked incredibly hard over three years to try to finish that off. I got the job, which is the good part. I went back to uni to ask them if I could do a test or something and just get my certificate. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
To answer your question more directly, I’d been working at NAB for quite some time and I had been investing in cryptocurrency. A good friend got me into cryptocurrency quite early. This was around late 2015 or early 2016.
In the bank back then, if you think cryptocurrency is controversial now, back then it was even more so—for drug dealers, people who were buying drugs and all of those kinds of things. There were very few people in the bank that were involved in crypto.
My business partner in Nebula Ventures, James Kouzinas, started an advisory firm. He got an opportunity with a few overseas clients and invited me to join him because I was the only other person he knew who understood crypto.
We were advising cryptocurrency companies, making pitch decks and financial models. One day I was working at the bank, having the time of my life and living in Sydney. I worked at NAB during the glory days of banking.
One of my old bosses said it wasn’t a job, it was a lifestyle. We went to lunch with clients and built really good friendships with them. It was an incredible experience for me. That experience there led to fundraising later as a startup, because I worked in the private bank at NAB, so I got to be around a lot of high net worth individuals.
I learnt how to interact, speak and build relationships with them. You realise that rich and successful people are like you. They have the same problems, and you have to be normal around them. That was an incredibly important part of my journey.
Then all of a sudden I quit my job. We were on a plane to the first client we had where we met them in Europe. We flew all around Europe and then went to Asia, ended up in the States and did various different speaking gigs and worked with different clients who were launching tokens.
It was an absolute whirlwind. I didn’t grow up as your typical entrepreneur; I was the opposite. I hadn’t started selling T-shirts on my own. I was averse to entrepreneurship because I’d grown up in an environment where you were constantly working in the business.
But there’s a saying—“mirror, mirror on the wall, I’m like my father after all” or whatever it may be. In some capacity it was in my blood, and once I took that dive, it just never stopped. Do you want me to keep going through to how ThisApp came to be?
What Robby learnt from Crypto Advisory#
James: Maybe we’ll pause and ask you to go into some of that in a bit more detail. Travelling around and meeting all those people—do you still use those kinds of skills? You said you learnt a lot about how to operate around certain individuals. And I guess the pitching you saw when you were doing crypto parallels what you do now as well.
Robby Wade: It’s not that different. When you’re in a bank trying to get a high-net-worth individual to invest in one of its products, refinance their loans through your business, restructure their family portfolio or build a relationship, you use exactly the same skills needed to get investors into ThisApp.
Very recently we weren’t originally going to introduce the concept of the token as early as we did in ThisApp. Then Web3 had accelerated over the last year or two in the venture funding space. All of a sudden I had to write some token economics and write a token paper and whatnot, but I’d done that in my advisory business. That’s what we used to do for companies. We used to build their burn rates and their cap tables. Bringing that into our company now, all of those skills have definitely transcended over.
The funny thing is that you don’t realise it’s happening along the way; it slowly manifests. I take pride in building very deep relationships with our investor base. It’s an uncommon experience for them because I’ve gone out of my way to build deep friendships.
I don’t do that for any reason other than it’s what I’ve always done. At the bank, our job was to maintain relationships with high-net-worth individuals. Many have remained friends because of the depth of those relationships, and I’ve continued that process throughout my career.
Robby’s ThisApp story#
James: Tell me, I want to hear the story now of starting ThisApp. Crypto and all that stuff is really cool, but what was the thing that happened to get you there?
Robby Wade: I’ll continue the story I was telling before, because it leads into ThisApp and requires a fair bit of context.
Robby Wade: We did the advisory stuff for about a year and a half. Then we met Adam, who you’ve interviewed on the podcast before.
Adam Geha is an incredible person who has changed my life and my business partner’s life in a number of ways. He said to us, “I think you two are great. Come and work for me.” We replied, “Look, man, we just quit our jobs, travelled the world and did all these amazing things. We don’t want to work for anyone.” He said, “How about we partner with you?”
