Who is Avi?

Avi Schiffman

I would introduce myself as a 19 year old internet activist, which means absolutely nothing, it's a made up term. I see it as I make these websites based on things happening around the world that, because the internet is so widespread and so accessible, you can make tools that can help so many people just from laptop in your bedroom. I've got the coronavirus tracking website, which I made with just a laptop, sitting on my bed, watching YouTube videos, figuring out how to cobble it together. Now it has, hundreds and hundreds of millions of users. That's the power of the internet and internet activism.

Will DePue

Can you just tell me about what that process is like, how did you come up with that idea?

Avi Schiffman

There's always something happening around the world. Even like right now, there's the monkeypox disease, I was thinking I could make a tracker for that, or a few months ago there was the baby formula shortage. I could totally spin up a website that like helps, find where it's available or let people share that they have it and sell it.

You just gotta pay attention and those are global issues, like locally there's also gazillion things. I have no idea what the local issues of some village in India is but I'm sure you could use technology in some way to help better that situation. I really feel like it's never been an easier time in a 13 billion year history of the universe to just learn how to do super complicated things.

The amount of content that's on YouTube in all languages, and that's just YouTube, for learning how to code or anything is incredible. You can be in the most middle of nowhere place with a Chromebook and figure out how to do the most complicated coding.

You didn't even need coding. You can even learn surgery. I just hope like my doctor isn't learning it, you know, through YouTube, but, you can just learn so much and get these jobs paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars, overseas. These days, much work is virtual, like we're virtual here. I don't need to actually fly over there to California for us to talk like it's pretty incredible.

My backstory

Will DePue

I'm just gonna walk it back a bit, just so people can learn more about you. Where are you from? What's your background.

Avi Schiffman

Sure. I currently live in Washington state around Seattle, but I wouldn't say I've grown up anywhere specifically. I've lived in five countries I was born in LA, but then when I was two months old, I moved to London and then Scotland, France, and, England I've lived in Israel too a little bit. In the United States, seven different states.

Will DePue

So for school then, was that middle school, high school experience just swapping around schools around the world.

Avi Schiffman

Mostly elementary school. I'd say I was in a different elementary school, like every year, pretty much. Now I guess I'm a college student, I'm also a student at Harvard, I suppose, but, you know, I kind of hate, like, it's not like a lot of people would say Avi Schiffmann, Harvard student I don't really see it as a major part of my personality.

My experience of school

Will DePue

I think we're gonna connect to a lot of kids around the world who have a hard time at either middle school or high school where they're sitting around and like, my classes are boring or they're not exciting me or I'm excited about something I'm going home and teaching myself. Did you have those experiences? What was your high school, middle school experience?

Avi Schiffman

I had a very interesting time, most specifically, probably in high school, I was a terrible student. I had a 1.6 GPA. I actually did drop out of high school, halfway through junior year, because my projects were just pretty successful and I was like, why am I just chilling here? I should just get my GED, everything was going online that time anyways was the pandemic. I was the kinda student that I was failing my physics class or I had a C minus in there, but at the same time, I'm winning my school's science fair for a physics based project.

So, yeah. You know, it's not that I was not interested in the subjects, I was very interested in in all the subjects, but the way that the school system worked didn't apply to me the most. I mean, maybe if I was pump full of Adderall. Sure. I would've done all my homework and all that kind of nonsense. But I think the times in school where I thrived the most was when I had to do project presentations I'd always go all out for that. I'd always make the most amazing videos or projects. That was the kind of school that I was very good at, but of course that was not what was traditionally acceptable?

But, in middle school, I remember, we'd have silent reading time and everyone would be reading and I had a Kindle and I would be reading the absolute beginners guide to Python programming. And I had this little thing on my phone where you could write Python programs and compile them. So I'd write text adventure games in the middle of class. Yeah. As reading work, I guess. My teacher was fine with it, I was certainly not a traditionally successful student. But whatever who cares.

How I got started building

Will DePue

Tell me more about that actually it's an interesting point: what was one of first times you got started and realized you could build something?

Avi Schiffman

I think like the first successful one was this website I made that was a real precursor to the COVID tracking site. Actually, the COVID site was just the reskin of this one, but I noticed that in Washington state where I live all the public high schools, other sports goes through something called king co.

So like all the football, lacrosse, etc. all goes to this one website, but their website sucks. It looks like it was made in the early 2000s. I mean, they don't even have a mobile version of it. It's one of those like terrible flash sites, but all the data is there and they update it every few hours.

