Garry Tan

Second place is a box of steak knives.

And third is you're fired.

It's like that's basically how the competition of technology sort of works.

We got the box of steak knives and sold that company to Twitter for $20 million, which is very powerful and meaningful for me.

But when I look at what happened there, it's like I needed to be who I am now in order to properly win that tournament.

Yeah.

When I really look at it, I hadn't done 10 years of therapy yet.

And that's what I actually needed to be able to work through all of the things that caused my startup to fail.

I ended up falling out with my co-founder.

The startup started failing the day Instagram launched, actually, which we should have paid attention to.

Yeah.

And then I just wasn't developed as a full human being to be able to go to my co-founder and say what was going on for me.

I just ate it.

He had a really strong idea for what he wanted to do.

And I was like, I had read some like advice on the internet about if you want your startup to succeed, you better be a really good co-founder.

You're a co-founder.

And I read that and I thought like, oh, that means that I should self abandon.

that I should just do whatever he says, right?

I was like, no, are you serious?

Like I was 30 at the time and I wish that I could go back and like shake the me of that time, but I just wasn't ready.