# Darius Monsef: Serial Entrepreneurship, Happiness, and Giving Back! 🔥

by [kirupa](https://www.kirupa.com/me/index.htm) | filed under [Interviews with Creative People](https://www.kirupa.com/podcast/index.htm)

[Darius Monsef](https://www.bubs.co/) talks like a builder who has seen several internet eras come and go. He connects the playful energy of early web making to today's AI-assisted prototyping, then gets candid about pivots, parenting, responsibility, and why the most durable work often starts with community, conviction, and a product you genuinely want to exist.

Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM

A conversation with **Darius Monsef** | 1h 20m

## About this conversation

This is an especially personal conversation, and that history gives it a relaxed honesty. Darius Monsef and Kirupa have known each other for years, so the episode moves easily between old internet memories and present-day startup reality. One of the strongest threads is Darius's excitement about AI coding tools, not as a substitute for creativity, but as a way to bring some of the fast, playful building energy of the early web back into reach. When the gap between idea and prototype shrinks, experimentation starts to feel fun again.

That optimism sits next to a much harder founder story. Darius talks about building an AI companion for kids, going through Y Combinator, and then deciding to step away from a direction that no longer felt right. His point is not that products for children are impossible. It is that they carry a deeper moral weight than many startup stories admit. If growth depends on becoming more addictive, especially for young users, that changes the kind of company you are building. The pivot toward a car-focused community project feels important precisely because it comes from that line of thinking.

The episode also shows how entrepreneurship is shaped by values that sit outside the usual startup script. Darius talks about giving back, volunteering, and feeling a real responsibility to contribute as success grows. He also returns often to community, whether through earlier internet projects, current product ideas, or the practical work of talking to users instead of hiding behind theory. By the end, the interview lands on a useful tension: modern tools may make building easier, but focus, code quality, self-awareness, and conviction still decide whether any project becomes worth sticking with.

## What you'll hear about

- AI tools can restore creative momentum, but they also make focus more important.
- Products for children raise ethical questions that founders cannot treat as side issues.
- Community is not just audience, it can be the core of the product itself.
- Giving back is part of Darius's idea of success, not a separate activity.
- Fast prototyping still needs judgment about quality, direction, and what to build next.

## Jump to a topic

- [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=0s) **Reconnecting Through Building**: Kirupa and Darius reconnect and talk about why AI tools have made building feel playful again.
- [8:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=480s) **From Pivot to Rides**: Darius explains how a startup transition pushed him toward rebuilding a car-focused community product himself.
- [18:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1080s) **The Weight of Kids Products**: He reflects on building for children and why competing for attention in that space can feel ethically wrong.
- [22:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1320s) **Community Roots**: The conversation turns to ColorLovers, volunteering, and the kinds of communities that shaped Darius as a builder.
- [29:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1740s) **Founders, Luck, and People**: They discuss cofounders, key relationships, and how much success depends on the people around an idea.
- [40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=2400s) **Parenting, Work, and Ambition**: Darius connects family life, work ethic, and personal interests to the choices he makes as an entrepreneur.
- [57:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3420s) **What Rides Could Become**: He outlines a community for car enthusiasts that centers identity, showcasing, and shared passion.
- [1:12:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=4320s) **Better Tools, Same Standards**: They close on AI-generated code, code quality, and the need to stay thoughtful even when building gets easier.

## To learn more

- [Darius's Blog](https://www.bubs.co/)
- [Darius's Rides](https://www.rides.co/)
- [Darius's LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dariusmonsef/)

## Transcript

The automatically generated captions have been organized by speaker, lightly edited for clarity, and broken into paragraphs for readability. Names and wording may still contain errors.

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=0s) - Kirupa

Hi everybody. Today I talk with Darius Monsef, serial entrepreneur, designer, developer, and a billion other things. He's someone I've literally known for decades, so it's great to catch up with him in real time and talk about his path into tech, entrepreneurship, and his latest ventures. Along the way, we talk about life, cars, and a whole lot more. This is going to be a fun one you don't want to miss. So let's get started. All right, Darius. Well, it is great to meet you. I've known you for what seems like a lifetime. Probably over 25, maybe even 20, but definitely over 20 years.

I feel like I've known you online forever, and we met in person 15 years ago. And here we are again, meeting in real time after all this time.

### [0:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=39s) - Darius Monsef

Yeah, it's not frequent enough, but I appreciate you reaching out, and it would be nice to reconnect. Actually, there's a time in my life, when we first met, that felt so creative and so fun. Then there's been 20 years we can catch up on. And because of the Copilot/Cursor nature of AI agents, I'm back to feeling very similar to how I felt 20 years ago. So it'll be fun for us to explore.

### [1:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=68s) - Kirupa

It will be fun to explore, because the respectable day-job part of my life does pretty much revolve around this Cursor, AI-based developer-assistant kind of thing. So we can touch on that as well. But you still seem pretty creative right now, by the way. Looking at your background, it seems like you're doing really creative things, just based on the sheer color and everything I'm seeing there.

### [1:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=90s) - Darius Monsef

Well, I mentioned this in a few places before, but this is everything I wanted when I was a kid. I have all the toys my brothers wouldn't let me play with. I have adult money now, not that much money, but enough to buy the things that make your inner child happy. Then I do have young kids now, and some things they can't touch, but most of it they play with. When I was a kid, I read all of the Garfield books. And I remember every once in a while we'd drive an hour to the bookstore so I could see if there was a new Garfield there.

The collection is so disorganized because my two youngest are constantly in here pulling another one out and rereading them. So that's a fun thing for me. And then an unintentional byproduct of this room is that my 10-year-old was like, "Dad, you have everything that you wanted when you were my age." I hope that sticks somewhere for her, like, yeah, go get it. You make that life. And then, yeah, part of it too is everybody's so serious these days, and maybe I've become successful enough to be able to be a little more myself, or not worry as much about it.

### [2:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=159s) - Kirupa

Yeah, no, I hear you. I don't know if my camera shows it, but I have various things and collections from so many years. There's stuff I've been dragging around that's whimsical as well. Same reason. At this point, what's the worst they can do, not like me, because I used to have an Iron Man cutout. It's actually just off the screen over here. My cat knocked it over, you know? So just being yourself is the greatest luxury we can have these days, because it's just so hard to be authentic.

### [3:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=188s) - Darius Monsef

There is both the difficulty of that and, I think, a lot of the online world you created. I don't know how intentionally you created it, but it was such a special, original place, where a ragtag group of weird makers on the internet could find each other. And there was something so fun about the early internet because it was about being yourself, but also, because of usernames and personas, it wasn't, and so you kind of got to be whomever. I think I went through a series of usernames. At one point it was Pretty Boy, and maybe that was aspirational. I don't know if it was true, but it was aspirational.

But you could sort of be these characters and have this fun. And now, not only is there a lack of that, social media makes you sort of fake being, I don't know, maybe not who you want to be, but who you think you should be. And I don't know how healthy that is. I think the consequences are much greater than when you and I were online back then, because you could do stuff online and it never actually impacted your real life. No one could even search for things effectively.

Now you're one small app away from someone having your entire social-media history analyzed by an AI assistant and going, "Yeah, this person is interested in all of these things. This person isn't just into these things, they did this one thing 30 years ago. We can't work with them because of so-and-so." I think the stakes are so much higher. It's almost scary to the point where you can't be hybrid. You can either be fully online and be yourself, or you can be fully anonymous. But any in-between state leaves you open to unnecessary hurt. There's that thing people say about the difficulty of lying, that you have to maintain two realities.

The more you lie, the more you have to maintain them. I feel like most of my internet persona is me. I don't have to spend a lot of cognitive energy managing who I am and how I act. That hasn't been getting as much engagement on Twitter these days, but whatever, I'm spending less energy on it, so it's fine.