We ended up partnering with Adam. The most humbling thing was that he invested in James and me rather than an idea. He said, “I really like you guys. I want you to find a business that you really like.” We worked with Adam on many interesting projects during that phase. In the end, we didn’t partner with him on a business, but he backed us for a couple of years, and that’s an investment I’ll never forget.
He invested in me as a human and I feel incredibly lucky to have had that opportunity because the experiences I had in that time were unbelievable in many different aspects. You’ve met Adam—he’s an incredibly deep person and there’s a lot to learn from him.
We did that and then I ended up going into a startup that I’d known from the crypto time. That was Vid. I went into Vid when there were only four or five people there. We grew that team to over 50 people. We launched our token on a couple of exchanges around the world. That was such a remarkable experience.
I was a banker and then an adviser, always on the other side of the table from the builders. Vid was the first time I went deep into a company and became involved in the product.
I was lucky enough to get the COO role—Chief Operating Officer—which, in an early-stage startup, means being the operations dude. It’s a fancy title for somebody who does all the stuff no one else wants to do: a glorified administrator. The good thing was that I had to be involved in marketing, legal, product, engineering and everything else. Because I had no preconceived notions or ego around what I already knew, I could immerse myself and learn immensely. I loved every second.
Vid was like one of those Silicon Valley experiences you see on television. We were in LA, living and working 12 hours a day in a big house with about 11 team members. It was insane. Influencers came to the house, while people made videos and coded in the living room.
It was a really cool experience to live and work in a house with the whole team. The CEO lived there too. It was the best and worst experience of my life. We never stopped working because we were always around our work. If you think remote work is bad, live-in work is completely different.
It was great. Then COVID came. The COVID bear market in crypto happened. The CEO decided to sell the company to a private equity firm.
LA was a weird place when COVID began because people were loading up on ammunition and doing that American thing. I thought I’d return to Australia for two weeks, but stayed for 11 months. I had time to reflect on all the journeys I’d been on over the previous few years. Lockdown wasn’t that bad for me because I’d spent the previous year and a half working in the Vid house every day; it wasn’t unfamiliar.
I took a few friends to my family’s farmhouse in Mystery Bay, five hours south of Sydney. We lived there among a population of about 60 people and got to enjoy our lives for a while. We weren’t in a big city with much tighter lockdowns, and the beaches were quiet.
During that phase, I wanted to start something new. I’d noticed that the startup world has incredible communication tools. It’s often easier to communicate with your colleagues than with people in your personal life, so you tend to spend more time at work.
It’s easier for you and I to organise a podcast together in different time zones when we’ve never met than it is for my mum to organise a call with me. If you just think about that—she should just be able to press my icon at the top of WhatsApp, see what times suit me, put time in my calendar and catch up.
People say your mum or your friends should just be able to call you out of the blue. Yes, that’s true. But if you call me and I’m in the middle of work or something, I’m not present. I focus to such an extent that it takes a little bit of unwinding to come out and focus on what someone’s saying.
I don’t know if you have a similar experience. When someone calls while you’re coding, you answer but aren’t fully present. If they schedule with you, you stop what you’re doing to take the call. I’ve been working all day, but I saw that I had a call with you and stopped so I could be present and have a proper conversation. Scheduled conversations are undervalued.
We took that further. We asked: how do people organise events and trips, get together and communicate? How do we bring lessons from the business world about running a coherent team into social and family life?
The depth of relationships you build in startups and work—the reason is because you work on these projects together, you organise things together, you communicate efficiently together. How can we take these lessons and bring them down into this consumer social world, not make it feel worky, but take these principles and distil them down into an app?
I’d also spent a bit of time—we had a team in China at Vid. I’d used WeChat a number of different times and I saw how inferior the chat products were in the West compared to how WeChat worked. I took a lot of lessons from that and brought them over.
I know that was a long-winded answer, but I wanted to offer you the full context of how we ended up here.
