Gadgetory

I'm Alexis Ohanian I started startups invested in them and met amazing people using the internet to change the world our generation has an opportunity unlike any other we can create small empires without anyone's permission Union Square major downtown hub lower Manhattan and also home to plenty of college students I'm about to meet two founders who met each other their first year of college and use their own personal physical transformations to build software and a community in photography that helps millions of people all over the world change their lives through fitness usually when we hear about startup success it it happens overnight so these guys success has been anything but tell me about photography photography is a fitness social network at its core that gets everyone to get to the next level of fitness it does this through the combination of community knowledge and gamification we have everyone from sedentary Joe - Arnold Schwarzenegger using the site because it's so powerful to helping people level up their fitness what's this the chakra see turns Fitness into a social game fits opressing fits chakra see fit opera see fit across the I don't know phenoxy husband keeps me busy ten getting beauties there and it's a really cool site I started photography two years ago with my co-founder Richard because we wanted to build a world where Fitness was possible for anyone it was a stunning from our own personal backgrounds from your sous vide is really out of shape peaks and then made these big fitness transformations and that experience was so meaningful that we want to bring that to as many people as possible and so today in two years later photography has now got an incredibly user base of nearly a million users making these huge transformations in their own lives every single day all right I was kind of expecting to see like basketball court free weights hello woman nice to see you dick yo dude sitting next to I kind of feel like the before photo and you're the after photo when I was young I was you know always kind of a fat kid I don't want to say kind of fat I mean like really fat and it's funny because both of my parents were doctors both of them had me eat healthy follow the food pyramid like eat less move more exercise all that fun stuff but I'd always been fat at some point when I was 17 you know just like all geeks if you want to get into something if you really get into something right so I was really into video games I played that request like 16 hours a day 17 hours a day okay and what was your class I was a shadow knight troll a shadow Knight yeah I was 20 out of my mind um you're talking to a level 52 bard which I guess technically about 50 I know I know I don't know what I was thinking it's against a nice group class it's really annoying PvP cuz we just sort of run in circles chaining you get over juggling but the speed and it's it's embarrassing death so a lot of well a lot of world apart a lot of EverQuest a lot of EverQuest yeah and at some point I just transferred that same geekiness into fitness and I was like all right I'm gonna geek out over Fitness we met at a dining hall UPenn our freshman year dick will say that I was the one putting tuna and broccoli into a plastic bag but in fact it was actually dick he was shelving that stuff into his plastic bag I saw him eating chicken and tuna and broccoli in the cafeteria okay and then I tried to like ask him to see if he was like into fitness and he said that I'm cutting right now and cutting is like the term that people online are mostly in forums use when they're talking about you know losing weight or leaning out would see I mean do you think he was weirded out by this a little bit like I think hulking dude comes over to him it's like I wasn't walking back that looks like you're eating tuna broccoli I think we have a lot in common which is all I mean I think that when you have an interest that you're really passionate about and you don't know anyone in your offline circle who is passionate about the same thing you tend to very starved for those kinds of people clearly there was a mutual love of fitness right when did the whole love for entrepreneurship start or when did that when'd you guys go from talking about working out together to working together you know I think it started as early as our senior year of college in your senior year of college you are in a situation where you're thinking really hard about your career and there's this temptation to follow the herd and go into the standard finance or consulting or or management or whatnot and I was definitely a part of that as well but there was always a little something in the back of my head where's like well I would really like to do something on my own I would really like to start a company eventually but at that point I was kind of deferring it I was saying well I'll get a few years of experience and then do that I went to go work for comScore he went to go work for consulting in Connecticut tragic yeah you know I was chatting with dick everyday on instant message I think I was one who had to convince him on the idea cuz he was pretty happy with where he was working at the time I was like did you know we're young we don't have a lot of obligations right now we're gonna do it but might as well do it now I had to go and sell him on his idea of quitting it and taking a huge risk and starting something together and it took you know I think maybe a couple of weeks to get him past that point and once we were past that point then we started thinking what to work on together a lot of ideas the worst was like Groupon for CPG and then there was like