### [5:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=319s) - Kirupa

Yeah, no, I agree. And also, having kids, I have a 7-year-old, and it's always interesting because once they get to a certain point, you start thinking about how you were at that same age. You kind of see yourself through them and their interests and so on. I think it's one of.

### [5:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=331s) - Darius Monsef

The most fascinating things I never, ever imagined I'd experience. We have 3 of them, and they're all different. You can see parts of yourself, or the things you wanted to be, but they all choose different strengths and have different challenges as well. It's been fun for me as a maker. My oldest is such an incredible performer. I'm not comfortable performing. I think I've always taken extroverted roles as CEO, and I have to play that person. That's where I do bear a cognitive burden, because I'm pretending to be extroverted. I'm really not. She just doesn't have that. She's such a performer and loves to be on stage.

It's the other 2, the younger ones, that seem like the builders, the makers. My youngest, who is 7 as well, has an idea booklet. He's constantly making full-on comics. And there's a seed I see there, like a future builder-maker, that focused creative time all by himself. And again, we'll come back to this AI unlock, but it's similar with them. My middle was doing Scratch, and it was cool to see her trying to get this game to work. I was trying to troubleshoot with her, and then she got enough knowledge to troubleshoot on her own, which is how you learn everything now. Anything's available.

But there's a part of me that wants to jump straight from Scratch to Cursor, like, just build actual things now. I think if you understand this does this, but here's how I could improve it, maybe knowing the language itself will matter less in the future.

### [7:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=437s) - Kirupa

Oh yeah. I think we're rapidly getting to a point where all you need is an idea, and then the output could be anything. It could be a block of text, a song, a video file, or what we're calling an app today. I think that whole world is inevitable, and I think we're getting there sooner than any of us expected.

### [7:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=454s) - Darius Monsef

Well, that was the thing. So, 20-whatever years ago on your forum, it felt like, because I was a hybrid unicorn of the era, I could design and code. I could build anything I wanted. And things were pretty simple back then. You could build and launch something in a day because you were really just limited by the features. It was simple. And then in my career I got more experience. I got to be the leader of companies, and I was just like, I'm not the best engineer. Somebody else should be that. But over 20 years, I just hadn't touched code in a long time.

And we went through a phase with my current company, which went through the YC Summer 24 batch, building an AI companion for kids. For a number of reasons we pivoted out of that, but my technical co-founder and I split at that time. We're good friends. We have coffee every Wednesday. And I really wanted to pursue this passion I have around cars and build a community for auto enthusiasts. He really wants to solve frontier AI tech, and I'm like, well, that's not really the same thing, let's just split. But then I'm like, well, I can't build anymore. I'm stuck.

And we were trying to find contract engineers or bring someone on full-time. We ended up using an offshore team. It was really depressing because I knew what we could fix here, but I just had to compromise my feature set so it was something shippable that still took a week or more to ship. It just felt like being in quicksand. And I had enough founder friends asking, "Why aren't you just vibe-coding this thing? You build it." I'm like, because I don't know what I'm doing. I don't want to get stuck. And then I finally was like, you know what? I'm just going to do it. I really feel unlocked.

I feel unshackled. Now my problem is I just need to finish getting the Rides app out, but I want to build 3 or 4 other things. I am building things while I'm building things. So the danger now is really focus, because it feels like I'm unlimited.

### [9:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=574s) - Kirupa

Yeah. I think it's all about abstraction. Back when we were doing Flash and so on, it was interesting because there was a lot going on under the covers and we had no idea about it. There we were, drawing something, animating, making movie clips, adding some code, and in the end it all just worked out. And then you go to a real serious programming language and you're like, wait, even getting Hello World up is so much work. It takes so much effort.

I'd say what you've gone through the last 20 years is not in any way disconnected from what anyone who's been coding regularly feels as well, because writing apps has gotten very difficult. When Flash died, developers pretty much got full control over everything, and everything became complicated build tools and terminals and windows and so on. And then you're like, wait, why is it so complicated? Why can't it just be like the way it was? And I think the revenge of Flash, and the revenge of that world where things didn't have to be that hard, is actually AI. So I think vibe coding is really going to be the future.

Just like you still see COBOL developers writing code from 40 years ago, that world will still exist. But I think the future is going to be a lot of us not writing code the way we used to, but using natural language and going from pictures or text or voice to having apps be built. How the app is built, what it's using behind the scenes, and so on, I don't care anymore. Just make it safe, make it secure, make it scalable. Here's my budget. Don't do something in the cloud that's going to cost me a ridiculously large bill because 5 people visited it. Just do those basic things.

As the models get better, we're probably not too far away from that becoming more of a reality than it is even today.

### [11:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=675s) - Darius Monsef

The stigma is so funny, since you just brought Flash up, because I was never smart enough to get things to do what they needed to do with code. It'd all be keyframe hacks. I was making it do what I needed so I could make it look like some too-advanced little motion thing, but I wasn't really programming it. And it feels very similar to, oh, you're vibe coding. That's a kind of derogatory way to describe it, rather than, no, I'm just letting this coding agent, which is much smarter than me about writing current code, do that part. I was writing ColdFusion. It's been a long time since that was available.

But I understand the architecture. I understand how the technology works. I was talking to another friend, because it seems like a lot of my friends now are building tools for the toolmakers. And I'm a good sounding board for them because I'm really smart and also really dumb, because I don't know any of the modern languages. I don't even really know how we're technically deploying things, where it's going, or why the app is being built that way. I just haven't had to pay attention to that. I had really great technical partners, and my focus is user acquisition, growth, and the UX of things. So it's almost the same.

I just get to continue to make, but my iteration loop is near-instant. I was building for Rides, where people share photos of their cars and add their ride and attach images. We're doing moderation, so you can't upload bad images to the platform. If I reject them, I was like, I'm going to show that I rejected it, but I'm going to put the Wasted graphic from GTA over it. I don't need to do that, but it's just fun. It took me 30 seconds to do that. And we over-optimize for engagement. I don't think it's conspiratorial.

If your goal is to build a product that people engage with, you just set the high-engagement parameters. But unfortunately, the most engaging things for people are things that generally piss them off. So I'm going to show you the thing people like you engage with most, which often comes from having some buttons pushed. That's the machine social media built, and now it's kind of out of control. I don't really enjoy it much anymore. It's not fun. I don't know if I'll be successful with it, but part of the point of Rides is to make the internet fun again. I want to build a Kirupa for cars.

I want that place where a bunch of weirdos met on the internet, had a lot of fun, and built real friendships. I'm still in touch with a bunch of the members from 20 years ago. I'd like to see that return. You talked about these whiplash generational changes. Maybe there's this version where you're there for fun and enjoyment, not for dopamine and anger buttons being pushed.

### [14:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=850s) - Kirupa

Yeah. I know social communities, especially smaller, more interest-based ones, are tough. Not because the idea isn't there, or the technology isn't there, or you and I aren't passionate about it. It's because there are massive companies whose entire goal is to make sure the few minutes you have in a day are spent on their platform and not on anything else. So if you have anything remotely like one human interacting with another human, and it's professional-related content, you must go to LinkedIn, and LinkedIn will do its best to keep you there. If it has to do with small bite-sized updates, you're going to Twitter, X, or Threads.

If it's visual, you go to Instagram. And the systems are designed so that, back then, you created something, shared it with your friends on AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, or whatever, and that's how people got most information. You posted a link and it'd be indexed by Yahoo or Google or so on. Nowadays, if you share a link or try to get distribution in any format, the moment you post a link to any of these networks, they immediately down-boost your content. Like, no, no, no, you're not going to see this content ever because you're taking someone away from here. Oh, but you have a cool idea?

Why don't you post it in our particular corner of things? I think that's the hardest part, because across all of these vibrant communities, all these areas have been pigeonholed into 4 or 5 major networks that kind of control it. Reddit is still managing to maintain its own independence. But even its days, I feel, are slowly getting numbered. People in all these larger social networks are like, oh, there's a vertical for gardening, a vertical for cars, a vertical for neighborhoods, let's make that a core priority and use all our resources to get people there. We have distribution. We have 3 or 4 billion people using some combination of these services.