James: Thanks for listening to this episode of Graduate Theory. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Graduate Theory newsletter, you can do so at the links in the show notes. The Graduate Theory newsletter comes out every single Tuesday morning with my thoughts and lessons from each episode.
But without further ado, let’s get back into it.
What keeps Robby going#
James: That’s an interesting journey. Seeking to change chat is no easy feat. From my perspective, you’re taking on something huge: trying to become the best chat app in the West. How do you stay the course, and what drives you to persist with this goal?
Robby Wade: It’s an interesting question because we’re going against the grain of what you should do in a startup. Everyone tells you to pick one small thing and monopolise its target audience: choose a niche and go into it.
We’re doing the opposite. I have a contrarian view of that idea and the lean startup methodology. There are hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, but you probably use only five or six each day or week.
If you look at the five or six that you use every single day, they probably do more than one thing. They’re usually multifunctional apps. Whether it’s Instagram or Facebook or whatever, they do two or three things or four things. What’s tending to happen is people are building these smaller products and then these bigger companies are just buying them. I found a lot of products that were being built weren’t really businesses. They were features.
For example, I don’t see split payments as something that should be a whole app. It’s a feature to me. I don’t see something like Calendly—it’s weird to me. It’s a feature that should just be inside Google Calendar. I don’t understand how that’s a standalone product. It doesn’t make any sense.
I initially followed that methodology. The size of this challenge is exciting and makes you want to wake up and work on it every day. Now that we’ve designed the product, I can see that it needs to exist.
We haven’t picked these features out of thin air. Each is in sync with the others, and together they become greater than the sum of their parts. The iPhone isn’t simply a compass, internet access, an iPod and a phone. Combining those features unlocks experiences people couldn’t produce before because the connections didn’t exist.
How do we stay on track? It’s very difficult. I’ll be direct with you. The work is exciting enough to wake up for every day. You can tell people about the vision and investors get excited. Then you have to product-manage this beast and ask, “How are we going to get this done with our smaller team?”
With a tiny amount of funding that we’ve got compared to these juggernauts—we’ve raised a decent amount of funding from my perspective, but some of these companies we’re going up against have more money than the US government. That’s an incredibly daunting task, but I don’t think that’s an excuse to shy away from it.
You just keep going over these hurdles where you have that Dunning-Kruger effect. At the start, you’re like, “Yes, this is a brilliant idea.” Then you go down into the valley of despair thinking, “Oh my God, what have I got myself into?” But you just hit milestone after milestone. You raise your first cheque, you get your first product out, you get your first user, you raise more money. You hire more team members, you build more feature sets and you just keep solving problems to the extent where you generate so much momentum. You get to a stage where it’s harder to not do it than to do it.
That’s a useful framework. Right now, it would be harder for me to stop than to keep going. We’ve built so much momentum towards where we need to be that I would have to work hard to go the other way, which is a strange position to reach.
James: It’s cool that you’re excited about what you’re doing and that the passion is definitely there, which I think is so important. I think often young people today—and it’s maybe a trend that’s starting to come off—are more concerned about having a mission and having that positive impact on the world, rather than being a manager at a bank where it’s not super clear what benefit you’re providing.
Robby Wade: My business partner and I used to call NAB “the pit.” You’ve seen the Batman film where he goes into the pit and has to climb out of the well. You have to work at some of these big companies because, even though they suck, you learn so many lessons: how to interact, read, write emails, raise money and work with high-net-worth individuals. You become the type of person who can fulfil a mission.
It’s one thing to have a mission and another to be the type of person who can fulfil it. The mission is useless unless you have the skills to make it possible.
A lot of people have different views on Gary V. I don’t follow him that closely, but one thing I do like about Gary V is his understanding of how long life is. I always have to remind myself of this. Sometimes when you’re young, you’re in such a rush to fulfil your mission that you don’t realise how long 10 years is.
If I think about 10 years ago, I was working at McDonald’s at uni and trying to get by. I was a manager at McDonald’s, going clubbing every second weekend or whatever. You think about what happened over the next 10 years, and I’m like, “When I’m 38, 39, that’s another whole period, except I have all these lessons and skills.” The compound interest of that is an order of magnitude higher.
