August 20, 2024 • 41 mins
Dylan Diamond shares his entrepreneurial journey, starting with making websites in 4th grade to becoming Tesla's youngest intern at 17 to dropping out of UPenn to pursue building a company. He discusses his engineering background, early projects, and the creation and adoption of the Saturn app. Dylan balances his Tesla work with app development, meets co-founder Max, and reflects on early startup lessons. The conversation covers Saturn's growth, strategies, and challenges faced, as well as critiques of social media models and monetization strategies. Dylan concludes with key lessons from building Saturn, reflections on past failures, and personal advice.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
You were getting sky high valuations andinvestors were flying you around the country in
private jets, and you were kind of told yourking.
This guy is Dylan Dimond.
He's a twenty five year old who built thenumber 2 most downloaded app on the app store,
saturn with millions of users.
Last month, I had a Matter Studio and asked himto teach me everything he knows about how he
(00:21):
became the youngest intern at Tesla and createdone of the most viral apps in the US.
There was no marketing, and I didn't reallythink much of it at the time.
What do you think that the team has figured outthat other consumer founders haven't been able
to figure out.
A few things.
It's not good enough to be a product thatpeople use once a month.
You want to be something that they're using 10plus times a day.
(00:41):
How'd you become the young intern at Tesla.
So I hacked together this Apple Watch app,Iphone app called Tesla toolbox and posted it
in the Tesla Motors Club, and it went viral.
How did they originally reach out to?
I remember on the phone, my age did not come upuntil the end, and I said I'm about to start
senior year of high school.
And they're like, woah, you're young.
When did you decide to drop out a pen and leaveTesla?
(01:04):
We took a trip out to California, and we werereally fortunate to meet general catalysts.
He gave us a term sheet the next day.
It was for $2,500,000 And I was like, wow.
Before we begin this episode, I have a quickstory to show with you.
The other week, I was interviewing this guynamed Kianzadecki, super cool kid, teal fellow,
(01:24):
etcetera, and made an interview.
Something really embarrassing happened on myfront.
I'm not sure if you guys want that included inthe episode because I've never really included
blupers before.
But if you do, let me know by subscribing tothe show and sharing this with 1 or 2 friends
who you think might find value from us.
If you do that, I'll make 2 promises to youtoday.
1, include the blooper at the end of that nextepisode, and 2, I'll continue to level up the
(01:48):
production quality and our interviews everysingle week.
Thanks so much.
And now on to my interview with Dylan Diamond.
Dylan, I wanna start this interview with yourearly context.
If I was around you, when you were a teenager,would I have been able to know that you would
be on the path that you are today?
Definitely with engineering and coding a lot.
(02:09):
I think, starting my own company probably, butback then I was I was just building tools for
myself, building a lot of apps, super nerdy,and, I don't think you'd be surprised.
I'll say that.
What were
some of those apps that you were building andwhen you were younger, and how did she get
interested in building apps?
(02:29):
So in 4th grade, I got my first MacBook, like,the plastic 2008, white polyphane macbook.
And I was browsing Safari, clicked view sourcecode, and discovered this whole new language
that was, you know, completely foreign to methat later turned out to be HTML, JavaScript,
and CSS.
(02:50):
And I was immediately transfixed that as my dadexplained, you could input instructions into
the computer and it would output graphics andit would output whatever you want.
And while my friends were playing Xbox and, youknow, a ton of video games, I was not
interested in that, but I started learning webdevelopment, and built, a web design company in
4th grade around, static sites for therapists,nonprofits, friends of family.
(03:12):
And I loved doing it, but I think the theclients at the time felt bad that I was just
coding these sites for free.
So they'd pay me a couple hundred bucks.
I soon realized I could make a business out ofit and started scaling that up.
And then later started building more dynamicweb applications.
Think, you know, content management systems forblogs and newsletters and things like that.
(03:35):
And then my first iPhone app was a it was for aproject in 8th grade, to educate younger
students about the moon phases and people madeboard games, videos, and I decided to make an
iPhone app, that told you the moon phase.
Sounds very trivial, but it was my firstproject in objective c first app on the app
(03:55):
store.