social gift services we thought about fitness but everyone was like you know the fitness space is super saturated you're not going to be able to make a dent in it it is a difficult space no matter how you cut it you're really driving at these human behaviors that are notoriously difficult to change we weren't even founders at the time yet we were thinking well you know there's seem like these larger companies out there how are we possibly going to topple them at some point we looked at each other and were like dude we know so much about the space we look at kind of founders and you know people who have startups in the fitness space and they reduce Fitness down to like eating less moving more and tracking they don't actually understand the habit component or the human component behind fitness which both of us really do because we've helped a lot of people we've spent all this time learning about this and so we're like and if we're going to spend you know conceivably the next five to ten years 80 hours a week on something it might as well be something that we like we were hanging out in DC at the time this was I think in August of 2010 and we're just like screwed dude let's just do something in the fitness space because we know this area front-to-back there's all these products out there but they kind of suck but do something interesting and at that point we commit ourselves to that and we'd never look back so I'm not exercised in a very long time see how this goes Ben what's up I'm Alexis great to meet you gonna meet you two ready to uh exercise yeah and we've got we've got our photography apps I've got the closest thing I could find to athletic equipment in my home yeah I'm looking forward great alright Segway race yourself so I took off my Walter White's and I put on my RG threes we're where are we exactly what's this gym called we're at Marc Fisher fitness all right I love the use of unicorns in this gymnasium all right this is very empowering I despite the fact that I have not exercised in a decade between the unicorns and your guidance I think this will not be a total disaster so where do we begin well we're going to start at the squat rack all right never done one of those before I have squatted not with weights on me but we the way a solution to fitness isn't the solution that most people think it is we don't need to put weights on that we can just use the ball yeah well start I always warm up with the bar anything that's good I knew that most people think that you just have to be super disciplined and like apply willpower and like grit through and just like run in the morning and like eat healthy etc the actual solution to fitness is ten times simpler than that it requires you to really suppress your ego and understand that you don't really know anything about exercise and nutrition so we don't have to roll cameras for this part all right all right a couple steps back oh alright then Bennet your hips first been way like lean forward a little bit yeah there we go yeah all right now stand back up how'd that feel awkward to me this is very much a personal mission I think a lot of the team feels the same way to help solve the obesity epidemic another thing that's the thing that's keeping me together right now the smile raised my Mary and knowing Emily photography points I'm getting for this oh yeah this is very very high impact people are looking in the wrong places like people are looking at wearable devices which is the dumbest thing like if I'm a person who has never stuck to a fitness program and I try to optimize for steps taken that increases my hunger that makes me more tired and that expends willpower that's going to make me overeat in fact I might actually be worse off a lot of people like to make it seem like people who are obese are aways on the next dr. oz does getting healthy feel like too much work take the easy way out with dr. Oz's lazy girls guide to getting healthy no workouts burn calories without exercise no cooking can order pizza you can order Mexican or Chinese eat what you want lose weight prevent cancer if you're gonna be a lazy girl do it right minimum effort maximum results this last tip is the ultimate many fat people are like the hardest-working people you'll find it's just that like since it's not a solution of eat less move more and it's incredibly complex to solve like this problem of weight loss there's this stigma on them we just need to absolutely blank it and dominate the web and the app store everything Fitness related we can get our hands on and that means like making a lot of noise calling people like dr. oz out for being you've been talking about the five biggest fat Buster's 4 5 body types in just 5 days and now I've got the number one miracle and a bottle a girl with that like prescribe something like raspberry ketones a supplement be like this is a miracle fat burning supplement how'd you find this these amazing research research research they help your body burn fat not only that they slice it up inside the cell so it burns fat easier and we all want easier easier it makes a smarter there's no research to support that I don't know where he's getting it from but all these you know housewives who are overweight listen to him they go out to GNC G&C ratchets up the price of Raspberry Ketones sale like get their hands on as many as they can they take it what happens they don't lose weight dr. Oz says it's a miracle fat burner but they're not losing weight so how do they think about fitness suddenly they're like man I must have the worst genetics ever like Fitness must be impossible it's so hard I'm just like really passionate about