But at the time it’s so hard to see those things and to be able to think long-term. I’ve been lucky to have really great mentors and work around people who have supported me and backed me and taught me.
The problem is that when you’re young and have a mission, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t realise how naive you are, how long life can be or how hard certain things are.
The value of doing a shitty job is understated. At McDonald’s, you’re doing 10,000 hours with 14-year-old staff members who tell you to get stuffed. They don’t want to do anything. You’re trying to rally people who earn 10 bucks an hour flipping cheeseburgers and get them excited about their work.
That’s hard. You have people complaining to you that it’s taking too long to make orders. Excuse me, can you feed a family? I dare you to go home and try to feed your family of four in three minutes. I dare you to do it and get your 12-year-old son to do the cooking. It’s remarkable.
I think these things offer you a lot of perspective. A lot of people ask, “How do you deal with the stress?” This isn’t stressful compared to a Friday night shift at McDonald’s. I think those kinds of perspectives are important.
I often think about Nolan, one of the engineers I hired straight out of university. Nolan grinds and works his arse off, which is a beautiful thing. But people sometimes think working for a startup is epic, with good work-life balance, perks and exciting, fun experiences. You don’t get that at McDonald’s or NAB.
It’s valuable to know what sucks. People who grow up in low socioeconomic environments are incredibly hardworking and appreciate what they have. You can artificially create some of that perspective by having a shitty job at some point in your life. It helps when you later work in different environments.
James: That was really funny and really interesting to hear.
Robby Wade: I’ve never said that out loud. Thank you for drawing that out, but it’s important.
James: I liked the point about how sometimes doing things that aren’t so good gives you perspective and allows you to almost enjoy the good things more. If you’ve seen things that aren’t so good—like working at McDonald’s on a Friday night or whatever—it puts things in perspective.
Robby Wade: It’s so important. My job at McDonald’s was to make sure that the back area had enough meat and nuggets—enough meat and chicken—so that when we went into a rush, we wouldn’t run out. And that the order-taker had enough cash in her drawer. And that the order-taker had somebody taking orders as well. And that we had enough people at the front and everyone was positioned.
It’s not that different from a startup. I have to make sure engineers have their designs, designers have their product specifications, and the marketing team interacts with both groups. At McDonald’s, you make sure all the jobs come together to produce a quality product. It’s a microcosm of what you do at a grand scale in a startup, except the result is a cheeseburger in a bag rather than an app.
Robby’s Learning Journey and Engineering#
James: I’d love to talk about your engineering experience at work and the learning that goes along with going from NAB to where you are now and all the things you’ve had to learn in that time. One thing we spoke about before this was learning engineering stuff and how you didn’t study computer science at uni, but having to learn that has been really beneficial and a great part of what you do. I’d love to hear about all the things you’ve had to learn over this period and what, looking back now, have been some of the really important things you’ve learned on your journey to where you are.
Robby Wade: I’ll start with the engineering environment. My engineers would probably roll over laughing if people said I had an engineering base, but I take it as an incredible compliment. I’ve spent a lot of time developing a deep enough understanding of that environment.
I didn’t study as an engineer. I wasn’t trained as an engineer. I wouldn’t even call myself an engineer. But what I would say proudly is I’ve spent a lot of time to understand engineering. I’ve also done that in design as well.
That’s the benefit of being a COO: you spend a lot of time in different environments. Those of us without design or engineering backgrounds tend to have imposter syndrome and think we aren’t smart enough to understand that work. Sometimes, when you speak to people, they’ll make it sound more complicated than it is.
I heard Jacqueline Novogratz talk about this, and it made a difference in my career. She made a career out of asking stupid questions and continuing to pull the string. I’m reasonably intelligent. I wouldn’t say I’m the smartest person in the world, but I can generally understand something if I read it or someone explains it to me.
