Ben Fisher

And it probably says a lot about the pressure and the expectation maybe on them to win that game.

um ben is it by any chance about the size of a pair of folded bagpipes yeah for reference they're about the same um what are your impressions so far then of the of the world cup where have you been you've been to toronto then yeah i started in toronto then arrived in la about yeah 24 hours or so ago um yeah it's been great to be in toronto to be in canada for the opening game after their first world cup game on home soil was you know obviously a privilege it was

Great atmosphere actually in Toronto in the days before it was relatively low key as I think it has been throughout kind of different places maybe barring Mexico in terms of that sort of World Cup fever but come game day it was really good really enjoyable and yeah you kind of detected what it meant for Canadians for people who travel from across Canada.

to be there for that moment, especially when you get reminded of the ticket prices, which I know is probably quite boring to hear about now, but even today... Still valid, right?

Yeah, and hearing today outside the Iranian hotel, a couple of the Iranian fans were saying it's $2,600 for the New Zealand game, you know, the next game, so...

that just blew my mind again really um but yeah no it's been great it's it's been very um good fun and i think in essence of it was arriving at la and then me sort of peering over this bloke waiting for his baggage who had the brazil morocco game on his phone and just that appetite and thirst to know what's going on what's the latest in the in the game so many games so yeah it's been brilliant

No decorum.

I think this is... Oh, this is slander.

And actually, it's sort of funny how there were companies or projects before Lean Startup Machine, which Lean Startup Machine was the evolution of.

of those experiences, largely, you know, failing to start companies and probably focusing on the wrong stuff.

And at the time, um, lean start machine, like, uh, one of my partners at the time, he, uh, he'd come across like Eric's blog, lean startup, Eric, Eric Reese, correct.

Um, was, you know, it, it was just a blog.

His book hadn't come out.

and at the time we were in the new york tech scene like even startup weekend was only going around new york once a year so it was a really interesting period within at least within tech on the east coast um and a bunch of us had just graduated college we're sort of figuring out our today our first adult companies um adults mean like after after we uh had graduated into the real world and a lot of stuff wasn't working and you know the economy was kind of in

in the can.

And so what we had was, um, I think especially for, for folks who are just out of college, a lot of people who get normal jobs after school, they'll have like a cohort or like a class, like in finance or even in advertising, um, or other industries, um,

Whereas if you work at a startup or you're trying to build a company, you don't have that same sort of peer group.

And so the time, sorry.

Yeah, it started as a single weekend experiment where we were trying to have, like a hackathon is great.

And we'd actually approached Startup Weekend about just having it.