So I was like, Hmm, I wanted to learn web scraping at the time because I felt that the best way to learn these new skills was to make entire projects around the key concepts. So I wrote a web scraper to take all the data from the sports site and designed the UI to look like ESPN merging together and made this sports website for my high school.

It was pretty cool looking compared to the terrible website that nobody used. And they liked it so much that my high school put it up on all the TVs there and, I was working with the school for the spring season of sports to make a more advanced version of this and a mobile app that would have live streaming...

Later on in high school is when things maybe started picking up from, ah, this is like a fun little game I'm like putting on game jolt to oh, like thousands of people are using like a real thing I've made.

Will DePue

Totally, it's like shocking how much you can create an impact in the world. That's for sure.

Avi Schiffman

I think one thing that's cool about like the internet and tech is you don't really have to do that much. Coding a website, sure, maybe it takes you a few hours or days, but the amount of stuff that can happen from that is so much it's pretty incredible. That's what I really like about internet activism, because I'm not like having to be there on the ground in Europe. Every day, I can just develop a website that runs while I sleep that does a much broader range of impact than I could do as an individual there.

Will DePue

I think it is so incredible to be able to launch a website and then anyone in the world can access it...

Avi Schiffman

It's also just really easy to share them too. On social media, you can easily share a link to someone that, embeds beautifully, or you can be on the news and speak a domain name that's easy to remember and someone could pull up their phone and type that URL in.

Building the world’s largest COVID analytics site

Will DePue

So let's zoom out a tiny bit. Can you just tell me the story on how did you get to where you are now?

Avi Schiffman

Pretty much, instead of, scraping Washington State's sports website, I can just point the same thing to Chinese government health department websites, take their data and just change the background, color of the website, change the table headers a little bit and bam, you have a coronavirus tracking dashboard.

I posted it on Reddit and people were like using it and everything. It was great, but I'd say it all really kickstarted when I posted it on Nextdoor, which is a hyperlocal Facebook type of platform. And, this was like, another month or so later, when the first cases started happening in America, which was actually in Washington State a few miles away from where I live.

So people really started to freaking out, all the grocery stores were being looted so I was like, well hey, you know, I got this website, why don't I share it to them? Back in the early days of the pandemic, like there was nothing you could find. The information was so scattered and the CDC website was terrible. News articles are mostly outdated by the time you read them anyways. So, you know, I just put my website out there and then, people really liked it in my local community.

And one person gave a tip to a local tech blogger in Seattle who was writing for a paper called GeekWire. And I remember just sitting in Starbucks, oh, this is pretty cool and whatever respond to the email questions really didn't think much. But that article became really popular and within 24 hours, I was being pulled outta class to do interviews with The Today Show and the Seattle Times and much bigger publications and then 24 hours after that, it was in all the international media.

I think the coronavirus site has pretty much been in every single media outlet in the entire world multiple times over. The amount of attention that site got I've kind of forgotten about it over the years cause it's been a while, but like, man, that website was everywhere and that was pretty stressful. Yeah. A lot of pressure. But, I think I, I learned a lot. This is the one thing you can't really learn this kind of stuff online.

You have to learn a lot of this stuff by really doing it being up at 3:00 AM with the pressure of literal governments and scientists and all these people using your site as like a main repository for information, is pretty stressful. But, I learned how to manage that and now, yeah, I feel a lot more confident when working on bigger projects, in some ways like the Ukrainian site.

Will DePue

I think this is a great point too, it illustrates the fact that a lot of what it takes to be an entrepreneur and help people is just look for opportunity and pounce on it. I already have this knowledge, I see something new, I can go use it. You don't realize how fast you can build something that's really helpful and explodes.

Giving advice to my younger self

So more generally, let's just kinda look back. Can you give advice to your younger self? What was the most valuable skills that you would learn or things that you...

Avi Schiffman

Yeah, I'd say I wish my younger self completed more of my projects. I view everything I did as a stepping stone, I think that's a good mindset for everyone to have. I have worked on hundreds and hundreds of unfinished projects over my entire life and the amount of ones I've actually finished and publicly launched is a tiny fraction. But I don't view any of them as wasted time, I view it all as stepping stones where I learned new things and came up with more ideas. While it is great and all I do wish my stepping stones were maybe a bit more powerful each. By that I mean, I actually finished a lot of the projects, committed to them a bit more instead of instantly jumping to the next idea.