And then my real my real first app that gotmore scale was called my hack, and it was a,
online portal to or integrated with an onlineportal to check your grades.
So I went to a public school in Connecticut,and it used a software called home access
center.
You probably went to a school where you couldcheck your grades online.
(04:18):
At the time around 2012, it was not mobileoptimized.
So I had to learn web scraping.
I had to learn objective c and and build a toolfor myself that allowed me to check my grades
versus, waiting in line at the desk cops in theschool library.
So I built that for myself, and then my friendsstarted saying, hey, Dylan.
How are you able to, you know, get thisinformation in the classroom versus at the
(04:40):
library?
They wanted the app.
So I put it on the app store.
My entire school, you know, 2000 kids got thatthat 1st week.
And then later, I scaled it up to, you know,thousands of, schools across the country.
One of the app set you built early on was a webapp.
It ended up turning into the Saturn that weknow today.
What was the story behind that?
(05:00):
Why did you decide to to create, a schoolcalendar app?
So that was a couple years later.
It was a schedule sharing website as simple asthat sounds.
Yep.
And I was not the first kid to do this in theworld.
I was the first at my high school.
But we all used Facebook really heavily at thetime, and there was a moment twice a year in
homeroom.
Where you would get your, paper schedule forthe upcoming semester.
(05:25):
And people would take a picture of it and postit on Facebook and say like or comment if you
have class with me.
And this was a common ritual across every highschool in the country.
You know, and even before Facebook, people werecomparing notes about who they were sitting
next to in class, because there's a lot ofanxiety over, you know, you're a freshman,
you're at the high school.
You don't know where to go, who to talk to.
(05:45):
So I built a web app.
It was really simple at the time, but it wouldauto complete your courses, auto complete your
teachers, and you'd input the period number,and it would match you with your classmates.
And I, you know, posted a link about that sitein the school Facebook group.
Every single kid in the school got on that wasweb app.
And it was used for, you know, the next year orso, at the peaks of the semester.
(06:07):
And then later another problem that I had wasthe calendar was a mess in my high school.
It ran on letter days.
They were constantly rotating.
There were early dismissals.
And I thought there had to be a bettersolution.
So I I built an Apple Watch app.
The Apple Watch had just come out at the time.
An Apple Watch app to have the schedule on myphone and then later paired it with the
(06:30):
database of, classes and and sections that, youknow, from the other web product, that everyone
had.
And that is what became I Staples.
I Staples was a rudimentary calendar schedulesharing tool.
And friend finder, for my community, and italso like that it spread word-of-mouth,
throughout the entire school.
(06:50):
Yeah.
I heard that about 90%, of the campus was usingit.
How did every day.
Yeah.
And that was that was by the 3rd year.
The 1st year, it was like, you know, 40, 50%and it kind of, it was all word-of-mouth and,
still Saturn today grows mostly with theyounger grades.
Getting it as they get acclimated to highschool.
(07:11):
It's a rite of passage.
It's a ritual.
And in the schools where Saturn's really deepand staples back then, it was something you
find out about from your older siblings, upperclassmen, it's the way to get around.
You are lost without the product, and you cometo trust it multiple times a day as your
lifeline to know where to go.
You walk in a a new classroom.
(07:32):
You don't know who to talk to.
You pull out the app.
It shows you where everyone is.
What mutual classes you may have with them, andit contextualizes it a little bit.
I think on a lot of other platforms, like, youknow, people try and pretend who they are and
and fabricate, with fancy photo editing and youknow, very polished content and videos, but on
Saturn, it really is who you are relative tothe community.
(07:54):
And you can't fake that.
You you know, it's your classes, your groups,your activities, your friends, and it tries to
be very much at that utility and and friendfinder and communicator.
And that's kinda how it's spread throughout theschool.
And I was on doing a few other, you know,college and, working full time, but in the
background, it was spreading all byword-of-mouth, no marketing.
(08:15):
I think if our podcast got 2000 listeners offthe bat day 1 and just started expanding
rapidly very quickly.
I probably would have put the pedal to themetal.