What I’ve learned in my life is if somebody can’t explain something to me, then they either don’t understand it or they’re lying. The best people in the world who care and who are doing the right thing by you—if they know what they’re talking about, the definition of knowing what you’re talking about is that you can explain it to somebody else. If you know what you’re talking about, you can teach somebody. If somebody is not willing to teach you, you probably shouldn’t be around them anyway, or they’re lying to you, or they don’t know what they’re talking about.
The first principles of design and engineering have many similarities. You don’t have to understand every line of code, but I’ve spent a lot of time understanding why things are hard.
Then you start to draw these parallels when you’ve been doing it enough. You say, “We did that speech bubble thing the other day that had metadata. You said it was hard for this reason. So why would video be hard? Isn’t video just moving pictures?” I’m just giving a dumb example. But my point is, you start to get your own understanding and you can challenge people on what they’re saying. You say, “Hang on a second, I understood what you were saying before, which means that if I understood that, the thing that you’re saying now doesn’t make any sense.”
The more questions you ask and the more inquisitive you become, the more knowledge you build, until you can bring an intelligent perspective to the conversation.
I think CEOs and people who consider themselves non-creative or non-technical are lazy when they don’t spend the time with their team and ask them why they’re making the decisions they’re making. Our whole product is design and engineering. If I don’t spend time learning what it means to be a designer and an engineer, how can I do my job? And how can I get my team to respect me? Not respect me in the sense that I’m the leader and you need to do what I say, but why should they care about what I think if I don’t understand what they do?
That’s an undervalued part of the job. If you’re neither technical nor a designer and don’t understand how hard things are, you can become the ignorant CEO who says, “Get that done in two weeks,” or, “You’re fired.” You pulled that timeframe out of your arse. You have no idea how hard the work is, what skills the person has, what’s possible or how many resources they need. You can’t have an intelligent conversation with them; you’re being a tyrannical dictator and throwing out a random timeframe, which is incredibly dangerous.
You have this romanticism in startups where everyone’s seen the movies where they make their team work nine hours a day, seven days a week to push out a feature set or something. You can think about that romantically.
I think about this—I do a bit of long distance running. If you say you’re training for a marathon, you might be able to do one marathon a month. You burn your team out, then you need to let them rest so that they can recover. Or they can do five Ks a day for 25 days. A marathon is 42 kilometres. Five Ks a day for 25 days is a hundred kilometres.
If you think about that as product evolution, I’d rather they do a hundred kilometres of development than smash themselves pushing out one marathon effort. A consistent cadence is better, but building it requires understanding their jobs and mapping out the product roadmap in a sophisticated way.
I would never say that I’m an engineer or a designer or anything like that, but I can proudly say that I’ve spent a lot of time understanding these areas of the business so that I can be a good leader and work reasonably with my team. It’s offensive when you question them on things that you have no idea what you’re talking about—“How is this not done yet? Why haven’t you done this in this timeframe?” when you don’t know anything. You don’t want to be that guy. That’s something to think about.
Failures that turned out to be a success#
James: I think one question I have for you is around failures. I wonder if there’s been any particular failures you can think of that turned out to be a success later. Is there anything that comes to mind? Any times where you’ve failed at something but it ended up turning out well?
Robby Wade: I think there are so many. There’s value in everything that you do. In previous relationships—romantic partners and stuff—I’ve failed certain romantic partners, but then became a better partner for every subsequent partner after that. It’s the same in business.
We’ve done well in each business and my peers and family and friends would consider that we achieved things and succeeded. But there were essences and elements that I failed at, that we failed at. You fail in micro ways all the time. I think those elements—you keep them as a reminder to keep yourself on track.
In terms of huge failures, I can’t think of anything specific where it’s been a failure that has really crushed me as a person and sent me into a dark place that I’ve had to recover from, or where I’ve dramatically let people down or whatever it might be.
Failure is a perspective in many different ways. It depends on what your goal was. One of my favourite quotes that I live by is: “You’re entitled to the action and never its fruits.” If I wake up every day and live by my values—my code of ethics—and I do what I say that I’m going to do to the people that I promised, it’s very difficult to fail.
