Transcription
So let's imagine you have to start a company again. Walk me through the first 30 days. What will you do?
If I have to start a company again, I think the first thing is this is Yan, co-founder and CEO of Opus Clip, an AI tool that turns long videos into viral short clips. In just 2 and 1/2 years, he built it into one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world. 50 million users, $215 million valuation. LLMs are advancing so fast and large companies are releasing better and better products. Do you think there are any niches or problems that are not worth solving anymore?
If you ask me like 3 years ago, the answer will be much simpler. I think every AI founder should be somehow AGIP, which means that you can predict what the financial models can release in the next few weeks or months.
The rules have changed and most founders don't see it yet. Young breaks down where the opportunities are, what to avoid, and what it takes to win in 2026. This video is sponsored by HubSpot.
Okay, Young, thank you so much for being here. You've built one of the fastest growing AI companies, 12 million users in 12 months, 215 million in valuation. Can you introduce yourself in 60 seconds? What do you do?
Thank you for having me, Marina. Um, I'm Yan, co-founder and CEO at Opus Clip. We built the products that turn long-form dense information content like articles, blogs, footage, papers into engaging content like short-form videos that can attract your audiences worldwide. We have gathered actually more than 15 million users in the past 2 and a half years.
What? This is crazy. Wow.
Super crazy.
And also like your story is fascinating cuz you started during COVID and you started with all the different features and only this one stuck. Can you talk to me about this mindset of like trying things and seeing them not work and not giving up?
Yeah. Um, it's kind of frustrating for sure. I think in the early days, like we are like new founders or early founders. Um, it's actually the passion that drove us to continuously try different things. Uh, but like probably after half a year or even one year of trying, like let's say three to four different things, if you don't still get any early signals of the product-market fit, you will be easily fatigued. Um, so I think that's the challenge. And we're kind of lucky that we first built a live-streaming tool. Um, nobody liked it, but there's only one feature that is like, um, the clipping feature in the live stream tool, uh, that had somehow early signal of the product-market fit. And also thanks to that time, which, you know, actually in the same week was launched by OpenAI. Um, so we quickly married that to this, you know, standalone feature and pivoted to a new product, which is the Opus Clip right now.
What should people pay attention to when they decide to double down on one particular feature?
Good question. So, we were not tracking any classic OG, um, ARR kind of metric. We didn't build a product for Opus Clip in the in the first day. We actually engineered the result, the final outcome, the final videos, and just emailed them to all of the potential customers.
Oh, so you're like manually creating?
[laughter] We, we, we manually, we, we work with the AI to edit all these videos and write and send out to all the, um, potential customers. And I think we got like more than 60% of positive feedback.
I love this clip. I want to use it. Like, I just want to tweak one thing and, you know, I can publish it right away. So those are the very early feedback. And then, like after a few more weeks, we built the product into a Discord bot. Still no interface, right? So we save a lot of time building the, you know, UI/UX and all that, all that kind of stuff, and just focus on delivering the value, validating the outcome. So we grabbed, you know, hundreds of, uh, thousands of, uh, creators into our Discord channel, and they are playing with the bot. So what we were looking at, or basically their retention, right? Their engagement of that tool. And, but, but beyond that, we also look into the discussions around the content. Like we saw people, "Hey, how do you get that content? How do you get that piece of, um, the clip?" So I think in the early days, quantitative data are important, but qualitative, um, [snorts] data or feedback is also super important. When we start hearing people, uh, complaining about the queue, complaining about the quota of their daily usage, we realize this is the part of market fit moment.
Nice. And was there a metric, uh, when you said you were tracking how often people were coming back to the bot in Discord? What's a good number? 'Cause I feel like it's not something like Google, right? When you're like, "Googling several times a day." But for a feature like yours, what's, what's a good metric?