I thought I was a genius and and start growingthe show pretty
good.
I did not think that.
I was a, you know, I got lucky and I was usedto every app I had built at that point just
growing on its own because it was I it wasbuilding for myself, but it turns out that I am
(08:39):
a stereotype of, you know, high schooler in myhigh school and many others.
So whether it's checking your grades, yourschedule, your friends, there was no marketing,
and I didn't really think much of it at thetime other than, hey.
It's cool that my friends and my school are areusing this app.
So you mentioned you were working full time.
You're actually working at Tesla, I believe.
Right?
So building out their their superchargingnetwork, doing some of the back end engineering
(09:01):
stuff for them.
How'd you become the youngest intern at Tesla?
So around the same time that I was buildingthis Schedule Sharing product.
And again, I just got the Apple Watch, so I wasreally eager to build, you know, new products
on that surface.
I also, was, I was kind of introduced to Tesla.
My parents had gotten a model s at the time2015, and there were only, you know, a 100,000
(09:26):
vehicles on the road back then.
And I thought that it was more of a computer onwheels than in a vehicle.
And I'm not a car buff, but I am, you know, ahuge nerd.
So this was really exciting to me that it was,you know, this really sexy vehicle with an API
and and with an interface to the internet.
So, I, you know, I got they got this car.
(09:49):
I was really excited.
I think I had my learner's permit.
I couldn't even drive it on my own.
But I hooked it up to my wifi network and wasreverse engineering.
A lot of the API calls that the vehicle was,communicating to mothership, which is what I
would learn was Tesla's servers.
And I discovered that there were a lot ofundocumented, endpoints that were not in the
(10:11):
the their iPhone app at the time, like,summoned so you could move the car in and out
of your garage, home link.
And at at the time, Tesla's app was prettysimple.
It was a bunch of buttons, flash the lights,honk the horn, open the sunroof, but that was
about it.
No map, no data, no sharing, and the API gaveyou all that data.
So I basically built a strava or Garmin forTesla on the Apple Watch.
(10:35):
You could track where you're going, share rideswith friends, talk about energy consumption,
max speed, fun stats.
And at the time, the community was really tightknit, and everyone was sharing online in a
forum called the Tesla Motors Club.
So I
hacked together this Apple Watch app, iPhoneapp called Tesla toolbox, It was one of the
first Apple Watch apps for Tesla
at the time and posted
(10:55):
it in the Tesla Motors Club, and it went viral.
It was like, you know, 20,000 something peoplebought the app in the 1st month.
Was it free or what?
App was free and then later made it paid.
But I always thought, you know, make it free tostart because you just wanna learn and talk to
the community without any, you know, negativefeedback.
I, you know, was connected to Tesla, and Ithought at first that it was gonna be like a
(11:16):
cease and desist interaction, but, actually,they were really intrigued with what I was
building.
How did they originally reach out to you?
Did they call you up or send you an email onyour on your school email?
Or I'm trying to remember.
I think it was an email.
And I got on the phone through a recruiter,then as I would learn, they forward you
internally to whatever team they think makessense.
And the supercharger analytics team, had arole.
(11:37):
And I was like, I'm just gonna get my foot inthe door.
And I remember on the phone, my age did notcome up until the end.
When I said, I'm about to start senior year ofhigh school.
And they're like, woah, you're young.
I have 17 during that phone call later turned18, and started working for them in May of
2017.
When I got to Tesla, I was able to take a lotof their back of house data software and
(12:00):
commercialize it and build it into internaltools, build it into customer facing software.
So things like inputting your destination intothe supercharger network and seeing, you know,
where you have to charge along the way,building out dashboards for real time
monitoring of sites, and we were expanding soquickly at the time.
I think we were, you know, launching model 3.
The supercharger network was doubling year overyear.
(12:23):
It was a really exciting time to be at thecompany during hyper growth.
Especially when the entire world was bettingagainst us.
We were building cars on the weekends trying tohit 5000 vehicles a week.
It was so scrappy and taught me a lot.
But the people I worked with were incredible,and I had such free reign.