Let's funnel them over there. And it's an uphill battle.

### [16:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=964s) - Darius Monsef

Yeah. There's, like, I've been through YC a few times now, so some of their mantras just get burned into your brain. "Do things that don't scale" and "talk to your customers." Why I think ColorLovers was ultimately successful is that I built it for people to check out, and they weren't really intentionally my customers, but they were all the other designers on your forum. It was, you know, I built Hot or Not for color because I thought it was funny. You like this color, you don't. And then some member, it'd be fun to go back and figure out who it was, said, "Let us make combinations.

That would be useful." I'm like, that is smart. And then I made 5-color palettes, and that's really how it all unfolded. But the initial users cared. I think what's hard about Product Hunt or YC's Launch is you just get a lot of tire-kickers. They're not really your customers. They're not particularly interested. You need that tribe of evangelical people who enjoy it to do that early building with. And I think that's lost a little bit in everything that's happening. Yeah. But I think the big thing you have going for you is that you care about it a lot, and you're customer zero in some cases.

As long as you're passionate, your energy shines through. I would never discount that. That by itself plays a huge role in helping get other people excited about something you're doing. And even if people aren't excited, if you're enjoying the motion of doing this, that's naturally going to attract other people at some point. Whether that's a lot of people or not, that's different. That's often where the luck part comes in. But overall, as long as you feel like you're learning something and having fun along the way, I'd say that plays a big role. There was the other thing you mentioned before too about engagement and what these products are built for.

When we were building Genie, the original intent was a safe place for kids to have access to the wealth of information the internet has. Imagine a kid could ask a question about anything, and it's answered in an age-appropriate way. We saw kids being super creative. We saw kids being able to find something positive in pretty dark times. But what you ultimately compete with is whatever the most addictive thing they have access to is. And then we had this fundamental philosophical question: do I want to compete and be more addictive than Roblox or something, especially with a kid? And it was more like, oh no, I don't.

I'm unwilling to compete that way. I don't want to win that battle. I'd rather focus on something else where, if I can be the most addictive car community and adults are making decisions and having fun, then okay, I'm all right with that. But with kids, there's an extra burden of responsibility, and it just didn't feel right. Yeah, I mean, sleeping well at night is one of the many underrated pleasures people sacrifice unnecessarily. At the end of the day, what's the point of everything we do if we can't look in the mirror and say, "Yeah, I'm happy with what I just did"?

Otherwise it all gets boring and dull after a while. I did realize, when we were figuring out what to do next, that it was a hurdle for me to get over in my brain to build one for myself. Genie was kid-oriented. The previous company before that, Brave Care, was children's pediatric care, and I care a lot about that. I've been on the board of a Make-A-Wish chapter. So it felt like, one, I believe that the more successful or wealthy one becomes, the more of a societal obligation you have to contribute back.

And I think I just needed to shift to, well, I've achieved some level, and therefore I have to continue making that a major part of what I'm doing, versus almost giving myself permission to be a little selfish and say, you know, I want to build something for me. I would really enjoy this, and I will continue to be a good person, and I'll give to all these causes. That's just how I'm wired. I will give back. But it almost felt like a betrayal to say I'm going to build this one for me. But there was something really freeing in it too. It does feel good. I am my customer.

I know what I want. I will enjoy this. So, you know, it's the messy decision-making of a founder. Yeah. And you've been a founder quite a number of times, too. I know you mentioned a few of the.

### [20:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1223s) - Kirupa

Companies already a few times, but let's go back in time. What made you decide to go down this path of both tech and founding companies, and then becoming a serial entrepreneur?

### [20:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1235s) - Darius Monsef

I think one of them is very obvious in hindsight now, because I've done one thing and tried a couple of times: I'm just not a very good employee. I'm wired entrepreneurially, somewhat with a rules-don't-apply-to-me mindset. I can see a better way to do something. I really value my individual impact. Post-exit, I'll jump around and come back. When we moved home to Hawaii after we sold Creative Market, I had a bit of time where I could sort of not work. I was really depressed after a couple of years of doing that because I like hard work of all kinds.

Working on a fence for a day felt like hard work, but once you've built at the internet scale of impact, it was deeply unfulfilling. So in hindsight I know these things. But early on, I just wanted to make and build, and I had ambitions, and the internet gave me that ability. I myself could build a whole company and make something happen. I wasn't intentional about starting ColorLovers, my first company. I'd written lots of business plans for other companies, and I think I always wanted to have that role. ColorLovers just sort of unwound. I started it with your community, the first users.

Then I did go to Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami. I think I launched ColorLovers in early December, maybe the beginning of December. The tsunami happened, and then in January I went to Thailand to volunteer. And, being not a good developer, I set the primary ID table to a small int. So 255 people signed up, and then no more could sign up because the database wouldn't allow it. So I had maybe one of the first limited betas, where the rest of the members were like, "How do I get in?" and I'm like, "You can't get in.

Only the first 200 got in." But it created enough hype that then I came back and worked on it. Again, I never knew what the business was. It really wasn't a business. I was unwilling to shove ads into it to make money, so I lost money for basically a decade. But when I moved to San Francisco, where my still-girlfriend, but also wife now, lived, that was a very out-of-context joke, this idea of my last girlfriend still being my girlfriend. She's been my wife for 15 years. But she lived there, and I was like, I'm going to move to San Francisco and do all this.

I was wearing my ColorLovers shirt, because I do feel like as a startup founder, wearing your brand all the time helps. And Paul Graham saw it and was like, "I love ColorLovers. You should come do YC." That was this huge change agent for me, getting into Silicon Valley and learning so much more about the business of startups. What we realized was that it was less about the color. It was about making design simple and accessible to everyone. And what we saw from people creating patterns and other things with our tools was that there wasn't a great marketplace.

No offense to iStock and the Envato network, but ThemeForest and AudioJungle felt federated. Our view was, what if there were an Amazon, a digital Etsy, one marketplace that had all the stuff you were looking for? So we launched Creative Market. I had been broke literally building ColorLovers for about 9 years. Creative Market was an overnight success. It got acquired 11 months after we launched it. If you only look at that window of time, it's like, woohoo. But I bled for a long time before that. Yeah, that's partially my fault in hindsight. Opportunity cost, sunk-cost fallacy, I should have killed it sooner or changed it sooner.

But you do get vanity metrics. We had like 5 million visitors a month or something, so there was a ton of traffic there. It was just painful. You also got indirect validation. Adobe Kuler, I think, was trying to compete with you guys. So I'm like, you had a hit product so good that a large company was like, I'm going to do the same exact thing. There's a fun thing about being this old in the internet game. I genuinely don't know, did I create the 5-color palette? Because I see everybody use it now, and I'm like, I didn't intentionally do that.

I just thought 5 was good, and now everybody uses 5.

### [25:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1512s) - Kirupa

I think so. I was always eager to try all these things out, and before you had ColorLovers, there weren't too many options. You had physical paint swatches at Lowe's or Home Depot, and those individual cards might have 4 or 5 colors in them, but nobody connected the dot between the physical world and the online world, much less the community aspect of it, where I can share a color, you can take my color, like it, comment on it, remix it, and so on. I think a lot of great ideas are like that.

There's a good story here, and then you scale it for the current era, the modern times, and what new technology allows you to do. I do think it was probably the first one of that kind. And I still look back and think there weren't many better solutions, even today. There's Coolors. Co, which is good, but that's basically ColorLovers with bigger swatches. Well, the other story in there is that there was somebody else doing color, and it was ColorSchemer, which was desktop color software. No offense to Aaron. I thought it was unwieldy and had lots of stuff happening in it, but he was very smart at building software.