Yeah, the general use case for a content creator, let's say, they would normally have like one piece of long-form content, uh, long-form footage, and they want to use our tool to generate like 5 to 10 short clips so that they can post to their channels, one clip a day. Um, so I would say the average, uh, frequency of using our tool is like on a weekly basis. But when we see people like come to use it every day or, you know, multiple times a week, that is a very strong usage.
Yeah. Beyond what we can imagine.
So based on this story that we just talked about, of you ended up finding this feature, what would be your advice to all the startup founders? What would you say is the key learning from that?
The key learning is that you should build a real business with a product, not a cool demo. Right? Because many people just start with building a very cool demo. Um, they showed it off to the people, and you know, it looks like magic because the demo really demonstrates—
You polish the way it looks, right? Works.
Yeah. Yeah. So the demo shows a very strong capability, but, um, many founders failed because they didn't find a product-market fit for a real business. What that means is that they are not solving, probably they're not solving a real pain point, a real painful job to be done in the real world. Because for your product, if it is a real painful job to be done, there must be a lot of alternative solutions. Like, you know, humans do the job, or they build some internal tools, or they manually just, you know, concatenate couple of different snippets of the, or solutions to make it work, right? They spend extra time, effort, or, you know, painful hours to get the job done.
So are you really replacing those type of like tedious or human-heavy workflows? That is one part of, you know, whether it is a real business. The second thing would be how your customers, uh, understand the value you created, right? If you can tell your product value in just like 10 words, maybe, or probably you're close to a real business. If your product is just cool, and all the feedback was like, "This is amazing, this is awesome," but nobody wants to give you, uh, their credit card information. Nobody wants to ask you, "What is your pricing tier?" It's also not helping you, um, get to the product-market fit as well.
I really like the way you approached this. So you figured out the problem that people are solving manually, and then you created a product manually without any interface, and then you saw early users' feedback. I really like that approach. If people want to use that approach, what would you say comes first? Passion about a particular problem, or the problem itself?
Yeah, I would say both of them are super critical. Um, but my first principle for passion is actually not necessarily the passion for solving the problem. I think passion is something more emotional. Um, I think all the entrepreneurs, all the founders need to have the passion to be a problem solver. You need to have the passion to be a builder, to build something that people want, to build something that, you know, ideally changes the world. I think that's the passion founders need, right? You don't have to have a passion for, like, video clipping. You don't have to have a passion for, like, you know, running a restaurant. I think all you need to have for a passion is to be a problem solver, be a builder, be a game-changer. And rationally speaking, the real painful job to be done is something that is inevitable in your journey. Um, you have to be very rational to figure out, "This is a real problem to be solved by my passion," right? Um, so the deep understanding about the industry, about the workflow, about the customer profiles, about the use cases, those are all rational. Um, so I think an emotional passion for, like, a bigger picture, just to be a builder, plus, um, the rational conviction for solving a concrete problem that you know very well. Those are the necessities for becoming a founder.
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Let's talk about your new agent, Opus. Because I was, I heard this presentation where you compared, uh, where your tool, your tool is doing now to human editors. And yes, human editors are slightly better, but when it comes to someone who's just starting out multiple channels, Agent Opus becomes invaluable because it just takes all the content, creates, I guess, all those channels. Can you explain how it works?
We currently have two products, right? The Opus Clip product is like a very refined workflow, um, or agentic workflow that follows, um, a rigid, um, plan and then executes it. The Agent Opus, on the other side, is more, um, is more agentic. Um, there is no preset workflow. Um, and the interaction for users is that you can just drop your, um, drop your idea, your story, or some links, or some, you know, assets, and instruct the agent to do whatever you want them to create.