If I had an idea, like, building out this suiteof software, that that now powers a lot of
(12:46):
Tesla energy called network maps.
They just let me run with it, and you were ableto build whatever you wanted.
So it was a really fun opportunity.
That's funny.
I try not to mention my age too much to Yeah.
Potential clients unless they ask where if I'mgoing to school because I found is that if I
mention my age, then they automaticallydiscredit a little bit, take a little bit off
(13:07):
of my knowledge.
And then if I mentioned I'm going to school inthe fall in this case, then they're like, oh,
well, are you sure you can run the businessfull time while you're in school?
How did you think about that?
Cause I think you were over at Tesla, you werealso in school, and then you're also building
out I
would later learn that your age is an asset,and that people have been here to talk to you.
(13:29):
Now I'm twenty five.
Feel very old.
But, what happened was I was at, Tesla andloving it.
I was learning the most I would ever learn insuch a short amount of time.
Engineering, business relationships, product,technology, being able to, you know, see Elon
up close.
It was just such an incredible experience foran eighteen year old.
(13:53):
And I was in a dual degree program at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, the M and T
program, which is an amazing program, and thehead of that is a Saturn advisor, and he's the
best.
But the it was Wharton And Engineering, sobusiness and engineering, and I think that it
was such a, you know, rigorous program.
(14:14):
It really forced me to prioritize, what Iwanted to do because you had to take double the
amount of classes of any other pen student andmost, you know, any other college student I was
learning more at Tesla than in the engineeringclassroom.
And I always wanted to optimize for learning,and I didn't feel stressed like other, students
for, doing on campus recruiting because I hadthe job at Tesla the colleagues at Tesla were
(14:38):
teaching me so much, and I was, you know,writing, like, you know, production level
software for arguably the coolest company inthe world from my dormer.
And that was really exciting.
And I would be in the classroom VPN ing intoTesla writing code, and there were some great
courses, but I was just like, hey.
I'm not gonna give up this opportunity atTesla.
(15:00):
I wanna take it with me even though I'm atschool too.
So I was flying back and forth between Phillyand San Francisco to, Tesla working around the
clock had no free time.
It was really fun, though.
What word would you say?
You you mentioned you were learning a lot atTesla.
Yeah.
More than you were an Ivy League program.
What would you say are, like, some of the mostimportant things that you learned that you
(15:21):
implemented when starting your own company?
The bar of talent at Tesla for engineering isso high, so being able to look for that.
Tesla didn't have, you know, excess capital.
So you had to really be scrappy and being, youknow, and when Saturn started, we were we're
self funding it.
My, you know, Max and I.
So learning learning to, really be scrappy andfocus on one problem at a time, and then all
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about engineering fundamentals and, you know,being technical, a Tesla when I was building
software, there was no designer.
I was the designer.
I was the tester.
I was the user.
So it kind of not and typically in a productcompany, you have PM, you have designer, and we
have all that now, and they're great.
But back then, it was a one man show.
So, at least what what I was building.
(16:07):
So I took a lot of that with me, and was ableto, you know, make sure that want it's a best
in class product, and Tesla's look really good,but they're also best in class engineering.
Oftentimes you have one or the other.
So it kind of taught the the marriage of thatand on the business side.
And school also taught that.
I just thought that a Tesla It wasn'tsimulated.
It was cutting edge.
You were innovating.
(16:27):
You were, you know, years ahead of anycompetitor, and it was a fun place to be.
Your co founder, Max, how did you meet him?
What what's the story?
He actually pinged me on LinkedIn, as Whartonkids would do.
And he read an article in the daily,Pennsylvania, the school newspaper about, I was
the youngest player Tesla.
(16:47):
I built a, you know, an app for pen.
And he said, hey.
I'm the youngest, you know, managing directorat Havas, big marketing firm, worked with
brands like Coca Cola, Beats, T Mobile, and hewas also not in a frat prioritizing his work
over school and thought we would bond.
So he invited me over, and we just talk forhours.
Spitballing ideas back and forth, talkingabout, you know, each other's different
(17:10):
careers, very complimentary skill set.