He had a blog post that I basically stole and made better. We met each other early, and it was like, hey, maybe we should partner. I met him at a Subway in Boston, and it was like, no. Then I think a year or 2 later we met again, and at that time it was like it would be better if we just did this together. Again, having your forum was this big thing. Moving to San Francisco with YC was another. And Aaron was another one of those moments where I just don't think it would have been what it became otherwise.

Instead of seeing each other as competitors, the thought was, if we just do this together, we could be much more successful. He's still one of my closest friends. He's a YC partner now and has been there for a number of years. So I often echo that to other people. I don't worry about scarcity. You look for abundance in things. Post-exit from Creative Market, I've built a couple other things since then. Another lesson learned: I dropped out of college to work at a web-design firm, which is how I learned to code. The founder there has been a very good friend for still, we had breakfast this morning.

He had built template websites for eye-doctor offices and was visiting me right when Creative Market was getting acquired. I was like, man, inside this whole terrible website builder, there's a place for people to order contact lenses. If you strip that out, Dollar Shave Club-style direct-to-consumer is going to be a thing. I helped him start it, but to his credit Travis ran that very well, launched it, built Sitebox into a big thing, and then it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for much more than Creative Market was acquired for.

Because I helped them start it and had founder shares, I made basically as much on that one as I did on the one I ran for 10 years myself. So there is probably an argument for VCs there: just bet on good people and help them. And then, yeah, we did Brave Care, which was pediatric. We went through YC the first time with Creative Market, the 2nd time with Brave Care, and started a healthcare company before a global pandemic. 4 And a half years of that was just insane. We raised a ton of money. We operated 5 clinics in 2 states. Then ultimately it just couldn't survive.

Too much business debt, technical debt, legacy, whatever it was. It just couldn't make it through. So that was pretty painful to wind down. Then we went back through YC with Genie, which is the same company now pivoted into Rides. No, no, very cool. And you mentioned you were not a great employee, which is why you wanted to do this.

### [29:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1771s) - Darius Monsef

If you look at a multiverse version of you, a version that never met your co-founder and a version that did, how would the world have been different? You never know. It could be that you still got the idea on your own and were still successful. It's hard to figure that out. There is a part of me that realizes this. In the small town in Hawaii where I grew up, there were basically 2 schools. At the time, the one I went to was artsy-fartsy. You didn't really have to go to class. People were smoking weed in the bushes and not going to class.

It was not good academically, but it let you do whatever you wanted. So I was doing my own internet classes. It was great for me as a motivated self-starter. The other school in town was much more rigorous academically. It was a much better school. One year, maybe sophomore year, a buddy and I were like, maybe we should transfer. It's hard to see it because of how I am now, but I think the same things that make me how I am could have made the parallel version of me highly rigorous, corporate, detail-oriented, something like that. That version of me just got wired in a different direction.

So I do think it was in there. Now, I don't think that one's capable of surviving in this current body. But I also think the founder thing romanticizes founder stuff a lot. I've been very lucky as a founder. I worked hard for it, but luck is a major part of it. I have founder friends who are smarter than me, more talented than me, and who worked harder than me, and they just haven't had that exit yet. Whereas there are other people who did work well for other people and have been incredibly successful. So I think the founder thing gets glamorized maybe more than it should.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think luck plays a huge role in so many parts of our lives, and even the best circumstances aren't fully within your control. Every little thing is the butterfly effect. Being in the right place at the right time, being born to the right parents, in the right environment, meeting the right friends, all those little things add up and can change the trajectory of your life and career in huge ways. So, yeah, maximizing luck is probably the most important skill you can figure out. A side effect of that is often hard work, persistence, not being a jerk to people, and things like that.

But ultimately, luck plays a massive role. I always give it outsized support. I don't think acknowledging the privileges one has takes anything away from me. I was clearly born at a great time, to a family that could buy me a computer. I benefited from all of that. But it doesn't diminish how hard I worked after that. And nobody is actually self-made. If you sell a product that goes on roads, then the road pavers are part of your success. That's enough framing for me.

### [33:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=1986s) - Kirupa

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And the other thing that's interesting is that I use video game analogies all the time. I used to use them even more back then. I don't play video games anymore, I don't have time for it, but I do keep up with the news and so on. For me, life is like the ultimate role-playing game. You don't get to choose the starting character. You don't get to choose whether you're a warrior, a wizard, or an archer. You're given whatever you have, and from there a large part of it is up to you in terms of making viable choices.

But you can't discount the fact that you started with a certain character class and therefore have natural advantages and disadvantages. How well can you identify them? How well can you partner with people who can balance out your advantages and disadvantages, so you create a more cohesive puzzle piece? I think self-awareness is one of those things that took me a very long time to fully realize that part of it.

### [34:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=2042s) - Darius Monsef

And once I realized, like, you know, there are things I'm good at, and things I'm not good at, and I shouldn't be afraid of leaning in on things I'm good at. And even if those things I'm good at were because of just my inherent, you know, like my situations and things like that, I'm going to lean in on it. And I think that's one of the hardest things, because you are taught from an early age, it's all about hard work. It's not about luck. It's everyone has to, like, you know, do all these things to be successful. I'm like, maybe, but not really, though.

Like there's a min bar, then there's the ceiling above which is like limitless if you are willing to take, you know, care of your unfair advantages in some ways. Is your seven-year-old? Have you identified? Like there's, there's a special skill set, a special focus, something that like sort of they get gravitationally pulled towards. Yeah, she loves to create stuff. She loves to write. She loves to read. She's persistent, you know, she loves playing music. She's very good at playing the piano. Like I'm, like I don't know how she got that good at. I played the piano when I was younger, but I was, I was awful.

My wife plays the violin and you know. But you know she stopped after a while as well. But she just has this natural thing where she just like, gets it. I'm like, okay, well, that's fantastic. And so, yeah, so she, you know, she enjoys the more structured programs. You tried like the Montasuri style of casual laidback, and she didn't like it, you know. And so we took her to more of an academic, rigorous kind of a thing. She's like she, she loves it.

I'm like, okay, you know, very different than how I would have typically thrived, but whatever floats your boat, you know, so we just keep trying different things to see, like, you know, what does she gravitate to and not to, and so on. But it's also an interesting thing as well because, you know, my parents were immigrants, but they were highly educated and so I had a pretty good quality of life growing up and I was able to get whatever I wanted and things like that, you know, but I also knew, like, you know, at some point I do have to work.

It's not like I'm just, like, you know, going to be sitting at home all day and, like, you know, just relaxing. But when I look at my daughter and the quality of life she's going to be having as a result- like my wife and I- both, you know, work in tech and we've been pretty successful in what we're doing, like she doesn't have to worry about most things at all ever. And even if she does choose likely just relax at home all day, she's going to be fine and probably a generation of her life will be, you know, will be fine as well.

Like how do we instill in her the same sense of like purpose and urgency, to kind of be like? You know, just because you have a fallback plan does not mean you should by any way slow down or be any less ambitious, because we want to be here to help you reach your goals and be, you know, even more ambitious, take even bigger risk than I could have ever taken. Even if I could, I was like guilty for taking it. Sometimes you know all those things. That's the part I always, like you know, kind of struggle with.

Sometimes I think the my value of sort The view of the most successful I can be as a parent- is to help my kids identify that like that special trait, the thing that is their passion, where you know if you're lucky enough to find whatever your innate talent is and then find an outlet for that where you can then pursue it. And it's like: similarly, we have these conversations of like my- I hope that I'm successful enough that they just don't have to worry about working.

But if my oldest, who really loves performing, wants to pursue do that completely, to not have to work a day job to pay the bills, so that the thing she really loves and wants to achieve she gets a small amount of time. It's like: all right, I'm not going to. It's the Warren Buffet. Enough to do something, not enough to do nothing. Like you're going to have some UBI that covers the bills. But I would hope that you just pursue your dreams, like whatever. It doesn't have to be. It could be a local theater production or, you know, a backup dancer for Taylor Swift, like whatever.