Will DePue

I totally get that. I had that same experience when I was younger. I never finished any projects, I think nowadays I finish all my projects. I think there's some level of just find an idea and make sure you deliver on it and have some determination about finishing it.

Avi Schiffman

I think it's hard because like you can be really motivated at the start. You can be like wow this is like the greatest idea ever, but then I'm sure, you know just as well as I do, a week later, if you're still working on that project, I'd be surprised. You just get so distracted with other things, there's just so much stuff out there. It gets hard, but, learning how to power through that and sticking with a project will help you long term. Also just gives you more about strong portfolio of just cool shit.

Will DePue

One thing I would recommend that got me through this is focus on getting a project to delivery so you can put it in a portfolio, share with other people. Since if it's not finished, you can't share it. And if it's not finished, you can't really put it in your portfolio. So finish it, and then if you wanna quit as soon as you're done, just quit it, bookmark it, archive it, but at least you finished it. And then you can leave forever. I think get to the end and then you can leave is a better perspective.

Best way to get started building

So one more odd question, if you had to restart back to before you ever got started while you were still learning, like what would you do with the knowledge of where the best path would be now?

Avi Schiffman

I think a big part is making sure you're involved. I mean, this is kind of hard, especially if you're a bit younger, but I feel like you and I, for example, we learn about all the major new technologies, pretty fast. We're learning about things like Stable Diffusion when most people have no idea let alone like image generation or what AI is. So I think that being in these kind of communities and at the forefront of, seeing new technological leaps really will help.

I was a bit more isolated, just doing my own thing, you know, middle schooler working on my little video games. Great and all, but if I tried a bit harder to keep up with the new technologies coming out, since if you're able to develop something with these new things coming out you'll have a lot more of an interested audience and an easier way to share your products.

For example, with the COVID site, it was a very relevant topic that everybody was talking about. So sharing it was very easy. Totally. If I made a project based on AI image generation stuff now people are gonna love that because that's what everyone's talking about.

Whereas if I made the website right now on like Lego, sure that's great and all and do that if you're passionate about it, way less of a audience is gonna be like, wow, new Lego website, amazing. So I think that's a great way to frame your projects is to make something based on the hype. A big recommendation I would give to my younger self or really anyone is make sure you're involved as much as you can be in technological leaps.

My most formative building experiences

Will DePue

Another question is can you name experiences, whether it's courses or projects, or a conference you went to or hackathon you won you felt were most important?

Avi Schiffman

I mean, the hackathon I did win in Washington, that was pretty cool. Just because I felt like we powered through that thing. I remember this was held in the Amazon headquarters building and there were a few hundred of us there. Everybody went home like that night, it was a 24 hour hackathon. And I remember everyone's working on stuff and time's up-ish for people to be walking around and really giving you help, they're going to bed we'll see you in the morning to judge your projects. And so most of the groups or everyone, literally, got up and left and went home, but our group stayed there overnight.

And we went into a room we weren't really allowed to go into, but had a big whiteboard and we just grinded, we were delirious, but they had free Red Bull there and nobody else was there. So we just drank red bulls and I think we went absolutely insane. I remember in the morning, 10:00 AM, and people start coming back in bringing donuts and were like, "Oh, you guys are still here?" And, then we presented our projects half asleep, but we won because we had, by far, the most advanced project.

I'd say that was a pretty cool moment, the other guys are not working as hard as us. I think it shows you if you actually stick with your projects and give it some real effort and you can see some real benefit from it.

Will DePue

Those moments are pretty magical. Just the experience of having a project you really care about, working with a team, just grinding and you're gonna stay up all night.

Avi Schiffman

Like hackathons, especially in college, it's just a great time where you could just be with your friends and be up at 4:00 AM and you're just like deliriously coding, the most ridiculous projects. It's very fun. I wish I had more friends that I could just call up at 3:00 AM and be, yo, this would be a sick idea. Why don't we work on this?

When I had the idea for the Ukrainian site, I remember I was actually like in my bed, had my pajamas on, all tucked up inside my covers, tweeting nonsense and I was like someone should make a website that helps, connect Ukrainian refugees to potential hosts and neighboring countries. And I was pretty busy working on my own startup at the time. And I was like somebody else should do it. You know, it'd be a great project, but that tweet started getting a lot of attention and people were like, wow, what a great idea. And I was like, yeah, it is a great idea. I should probably do it then.