He was all marketing and, you know, up and out,and I was very much an engineer much more kind
of introverted at the time and very focused onjust building things that I like to use.
And it was a good good mix.
And we didn't know right away what we weregoing to build.
But eventually, we started looking at theGoogle analytics data for that scheduling
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product, I Staples.
And he saw that step function of, you know, 50percent daily active users over enrollment to
about 90%.
And he said, Dylan, you have to bring this toanother school.
And it took some convincing because I was doingthe dual degree in Tesla.
But on the weekends, we would build this and wewe decided to take it to my cousin's high
school.
And that was when we kind of got signal whenhalf of that school downloaded in the first day
(17:57):
that we had something.
So when you realize you have something, youstart picking up traction from additional
schools, like like the one you mentioned.
Yeah.
What are
the next steps do you go to?
Do you decide hey, I wanna raise capital, or orwhat do you go to?
Definitely not.
And I would, advise any young founder listeningto delay raising capital as much as possible.
And we were lucky in that we were we were bothworking full time, so we were able to self fund
(18:21):
the business, for server costs, for interns,for, you know, operations, things like that.
And we got to it was, like, one additionalschool from Staples, then 2, then 3, then 4,
and they kept seeing the same type ofperformance in the first, 48 hours.
And we we didn't have any validator.
I didn't even know metrics like D 30 retention,DAO Mau, the stickiness, and the, you know,
(18:45):
penetration in each campus.
I just thought it was really cool that aproduct that I built for myself had spread not
just to my school, but started spreading todozens of schools and that people loved it as
much as I did.
But Max was much more commercial.
And we went to New York, and we met with somementors and advisors, and they thought that the
growth was really explosive.
(19:05):
And they hadn't seen anything like that inconsumer for a long time.
So the goal was not immediately to raisecapital,
although we were contacted by a lot of thestudent run arms of venture firms on campus.
But we put that off as long as possible.
And we, you know, didn't, take any of theiroffers because we were able to sell fund and,
(19:27):
you know, we didn't really need, like, a 25 kcheck or anything.
What would be your advice to maybe otherfounders in the audience?
Cause I see a lot of founders that sometimes Imight be at an event every once in a while.
And the founder would come up to me.
I asked what they're building.
And, like, oh, no.
We're we're raising capital for what we'rebuilding right now.
And, like, can you build anything yet?
It's like, no.
We need the money to build.
And I'm like,
so you have all the tools at your disposal,especially now with you know, AI and LLS
(19:53):
building for you that we did not have backthen, that you really don't need capital in the
beginning.
And I would argue capital makes finding productmarket fit harder because you have more
stakeholders and people and you have to worryabout you know, shareholders and company
structure, capital structure.
Whereas with us, it was just do kids like it?
Do they not?
And each additional school we would go to, wewould modify the product to suit their needs.
(20:18):
And it was not scalable at all, but it wassomething that really helped us.
And I think that with, you know, in the earlydays, it was Max, myself, Mason, who's
incredible, our first kind of intern later tooka year off schools, fellow student at Penn,
couple other interns.
And, you know, we were just having so much fundoing it.
(20:40):
The the the, you know, huge TV in the apartmentwould have real time analytics, and we'd see it
go from, like, 0 to 500, you know, concurrentusers at one school.
And that was, you know, so thrilling to us.
And I'd never raised capital before, so itwasn't even a consideration.
I think a lot of kids think, do I need to go toYC?
Do I need to raise capital?
(21:00):
I knew 0 venture capitalists I had not eventhought about going to YC.
It was either school or Tesla full time.
And, this was a fun weekend project.
When did you decide to drop out a pen and andleave Tesla?
And then how did your parents and and people.
How do you think about that?
So I was coding day and night trying to keep upwith school, Tesla, and what would become
(21:26):
Saturn, and and that was taking up increasinglymore time.
And Max was starting to talk to a lot of VCs.
And we took a trip out to California with nointention of raising capital, went to LA, and
then went to SF and just started pitching.
We made a deck before and, you know, working onthat in the hotel room late at night before we
(21:46):
raised and we were really fortunate to meetgeneral catalyst.
And Nico Banounces there.