But I hope you work hard at it and pursue it. And that has been a hard thing with her this year. It's like as a parent, she's in this like competitive dance league. They have a season of competitions. She's been on a team. Last year, she was on a solo, like this year. So doing the season as a solo. The first one, she gets 10th place. They only call, like the 10 finalists up, but in her view, she's last place because you're the loser of the winner bunch. You're the public loser to the group. So, full, just meltdown, cried all night. Hard for me to witness as a parent.

Hard to be supportive of, too. I'm on the like, do I force you through this? Is this one of those- like I'm the, you know, Andre Agassiy's dad that made him do it even and was like, "Well, then you get an Andre Agassi or Serena Williams or one of them, or do I go, man, this is really unhealthy for you and I'll let you quit". But she didn't want to do it anymore, but she had a team competition the next day. And my view was like, "You're on this team. Like, you have to do the team event". And they obviously did very well.

And then it was like just enough to kind of let it go. She like crawled, cried all night, all day. I basically had my release just after she won the second one and found peace. It was like such a heavy thing on me. It felt like one of those, does this shape you? Do I, you know, my kid's in pain. Do I let, do I relieve the pain and let her quit this thing? And so it was a very rough thing. And then she ended up. She placed, you know, roughly somewhere in that top group all season. And then the last one, she finished first overall.

And I'm- I've told her that, like to make it clear, I'm more proud of you for not having one, but she worked her. You like where's your weakness? Work on it. And then over the season, like did it and then won. Then if she just won the first one, like okay, I don't know if you learn as much from that. So it's almost the experiment worked out as as best as it could. But it's stressful as a parent. Yeah.

There's no instruction manual and you know, every, every kid is very different and you know there's always this fear of like, you know, this is a core memory- is going to be stuck forever to do the right thing on this core memory aspect of it. And so, yeah, for each of them. It's even, you know, my middle really into video games and so, she was into Rocket League there for a while. And we did training. She was allowed to play an hour every day. It had to be training packs. And then we took her to the world championships. It was the same thing to me of something else.

I was like, if that's your passion, then let me show you that continued practice and then competition around it to like. I don't know where that outlet is. She's now moved on to Fortnite- Fortnite because it's more social and, I think, fun, but it's a similar thing of like. I just want you to work hard at whatever it is. Exactly. Like. Just understand the value of hard work, you know, that by itself is a is a big part of like, you know, whatever you end up doing in life, you know, you being successful or not.

### [40:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=2427s) - Kirupa

Yeah. So let's shift over a little now to cars. Even though you and I haven't spoken, I've been following your work for a long time, mostly because that's what I use social media for. For me, it's not to meet new people. I met a lot of great people 20 years ago, and then 10 years ago, from the same community. So I just follow you all exclusively. My LinkedIn is basically filled with your stuff. I follow all your work, from Creative Market to Brave Care, and your app for kids.

You also mentioned the challenge around building for kids, not just how do you gamify things and make them feel fun, but also the amount of oversight, legal guidelines, permissions, and all those things. It's a whole different ballgame when it comes to kids. So I was like, yeah, I get it. It's a hard thing. But when you pivoted to cars, I was like, this is awesome, because I love cars. Not to drive them or anything like that. I have an electric car and my audio setup, and I'm happy. That's fine. But I love watching cars. I like configuring them for the fun of it.

So when I saw you doing this, I was like, this is great. And I also saw on social media that you frequently post about your quite-the-collection of cars. I've seen pictures of them quite a bit. So I was like, wow, you've found a passion of yours that you've probably always had. I'm certain you've always had it, especially with what you said about Make-A-Wish. So you have the Batmobile and Lightning McQueen. Are you the driver for both of them?

### [41:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=2513s) - Darius Monsef

So I ended up thinning some of the collection out. I also have the Batsuit, and it had been right behind me. But when I travel for work trips and my kids are all upstairs, whole other part of the conversation, you want to have it put away. My wife and I have separate bedrooms on separate floors of the house. I'm upstairs with the kids, and the Batsuit in the dark when my door was open was not something they liked. So the Batsuit's in the closet now. That whole thing came around during COVID and Halloween, when I knew kids wouldn't go out. I was like, what if I just reverse trick-or-treat?

I'm going to get a Batsuit, take candy to all these kids, and go do that. So yeah, it's weird when you look at it and go, why didn't I get to this sooner? I've liked cars and played with cars for a long time. I counted it: I bought 25 cars in 10 years. Not that the collection's huge. I just have a very eclectic taste in cars. There isn't one that fully satisfies me. I went from a lowered, wrapped Model S to a giant lifted truck. I also have the Corvette. I have a Porsche 911.

My wife jokes that if I can last 2 years with a car, that's pretty good, because there's always some other one I want to try or experience. But the Lightning McQueen thing happened because Travis, from that contact-lens company, when I helped him start it, because we were best friends, was like, "Look, if you ever sell this for a lot of money, you have to buy me a Ferrari." And I was like, "Yeah, dude. I'll do that. That'll be funny." Then, as he started doing well, I'd text him like, remember, you have to buy me a Ferrari. He'd say, yeah, yeah, we'll do that.

And then when he sold the company, it was like, this is going to happen. But the way it works with gifts, if he gave me a $100000 car, I'd have to pay taxes on like half of that. I was like, I don't want that. So he and his wife could give me and my wife $56000 and it wouldn't hit a tax threshold. So I was shopping for a car in that range, and I was like, I'm going to get a red Corvette and just make Lightning McQueen out of it.

I don't know if I would have been able to get it approved with my wife to do something like that unless it was this just-happened situation. Car purchasing is probably the most strife we have in our marriage. But we did it, and I've had Lightning for 7 years now. That one has sort of gone the distance. Then, because I had Lightning, and during COVID I left Portland for a couple of years and we went back to Hawaii, my brother was here in town, so he was taking Lightning out.

We basically have 3 or 4 families every weekend who find me on social media and say their kids would love it if I came out. We don't charge anybody. We just bring the car out for them. So he did it, and I was like, when I come back I want to get a 2nd car so we can do it together. So then I added Cruz Ramirez, who's the protagonist of the 3rd movie, and then I was like, I can build a Mater. So I had Cruz, Mater, and Lightning. I also had a Batmobile, but it wasn't very practical. It was like a Camaro with vertical doors, kind of Batmobile-ish.

I was like, well, I can't really justify that as a daily. So I'll get my Tesla wrapped, and the license plate on that was Gotham. It was like, what would Bruce Wayne be driving around where, if I had to get out of it in the Batsuit, it would make sense? I had that for a while. The story with that is that there was a kid who's been battling cancer, and I haven't checked in with the family lately, but they do car parades in front of his house every year for his birthday. We'd done it once before with Lightning, and it was a superhero theme.

So I was going to come in the Batsuit as well. My brother's driving Lightning and I'm driving Bruce Wayne's car in the Batsuit. Then I got out of the car to go give him a gift, and my car door closed. You know how the Tesla door handles tuck in. I didn't have the key on me. The key was in the car, or really my phone was what I was using, and my phone was in the car. So there I am, in the Batsuit, in the middle of a neighborhood street, and now I can't get back into my car.

But isn't the phone being inside your car enough for it to open? The way I had my settings, it wouldn't open back up. Okay, gotcha. So I'm locked out of my car, and it was this panic of, if my brother hadn't been there, I think I would have had to walk a mile to a Walmart or something. I was just stuck. In your Batsuit. In the Batsuit. Fortunately, I got in my brother's car. We drove around the corner.

I called my wife to get my password through my password manager for my Tesla account so my brother could download the app and open my car door so I could get back in. It was just like, what are we doing right now? How did I end up in this situation? But I've thinned that collection down now, and I just have the Corvette, my truck, and then I bought a Porsche 911, the '99, like the year I graduated from high school. One guy in my town growing up had that kind of car. So there was a part of me that's like, I could be that guy. I'll do that. Yeah.

