Ekabo Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Podcast
A podcast for those who do not believe they were put on this earth to work 40 to 50 hours per week for 40 to 50 years, to hopefully retire at the age of 65.
Ekabo Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Podcast
146. Unlocking Productivity: The Flow State with Steven Puri!
๐ Achieve Peak Focus๐
Welcome to the Ekabo Home Financial Freedom Podcast! In this episode, we dive deep into the fascinating world of productivity and focus with Steven Puri, the founder and CEO of The Sukha Company.
Helping remote workers focus, finish faster, and feel healthy. Founder of The Sukha Company | ex-studio exec/producer at Fox, DreamWorks, and Sony | daily yogi. ๐งโโ๏ธ
About Sukha (Software Development)
The focus app for remote work. Write, code, or design faster with great flow music, timers, AI assistants, and more. Helping remote workers to focus, finish faster, and feel healthy. Try the #1 global co-working site with focus music, AI assistants, and more.
๐ฅ The Quote of the Day:
"No matter how you do it. Go do it. Go do the thing you're capable of."
โ Steven Puri
This quote emphasizes the importance of taking action and realizing one's potential, which resonates throughout our discussion.
๐ Key Insights from Our Conversation:
๐ง High Productivity:
Steven reflects on his journey towards high productivity and healthy work habits, emphasizing the importance of sharing knowledge with the next generation.
๐๐Challenges in Entrepreneurship
Importance of listening to customer feedback and understanding market needs. ๐๐ก
Lessons from failed startups and the need for validating business ideas before seeking investment. ๐ธโ
๐๏ธ Episode Highlights:
๐ฌ Steven's Background:
Steven discusses his unique path from news broadcasting to engineering and then into film. He shares how his parents' work at IBM influenced his understanding of technology and creativity.
๐ก The Flow State:
Steven explains the concept of the flow state, a mental state where individuals are fully immersed in their work, leading to increased productivity and satisfaction. He references psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on high performers and their experiences in this state.
๐ถ Using Music for Focus:
The conversation touches on the use of music to enhance focus, with Steven mentioning that music at 60 to 90 beats per minute can help listeners achieve a flow state.
๐ฑ Managing Distractions:
Steven provides insights on managing distractions in the digital age, including the importance of time blocking and using tools like website blockers to maintain focus.
๐ Sukka's Vision:
Steven shares his vision for Sukka as an operating system for work, designed to help users be more productive and focused. He discusses the integration of AI to provide personalized insights and reminders to enhance workflow.
๐ Get in Touch with Steven:
If you're interested in learning more about achieving focus and productivity, visit https://www.thesukha.co/ to try the app for free for a weekโno credit card required!
๐๏ธ Tune in every Wednesday at 7 PM Eastern! Donโt miss out on our journey toward financial freedom through smart investments.
๐ Hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications so you never miss an update! Letโs unlock your potential together!
Our Links
โฃ Financial Freedom Mastermind Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/53083...
โฃ Peer Space Host Referral Link https://www.peerspace.com/referrals/g...
โฃ AirBNB Host Referral Link https://www.airbnb.com/r/niyia41
โฃ Ekabo Home Network (IG, Youtube, Email) https://linktr.ee/ekabohome
Niyi Adewole is a licensed realtor in Georgia, brokered by EXP Realty. Feel free to reach out at Niyi.Adewole@exprealty.com if you would like to work with an investor friendly real estate agent.
Welcome to the Financial Freedom Master Money Group Podcast. Here we're all about breaking free from the 40 to 50 year work pride and accelerating our journey towards financial freedom. Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can best track your path to financial independence. We serve as a hub for connecting with fellow members during our sessions so you can share successes, ask questions, and keep the momentum going.
SPEAKER_02:Good evening, everyone. This is Nii Adwale, host of the Akaba Home Financial Freedom Mastermind Group. And tonight I'm excited to welcome Steven Puri, who is the founder and CEO of the Sukha Company, which is a company whose mission is based on helping millions of people find focus, achieve more, and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Steven, I'm super excited to have you here and cannot thank you enough for joining us on the podcast. The way that we do our podcast is a little bit different. We have other individuals that may join uh to listen in live. And at the end, they may want to be able to ask questions to you on what we covered. And so I don't want them to be able to unmute or start their video to throw you off. But how you doing, Steven?
SPEAKER_03:Got out of here. I I am good. I'm having a son in four weeks from today. Come, oh, nice. I know. Are you getting excited or what?
SPEAKER_02:Super excited. It's my first kid. Do you have children? I I literally have my first three months to go next week. So we're we're in the same boat. Are you and and now I'm assuming you got the go bag and everything ready to go?
SPEAKER_03:Got all sorts of stuff, man. My wife is all over it. So yes, that's how this weekend I've dedicated two days just to read all the books that she said. You must read this. I have a stack. Come on now.
SPEAKER_02:One book that was amazing, and not to sidetrack anything, was uh intentional fatherhood. That book was incredible. Have you read that book? No, I'm Googling it though. And really, it's the intentional father, something like that.