So the agent is more, is playing the role like a director, right? It's not a video editor. It's not a video creator. It's not a video generator. It's not a designer. It is a director. And think about, you know, how directors work in those, uh, movie studios. They are like a true leader, um, managing and collaborating with multiple different functions. Like there are designers, producers, um, artists, um, researchers, and scriptwriters, scene writers, right? There are so many sub-agents in Agent Opus, all reporting to the central director agent. Um, so I think that's the magic part of it. Um, because when, well, everyone says, "I'm using AI, I'm building AI," but I think building a team of AI is another level of challenge, but it also unlocks another level of superpower. So when, when we saw that, um, agent, the Agent Opus was the central director agent, you know, designing a plan and also orchestrating among the other 8 to 9 agents. It is a truly end-to-end autonomous experience where the input is just some article or pieces of news, while the output consists like, you know, well-written script, polished voiceovers, um, photorealistic avatars, real-world assets sourced from the entire internet, and also YouTube, plus AI-generated scenes, animations, infographics along the video. So, it's a true multi-agent, multimodal agent workflow.
And so, or I can drop my LinkedIn post, right, which is a written post, and you'll be able to create a video out of it?
Yeah, exactly.
So, can you show the new AI feature? Because this is something that we're doing a lot. We're trying to repurpose whatever is going viral on LinkedIn. This is so funny. I posted myself sitting in the garage on a call because my kids were going crazy upstairs and I just couldn't take the call upstairs, and I'm like in this messy garage, I'm freezing. Um, and it got 120,000 impressions.
And ideally, I want it to become, you know, something else I can post. So for sure.
So I copy the link, right?
Yeah, you copy and paste. You can just say like, "Create a video of this LinkedIn post." And—
Should I add more prompts like, "Make it a viral reel" or—
Yeah.
Or it should, or it's like pre-prompted or something?
Yeah, it's pre-prompted, but you can always, always add, um, or you can add some thought on it. Um, up to you. So, and for voice, you want to also create your own voice, but let's just like use our default AI voice. Um, everything.
What is the hook?
Hook is that we have different, um, hook templates like the fast cuts, article highlight. Right now, it's kind of slow. Uh, so probably takes about like 30 to 60 minutes.
Oh, 30 to 60 minutes?
Yeah, we're optimizing this speed, hopefully we can get to like 20 minutes in two months. I'm going to show you the result.
[laughter]
Work and home lives blend together now more than ever. A constant zigzag between professional calls and family chaos.
Okay. So with all of this, what will happen to creators in three years? So like, in general, the creator economy, how do you see it evolving with all the agentic tools?
I think the entry barrier to create something is going to dissolve so that everyone has the superpower to become a creator. Um, that's a brutal fact. Um, and it makes the competition much more challenging, to be honest. But the good thing is that, um, everyone now doesn't have to think about, you know, "What tool do I need to use?" or "What techniques, what expertise do I need to learn?" But now you can focus on figuring out, "What is your uniqueness? How should you stand out?" Right? "What is your unique narrative, your story? What is your unique messaging? What is your unique tone?" Um, "What sets you apart?" Um, so just focus on yourself, focus on your own storytelling. And in, you know, point of two years, no more than three years, AI can just deliver the job for you. They're doing actually the dirty work for you, but you're going to be the real creative one.
But it's crazy. The competition is going to be insane.
It is.
Do you think there's less and less time to build a personal brand? Because what happens if in three years, everyone has access to tools, everyone tells a story, and then we don't have enough eyes to consume all that content? Do you ever worry about it?
I don't worry that too much. Um, because think about like 10 years ago, 5 years ago, when you want to build a personal brand, um, I think most of the time you're, you're wasting is to, um, you know, edit the video scene by scene, right? Is to design, design your colors, design, um, everything like page by page. I think that's how you wasted the time. So the analogy is that, is that if you have to spend five months, um, building your personal, personal branding from zero to one, but nowadays it's like you just need a couple weeks.
My like thing because I started 10 years ago and I remember editing all the videos. Something that set me apart was the willingness to do that. So my content was super mediocre, but because I took the chance of like, you know, spending six hours to edit a video, I got my followers. It's impossible today. Like, if my content is mediocre, it's not going to be noticed. That's the thing, right? So, your story either has to be extraordinary, or, or that's it. Do you think we still have this opportunity to showcase our personal brands, or because there's so many, we're getting saturated?