### [47:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=2833s) - Kirupa

Oh, very, very cool. Just out of curiosity, when I look at cars, one of the things I care about a lot is that it needs to be somewhat high-performing, but it also needs to be extremely quiet, which often seems at high odds with what I'm going for. For me, Teslas are good, but the road noise in them is not great. I love my Tesla, but it's noisy because that's just the way it is. I've test-driven so many cars. I go to the websites, I look at the surveys, I look at people with decibel meters. I have one myself, though I'm not actually measuring it. All of them are loud.

What, in your mind, is a good car that's quiet but not just some 2-wheel-drive slow family clunker? What I love about cars is that we can agree we really like cars and then, inside of that, completely different things. There's something in car culture that amounts to respect all builds. You go to a car show or meet and you're like, I don't like that at all, but I like that you like that. So we are literally the opposite. When I lifted my truck, my wife said, "You can make it as tall as you want, but you can't make it any louder," because I make all my cars louder, like the exhaust.

### [48:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=2910s) - Darius Monsef

Some of them also have automatic cutouts, so I can open a flange and have it come straight out of the pipes. They're all incredibly loud. I can also make them quiet, so I'm not obscene. It's funny because you're clearly optimizing for quiet, and I'm on the other end. I'm in the minority here, by the way, because I know everyone else definitely likes that part. That's one of the reasons you buy some of these cars. When you hit the gas, you want to feel the engine revving and the power going through the machine. So I completely recognize that. But to actually answer your question, the tires themselves have decibel ratings.

So you're not just looking at the car, you're also tire shopping. And I don't know enough to know for sure, but I would assume the wider the tire, the more friction and the more noise. On my Tesla, I changed the wheels, and those are incredibly wide tires. Your safest answer is probably a not-very-fun smaller car. Then build quality matters too. When I was selling my Tesla, I was looking at the Porsche Taycan as an electric alternative. I don't know if you've test-driven one of those, but I'd be curious. Are they basically the same as the Audi GT? Same platform, different brand. Yeah. Okay. I have.

And you're right, they are quieter. So there's your answer: Porsche Taycan. And the new Model Y, a Tesla one I looked at last week, they said one of the big improvements is that it's pretty quiet. Some of the sites said it's getting closer to a Rolls-Royce level. I test-drove a Rolls-Royce Ghost a while ago, and that is very quiet. But I was also like, I'm not going to justify spending that much on a vehicle, especially because you look like Mr. Penguin from Batman. There's no version of that car where you can just drive casually without everyone staring at you.

No, no, I'm just wearing my usual unique clothes, flip-flops with socks, and I'm like, no, this will not fly. Maybe it goes back to the beginning of this conversation. You just have to be comfortable in your skin, or your Rolls-Royce. No, no. I mean, maybe. But that car doesn't speak to me either. I know you can customize it to look extremely boring, but the overall shape of it is just too much for me. For me, no one should know I'm basically driving around in that thing. If you can spot me from a mile away on the freeway, that's not a good sign. That's probably fair.

That's what's so different about Lightning. I'm similar. When we sold Creative Market and I moved home, I always wanted to buy a nice car and never had the money to do it. So I bought the top-of-the-line Tesla at that time, and I was the only one in my town who had one. So I'd be at Starbucks and want to leave, but I could see a few people looking at the car, and I didn't really want to go to it because the question they always asked was, "How much does this car cost?" I'm like, that's a weird question to ask, and I don't really want to answer that.

So I didn't like the attention of that. But if I'm in Lightning, I want everybody's attention. Exactly. Because it's not me. It just makes people happy. Lightning can say his catchphrases. I can push buttons and he shouts through speakers in the front grille. It's a different thing. So you have to find the kind of attention you might enjoy. Yeah. I live in a suburb of Seattle with a lot of tech people, so a Tesla would just blend in. Everyone has one, so you don't really mind it. But some of that also goes back to my upbringing. My parents, we grew up in Alabama, actually.

It's a pretty small town, but my parents did pretty well. I'd ask, why do you keep buying a Ford? And they'd say, look around at our neighbors. The average vehicle there falls within this range, and it would be odd for us to go several orders of magnitude beyond it, because it just wouldn't feel proper. At that point I didn't fully recognize that. As I got older, I totally got it. In some areas, maybe fitting in is not the worst thing in the world, especially if it gives you more peace of mind. I really believe in that.

The reason to fit in isn't to make others feel bad about you having something else. I do this all the time with my kids. They get dropped off at school in Lightning McQueen. There's a lot of fun stuff around that, but I'm always like, don't ever make somebody else feel bad because they don't have one. You don't have it. I have money. And you being a real jerk to other kids about it means you're going to get less of it. So just remember that. That one rubs me wrong. I want them to have all of this, but I never want them to make somebody else feel bad.

### [53:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3202s) - Kirupa

Yeah, I think you said it exactly right. That's exactly how I feel. Even your Lightning McQueen vehicle isn't extremely unreachable for most people. You just have to put the effort in and get it wrapped, which is fully within the realm of what most people can do if they spend the time. But there are other examples where some people can work a lifetime and never get close to buying that vehicle. I just can't justify that. Also, the people who could never afford that car are not less or worse people than I am.

The fact that I could buy the car has no bearing on my character or the quality of me as a person. One of the bummers was getting into the Tesla and hearing a kid go, "Whoa," and the mom saying, "Don't look at that. You'll never have that." It happened too fast for me to catch it, and afterward I was like, man, I wish I'd caught it sooner. I wanted to say, come sit in this car and let me tell you: I didn't get good grades in school. I had terrible SAT scores. You can do this, kid.

And that's part of the motivation that took me back to Genie, this idea that there's a spectrum of it.

### [54:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3275s) - Darius Monsef

I think that impact on a kid matters. Part of the reason I ended up successful is that my dad is very egotistical. The fact that I'm a Monsef meant, to him, we'll be more successful because we're Monsefs, we're better than others. I think that has an impact, because then you do believe in yourself. I believed I would achieve something great because I'd been told my whole life that I would. That's the whole increasing-luck thing. I looked for opportunities because I believed I'd get opportunities, and that gave me something to pursue. I lost where I was going with that, but the impact, oh, the kid.

Genie could have been that positive voice, because maybe you have a good family, but you're just not hearing that there is something about you that nobody else has. You're the only you that could ever exist, and that in itself is really special, and I want to see you succeed. Genie could do that, and I thought that was cool. But the other thing that felt even more powerful is that some kids do have parents whose voice in their ear all the time is, you suck and you're never going to be anything. Then it felt like, man, how much more powerful would it be for Genie to counteract that?

But then you mentioned the additional burdens of building in that space. What do I do when a kid says they're sad? When somebody's hurting them? What do I do when they say their parent's hurting them? If you're going to build a tool that kids will communicate with, you have the responsibility to deal with that. I think, no offense to other companies, they shirk that responsibility. We've got Alexas in our house and Siris, and I know they hear a lot of that, and from a terms-of-service perspective they go, not our problem.

I just don't think, as a company building for kids, you can say, hey, we heard this terrible stuff, but we don't want to deal with it. We had to build a whole escalation policy, law enforcement, all of it. We're not going to let somebody down there. That was hard because you're not focused on building a better product and winning as a product. The edge cases become very serious, and then they occupy all your time instead of building things. From a business point of view, you ask, is that the highest-leverage activity you can be doing? But it's the right thing to do.

As you know, the right thing and the right thing from a business point of view are often at odds.

### [57:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3426s) - Kirupa

So when are you launching Rides? I know you say you're working on your app right now. I went to the website again a couple of days ago and it looks great.

