Shreya Murthy

You're learning something that you've never done before.

You have no idea if it's going to work.

And you're balancing this deep confidence and conviction and passion that you have with this very real fear of the entire thing flopping.

And for us, that was compounded by exactly what you were talking about, which is that it felt like the whole world was moving in a different direction than us.

There were these virtual event startups that were raising hundreds of millions of dollars at insane valuations.

And we're

we felt very gaslit we were like are we crazy the thing that kept us going was two things one was just the feedback that we were hearing from our users who were telling us that this product was very important to them that it was making a difference in their lives that it was making it

And so just staying close to our community and hearing that feedback from them was a huge source of what kept us going.

And then the other was our community.

our own understanding of human behavior.

So one of my favorite things about Joy, my co-founder, is she's not only the best engineer I've ever worked with, but she's also one of the most insightful people about human beings.

She was actually an anthropology major in college and got a CS minor.

And so she has this very shrewd understanding of what people care about, what they want.

And so the discussions that we were always having is,

The human brain is hardwired for real world connection.

You can look at brain scans, you know, those like heat maps of the brain.

And when they do brain scans of people looking at their phone, it's just it's all kind of blue.

It's not registering deeply.

But when you look someone in the eye, the heat map just turns bright red instantly.

It is on a neurological level something that we are hardwired to do.