The good storyteller, um, or the, the real unique people can still, um, have the advantage. Uh, think about, um, you know, carriage versus cars, right? 100 years ago, very few people have cars. Uh, so it became a privilege to be, you know, one of the fastest people in the world. Nowadays, everyone is able to to drive a car. Almost everyone is able to drive a car. Um, but there are still Formula 1 drivers. There are still, you know, WDC drivers who are, you know, way faster than the ordinary people. So I think this probably, you know, 10 years ago, you showed your willingness to become, to build your personal branding by, uh, spending extra time, um, writing content, um, polishing your website, editing the videos. But I think in the future, you, people who want to stand out should still probably spend the same amount of time on something else. Not using the tools, not, you know, building by yourself, but the time should be spent on thinking it through, how you should stand out. So I think time spent, probably the same, but the actual work are completely different, which is more human, actually.
Yeah. Yeah. I like that reflection. I like the car analogy, actually. Thank you.
So let's imagine, uh, you have to start a company again. Now walk me through the first 30 days. What will you do?
If I have to start a company again, the first thing is always to figure out what is, what is a real painful job to be done. Um, I want to, so I, I'm the prototype of founder who don't start everything from technology, but from, um, users, from the market. Um, I have to segment my market, um, to a very clear, very vertical niche that I can clearly understand their existing workflow, their existing pain point, um, their existing alternative solutions. And then, so I think probably I, I would have to spend, you know, the first couple weeks, um, two or three weeks understanding the real use case, um, the very specific ICP. Um, and the second thing is to just engineer a, you know, prototype or proof of concept. I can do that very easily with all the web coding tools right now.
Right. What's your favorite?
Uh, well, I'm a heavy, um, Cursor user. Um, but I, I tried many other different tools, but Cursor is my go-to, go-to tool. Yeah. Cuz I came from an engineering background, so it's, um, yeah, more familiar with the IDE. The step two is actually just, um, couple days should be good enough, um, to have a proof of concept. Uh, and then I go back to share that with the early users, um, the ICPs to get, you know, their feedback. Uh, the feedback should not only be about, "Do you like the product?" but also like, "What kind of problems am I solving for you?" and "What is the value you perceive?" which means, "How much money are you willing to pay for it?" Um, right? So that, that process probably is the majority of the early 30 days. But I think on the other side, I'm also, I also need to think it through about what kind of proprietary data can I possess along the way, and will that data set grow as the product grow, as the user grow, right? We don't have to build toward a moat, um, or a very clear plan of differentiability, but I think we need to have that idea at least well thought in the first early days. Um, because you can't avoid it, right? When you really launch the product. So it's better to have something in mind, have some idea in mind.
Like what makes you stand out in the market and what makes people come back.
Yeah. And if you ask this question, especially nowadays, especially we are entering 2026, we're switching between apps like crazy. Like there's a new shiny app, you install it, you're like, "Oh, I love it now." But the next day, something else comes out, and it's so easy unless you have history within a certain app. Right.
Exactly. So the last thing I think we should consider is the distribution channel. Um, I think the competition is totally different. Yeah. Two years ago, two years ago, you can easily say, "You are the ChatGPT of ABC." It's so easy to go viral, right? At that time. Nowadays, like everyone knows AI, everyone has used AI. Um, so figuring out a distribution channel will help you better refine your user experience, your onboarding, and also, um, your target ICP as well.
So, [snorts] basically, you start with expertise. It looks like you need to understand at least one niche to be able to build something, not like, "Oh, this market looks good, I'm going to try and build something for it." No, you need to be deep in that market and understand the problem.