### [57:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3433s) - Darius Monsef

We're sort of tearing it all down. That was the thing. We had the team that was building it, and then I believed in myself and said, I'm going to rebuild it. So there's a better version that I think is maybe a few days away. As I've been rebuilding it, I've been able to add more things that I wanted to see in it. So I would hope this new, improved version is out in the next week for people to play with and see the beginnings of what I intend it to be, which is a place for car enthusiasts to showcase their car.

Often it's modified cars, because you and I are on the wide spectrum of modified. If you've got one of those cars with 100 bumper stickers on the back, that's a modified car. You saw it and said, I'm going to make this more how I believe it should be. That's in the same spirit as somebody who wants to make theirs quieter. You're going to extra-seal the door jambs, the other person's cutting holes in their exhaust. So you could have a feature-dedicated place to do that. Instagram is the visual place to show it, but I don't really know what else is happening there. I'm not meant to learn more.

I'm meant to click really quickly and like it. I want a place where everything you've done can be told. Then there was an interesting evolution in how we wanted to organize community engagement, because the most dominant place to get information about a car is still a bulletin-board forum. Exactly, the bulletin boards still reign king for car info. And not even like what you did, where you adopted newer forum technology. They're still on whatever version will never change. So if I have a community for everybody, the forum structure would need to be cars, then Porsche, then Taycan, and on and on.

Then it was like, oh no, I think this is more like what Gmail did for email. I don't organize my email anymore. Search is so good I don't have to. It just helps me find what I want. So I'm building the post-sharing feed so you just put it out there, and then our responsibility is to help filter it. You'll get all the quiet things. You'll follow the Quiet Ride hashtag and find all the people into that. That's what's so funny about cars too. You aren't a minority. You might be in the grand spectrum, but there are 50000 other people who geek out about exactly the thing you geek out about.

If you find those people, you have your tribe. So I'm trying to build enough community structure, based on what we saw with forums, to see how people build with it. I was very, still am very, proud of myself because you had a test forum category, or a trash one, or something, and I got like 1000 messages deep with my own club inside the trash category. I remember it being either a don't bury this post thing, or keep bumping it, or don't bite. It was one of those things where what you told people not to do is exactly what they did, 1000 messages in.

Then I think clubs were happening, and there was a Revol Club. So I said this was like a club that's not the club. I vaguely remember all that. There was a lot of, you're not a real person, you're just an AI, which now makes more sense because you could actually be AI now. There were a lot of memes around that. I think you coined quite a bit of it. Was it Urban Dictionary? I think that's still my definition. Yeah, that was you. It was just enough structure for people to be creative within, and when that happens, magic happens.

So I'm trying to launch an information-sharing platform that feels unstructured, but structured enough to see what people would use. The 996, the Porsche I have, the motor went bad. I drove it for like 3 months. Now it's dead. On those cars, fixing the motor costs more than the car costs. So I'm going to put a Corvette engine in it. If I have this thing, it's going to be a thing. I'm in the 996 forums a lot, on Facebook and in a swapped-Porsche group. I want to find a few of those tribes and have them come over and see the value.

If I launch a car community for everybody and you go look at Quiet Ride, there's going to be nothing there at first. It's hard to build communities because you need enough engagement around a certain interest to be successful. So I'm also in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm probably launching with the Seattle-Portland PNW car scene, which I'm part of, and then finding a couple of the forums I already participate in. Hopefully we build a better way for people to organize around that. And because I'm selling it, the business is actually huge. $60 Billion a year is spent on aftermarket parts for cars in the US.

Then for private-party, Facebook parts, junkyard parts, it's another 10 or 20 billion. Add the services people use to install that stuff, and it's like $100 billion a year spent modifying cars or adding aftermarket parts in the US. So it is a very big business. Our view is mostly legacy players using AI in a bolt-on way. I want to use AI to accentuate the human experience rather than do trivial stuff like, oh, AI writes your messages. Every forum has the same issue, which is the reply, search the forum first.

We can have a Clippy-like answer that says, based on your question about the quietest ride, here's an answer built from actual people's recommendations, with links so you can go get the background. How do I use this to make the information more accessible? There's a lot of fun stuff to build.

### [1:03:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3816s) - Kirupa

Yeah, I mean, that's one of the main reasons I switched from vBulletin to Discourse, actually. As you're typing a question, it can say, this sounds like something someone else has asked. Back in the day it wasn't very smart, but now with AI it's much smarter. The funny thing is, so much of the posts back then... I became transactional at some point when all of us got busy and I got too busy to manage it myself, be there all the time, and it turned into question, answer, question, answer, and people left. Even now the forum gets a lot of traffic.

When someone is about to post something, it can show them that 10 years ago someone posted the exact same question. They go there, get the answer, and leave. And for what it's doing right now, that's okay. So I really like your idea. Let's say I decide to modify my Tesla Model Y in various ways, and I go to your site, post a picture of it, and describe all the things I've done. The idea is that someone else can come in and everything I described becomes an indexable, searchable entry. So if I change my wheels to a different brand and model, that itself becomes data.

Then if I use that as a tag, I can see all the other posts from other people that are related to that particular thing. So basically you're taking one thing I posted, getting signals from many parts of it, and making each of those things a potentially searchable topic that can lead to more content. Yeah, and that makes discoverability better, because you might buy that Model Y and think, I want to do something to it, but you might not know what. So you could look at a bunch of other Model Ys that have your same base color and think, I like the way the wheels look on that one.

Or, I bought the white one because they had it, but I wish it were a different color. What colors do people wrap Model Ys? You can go look at all the wrapped Model Ys and say, I love that. What specific 3M color code is it? And then the other side of it is, who installs these? Here are the wrap shops that are basically vetted because you can click into Ira, who does all my wraps here in Portland, and see all the cars they've done in the community.

It becomes a trusted network for finding something you want to do, understanding who sells that part, and who could help you put it on. So yeah, are you using any AI for this, or is it still just pattern matching?

### [1:06:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=3966s) - Darius Monsef

The AI right now, and where I've been building, is in moderation and in helping build the background tagging for easier discovery. We're also using AI to do the parts-discovery piece. When you add a car, you first add the images. We help identify the car. So on the 2nd step, where you'd normally have to do make, model, trim, I generally know the generation and what it is, so I can streamline that input. Then when you get to the parts, that's where this learning loop comes in.

The first version we built was, you tell me what category this mod is, like exterior, then you choose the subtype, like wheels, and then the manufacturer. And once you see it, you're like, I can classify it. I don't need you to do that. That's not how you think as a user. You don't think, I'd like to modify the exterior of my car. No, you're like, wheels. You go straight there. So for finding your mods, you just say, I got HRE wheels and they're FlowForms, and then we use AI to return likely matches. It says, it's probably this one or that one, and you go, that's the one.

So we're using it to find things and build the product-parts library. I also wonder how niche data APIs survive in a world where AI is getting pretty close to parity with those data sources. There's an API we pay for that prefills year, make, model, and trims. That's a finite amount of information, and it doesn't have all the details I want, like colors and interior trims. So I built a process. I'm not scraping their API. I'm using both Gemini and GPT in tandem to do this faster for me, basically hitting my rate limits on both and asking questions like, what year was the Taycan available?

Okay, for those years, what trim levels did it have? It had the S, it had the 4S, and then go get more. So I'm building an internal API/data source so I don't have to use the other one, because it bothers me that every time you choose one it takes a second to load the next one. This should be instant. It should be auto-completed. Again, because I have the power now with Cursor, I'm going to build that data source myself. Embracing Cursor is going to dramatically shape the product I build, because I think differently now.

I think about how I could build it, instead of just, it'd be really great if it could do this. What else could it do? There's an empowerment there that will really change the way the product is built.

### [1:09:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=4148s) - Kirupa

Because you're familiar with code and you've done this in the past, there's a certain level of, wait, is this right? Your mind starts going into the implementation details of how something should work. But when I use Midjourney, DALL-E, or Imagen, I have no idea what codecs are being used or whether it's a one-pass or two-pass filter. I don't create vector or raster graphics, so I don't know that world at all. Because I don't know anything about it, that ignorance lets me focus on the result. There are 10 images; I like three of them, so make these changes, finish, and I'm done. This is great.