SPEAKER_03:Intentional father. The intentional father. I see that. Really good book. Amazon, four and a half stars. Come on now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No, Steven, I appreciate you joining me and the team here. And we're gonna kick this. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So let me just ask you this. So given that I'm having a son, one of the things I said in January with Laura was I said, one of my intentions is now that I'm thinking about the next generation, the world we're gonna hand over to our kids. What have I done to share what I've learned back into the world? Right. A lot of what I've learned is about high productivity, healthy productivity, you know, flow states, like stuff like that, right? So I asked my community in Suka, where do you guys get information you trust? And they said, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube are all just clowns. They're all just trying to sell you energy drinks and trying to sell you like get rich quick courses. But they said, I do trust my friends and I do trust these podcasters. And they named people I'd never heard of. It was not the Joe Rogan's, the Tim Ferrises, it was all these like under 100,000 monthly download podcasts. So how I found you is you're one of the many names that people mention, like I love this one, I believe this person. So what my offer is to you is what I have to offer seems maybe a little far afield from what you normally talk about. Because I've listened to some of your episodes. I don't really talk about real estate hacks and investing hacks and wealth creation. I talk more about how do you funnel your energy and do something great, right? Which is adjacent to what you talk about, but it's not, hey man, here's a tip on a read. You know what I mean? Agreed. Agree. What would be the best way for me to frame what I have to share? So your audience is like, I love this.
SPEAKER_02:I think it goes hand in hand. It's one of those where if you don't have your environment in in your mind and kind of that health going for you, you're not gonna be able to do all these other things. It's almost like that analogy of uh being on a plane, right? Where it's like, hey, yes, you want to put that mask on your kid first, but you should do yourself because if you take care of it. If you pass out, both of you guys are gonna be in trouble, right? So you gotta move yourself first and then and then everything else will follow. So I think if you stay on that line, I'm gonna go with the flow of the conversation. I think this could be smooth. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_03:How long would you like this to go?
SPEAKER_02:Um, so we have I usually try to keep it to about 30 to 40 minutes, and then anybody that joins in that time period at the end, they'll get to ask questions. Sometimes some people aren't able to because it's middle of the day, but but we try to make it happen. Let's do it. Come on now, and we're gonna kick this off.
SPEAKER_03:My wife says that all the time. Does she? Come on now. That's like her thing. Was she born in the southeast? She was born in just on the northeast side of Phil of Philly. So I lived in Philly for a decade.
SPEAKER_02:I probably got in Philly. I probably got it from Philly.
SPEAKER_03:I don't know if I got it from that's her thing, man. She's like, Come on now. She has this arm thing. Come on now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we probably both got it from Philly. Uh there you go. That's funny.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. I look forward to this being one of your more entertaining and hopefully actionable and helpful episodes. Come on now.
SPEAKER_02:And and I want to kick this off from the beginning and kind of take us back because your story is very interesting. When I was looking at your background, I'm like, how did you even get to this point? Right. So so you you grew up with parents that both worked at one of the major quote unquote tech giants of of before, IBM, right? And so, how did that shape your environment coming up? What what did that look like?
SPEAKER_03:I think two things. Uh, and what Ni is alluding to is both of my parents worked at IBM. My mom was a software engineer writing code, dad is a hardware engineer designing CPUs. And two things about that are very important. Number one, you never you know, your mom's a great ice skater. You probably learned how to ice skate when you were a kid, you know. So I learned how to code, right? That wasn't I learned that sort of like I learned French or something. You just got to sort of understand it. Second thing is both my parents were born into poverty that I do not understand, and they worked very hard to make sure that I do not understand. And that definitely infused my childhood with a sense of, hey, you need to go do something with your life. Like we came up from nothing, engineering, working hard, goddesses point of like every night there's food, there's a place to sleep, and that is not lost on me.
SPEAKER_02:Come on now, and that's that's huge to be able to take those two pieces and see see that at a young age. And it's one where we mentioned it at the top before we really got into it, but but you're expecting a kid, and I just had my first four weeks from today. Come on now. I'm right behind you. Yep, yep. And it's one of those things where you want them to have that understanding, but not necessarily have that struggle. So it's it's a delicate balance trying to think through like how are we gonna give that hustle to our kids without having them go through as much struggle as maybe we did come back.
SPEAKER_03:You are listening to the conversations Laura and I have been having all year, 100% with you.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No, one of the things that you did as well is you moved from news broadcasting to engineering and then into film. Was this a plan path or how did this kind of happen?
SPEAKER_03:Heck no. Okay. So my life is if you were to make a movie spine for to hang everything on my life, it's probably a spine slim forced gump where it's like things happen and then I try to make the best of whatever the lucky thing is that happened, right? So, what you're alluding to is when I was in high school, uh growing up in Washington, DC, happened to be at an audition for a youth news show on Channel 5, the Fox Metro Media Station, right? Got won the audition. So I did that for six to nine weeks, and we were the top-rated youth show in the DC Baltimore market. Super fun. It led to USC in Los Angeles saying, Hey, if you want to be on air talent, we have a great journalism school. So I came to LA thinking, oh, I'll study journalism and then I've got my coding thing going on. I had a scholarship from IBM, and as a Watson scholar, that guaranteed me a job. So I could make money coding during school for IBM, which was great. So there I was going to USC, doing something kind of creative, a lot of my friends in the film program and writing code. Guess what happened while I was there? That was when computers got powerful enough to manipulate film. And I was lucky to be standing there when it's like, hey kid, you speak engineer. Oh, you speak creative. We need people who can do that, who can talk to a director about what should happen in this scene and turn around to an engineer and say, here's how I think we can do it. What do you think? Right. So I fell into digital visual effects, did about 14 movies in a space of about four years, got to work with a lot of great directors. This is luck. Okay. This is not like my being brilliant. This was Mel Gibson needs someone to do digital effects for Braveheart. Cameron uh needed some title stuff on True Lies. Fincher, we did the titles and the um the effects for seven. Uh, you know, because a bunch, a bunch of like top directors learned a lot and ended up meeting Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. And we did Independence Day together. I produced the digital effects for that. We won the Academy Award for the visual effects. It was great. A thousand people contributed to it. I'm honored to be part of that team that won, right? And the interesting thing is Roland Dean and I set up a company together, did visual effects, digital effects, computer generated effects, raised about 15 million for that company, sold it four years later. And then the next big turn in my life was I'm 28, I've sold a company, I've got some money in my pocket. I took two years off and traveled and thought, what do I want to do next? And what I decided was making films, like going from being a guy hired to make the computer part of a film, to could I put together films? So I worked my way up that ladder. As you know, I ended up uh you know vice president at 20th Century Fox running the Die Hard Wolverine franchises. I was an executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtzmanorsi. That was the era of Transformers One and Two, Star Trek 11, um, Eagle Eye, a bunch of stuff like that. And then most recently, to conclude your answer is uh after Die Hard Five, I was like, wow, man, like my studio's making really bad movies, and all they really care about is making them cheaply. I was like, This is not an inspiring way to go to work every day. Like, hey, could you shoot this in Romania for like a million bucks less? And you're like, I guess I could find so I got out. I was like, the only thing me that I knew to do other than film at that point was engineering, which is where it started. So I got back into that and I was like, what have I learned? I've been around incredible high performers, they have a lot of similarities in how they work. I learned about flow states and I created an app to help people get into a flow state, which maybe some people listening know, maybe some don't. We can talk about that. But that's kind of the full circle of engineering, got into film and creative, and then got back into engineering.