Exactly. Because you asked me a question. Uh, the assumption is today, right? AI has been there for like more than 3 years. The LLM has been there for more than 3 years, right? It's because if you ask me like 3 years ago, the answer was will be much simpler. But nowadays,
Just build with AI.
[laughter] But now when you know LLMs are advancing so fast and large companies are releasing better and better products. Do you think there are any niches or problems that are not worth solving anymore just because big companies can take over in like a week?
I think two major types of problems that a founder should avoid. Um, the first one is that you are just building a feature for an existing type of ICP (ideal customer profile) within an existing workflow built by the incumbent. So basically, what that means is that, um, the incumbents can easily build a feature that, you know, bundles everything, right? And probably you won't have your own distribution channel. For example, I think like if you want to build a note-taker, think it through, right? Probably find another direction because it's super easy for Zoom or, you know, Google Meet to have that feature in their existing workflow because you're targeting basically the same ICP, same market, same almost, you know, same or adjacent use cases attached to a big workflow, a big platform. I think every AI founder should be somehow AGIP, which means that you can predict or you should be confident to make some predictions about what the financial models can release in the next few weeks or months, right? If they are already doing, you know, some job 80% very well, 90% very well, I think it's, you know, in their second, in their next few releases, they can probably do that job like 99% well or even 100%, right? So, um, run that test in your internal strategic discussions. If you're just becoming a wrapper with some prompts, then probably you don't have to write any prompts in the second release, in the next release of, um, Gemini or ChatGPT. You need to focus on solving like a vertical business problem by, like, integrating the workflow end-to-end, right? You need to own the workflow end-to-end so that, you know, AI is part of the workflow, but it's not all. Instead, like if you build a wrapper with some prompt engineering, AI is almost the end-to-end workflow itself.
Can you also walk me through, um, the process of coming up with pricing for an AI tool? How do you decide on, 'cause I know you have a lower tier, but then you also have like a $20k check for, um, bigger companies. How do you come up with the price?
Pricing is a, is a real science. [laughter] So, couple of factors we, uh, considered in the first place. For example, first, what is your value creation? How to measure your value creation? Right? Um, before using your product, what would your users do to achieve the goal, to get the job to be done? Uh, they probably, you know, spend their own time, which there is a price for their own time, right? They probably outsource it to some vendors or, um, yeah, they pay humans to get the job done, or they may like use some like OG tools, uh, by some professional guys, like in our use case, professional editors, to to get the job done. So in our industry, like editing a clip, editing a like a [snorts] viral-ready high-quality clip, one-minute clip often takes about an hour or at least 30 minutes, and the price, the market price is about $25 to $50.
So that's the value creation we're benchmarking against. The second thing is about your unit economics. Um, because you have inference cost, and that can even that can go down in the future, but it's still very pricey in the early days. And also for videos, another elephant in the room for the cost is the storage. The storage can be just 5% in the early days, but it can become like 50% of your total COGS after 3 or 5 years.
Yeah. So the unit economics, you want to make sure it's healthy, it's, um, sustainable. The third one, I would say, just do as many experiments as possible. We actually send out like thousands of surveys in the first few months, and we tweaked our pricing logic again and again. Well, in the early days, right, you don't want to change drastically in the, in the late stage, but in the early stage, um, we, we did a lot of surveys, customer interviews to understand how much they are willing to pay. Um, because even you have a clear value creation and a well-calculated, um, unit economics, can users still perceive that, right? Is your metric clear enough for users to understand the value creation, you know, to buy in your value creation? That is still relying on your market messaging and also your, um, metric setup. Like most of the products are using a metric of usage instead of seat. I think that makes sense, especially for solo printers. Um, but the experiment really tells us what price to go because you don't have to, uh, set up a price that everyone are happy with. You probably have an assumption or hypothesis of what kind of customers you want to target too, right? All you need to do is to make sure those ICPs are okay, are happy with the price. You probably have to say no to like 70% of the early-stage users, but you should be to only focus on your ICP in in the early days, and then maybe you can develop other, you know, pricing or even product, um, capabilities for the rest of the users.