So I remember like I literally jumped outta bed, like ran to my laptop. It was like midnight or something. And I was at this office and I just started working on the project and I like did not move from that table for the next three days. I was just eating dinner at the like table, just working on it nonstop and, those kind of moments are very motivating and very fun.

How to get in the loop and capture opportunity

Will DePue

You were talking about being a forefront and learning what new technologies coming out. Where'd you get that now? Do you use Twitter or is there a certain news source you look into to stay on the forefront or be in those communities.

Avi Schiffman

I mean, that's part of it too. You gotta know what platforms people are really on. I'd probably say Twitter, maybe Discord a little bit. Reddit can be pretty useful. I'd say Twitter is probably the best though, because people are just a lot more raw on there and you can follow individual people.

I mean, that's how I know you, for example. Yep. Um, there's a lot of in-person events too, I think are pretty good. If you go to hackathons, you'll see what technologies people are using, what people are excited about and you'll just be in those conversations. I know at least in Seattle, there's a lot of hackathon, meetup type things all the time.

Will DePue

Yeah. Go meet in person, if you're in high school, meet your parents to drive you. You might be a bunch of older kids, but that's the whole point.

Avi Schiffman

I took the bus. Good old Metro bus bobbing around the whole city, just, good times going to those hackathons.

But, one other thing I would recommend somewhat is I follow a lot of accounts that give me like a Bloomberg Terminal for news that's just free on platforms like Twitter. There's a lot accounts I like, like the Spectator Index or Insider Paper, and a lot of private accounts I follow, that I get news, as soon as possible.

I really like learning a lot about geopolitics and a lot about the world and feeling that I understand what's happening these days. I like being the first to know about those things, because it helps if you wanna work on something big, like, let's say the coronavirus website, I knew about coronavirus in early January of 2020. It didn't even have a name then. It was, my website has a terrible domain of nCov2019.Live, but that's just because people called it, it just means novel coronavirus, 2019, the term COVID did not exist. Yeah. I remember watching the live stream when they were like, oh, we're gonna call it COVID. And it was like, oh, I should probably buy the domain for that. It sold out within seconds.

Having a builder mindset

Will DePue

I think the thing you're not mentioning here is that you're watching what's going on in the world and constantly thinking: Can I do anything here? Is there any opportunity? Is anything I build?

Avi Schiffman

Yeah, exactly. I think a large part about this too is having the confidence to realize that there is opportunity in everything. And I say you really need confidence for that because a lot of people they see all these issues going around the world and they are like, man, I can't do anything about that, but I don't think people realize how much you actually can impact the world with such low effort, especially with the internet and technology.

The Ukranian site that I made became huge but I just had the confidence to look at an issue that I honestly don't know that much about. You don't need to be an expert in so many of these fields to realize there's opportunity in them. I think more people should just instead of doom scrolling all the time, view it as like opportune scrolling or something like that. These are all these issues people are complaining about, what great opportunity for me to go and develop something that could solve some of these issues or give more information to people.

Will DePue

There's also, I think the fact that let's say you build it and it doesn't work right. You didn't waste that much time.

Avi Schiffman

It's a stepping stone.

Will DePue

Yeah, then if it does work, then amazing, you actually brought something into the world, right. Just try and mess around. I think a lot of the startup founders we know, the one general trait we all share is a lack of humility, and not to say that's the good thing, but generally have a very high agency. I could do anything. I can build anything. I can learn anything I want.

Avi Schiffman

Right.

Will DePue

It doesn't matter if there's a lot of institutional people in the field I'm just gonna break in and that kinda break in mindset.

Avi Schiffman

Another mindset I would maybe have, I think people are almost too focused on trying to develop a "startup" as like a proper term for what they're working on. But none of the projects I've worked on, I considered a startup, nor are they actual startups at all. They are simply just websites, or platforms. There's no legal entity behind them or anything like that. You don't need to develop an organization of any sort you can literally just make a website and toss it out there. You don't need funding or anything like that.

Will DePue

No, I can't agree with that more. I think the biggest thing even just don't think about money in the short term, if you don't need it. If you're building and you're young chances are, it's not gonna be a financially beneficial project...

Avi Schiffman

You're a high schooler you don't need a mega yacht. You can make a few hundred dollars project and that would be good enough success like you.

Will DePue

Hahah yeah. Just build, and maybe your project might turn into a company in the future, but you just gotta build and try out fast. I totally agree with that.

The story and future of UkraineTakeShelter

So what are you working on right now? What's your plan for the future? Anything you're excited about?

