Pieter Levels
speaker
696 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Aug 2024
Pieter Levels’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's really about fun. Because I was doing it when I didn't make money, right? That's the point. So I was always coding. I was making music. I made electronic music, drum and bass music like 20 years ago. And I was always making stuff. So I think... A creative expression is like a meaningful work that's so important. It's so fun.
It's so fun to have like a daily challenge where you try to figure stuff out.
Yeah. The problem is I don't dictate that, right? Like if more people start using, if millions of people suddenly start using it and it becomes big, I'm not going to say, oh, stop signing up to my website and pay me money. But I never raised funding for it. And I think because I don't like the stressful life that comes with it, like I have a lot of founder friends who
And they tell me secretly, like with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and stuff. And they tell me like, next time, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it like you. Because it's more fun, it's more indie, it's more chill, it's more creative. They don't like this. They don't like to be manager, right? You become like a CEO, you become a manager.
And I think a lot of people that start startups, when they become a CEO, they don't like that job actually, but they can't really exit it, you know? Yeah. but they like to do the groundwork, the coding. So I think that keeps you happy, like doing something creative.
But look at Elon. He's doing things a million times bigger than me, right? And would I want to do that? I don't know. You can't really choose these things, right? But I really respect that. I think Elon is very different from VC founders, right? VC is like software. There's a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There's a lot of dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think.
And I never have concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something's going on with like... Companies getting sold to friends and VCs and then they do reciprocity and there's shady financial dealings. With Elon, that's not. He's just raising money from investors and he's actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, you know, hardware stuff. And that I really respect.
So I was in Holland and I graduated university and I didn't want to like get a normal job. And I was making some money with YouTube because I had this music career and I uploaded my music to YouTube and YouTube started paying me like with AdSense, like $2,000 a month, $2,000 a month. And all my friends got like normal jobs and we stopped hanging out because people would
Like in university, you hang out, you know, you chill at each other's houses, you go party. But when people get jobs, they only party like in the weekend and they don't hang anymore in the week because you need to be at the office. And I was like, this is not for me. I want to do something else. And I was starting getting this, like, I think it's like Saturn return, you know, when you turn 27.
It's like some concept where Saturn returns to the same place in the orbit that it was when you're born. I'm learning so many things. It's some astrology thing, you know?
Exactly, the summer of 27, man. And it was for me, like I started going crazy because I didn't really see like my future in Holland, buying a house, going living in the suburbs and stuff. So I flew out. I went to Asia, started digital nomading and did that for a year. And then that made me feel even worse, you know, because I was like alone in hotel rooms, like looking at the ceiling.
Like, what am I doing with my life? Like, this is... Like, I was working on startups and stuff and YouTube, but it's like, what is the future here, you know? Like, is this... Is this something while my friends in Holland were doing really well and with a normal life, you know? So I was getting very depressed and like, I'm like an outcast, you know? My money was shrinking.
I wasn't making money anymore a lot. I was making $500 a month or something. And I was, you know, looking at the ceiling thinking like, now I'm like 27, I'm a loser. And that's the moment when I started building like startups. And it was because my dad said, like, if you're depressed, you need to, you know, get sand, get a shovel, start shoveling, doing something. You can't just sit still.
Which is kind of like an interesting way to deal with depression. It's not like, oh, let's talk about it. It's more like, let's go do something. And I started doing a project called 12 Startups in 12 Months, where every month I would make something, like a project, and I would launch it with Stripe so people could pay for it.
Yeah, add a Stripe check. I'm not sponsored by Stripe, but add a Stripe checkout button.
100%, I think so, yeah.
Yeah. And they're really nice. The CEO, Patrick, is really nice.
Dude, I know this. Because when I was nine years old, I was making websites also. Yeah. And I tried to open a merchant account. There was like before Stripe, you would have like, I think it was called WorldPay. So I had to like fill out all these forms. And then I had to fax them to America from Holland with my dad's fax. And my dad had to, it wasn't my dad's name. And he had to sign for this.
And he started reading these terms and conditions. It was just like, he's liable for like a hundred million in damages. And he's like, I don't want to sign this. I'm like, dad, come on. I need a merchant account. I need to make money on the internet, you know? And he signed it and we faxed it to America. And I had a merchant account. But then nobody paid for anything.
But it's much easier now. You can sign up, you add some codes and...
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