SPEAKER_02:And we're gonna dive into that app definitely in a little bit. But what I love about your story is is twofold. First off, I've seen like 90% of the movies that that you've been a part of, and so now I want to go back and watch them and see most of them. I'm sorry, I apologize now. Hey, that's fair. The early ones were good, all right. Independence day is still a classic. We watched that just about everyone.
SPEAKER_03:Star Trek 11, I thought was good. Yeah, yeah. The new, yeah, yeah, true. That was the first reboot with Chris and Zach. Yeah. You realize that movie is just Cain and Abel. That is what the organized organizes me, the organizing principle of that movie is if you strip out all the genre stuff, all the photon torpedoes and the starships. Star Trek 11 is just there are two brothers who are going to kill each other, and they lose the movie until they have it out and they team up, and then they can win the movie. And it's simply a story of Cain and Abel disguised in Star Trek, you know.
SPEAKER_02:And honestly, those are the best stories, right? Where it's like a simple message that people play, but then there's all this other stuff that kind of brings you in. But at the end of the day, we're we're pretty simple. We're we like stories, right? Stories that lead somewhere.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, stories are about a family, it's what we know, you know. Agree. The heart of these things is is there a truth to it? And we would always push ourselves to say, yeah, maybe the budget will eventually be 150, 200 million dollars. But suppose we only had two. Is there a story that we would still go see in a theater? And that really pushes you to go, like, okay, is it about a husband and wife? Is it about two brothers? Is it about, you know, what's the thing? Like diehard, you know, the original diehard, which is so good and stands up 5,000 years later. It's about a guy in a world where suddenly women are working and they're making more money, and he loses his wife and he wants her back. Super relatable. You don't need to have terrorists for that story to work.
SPEAKER_02:It's true, but the terrorists do help, and that's what brings us to the theaters. But you you're right, it's a love story. There you go. I'm just saying diehards. That's how I got my wife to watch. I'm like, listen, this is a Christmas love story.
SPEAKER_03:All right, it is. It is, you know, should we ever do an episode just on that? It is amazing the way that movie works. It is like a Swiss watch, it is so good. I'm telling you, as a studio executive, 25, 30 years later, after the movie's made, you still get writers who come into your office, sit on your sofa around the coffee table, and hit you their script by beginning with, well, it's basically die hard on a in a with uh it's that good. It's just one of those like platonic prototypes of a story. Come on now.
SPEAKER_02:And and and what I love from your whole journey though is the fact that you're able to take different pieces that you've learned along the way and implement it somewhere else, right? And so you learned about something called a flow state. And if you don't mind for our listeners, could you dive deeper into what you mean by that?
SPEAKER_03:That flow state I would love to, and I'll tell you, it wasn't that I knew what a flow state was when I first experienced it and went, What? I was going from Austin where I am now to San Francisco. The next day I was going to meet with my team and I wanted to mock up an idea I had for a feature. So I thought on flight, I'll, you know, get into Figma and work on it, right? Get on the plane. Alaska runs that nonstop route. And the captain's like, Hey, sorry, kids, you know, Wi-Fi's out. We took off. I started working. 15 minutes later, we're descending. I'm thinking, we're descending into Dallas. Like the engine fell off, they're making an emergency landing. They won't tell us what's wrong until we're safely on the ground, right? I looked down over two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I had no concept of time. I couldn't tell you if the drink cart came by. I couldn't tell you the name of the dude in the seat next to me, but my designs were done and I liked them. And I had been prepared for that, you know, run to the hotel lobby, grab a sandwich, go up to the hotel room, try and finish, you know, and go to bed for the meeting the next day. Reality, I called a buddy of mine. I was like, dude, I have a free night in SF. Do you want to go to have dinner? And that was an interesting opening of okay, what just happened? What was that thing where I feel uplifted by doing this great work? I did it quickly. I don't feel depleted. And it came down to what you said, flow state, which is, and here comes the explanation, kids. Those who are playing at home, this is the important part, right? There is a Hungarian American psychologist, this guy, Mihai Chitset Mihai, who's had a thesis. He said, These high performers in various disciplines, athletes, artists, investors, inventors, they go into these concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous. They do the thing that changes the world. And they all describe that state in very similar ways. What is up with that? So he did this research with all these high performers. And at the end of it, he wrote a book. And the book is called Flow. It is the seminal work on this. It is from whence we get the term flow state. And he said, I think the greatest thing, he said, I chose this word because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found. We are all on the river, paddling to move ourselves forward. It magnifies your efforts. You go further and faster. And that's what these people know how to do consistently and reliably. And he laid out here's what it's like. And it matched a lot my experience in the plane. He's like, when you get into this state, time falls away, you're not watching the clock, distractions fall away, you're not going to the fridge, you're not going to the bathroom, you're not, you know, like opening YouTube or pick up your phone. You're doing meaningful deep work. You're doing it quickly. At the end of it, you feel the sense of joy because you're in control of your day. You're not behind your day, you're ahead of your day. You don't feel depleted. And he said, There are some conditions precedent that seem to work for all these people. It only happens when they think they're doing something meaningful. So it's not like, hey, man, I'm going to staple these papers or mop the floor. It is, hey, man, I'm I'm doing a really important business plan. Hey, I'm evaluating something that could change our investment strategy. I'm painting Guernica. I'm, you know, like Michael Jordan's quote about when it's when I'm in the zone, it's just me and the ball. The whole world falls away. It's just like, it's about controlling this ball. I will win based on that, right? And it's an amazing thing. And it is repeatable. That's why I built that website to go. What he wrote about, I was like, how do I put that in one place where there's a play button and it gives you most of what you need?