like disrupting that kind of a that mindset is just like you want to say to dr. oz right now you can just say it ready camera dr. oz you suck you are a scam artist and a charlatan and you're going down so who who is responsible for the mascot the robot that's all Jared I'm a bit of a mascot nut what inspired the robot the server was running really slow at the time and own workout submission so there was a time between you submitting a workout and you waiting for your points and you know we brainstormed a little bit about what could happen during that time and it was a natural progression to kind of lead into the red mascot this this little guy who sits there in the background and calculated points and kind of helps you through the doctors experience so does the mascot of a name yeah Fred Oh Fred is which which kind of name for a robot stands for photography rewards for exercise droid but that's a great official thing nice acronym okay that's some good veteran photography trivia right there for the superfans were you just just chilling an illustrator one night you were like all right I got to come up with a mascot like I was with the robot no I was in a BA and drew it on napkin really and that kind of a cocktail napkin it was a cocktail napkin and that translates it if this does happen when you started out you probably weren't thinking how do I grow this into a billion dollar company you were thinking like how do I make sure that we can pay the rent like next month because you guys bootstrap this thing from the first savings right for how long for the first year the first year yeah so talk about bootstrapping a startup in New York the first year we were saving up we weren't spending much money because we knew it was gonna be pretty lean times and when we moved to New York we found a really cheap apartment in Brooklyn the ghettoest of getting places in Brooklyn okay wait whatever uh it was Clifton Hill but it was like right about last night it was like ah that's I was like next that makes you unsure and that makes you cool I moved in with dick and his girlfriend at the time and their cat so we were splitting the rent three ways ice the cat was not paying cat was not paying you know it was very like kind of heads down we were sticking inside the apartment all the time we were buying her food from Costco and there was really no time to go out or money to go out or spend any real money you just like sat down learn how to code Brian learned CSS and HTML and we pumped out the like a Bleus website anyone is ever such a web app this is before the iOS yes I didn't come on to like a year and a half at okay this was just a website website of the ugliest thing you've ever seen in the first several months we were rolling out of bed straight to our IKEA table getting to work in the middle after the afternoon dick would end up cooking a whole bunch of food for us to eat in the midday and then go right back to work and we'd probably work till like 3:00 a.m. every night and you know it wasn't that bad in terms of not spending much money because we were so focused all we wanted to do was just get this thing out the door so we you know iterated it was still really ugly at some point if there were like 10 people at the same time on the site it would crash the server like we knew it was so like really crappy but we're like okay we're ready to like just show more people and so Brian posted on Reddit and said that you know me and my best friend from college starting a fitness fitness site trying to turn Fitness into an RPG and people are just like super excited because that type of user didn't just look at kind of the surface of the site and say oh this designs ugly they looked at the I guess long term vision so I wouldn't he would have had on the inside yeah was that really what sort of launched yeah autocracy really was um um so right why doesn't reddit get a cut of this early you know you guys are sharing this office space with a couple of the companies do you guys find like as I noticed wait real quick tweet just is this this is work-related presumably strong curves a woman's guide to building a better button and body yeah I don't mean to blow up your spot like I don't even know what I was gonna ask now but wait so okay oh yeah well it's undoubtedly work-related what what percentage of the stuff the knowledge that you use every day would you wager was learned sort of from the internet from your own self learning from books like not from college curriculum yeah I called it yeah that's pretty reasonable you have to go the extra mile to learn on your own a lot mmm I'm gonna I think that's sort of like he's gonna you're gonna learn a lot more on you you all possess arguably the most valuable skill of this century right being able to write code bills I'm like extremely valuable at no point in human history as such a valuable skill also been so ostensibly accessible like like as you said most of what you learned is self-taught that's amazing but yet there's still this gulf of limited supply not enough people doing it and and what appears to be unlimited demand what do we do to bridge that me I think a lot of it is you know there's a mental block that a lot of people have I don't know how to code and it's intimidating and it's the kind of thing that it's easy to get stuck on a small syntax error and your first leak six months and never get past it I feel like a lot of it is just kind of being able to recognize that it's not infinitely complexed and then just learning what has been the lowest moment so far and then what kept you from just quitting and going back to a good salary and a normal job at a certain