Avi Schiffman

Yeah, I have this one project that I've been a little lacking on motivation on a bit. Basically in a nutshell, imagine if UkraineTakeShelter was not specific to just Ukrainians and not specific to just housing, but really for anything and for any disaster and existed prior to these issues unfolding.

Imagine if UkraineTakeShelter was already up and running with hundreds of thousands of people on it before the war broke out. Well, I wouldn't have had to grow it as the war happens and get all the media to talk about it weeks and days after the war.

Will DePue

Can you give some context on how UkraineTakeShelter works for those who don't know?

Avi Schiffman

Yeah. UkraineTakeShelter is a website where anyone can sign up and say, Hey, I can host refugees in this house As a refugee, you can go on UkraineTakeShelter, it's translated into over a dozen languages and you can type in where you are, where you're headed and see thousands and thousands of listings, and get in contact with those hosts. Get housed and it really works like really, really, really well there's many stories I've seen covered by the news.

Where they'll interview some host families, "Yeah you know, I, I contacted like all three of these refugee agencies around me. None of them even got back to me. I usually UkraineTakeShelter I've got refugees on my doorstep the next morning." Pretty incredible.

There was this one story of this family that was in Kharkiv earlier on in the war, which is the second largest city in Ukraine. Right. And the city was currently being besieged by Russian troops and this family was hiding in their cellar. They're hiding in this damp dark place, but they're able to use UkraineTakeShelter to find a host that was in France that was able to help them come to France and stay in their extra holiday home on the French countryside. And it's beautiful, it's on the beach, this amazing place and three days after this family arrives, their house in Ukraine was destroyed by Russian bombs. So it was a pretty cool moment to see wow, this website is able to do a lot more than just house them it's also able really in a way save their lives.

My new initiative

Back to the, what I'm working on now, a way more broad version of that. Everyone always wants to help whenever they see a disaster unfolding around the world, but really all you can do as an individual is donate money to some like, you know, stupid nonprofit that's just gonna take half of your money for administrative fees anyways. And you don't even know what happens with your money, or you can sign some useless American petition that doesn't actually do anything.

That's pretty much all I can think most people can do and that kind of sucks, but with UkraineTakeShelter, it proves the model that people want to help in all kinds of ways that isn't just monetarily. A lot of people have houses, but there's also immigration lawyers and they wanna contribute their skills pro bono. Or maybe they're a mental health support type of person. They wanna provide trauma relief to refugees.

Having a major network where everyone's able to say this is how I can help. You multiply that around the entire world. This would be really successful too, because like with UkraineTakeShelter, most of the traffic comes from mobile devices. You just be a refugee on the run, pull up your phone, be like, I can go to this website. I have an internet connection and it's like a public bulletin you can carry with you in your pocket, wherever you.

Will DePue

Yeah, I love this idea. I've been doing a bunch of volunteering and trying to look for volunteering options is horrible. The process of getting to volunteer is very difficult and very unclear and people wanna help they just don't know how. And if we increased the efficiency of volunteering by 1% that has like absurd outsized return.

Building is easier than you think

Avi Schiffman

Right. And this would be significantly more than 1%. Exactly. This wouldn't even be that hard to code in the first place as well.

UkraineTakeShelter is just a database. You add things to delete things from and have an authentication in front of it. It's not complicated. There's no math required.

Will DePue

Think that's great message for everyone out there too, which is it's not that complicated to create massive impact, like UkraineTakeShelter is immensely helpful and all it is a matching program with identity layer and you guys use Stripe.

Avi Schiffman

That's just a simple API, you can plug in there. I mean you can figure how to make a website like UkraineTakeShelter just by watching videos for a week or two, like the database does not need to be perfect. We used the initial version of the website, which I think is still running this way. I think, we used Firebase, Vercel and NextJS, Yeah. And just toss that together, Firebase is like the easiest thing.

Sure. It's not the most efficient database, but honestly who cares? Get it going. It really doesn't matter. To make a website like UkraineTakeShelter took us like under three days and most of the time was spent choosing what color blue looked good for the background the most.

Will DePue

Well, also the design was quite good. I think we should also emphasize how important design is.

Avi Schiffman

That's a big thing. I'm very passionate about good user interface, design, and good user experience flow. Yeah. that's definitely something you need to keep in mind when developing things. I have to say people suck at design almost all the time when I see people's websites and it's so disappointed to me, even government things.