SPEAKER_02:And what you just said is spot on, right? I believe that as well. And those that have you experienced the blessing, the flow state, the flow state piece. Have you been there? Have you been in that state? Absolutely. I played sports. What helps you get there? What helps you get in that state? Nowadays, because it's more business-minded, is it for those that are watching or listening to the podcast, you may notice that my background's different and my lighting's terrible. This is because I'm actually recording this from Argentina, right? So once a year, I take a trip outside the country to get into a flow state, right? And I usually take a trip somewhere I've never been before. I love it. And on these trips, I have my little remarkable journal, and I'm just writing stuff. I'm working on the deep things that are going to transform the life of me, my family, and things of that nature and the business. And so that helps because you get out of the business and you start working on it, and you're in a different environment that focuses you, forces you to go to like a coffee shop and work on something, which you normally wouldn't do in your day-to-day. And then also what I like to do on a weekly basis is block off a good four hours of time, usually on Fridays, to work on one thing, literally one right.
SPEAKER_03:Hang a lantern on what you just said. What you just said is a big one. I'm going to tell you this. I run a community of thousands of people who want to be focused and they're really positive and nice. And I'll tell you this what you just said is huge and it's so simple, which is the research shows it takes 15 to 23 minutes to get into a flow state. You don't just go, I'm in flow and you're magically in flow. Like your brain kind of falls into it. And if you get interrupted, it's another 15 to 23 to get back in, right? So you have to time block. You have to say, This is sacred time. No one's going to book a Zoom here. I'm not responding to stupid slacks or WhatsApp messages. I'm going to go deep. Exactly what you said.
SPEAKER_02:And I love what you were talking about with this piece. So that's one way. You just mentioned time blocking. What are other ways that you can achieve this flow state in today's day and age where you do have Slack, you do have WhatsApp, you have Instagram, you've got all this stuff, all these notifications. What are other ways that you can achieve that flow state in this day and age?
SPEAKER_03:So let's highlight two. There are a bunch of things, but again, this is a short pod. So let's highlight two. One is a lot of people have done the you know, standing on the shoulders of giants thing. So Miha planted a flag and go, here's this thing. It's magical, use it, right? Other people, Cotler, Clear, Newport, Near, have all done research on different parts of this. So music is one where people have done a bunch of research. The sweet spot for most people to help their brains fall in certain key signatures, non-vocal, you're not singing along with you know black pink or whatever. You have an ambient rhythmic feel to the music, right? There are outliers. We have all got the buddy who listens to 90s gangster rap or show tunes or Tchaikovsky or whatever it is, right? But I'm not talking about the outliers. I'm talking about this is the sweet spot for most people. So when I started Suka, luckily I've got a bunch of friends who are film composers, right? With time on their hands. I was like, could you write some original music that matches this research, right? So we have like a thousand hours of that. I'll tell you something I discovered. While people are listening to this, all these different lo-fi playlists and up tempo and you know down tempo playlists and all that. A buddy who does the sound for LucasArts, the Star Wars games up in Marin, he said, Listen, man, I just got back from uh Nepal. It's my son's uh graduation present from high school. You want to go to Kathmandu? While we were there, one day it poured rain, this like lush rain, so hard we didn't go out. But I had my recording equipment, I recorded it. Do you want two hours of rain? I'm like, okay, I have no idea of where this is gonna go, but it sounds like a cool offer like rain in Nepal, right? So we put up a playlist quietly in the middle of all of the scientifically designed ones, just called Himalayan Dream Rain. It's our third most popular playlist now. And when I asked people, because you know, I'm on the platform, so I can see who's listening to it. I was like, hey, Ni, you know, can I just ask you a question? Like, what is it about the rain? Like, we have all this beautiful music. Why do you listen to rain? And it was so interesting, the associations where people would tell me, you know, when I was a kid, I'd go to my grandmother's house and she raised me. I would study there, and it was in Georgia and it rained. Or, you know, my parents had a house. I was growing up in Virginia and like in the spring around finals, it'd always be the spring rains. It was like, oh wow. So that's this mental trigger few of like, get in the state, you got to do the thing right now. So we launched playlists, bunch of triggers, streams, birds, the surf in Cyprus. Even one woman asked for a coffee shop. She said, I had a kid. I used to always go write in a coffee shop because it's kind of a writer's thing to do. She's like, I can't go with my little one-year-old. We put up a coffee shop. Somebody recorded this coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. It's become a popular playlist. Just listening to like coffee cups and the little of the espresso machine. So, one thing to answer your question is sound. Sound is a really great way to get your brain to lull into and just go boom and block out the world, right? Second thing is what you brought up phone, big distraction. Me, guilty. Everyone I talk to, guilty, right? It's beautifully engineered to say, hey, look at me, pick me up, play with me for an hour, right? On your computer. Could be YouTube, could be ESPN, could be Amazon, Etsy, whatever it is. What distracts you when you work? What is the thing that gets you the worst? What website? So probably man, website?