I was talking to a VC yesterday and this would be a good example for a lot of the entrepreneurs out there. I don’t know if you guys have heard of Fast. It was an Australian startup that ended up closing down very recently. They raised a lot of money and then—this particular investor had invested in Fast, he was one of the early investors. He said that Dom, the founder of Fast, is working on something soon and he was going to show him.
I asked, “Would you invest again?” He said, “Absolutely.” The way Dom conducted himself as CEO during that time was incredibly impressive. He respected his investors and did what he promised at board meetings. It simply didn’t work out, but he didn’t lie. The investor said, “Have you seen Rocky? Rocky doesn’t win the title in the first one. He wins it in the second one.”
It’s an interesting dynamic. One time I brought myself up from the ashes was in my early twenties, when I suffered severe anxiety. I’d been a social person, then reached a place where I couldn’t go to dinner with my girlfriend, attend parties or easily leave the house.
I was somebody who had already been in the bank and was having a lot of early stage success. Everybody was saying, “You’re going to have a big career and you’re going to succeed heaps.” Then I went into this bout of anxiety where I found it hard just to do the day-to-day meaningless tasks.
I could call that a failure in some capacity, but it was an important experience. It wasn’t a failure; it simply happened. Before we started recording, I told you that I used to think people with anxiety and depression needed to get over it. I’d studied some psychology at university but didn’t understand it.
But going through it was an incredibly potent experience for me, because I can empathise with people now who have different mental issues. I would have never anticipated I’d be the type of person that would have something like that.
How I came out of that was building a really strong relationship with fear and risk. A lot of my anxiety was around fear. I just started doing stuff—I would feel like I was going to have a heart attack when I would go to the gym and different things like that.
I started to just challenge myself. I’d say, “I’m just going to go and run 10 or 20 Ks. If we’re going to have a heart attack, we’ll have a heart attack. We haven’t had one yet.” I used to have this concept of me versus my mind. My body would be scared about something and I would just go and do it. I would do the thing that I was terrified to do.
When I was in my early twenties, you couldn’t have paid me a million dollars to go tandem skydiving. The epitome of that journey was learning to skydive solo. I have a parachute in my closet and go skydiving from time to time; it’s one of my favourite activities. That was the pinnacle of my journey with fear.
It told me a really important lesson in startups in the sense that our bodies have fear for a reason—to keep us alive. We have to fear something. If you don’t build a good relationship with fear, it’s going to hold you back in many different capacities.
For some people, what’s scary is people seeing them wearing the wrong T-shirt or posting a photo on Instagram that doesn’t get any likes or whatever it is. But I’ve trained my body that what’s scary is being at 40,000 feet, jumping out of an airplane, or being deep into a really long marathon or a triathlon. It’s scary when you’re at 38 Ks and you feel like you’re going to die.
You teach your body what is actually scary. I think it’s an undervalued thing in terms of putting yourself in environments that are genuinely fearful. Now I don’t give a shit what people think about what I’m wearing or what I’m doing. People ask, “You’re going on that investor call—are you nervous? How do you handle it?” It’s not scary for me. I don’t even get that anxious leading into an investor call because the level of anxiety that I felt sitting in a plane at 40,000 feet and seeing the door open and having to jump out of an airplane—getting on a Zoom call with somebody is easy.
Thinking about doing a triathlon where you have to swim two kilometres in freezing water—when you do these things that are incredibly difficult and incredibly scary, these trivial things that people think are scary are no longer scary anymore.
I’ll end on this—it’s not an answer to your question about failure, but it’s a funny thing Jesse said the other day. When you’re young, you tend to compare what other people are doing and worry about what they think. That’s an important part of doing a startup: everyone will tell you you’re wrong and stupid, and you have to get through that.