point we had started to discuss a financing term sheet with a relatively small fund out in California and this was going to be the first significant money in the company and all signs pointed to this going through it was almost a sure thing we're basically just negotiating the terms did you have a term machine we had the term sheet you had a term sheet funny oh yeah this is an important note yeah okay so we had the term sheet in front of us we were discussing the terms yeah just going through some of the details and then over the span of maybe a week or two weeks there started to be a little bit of slowdown on their end a couple of red flags and then there's a Monday evening Skype call it was at like 10:00 p.m. because the investor that we're working with was overseas at the time and he said look we actually can't do the deal anymore and I won't get into details as to why but basically they pull the rug out from under us and you know this was in August so we had been going on for eight nine ten months without a salary our bank accounts were running low and it was just this moment where my head just instantly hit the desk you know heart in the stomach sort of feeling and I didn't know what I was going to do and the next day you know I gathered together with with dick and and our engineer at the time and look this deal isn't happening even though we pretty sure it was a sure thing and we don't know what the alternatives are other investors aren't biting right now we're just going to have to think about being really lean and figuring out how to survive and of course the thought of shutting down was you know running back of our heads now what was amazing about that week was that news came down on Monday and then that Friday of that week I woke up to find Dick freaking out on Twitter he was like oh my god photography's on xkcd I was like the hell is this guy talking about you know xkcd is a huge deal and a site that can't be right and then I went to xkcd and there we were in comic number 940 and in the following month I think we more than doubled our user base at the time so how did you first hear about photography but it was actually on a xkcd cartoon yes in like August of 2011 I think yeah I think I was one of like thousands of users that joined because of that cartoon yeah and that was a moment where I was able to go back to a lot of the investors that we've been speaking to and say check it out like we're up and to the right we're hockey sticking right now and we were able to actually start playing around today today those investors connect the dots that it was thanks to this execute CD comic or they were just like whoa up into the right let me get my checkbook you know I think some did they didn't realize it but they saw something shift you know there was this this moment or like oh like conviction happened wait so at the time well like would you see what was your fitness level was it like who Alexis - Alexis level even I mean you City have more doubt in 10 years like at the time I joined photography I had never touched one of these well why did you want to get healthy what motivated you when I was a kid I was always I really want to be strong and I realized that I'd reached the age of 30 and I had never really taken steps to achieve that goal that had heads for 25 years so I was like well what if I did just decide that I wanted to get strong as an adult where do I start and that's where photography came in and like the immunity there the forums the knowledge centre the group's turns out when you have a million users a lot of them have had the same goals a lot of them have travelled the same paths and got a lot of advice to share has this reached a point of like almost a mission because like we said earlier there was an undeniable epidemic of obesity right he's photography then Oh an undeniable part of the solution yeah obesity is not a data problem it's a human problem my father passed away when I was a teenager because he didn't take good care of himself he didn't watch his diet he wasn't exercising and you know in the end it meant that he passed away relatively young I think that's a tragedy especially when we're living in a world where we have so much abundance in excess and we we can see the great achievements that were reaching in our careers and our personal lives but if you're not focusing on the the body and your wellness then none of that stuff matters there's like trillions of dollars it's a you know with with obesity and like billions of dollars in the fitness industry and to be able to solve that and like be a piece of the solution means that you know photography has a very high upside when it comes to just being a profitable company but it's upside is I completely aligned with the social mission photography only becomes a billion dollar company if it can really help solve the obesity crisis and I'm just like really grateful as a founder for that because I get to do like two cool things that I love like helping people and making money you know I think we're still just at the tip of the iceberg we really really believe in creating that greatness and others and words we're still living in a world where it's not top of mind for a lot of people and we're trying to change that two guys met each other over broccoli and tuna they worked their butts off in Brooklyn to get this company up and running and today photography has over a million users who are as passionate as their founders you probably also have a passion something that you really care about and chances are you too can use the Internet to build a similar community of people who care just as much as you you you