But every time I use an AI system to write code, I wonder how it did that or why it's in JSON. I waste mental cycles on trivial things that, at the end of the day, don't matter. When you're trying to do something ambitious and grand, you have a certain amount of energy for the core work and then the creative, exciting work. In the world before AI, you're often already exhausted from doing the bare minimum. You don't care about the delighters, cool features, or flair that will make it more interesting. My cat just jumped on my lap, and I don't know why. Those little things always get cut.

With AI, I have more time to focus on the things that matter. What's holding me back isn't the quality of the models. It's my inability to let go and say I don't care whether something is structured in this format, the commas are in the wrong location, or the parentheses are there. It doesn't matter. The app works. An end user doesn't care how I built my app. In your case, all they care about is having a question about a vehicle or trying to modify their current vehicle. Just give them those details and make it easy. That's it. I think that's why I feel so liberated.

Because I haven't been writing code for long enough, I spend less time asking how they wrote it. It's in a language I don't understand, though I can troubleshoot it. One rule I set is to thoroughly document the code so others can understand it. I want to learn why things happen in this sequence and where these files are referenced so I can understand it better, but I'm not auditing the code. Because I used to be an engineer, I could feel less-than because I can't read or write the code. But it would be a waste of my time to learn now.

I've tried a couple of times, thinking I'm going to learn to build apps. Why? That's not the highest-impact, highest-value use of my time. I have less of that self-judgment and can just build with the tools. It worked well because I started this a week ago, right when Claude 4 came out, and people who can read the code and understand what it's doing say it was a dramatic improvement. I rode into better code, though we haven't stress-tested it. Even when I built ColorLovers, I wasn't particularly good at code. That thing went down all the time. It was PHP- and MySQL-based. It started as ColdFusion, which kept crashing my Media Temple account.

Then it moved to a Rackspace server, and I hired Chris, my first technical partner, who switched it to a PHP and MySQL LAMP-stack product. The tool is smarter today than I was when I built something successful before, and these tools will get smarter faster than I will. Absolutely. Did you know Media Temple shut down about 2 or 3 years ago? Wasn't it GoDaddy or something?

### [1:12:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=4377s) - Darius Monsef

Yeah, they were bought by GoDaddy, and then after 4 or 5 years GoDaddy decided to call it. Man, there's something about the cachet Media Temple had with internet builders. The idea that if you were good enough, your site got sponsored by Media Temple and you could put the logo on it. Then people like me put the logo on our sites anyway because we wanted people to think we were that good, even though we were paying for it. That's just free advertising for the cachet of that hosting company. It's impressive.

Now, Media Temple did sponsor me, and I'm always grateful for that because the expense of running the site back then was ridiculously high, especially with a PHP and MySQL forum and all that. They footed the bill entirely, and I'm always grateful for that. I'm like, wow, that was actually really nice of them to do. Even after they stopped hosting, I still kept the Media Temple logo there. I'm like, no, as long as they're around, I'm going to put their logo there forever. Because if it wasn't for them, 20 years ago, there would be no version of this now, or even the career I have.

They definitely played an outsized role in so many of these little things.

### [1:14:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=4445s) - Kirupa

Yeah, you need now to just keep the logo there as an in memoriam, or whatever. It's the wrap badge for it.

### [1:14:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=4451s) - Darius Monsef

Exactly. But I do miss the old pixel-art days from back then as well. Some of the people I've spoken to recently are pixel artists from 15 or 20 years ago, and I'm like, what are you doing now? They're creating fonts. The monetization of all these things has changed. They don't do pixel art directly, but they contribute indirectly in their companies through their own designs and things like that. So the world has changed, and the people have changed too, but those little passions, those little tics that made them do what they did, they still find ways to get that out even today in a different format.

Well, maybe you do get back to some pixel art. This just came in the mail, but it lets me Wi-Fi connect to my Game Boy Camera, because I've been taking photos with my Game Boy Camera. It's just funny to me to go to a car scene where everybody has their Canon 5Ds taking 6 shots and I've got my purple Game Boy taking photos.

But there is going to be a world in the future where, with AI video-generation tools as they exist right now, it's going to be hard to tell whether there's value in you holding a video camera and recording something versus taking a couple of static shots of yourself in the car and letting AI generate everything, interpolating all the missing pieces nicely. Well, that's the other thing that's interesting. Again, another impact on our mental health. I was laughing at myself earlier because I'm in Zoom all the time, and partially because of COVID you look at your face a lot.

I'm old enough now where I'm looking at calls and thinking, oh my God, all the signs of age are showing. And on Zoom, the older I get, the more the touch-up slider moves to the right. Then for something like this, it's a new video thing and my camera touch-up isn't going to be there. But what AI will do, when people take their portraits and then remake them with AI, is give them a version of themselves that doesn't really exist. It's a similar worry. I think I look great on my Zoom calls, and then I see myself in the mirror and it's like, well, I don't really look like this.

That can be a very negative thing. And if everybody looks like their AI version and they don't actually look that way, that's another byproduct of the bad expectations that come from not being yourself on the internet. Yeah, we're entering uncharted territory right now, because all the things you kind of know are probably not great and not what we should be doing are, by default, enabled for us across all these technology services. And it goes back to this idea that we were born in the right place at the right time and kind of caught it. It's like riding surf. You hit the right part of the wave.

You're not too far up, and you're not too far below. You're just right. I feel like our generation was the last one that got it just right. We had rotary dials, ridiculous phone cords that wrapped around rooms, and then cell phones came a little later in our lives. We know the sound of a dial-up modem connecting. We know the V90 upgrade from US Robotics to 28.8 or whatever. We were there. We saw that whole transition. When I talk to my daughter, she doesn't know a world without touchscreens. She's like, oh, what do you mean the screen isn't touch? And I'm like, yeah, my MacBook doesn't have a touchscreen.

She's like, wait, why? And I'm like, that's just how things are, probably for Apple, probably always will be. The familiarity kids have with all these new things is just taken for granted. Of course I'm going to talk to my little device over there and ask it the time, or the weather, or to tell a joke. And I'm like, back in the day we had Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and it could open a window and close a window, and that was huge when it could do that.

So I always wonder whether, at some point, we're going to become those people who just can't adapt beyond a certain point, who say, I don't get this anymore, I don't go beyond it. I literally thought earlier today that I should explain to my kids what a pager was. They're going to think that's ridiculous. It just told you the phone number of the person you had to call back. Why is that a thing? Well, that's just the best technology we had at the time. I wonder that for my daughter too.

Her starting point is already probably at the tail end of my ability to adapt to new technology, and for her the next 80 or 90 years of technological change are going to be huge. Maybe every generation says this, but I wonder whether it's going to be better than what we had, or much more complicated and worse. I do think that's a generational thing, like the music was so much better in our generation. It's probably true of every generation. My dad is 97. He was born in 28, before radio was popular, when cars weren't really a thing. He's from a village in Iran. He rode a donkey to school.

So even in his lifetime, that 90-year span got us to this talking device that has the world's knowledge in it and connects me to everyone. It really does feel magical. So it's hard for us to imagine it, but I assume the same thing will happen, and it'll probably accelerate, because all of this technology creates more and more advancements. We're getting close to the sci-fi books we read. We're in those timelines now.

### [1:19:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNnRm_bNUEM&t=4779s) - Kirupa

Exactly. Exactly. Wow. I think you and I could probably talk forever. I think we're making up for 20 years of lost time and not having done this properly back when we should have. But we should definitely do this again. You're in the Pacific Northwest, I'm in the same area, so at some point maybe we should do this in real life. Sounds good as well. Appreciate you. It was good seeing you. Likewise. Yeah.


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