SPEAKER_02:Amazon? I'm always ordering something from Amazon. Like I'll put this up and like, hey, let me order this immediately. What about on your phone? My phone's near me. It's usually my phone. Phone, it's any of the notifications. I got hospitable apps, I have uh WhatsApp messages from my team, text messages from clients. So it's usually right.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. So here's I'm as vulnerable to that as anyone. This is what we did. We were thinking, what's the easiest way when someone in the morning like wants to work? Like you said Friday, I've got four hours, boom, I want to be in it. I want to do eight hours of work in four, right? Because you open the website when you go to work, hit play, music starts. We talked about that. QR code pops up. Tap with your phone, put your phone down. You're working for an hour, you go to pick up your phone and you know, get distracted. Your smart assistant in your laptop goes, Hey, me, like, is your phone helping you? And you just get that one second to go, who do I want to be? Do I want to be that guy who finishes at noon or do you want to be that guy at five o'clock that's frustrated didn't finish? Right? Same thing with the websites. We give you a free Chrome extension, install it, specify which ones distract you. You can choose a little list and toggle them on and off. You open one, you get a little pop-up. It goes, is YouTube helping you right now? And then you you decide. But that's been for us a game changer, is just to say, you know what, you're an adult. But that moment when a friend sitting next to you would go, hey man, do you really need to be on your phone? Let's have your smart assistant. Just give it the opportunity to choose. So that's what we do is two of the biggest things, the ones you brought up, those are the biggest challenges.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. And and I love that you've found a way to help address that in this ever busy world where there's more and more technology coming out to distract you. And so one of the things I wanted to ask a little earlier, and you've kind of explained the whole concept of it, but but what's the definition of sukka?
SPEAKER_03:Oh, I'll tell you where I got the name. It's kind of a fun story, especially because you're traveling. You're in you're in Buenos Aires right now. Yep. Awesome. I love it. Yeah, I love continuous. Okay. So Laura Wifey, the one from Philly, right? Yeah. We met in New York doing yoga. For 10 years, we have a daily yoga practice together. It's an awesome time to be together, right? So we got married like two, three years ago. Where do you go when you do yoga all the time? You go to Bali, right? Hang out on the beach, do yoga. Great. Very grateful that my life is a place where it's like, we'll go to Bali for 10 days. So we had a working version of Suka without a title, right? And some early like beta members. So I said to Laura as we were flying there, you know what? For 10 days, no one from the office is gonna bug me to like do anything, purchase orders, nothing, right? Maybe in that time the universe will speak to me, give me a great name. Like Amazon is not called like bookstore. You know what I mean? Like Nike is not like shoe place, you know. Like, what's a cool name that's not like distraction blocker or flow state app, right? So she goes, Great, I wish that for you. So we got there, landed, and I said, you know what I think would seed my unconscious. What if I ask two or three people who are using it right now? What's their favorite thing? And maybe that'll inspire, you know, my unconscious mind to be, you know, come on, someone. She's like, Go for it. I'm going to the pool. I will see you later. Right. So I dropped in group chat. Who has time to chat? Three people say, Yeah. 10 minutes. Hey, knee, thanks so much. What's your favorite feature? Do you love the music, the timer, the you know, the breaks, the smart assistance? What do you love? Right. Third guy, I'm going to wrap up. And I was like, Thank you for your time. I promise 10 minutes, I'm gonna let you go. And he said, Steven, you ask the wrong questions. And I was like, Really? Guy, I don't know. Okay, what was the right question? He said, You should have asked me why I pay you. I was like, dude, we charge like 30 cents a day. Like, I don't collect a salary from this, I just do it because I think it's cool. We pay for the servers. He's like, Let me tell you something. The last year or two, I find I have two kinds of days at three o'clock. I can be playing with my kids. They're two and four right now, or at six o'clock, I can be down myself. Where did the day go? I was busy all day, but I didn't get the big thing done. And I realized the difference is did I open Suka that morning, which actually wasn't called Suka, it was called um Centered. And he said, Did I open it this morning? And hit play. He said, So I pay you because my kids are not gonna be two and four forever. I was like, Thank you. That was a way better question than the one I was asking. So I told this to Laura at dinner. She's like, That guy's really smart. Like, that's a really eloquent way to talk about this. So that night we're going to bed, brushing our little teeth, wearing our little spa robes on our honeymoon. And she looked at me, she goes, You know, in yoga, we hear all these Sanskrit terms, karma and your dharma and your prana. You wanted the universe to speak to you. It did through that dude. He describes sukka, that feeling when you're in your lane, doing what you're meant to do, you know you're good at it. You're in control of your life, you can do it with ease. You should name it after that, not after what the tool does, but what the goal is to feel in control, to feel happy. And that's what it means in happening in uh Sanskrit is like the happiness from self-fulfillment.