Will DePue

Yeah, that's true. So the greatest message you're saying here is it's not that complicated, but what was actually required was the fact that you had high agency, you were aware of what was going on. You were subscribing the news and you saw an opportunity and you just took it. It's a good lesson that as soon as you start learning and watching what's going on ideas are going come to you as you're laying in bed.

Avi Schiffman

Right, right.

Will DePue

It's about thinking about how can I actually help? The ways you help are not that complicated. It's not this crazy complicated world. The message we have is that none of us are exceptional. I think many people are exceptional in many ways that are legimate, but not exceptional in the ways of skills or ideas. I think none of us are specifically great coders.

Avi Schiffman

I'm a terrible coder. Terrible.

Will DePue

Exactly. But it doesn't matter, right? It's about that agency and that search for inspiration.

How to reach out to me

Let's say young people wanna reach out to you and ask you any questions. Do you have any way for them to reach out?

Avi Schiffman

I'd probably say Twitter is the best. If you just like @ me on Twitter or DM me I honestly check that like all the time.

Be naive. Don’t think that hard. Just do it.

Will DePue

And any last piece of advice or last note?

Avi Schiffman

Yeah. At the end of the day, it's really about being a little bit naive and not realizing what's impossible and just going for it. The more you think about it, the more problems you'll think you'll run into, or I really can't do this, but honestly you really just gotta don't think, just do.

And it's like a Nike ad here, at the end of the day, just do it work on the craziest projects you have in mind. I mean I'd start making like a website that has like your favorite food before you go on trying to make like a refugee matching service, but like, you know, start somewhere simple.

Everything you see in the world was made by people just like you, that had an idea and were passionate about it. I think once you realize that the world is really made up just humans doing stuff, and you also are human doing stuff. And there are so many resources and opportunities available and this is quite literally the best time in the universe to develop stuff. That should give you the confidence to just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks, especially when you're young if you do literally anything remotely useful, the local news will write about it.

You don't need to take all these... you know I took, AP computer science. I got a 2 on that test. I failed that class. You know, who cares at the same time? I'm giving talks about like computer to like my class. It really doesn't matter. You don't need to worry about these stupid classes, just work on your own projects and do your own stuff and you'll be far more successful just doing what you really wanna do at the end of the day.

How to stick out.

I feel like you could write a college if you like really like catching fireflies you can write a very passionate college essay about that instead of some stupid club and I'm sure colleges would love to accept you more for something like that. To be clear, that's not the reason I built these projects at all, like I dropped out of high school, but doing things like this is like a sure shot way to get yourself into Stanford or Harvard or whatever stupid school you wanna get into.

Just work on a decent project like this. Now you have a unique extracurricular, the news will probably write about it. Bam. It's probably more than most people in your school are doing. And it really does take, takes like a fraction of the effort it takes to do AP Computer Science or Calculus or any of these ridiculous classes, that people take just to hope that it looks good on their little application when in reality, like what the colleges are looking for are more so people doing projects like this.

Will DePue

The important part is just focus on your actual creativity, your passion, your difference. Build something that nobody's built yet. It's all about breaking mimesis build something new, build something exciting. Of course, I think you make a good point about the best way to get into these colleges is don't intentionally try really hard to get into these college the best way is kind of going around. But whether you are trying to game this into college or just do this because you're interested, I would say the central theme is don't try to copy other people or just optimize for the metric everybody else is optimizing on in a direct way. Go figure out your own way.

Avi Schiffman

I mean, copy other people, honestly, a little bit, at least like, you know, great artists steal in some way.

Will DePue

Oh no, no, no completely borrow from other people. I'd say in general though, like I think the guidance of the group of what everyone else is doing is usually wrong.

Avi Schiffman

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think, the way I see it is. You don't need to be the first person to work on something for it to be successful. I'm sure there were other coronavirus trackers out there before I made my own. That just weren't really that popular. If you have an idea and you search it up and it looks like someone's already done that, who cares? Just do it better than them.

Will DePue

Exactly. No, I totally agree. I wanna make sure that people know that I'm not discouraging from competition. I'm actually encouraging it. Generally, I think we're gonna talk to a lot of people who don't know a single entrepreneur at their high school. You're in the middle of nowhere. A lot of the people in your life gonna be focused on things that are usually around mimesis or copying other people.

Just realize the important thing is go do something interesting. And if what we're talking about, isn't what you're interested in great, do something different than us. Go find something interesting you like and go build it. For sure. Awesome. Well, thanks for talking to me Avi, it was a great conversation, happy to have you.