Yeah, the importance of saying no, right? All the time. When you said you do customer interviews, how many interviews do you need to do in order to land on some kind of a decision?
I think the number of customer interviews are not the key, um, but how you do it is more important. Um, I think we did about 20 to 30, um, for on average for one single, um, critical product decision. But we set the distribution of the those 20 to 30, um, customers in a very, um, diverse way where like, okay, four marketers, you know, five creators, and also they're in different industries. They're, they come with different, you know, purchasing power, come from different geographic locations, backgrounds. You want to make sure they are representative enough to help you make a decision.
You don't need a lot, but you need to have a clear, concise set of, um, testers.
Yeah, you want to make sure you get like a full picture of the market.
That's really helpful for the research and validation phase. Now, once you're in building mode, what about the AI skills? What is the number one AI skill everyone should be working on right now?
The number one AI skill is should actually go for first principles. It doesn't matter like if you're using AI for, um, you know, designing your poster, um, you're coding your prototype. I think everyone should treat AI as your thinking partner or even thought partner. Which means that when you are having a problem of understanding your users, when you are having a problem of managing your teams, when you are having problems of, um, figuring out your pricing, or, you know, all the critical decisions in your lifetime, uh, when you are a founder, I think traditionally you will just go reach out to your coach or some more senior people, or people with relevant experience, right, to ask for their advice. But I think in this era of AI, you should run through it with your, with, you know, Gemini or ChatGPT. They are actually a very, very senior, very important thinking partner. Just, you know, instead of like asking one line of questions, throw as many contexts as possible, and also, you know, do like more than 20 rounds of back-and-forth communications. You will be mind-blowingly enlightened through these conversations. So nowadays, that's how I practice myself.
Do you have a certain daily practice that you have? I talked to Mustafa Suleyman on this podcast. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI, and he shared that every single day he would talk to Copilot and just tell Copilot about what the day has been like and the decisions that he's made and how those decisions made him feel. So that when in three months, he has something like a similar problem, he still talks to the same thread and Copilot, and Copilot will be like, "Oh, when you made that decision three months ago, you actually regretted it. So this time, let's do this." Is there something similar that you have?
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Because I think the current, uh, chatbot memory is so powerful that, so what I, um, like monthly, one of my monthly rituals is that I ask ChatGPT about, you know, what are my major decisions in the past month, um, you know, give me some comment, feedback on—
But that means you shared every single—
I shared everything. Yeah.
How does it like, every night you just sit and like, "These are the decisions I made"? Or—
Yeah. Sometimes I, you know, talk to the AI in that way, and sometimes I would just, um, um, forward my decisions, just, um, like I captured like screenshots of our group discussion. Um, I dropped a link of my, the document of a PRD of a spec, that kind of thing too. I, yeah, I, I kind of forced myself to—
To document.
Yeah. To document it.
So you said Gemini is the best for it? Or—
Yeah. I'm, um, I'm, I'm heavily using both Gemini and ChatGPT. Okay. Yeah.
But I think recently I realized they really memorized almost everything I talked to them. So now I can start a new question like, "What is the biggest mistake I made in the past 6 months?" "What is one thing you want to suggest to me if you could three months ago?" I think this becomes super powerful right now.
I love these questions. Let everyone go, go to your favorite app and ask those questions. I'm going to do this right after the interview.
It's a good, like, end-of-year practice. [laughter] To see what's, what's going on. Love it. Absolutely.
Do you have any top three AI business ideas you would start if you hadn't had Opus Clip?
It's hard to name like three ideas, um, because I'm not an investor. I, you know, I, I don't meet as many founders as possible. Um, but I think the general first principle for now, right, the question is to start a business like in 2026.