SPEAKER_02:Even that's incredible. Seriously. And and pretty cool. The way that you went about finding it was almost using the app in and of itself. Taking that trip is getting out of your own way to focus on on one thing until you get into that flow state and you're able to- I get in my way enough. So I'm trying to get out of my own way. No, when you talk about, and I got a couple more questions before we shift it to the group to be able to do that. Yeah, no, let's do this. When you talk about Suka and how far it's grown, right? And and now having to balance adding other additional features with the user experience and scaling the infrastructure to continue to help everybody. Yes, what are some of the things that are uh because on this podcast, we have a lot of people that are building their own business or investing in real estate and things of that nature? What are some of the things you would say are the hardest points you've had to work on and things that you didn't see coming when it comes to building this out as big as it's grown now?
SPEAKER_03:I will tell you straight up, I sold a company in my 20s and I thought I was smarter than I was. In reality, I was very lucky. Okay. It was work hard, right time, right place, great exit, took two years off, just traveled the world. I tried after I left Fox. Two startups raised only three million for each. There were smaller companies, both failed. It was humiliating. I felt embarrassed. I hated bumping friends who'd asked me, Hey, how's it going with your startup since you left film? And I'd be like, terrible, just gonna die. The end of both, when the wounds were still fresh, not a year later when you're like, ah, it wasn't that bad, it'll all be fine. When the wounds were fresh, and I was like talking to my investors, saying, Hey, I painted a picture of what we wanted this to be. It's not gonna end up being that. And I'm sorry, I lost your money, right? Which is humiliating for me and hard. Both times I sat in a chair that I had in my house with a beautiful window next to it. I took a pen of paper and I wrote to myself, what would I have done differently? Like, wrote it out old school, not like dictating my phone. I wanted to have my hand go, like, what did I learn? What did I do wrong? And I tell you this: the number one thing I wrote both times was the word listen. And going into creating sukka, yeah, I may have a point of view on what it should look like, what it should smell like, how it should feel. But man, in our group chat, everything we launch, we talk to our members who go, is this working for you? Is this making it better or worse? Is this too much, too little? And when they see you actually listen, when they go, hey, you know what? When I do this thing, it wish it would do this other way, and you change that. The ones that are all quiet that don't talk, you know, that most people, you know, like less than five percent of people actually contribute to most social media, they mainly consume it. When you show people you actually listen and you respond, more of them stand up and go, Oh, okay, this is this is cool. And then they'll tell you what they need. And that has been invaluable. Listening to our members and going, let's build this together.
SPEAKER_02:That's amazing. That's amazing. And it's true. And you mentioned it even before, right? That when it comes to getting into that flow state, it's all about focusing on one thing. And when it comes to building a company, you're right. If you just listen to the feedback you're getting from the people that are paying for this service, they're gonna tell you what they need, which is pretty true.
SPEAKER_03:And that's helped us because you know, with your audience, there is, I'm gonna intuit a portion of their day that is interactive Zooms, meeting in person, going to places, doing anything, right? You're not gonna be in a flow state, but in their week, there's time when they have to do the thing that moves their career forward. That's that, hey man, I gotta work up the plan, the business plan for this next thing. I gotta really figure out how to market this. And it's not nine minutes in between Zoom meetings, it's not 13 minutes of chatting here on the phone. It is when you go, I'm blocked my calendar Friday, and that's when I'm gonna catapult myself forward. That's what we help with. Those moments when you go, I need to go deep and do the thing that moves the world.
SPEAKER_02:And for our community, those are the most important moments because we're all within the Akaaba home tribe trying to reach financial freedom. And that takes going above and beyond what you're doing in the W-2. Many people can work for 30 to 40 hours a week for 30 to 40 years and hope to retire, but we're trying to accelerate that timeline. And so you need that time, that focused work time to be able to move mountains so you can get there a lot quicker. And and using something like Suka could definitely make that a lot better. It's something that I'm gonna be tapping into here in the coming weeks when I come back because I do do that from time to time. It's just not as uh as structured, right? Like I'll throw on some classical music and and and I like doing that. And I'm like, okay, I'm working away. Or I live in Georgia, right? And so when it does start pouring, it it's kind of calming. It it'll pour for a lot. It is right if you start working.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I'm with you. And this thing is it's not just you know the Suka Company. If you're looking for music, like Endel is a great solution, Brain of Felmer, there are a lot of people out there who trying to create the tools that allow us to do the most that we can to realize our potential, right? So find the one that works for you. Whatever that if those people listening, those playing along at home, like this is not an ad for what I do. This is hopefully encouragement if you say, I want to go out there and seek out the tool that I need. It may be a pomodora timer, it may be music, it may be a website blocker, whatever it is. But I have a very strong thesis that we all have something great inside us. And the question of this lifetime is are you going to get it out or not? And there are a lot of forces in this world to make sure you don't. They want your life, they want you to pay attention to them so they can sell it to advertisers. And they don't mind if you end up 80 years old on the sofa, scrolling and double tapping, talking about how you could have started that company, you could have retired early, you could have created that app or written that book or done whatever. They don't care, they just want to have your life. So if you decide not to go into my grave with the things inside me, find the allies that'll help you do that.
SPEAKER_02:Steven, thank you. Seriously, for joining us for introducing a lot of the listeners to suka.co. And and if we if we want to, the listeners that are gonna listen to this now and in the future wanted to go and try this software out. How can we try it out? How can we get in touch with you to give feedback? What's the best way to reach?