But Jesse was talking about how little people think about you. Everyone says, “No one’s thinking about you,” but he put it into perspective in a way I’d never heard before. I use my iPhone for six hours every day. He said, “Do you know how often I think about Steve Jobs?” Think about that. You use his product constantly and he’s changed your entire life. How often do you think about Steve Jobs? Never.
The Wright brothers invented the airplane. You think about legacy and all these kinds of things. Whenever you’re on an airplane, are you thinking about how amazing the Wright brothers are and how they created this airplane for you? No, you’re sitting there worried about whenever they’re going to bring a glass of water or whatever stupid movie is on, Men in Black on the TV or whatever.
It’s an incredibly important mindset to get. It’s easy to think everyone always says no one cares about what you think, but think about the people that you actually think about. These people who have fundamentally changed the world in its entire capacity—you don’t even think about them.
When was the last time you thought about Winston Churchill? Winston Churchill saved the world from disaster. JFK saved the world from nuclear disaster. When was the last time you thought, “Man, JFK, such a good dude”? Never. It’s really important to not take yourself that seriously, because no one’s going to think about you. If I build ThisApp and I get a billion users and do all these things, no one gives a shit in reality.
That’s a relationship you have to build.
James: That’s a really good way to put it. Thanks for sharing that. I think there’s a thread there between hard things leading to better experiences—like the running and things like that, putting yourself in difficult situations. It puts in perspective these other situations similar to the McDonald’s experience—having that hard experience makes the other things easier.
Robby Wade: If you think about it, most things aren’t that hard. Your perception of what it’s going to take—in theory, when you’re talking to a venture capitalist, you’re just having a conversation. You have conversations every single day. It’s just a conversation, but you’ve created a story around that conversation that makes it hard.
In some capacity, most things are easier than you think. The anxiety and procrastination you apply to them add weight. Some things are hard, but those you obsess over usually aren’t worth it.
Robby’s Advice for Graduates#
James: I’ve got one question left, and it’s a question I ask all the guests that come on the show. If you were looking at the Robby that’s just finished university and he’s about to go into the world and tackle his job, what advice would you give him knowing what you know now and all the experiences that you’ve had?
Robby Wade: So easy. I would just say read and run every day. If you read books every day and run every day, I guarantee your life will change forever. If you just do those two things, even if you start with a kilometre and a page, those two things are so unique in their capacity.
I’ll be brief. Reading gives you mentors, knowledge and understanding; it levels up your education. Running gets you outside, which is important for your circadian rhythm and mental wellbeing.
When you run through space and your eyes move, it relaxes you and makes you calm. Cardiovascular exercise can promote neurogenesis in your hippocampus, supporting its health and improving your memory.
If you’re running every day, your memory is going to be better. If your memory is better, you’re going to be learning more. If you’re learning more, very likely you’re going to be fit and educated. It’s pretty hard for your life to go south if you just focus on those two things.
I think everyone can give you all these weird anecdotes and statements and all those kinds of things, but practically, try to read and run at least once a day. I think your life would just transform from there. You learn what you need to do next just by doing those two.
Contact Robby#
James: That’s really cool. Absolutely agree with that. Thanks for coming on the show today, Robby. Where can people go to find out more about ThisApp, the app you’re building, your life in general—where’s the best place for them to find out more?
Robby Wade: They can go to ThisApp.com. At the moment we’re in beta, so you can’t download the app yet. We are looking to release it soon. But if you go to ThisApp.com, you can claim your username now, so you can keep that forever. It’s a good way to lock that down.
Jump over there. We’re on all the socials like Twitter and TikTok, Instagram and all those kinds of wonderful things. If you do have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on any social platform. I’ll get back to you. Look forward to seeing you all on board.
Thanks for taking the time, James.
James: No problem, man. It’s been really cool having you on and hearing your background and your story. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.
Robby Wade: Thanks man.
Outro#
James: Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. If you want to get my takeaways, the things that I learned from this episode, please go to GraduateTheory.com/subscribe, where you can get my takeaways and all the information about each episode, straight to your inbox.
Thanks so much for listening again today, and we’re looking forward to seeing you next week.