Yeah. As we discussed, the market is becoming super competitive, and there are like, for most of the markets or industries, uh, there are like more than 20, 50 AI tools out there already. Um, so the first principle I would say is to find a really niche business. Often times, many people don't really understand what is a niche. For example, is the restaurant business a niche? No. Is a Chinese restaurant a niche? No. Is, um, Cantonese Chinese restaurant business a niche? Still no. Um, you have to drill down. There are, you know, so many different types of Cantonese food. And even for one specific vertical, are you going to target to be like the, um, Chanel of Cantonese restaurant, or the Zara of, or Uniqlo of Cantonese restaurant, right? So the different pricing will match to different, um, markets, different ICPs as well. So pick a really, really, really small niche that you cannot further segment it.
To start with.
Wow, that's, that's a good one. Yeah.
Yeah, you have to ruthlessly segment your niche. The second thing is, ideally, pick something that's boring because the non-boring, the cool ones are definitely 10x or even more, 100x more competitive. You probably don't want to work in those areas. That's why I mentioned earlier that the passion for building, the passion for problem-solving is more important because your passion for a specific business is most likely not a viable business. Right? So you need to have a passion to build something for a boring industry, but you solve a really big problem. And furthermore, ideally, there are a lot of existing services. I think we are actually, you know, changing from, we're redefining the term SaaS, and previously it was like Software as a Service. Nowadays, it's becoming Service as a Software. So in that specific market niche, boring market niche, are there existing services, um, done by like agencies, um, by freelancers, um, or some internal tools, or some hacky solutions, imperfect hacky solutions? That is your opportunity to tackle. Um, so go through some boring test, go through some niche test, and go through some service test. Um, so these are the my first principles to find a new business in 2026.
That's great. That's great. That's amazing. Okay. And for young viewers who are watching, what is one principle that you wish you understood when you were 20 that would have saved you years?
Damn. [laughter]
It's like me talking to your internal Gemini, ChatGPT. [gasps]
I really wish I can travel back to my 20s. But, um, I think the first principle is to be as disciplined as possible. Um, I've been following, um, Cristiano Ronaldo and LeBron James for two decades. They are at their 40s and they're still one of the best players in their fields. The reasons are they are super disciplined in their early 20s. Uh, you can't change your behavior when you are over 30 or 40. It's, it's just impossible. Um, but if you're like in your early 20s or even younger, um, make sure that you use time effectively. Make sure you can plan things accordingly. Make sure you push yourself to your boundary. Make sure you are okay with, you know, suffering. Um, you can recover fast. Uh, make sure you have a clear mission and you are well aligned with your mission, and you work toward automation every day. I think, you know, I can list a few different behaviors, but the key principle is to be super disciplined if you want to be a successful founder, uh, later on. And also be disciplined to your own health, right? Like how many hours you should log to sleep, um, what you should eat or not, um, what kind of exercise you should do, you should do every day. Like, I, I saw many people started to develop these, um, patterns, these behaviors in their 30s, but not in their early 20s.
It's hard in your 30s. I love that. And also that brings you to say no to different things, and it's also a great skill.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. This is something I've been hearing a lot when I'm talking to people who are building something amazing.
Yeah. Discipline. I think Priscilla Chan just shared that she only has work and family. Parties don't exist in her life.
Not exist anymore.
Yeah. And this is what you hear a lot from successful people here in the US. They work like crazy.
I'm trying to learn. Like, I think I'm disciplined, but like, that level of discipline, oh my god.
Yeah. Exactly. Because with a super high level of discipline, you can just like, Master said, right? You can segment your, your time into, you know, buckets of five minutes. You can easily, you can easily get super focused and also switch context to focus on something else. That is the ultimate result of discipline. I saw many people like find it really hard to switch context to focus for a longer time. That is because you are lacking the discipline from day one.
This is something I'll be teaching my kids. [gasps and laughter]
Thank you so much. It was amazing.
Thank you. Oh, thank you for having me.