SPEAKER_03:I'm gonna give you two very simple things. Number one, if there is anything that I've said that someone wants to know more about, who the hell is that Hungarian guy or whatever it is? My email address is public. I reply to every email in 24 hours if I'm not sick or traveling. It is Stephen at the Suka T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A dot co. I will not write you back 19 paragraphs of the story of my life, but I will send you a link back. So please use that if I can help. Second thing is if you decide you want to try a flow state, think of something you have to do, just like we need to be talking about Friday morning. This is what I need to do. I have four hours or an hour, whatever. Go to the Suka T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A.co. You can try it for free for a week. No credit card, no BS. No, if you don't cancel, we'll bill you. No, man. We built this so people can do great things. Try it. If after a week you want to help us pay the server bills, I love you to death. If you're like, I tried it for seven days straight, didn't change my life, drop me an email. Tell me what we're doing wrong because that'll help me improve.
SPEAKER_02:Come on now. Steven, we appreciate the work that you're putting in. And I'm going to open it up to questions from the audience. But first, I wanted to just again say thank you for joining us and taking the time out of your day. And I wanted to hit you with one question that I mean your background allows you to answer. So when you look at just how quickly the world has changed over the last two years since the introduction of you know the LML, the LML and Chat GBT. And then recently this past week, the Soro AI, where now people are creating videos and things that nature, where do you see the film industry going? Like, is this going to start to impact a lot of jobs? I know people that nature decimated.
SPEAKER_03:Decimated. I mean, the it is amazing on one hand to think like my son will be you know four months younger than your son, right? Our sons could sit at their laptops and create a feature film, like a photorealistic feature film, score it, edit it, like do everything. Absolutely amazing. At the same time, yes, the craftsmen that used to have to make costumes and sets and do location scouts and all that. A lot of those jobs are gone. And I've a bunch of friends that have left the the business in the past couple of years because the business is shrinking, you know. So yeah, it's a huge effect. Degenerative AI is a huge change for uh for any sort of creation.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And and uh you mentioned our sons. I actually get I'm happy they're being born right now because they're gonna have like a decade and a half to let everything shake out and figure out okay, this is where you want to be. That's true. It's gonna look a lot different than our childhoods, right? Oh my God, right? Yeah, yeah. And I look at just continuing to invest, especially for our community, as one of the most important things in this time period because we're going through a major shift and that gap is widening between the have and the have not. It's only gonna get wider. When you talk about what's happening to the film industry, it's happening across the board. A lot of these companies are now celebrating not having to hire as many people or laying people off. Like it's not like a sign of weakness, it's like a sign of strength now because they're using AI. And uh you start to wonder what is everybody gonna do? We'll figure it out eventually, but in the near term, there's gonna be uh a bit of a bit of pain.
SPEAKER_03:Completely agree with you.
SPEAKER_02:Any questions from the group? And Desmond, I see you were on.
SPEAKER_01:Feel free to tag in. Yes, sir. I will jump in and thank you again, Steven. This was great, and it's something I really resonate with being a software engineer. Um hello. Yeah, yeah. Hey, what's up? Uh, and you know, going through some job transition now, and that's really led me to kind of think about what my next steps will be and where I want to just take life. Um and you know, one question I have for you in terms of entrepreneurship, and you know, you might have some thoughts on this as well. What was one of the biggest challenges in building Suka? Um, and I think you might have had some advantage in coming out of the exit and not necessarily having to, you know, build it to, you know, I guess continue to sustain your lifestyle for lack of better words. But what was one of the biggest challenges you ran into?
SPEAKER_03:Um that is a fantastic question, and I will tell you this. Oh, hold on, he just disappeared. Is he still here? He will jump back on. We lost it, but please go ahead. I was gonna say, like, I was gonna say something. He's like, poof, he's gone. Okay, Desmond, I hope you find this on iTunes or something because you're gonna miss the next 10 seconds. So uh I will tell you the last two businesses that I did, much like oh, here we go.
SPEAKER_02:Desmond, you asked a great question and then bounced. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, you know, hope everyone won.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, good luck. Sorry about that. No, okay, we we were stalling, we're waiting for you. Okay, so here's my answer to you. First company in my 20s, Centropolis, we raised about 15, 15 million of venture. It was essentially a B2B company, right? We did digital effects for large studios that have billions of dollars. When I did those two startups in the past 10 years, they were B2C, right? I raised about three million for each. And what I realized is this is when I started SUKA, I said I'm not going to raise money because I want to see that the market validates this. If there are not people willing to pay to keep the servers on, then what we deliver is not actually that helpful. So I'm proud to say that we are small and growing, but we have never taken investment and we're cash flow positive. So the lesson in that that I would share with you is there are a lot of ways to cover over is this really a solution to a painful problem? You can raise venture where you're just like you're throwing money at engineers and designers and you're building something. And there is also, man, we can't keep servers on long enough. This thing's blown up. People just want it, and then you don't need venture anymore. You don't need angels. And eventually, you know, when you accept money in, it not only dilutes your ownership, but it also means you're suddenly governing upwards and trying to manage the expectations of new bosses you hired for yourself, as well as managing down. And that takes a lot of energy and time that could be spent on product, that could be spent on talking to customers and going, hey man, how are we doing? So that is my biggest lesson. And that is why I've resisted it with this company, raising one penny, because I want to see it stands on its own, or else we should fold it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that makes total sense. So effectively bootstrapping the company and and and you know, going with that model. So is that going back to the previous two failed startups? Would you have done those differently and not have taken on some of that money and looked to kind of just you know do it on your own?
SPEAKER_03:It would have forced me to listen to our customers better if I didn't have the money. So I can't tell you that I wouldn't raise the money. What I can tell you is I wouldn't let the money distract myself from the unit economics. If the individual unit of what someone's willing to pay for doesn't actually support the cost, that's telling. Something's got to change. And I I did that wrong. Like straight up, like I don't want to sugarcoat it. Like those two companies failed because I did not listen closely enough to that signal of, are you willing to pay?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. That's great advice. And the second question I had to just kind of in terms of Suka, where do you see the company going from here? Do you, you know, and also just in the crazy wave of AI that we're in now, is that something that's being factored into the app? And do you um, you know, yeah, just where do you see the company going from here? Where do you see the app going from here? Are there any big things in the works that we should be on the lookout for?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Oh my God. Thank you for asking that. Okay. So I have a vision, I'm gonna say vision, and then I'm gonna answer your question about so what kind of behind the curtains we're working on, right? Okay, my vision, if God, Allah, the universe were to come down to me and go, Steven, you're you're gonna get what you want. What I want is that this becomes like an operating system for everyone to work, where it is like this is that beautiful thing that runs in the background, helps me do my best, do it fast, right? I know Calm became very popular when they realized people used it to fall asleep. They did a whole bunch of meditation stuff, this other thing, and they had a discovery that people were turning it on late at night and letting it run. And it hit them. Oh my God, that's what the actual use case is. Our most popular use case is falling asleep, not doing a meditation at lunchtime, right? So, my hope is we become like a calm for work. That it's something you turn on in the morning, helps you stay in the groove when you need it. That is my dream. Now, the AI thing you brought up, spot on, man. So our smart assistant, right now, it does some obvious things for you. Uh, hook it up to your calendar. It will tell you five minutes before a meeting, hey, start wrapping things up. Remember, you have a meeting in five minutes, right? Because we found a lot of people when they're in flow, they miss meetings. Like engineers were missing standups because they're like, oh man, I was just so deep to the code. So we literally built that because so many people were like, This works so well. I missed my meeting, right? So your smart assistant will do things like welcome you to the day, give you some encouragement, like pick up your phone. Hey, Desmond, do you need to be on your phone right now? Hey man, I see you in YouTube. Did you need to be in YouTube, buddy? You're like, you'll do something like that. What we're working on is a deeper set of insights. So when you schedule that time, like Friday, to you know, go maybe you haven't got squash and bugs or you have to close some tickets, whatever. Your smart assistant goes, Hey man, you know what? I noticed when you're coding, you work best in the morning to this playlist. So, how about I'll meet you here at nine? I'm gonna have a playlist queued up for you. I already linked your linear or your Asana, your Jira, whatever. I'll pull the ticket in. You just sit, play, we're gonna do this, right? And it helps you get better day over day, going, you know what? Every day you start working about 40 minutes in it is when you usually grab your phone. I see your pattern. How about 40 minutes in today? I'm gonna set a break for you. So rather than fight it, just go, you know what? I'm gonna take five minutes. I'm gonna go downstairs to the kitchen, grab a glass of water, I'm gonna scroll, and then end of five minutes, I'm back. And I wanted to have that sort of insight for you be go, this is amazing. This is like the best work companion I could have.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that makes sense. So a lot of that much stronger predictive analysis and pattern recognition coming up with it. Yeah, that's super cool, man. I'm yeah, definitely looking forward to using the app. And again, just really cool to hear your story, definitely something that resonates with me. I'm a uh lover and uh devoted practicer of yoga. Um, yeah, man, you gotta practice sometime.
SPEAKER_03:Where are you? Where are you in the world?
SPEAKER_01:I'm in Atlanta.
SPEAKER_03:You're okay, yeah. The Georgia thing going on here. Okay, I am in Austin, but if you come in Austin, we will go. Matter of fact, after this pod, I'm actually going to yoga with my pregnant wife, which is crazy.
SPEAKER_02:That's awesome. That's awesome. That's that's wow.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. So thank you so much for coming. And when you drop in a sukkah, say hi in the group chat, just tag me and be like, hey, Steven, we met member. Boom. Awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Well dude. Thanks, Stephen.
SPEAKER_02:Come on now. And piggybagging off your answers, Stephen, which were amazing. I would say when you start going into that entrepreneurial world, it's just getting really clear and writing down like the niche and the goals that you have. Like, this is what I want to achieve. Don't try to go after everything and everybody. It's just what Steven said uh about his company, trying to be for the work that the workforce, what calm is for people trying to go to sleep, right? Like if you want to try to niche down as much as you can, it's because it's gonna help drive everything. If you try to be everything, you'll start spending money on random things. And uh that's right. If you're for everybody, you're for nobody. You're for nobody, and people won't remember. So highly focused on that piece. That's what's helped me. Uh, but Steven, any any last things? Any last thoughts, comments? What do we miss?
SPEAKER_03:Oh man, we didn't miss uh there's a lot we missed, but we didn't miss anything. But I will close with this thought, which is no matter how you do it, go do it, go do the thing you're capable of. That I would make anything that we say here worthwhile.
SPEAKER_02:Come on now. We're gonna end with that proverb, Steven. We appreciate you. We're gonna let you get out of here to go do yoga.
SPEAKER_03:I'm going to yoga. Okay, it was great, great to do this. I hope this is helpful for those playing along at home.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, absolutely. And for those that listen to this later, go ahead and hit the link in the bio or and in the description. We're gonna put a link to stuka.co so that you can go ahead and get into that flow state. We hope that you like this podcast. Please like, subscribe, comment so we can continue to do more like these. And Steven, we will catch you in the flow state.
SPEAKER_03:That sounds great. Okay, bye everyone.
SPEAKER_02:Join us every Wednesday at 7 p.m.
SPEAKER_00:Eastern as we explore different types of investments that can fast track your path to financial independence.