Did Snapchat series be one of the, you know,really good consumer investors.
And we met him, and we just had a goodconversation.
It didn't feel like a pitch meeting.
And he gave us a term sheet the next day.
It was for, you know, I think, 2 and a half$1,000,000.
And that was like, wow.
(22:06):
We, we'd not expect that before because all theventure checks were, like, you know, 25 k,
whatever.
And we didn't take any of those.
There wasn't really a decision about leavingschool or not.
I think back then, the decision was, are wegoing to work on this during the summer or not?
There was this big decision about do we, youknow, stay at our full time jobs, Tesla and
(22:27):
Havas for throughout the summer, or do we dothis?
And then when we got that term sheet, it wasmuch more clear that, wow, we have a big
opportunity and people who are really goodinvestors find this exciting we should keep
working on it.
And, you know, we thought that we couldn't hirea team around us if we weren't fully in it
because that wouldn't be fair if the foundersweren't committed.
(22:50):
The founders were doing school and you wannahire people who are gonna put their life on the
line to build this with you and be yourteammates.
And, you know, leaving the school school waskind of the easier part.
At least putting that on hold.
Tesla, I stayed around for another 2 to 3months for, like, a transition period.
Still talk to those guys today.
That's amazing.
People of company.
They're off doing great things, but the termshe kind of implied that this was gonna be the
(23:13):
full time focus and the traction from Saturn,the product kept growing.
And, we were really excited.
Yeah.
You talked a lot about having to spend a lot oftime working at Tesla, also at school, also
trying to build out the company.
I know about 2 years ago, I spent time doingalso multiple other projects all at once.
(23:35):
I was working at Columbia Business School.
Was also working at a venture fund part time.
It was also trying to scale out this podcastand then was also working at a startup running
operation for them for a little bit.
I thought I was genius doing trying to doeverything at once, but I soon figured out that
by spending so much time on so many differentthings that sacrificed, the quality of work for
(23:57):
all of those things, I realized I wanted to tryto be number 1 in at least 1 or 2 of those
things, but I realized to do that.
You can't really have a lot of balance, atleast not in your life.
How have you thought about balance in in yourlife, or or do you think it can exist start a
founding.
So, look, we we say time is the most valuableresource.
You cannot buy more of it, and it's whatdemocratizes every single one of us on the
(24:21):
planet.
So the most important decision that one makeson a daily basis is how to spend their time,
and that's the whole mission behind Saturn.
Give people the tools to empower them withinformation so that they can make the best
decisions on how they spend their time.
And I think balance is really important.
And at school, it's something I struggled within that there was zero free time with courses,
(24:43):
with Tesla.
As I said, my cofounder and I, were not in, youknow, Greek life, and we really were strapped
for time.
And now it's something that is really importantworking on personal relationships, fitness.
It makes you better at the company.
And then within the company, balance isimportant.
For the 1st, you know, few months after raisingthat 1st round and later than when Kotoo joined
(25:06):
in, I wasn't recruiting.
I should have been.
I was coding day and night until 5 AM everynight.
Go home, sleep for a couple hours.
Go back to the office.
Actually, right around the corner here.
And it was helpful, but I wasn't building, youknow, a company.
I really, I was just building a product and themoney was sitting idle on the bank account.
And, you know, you wanna be conservative, butyou also wanna scale yourself and you wanna
(25:30):
focus on the things that only you can do thatother people can't and empower them.
You work for them.
So unblock them.
Hire people better than you at engineering, atmarketing, at design, and then, you know,
continue to unblock them and and spend yourtime wisely.
That's been certainly a learning over the lastcouple of years, and I've, you know, plenty
more to learn and keep going.
But that's also helped create more balance andtime, you know, focusing on yourself
(25:54):
professionally.
I have a great executive coach that's been withme for 5 plus years as a great mentor.
So those are just some ways to create balance.
And now Saturn has millions of users, allacross the United States.
What were some of the things that you and theteam did to grow from maybe the few thousand
users that you had at a couple of those schoolsall the way up to the scale that you're at
(26:15):
today?
So we leveraged an ambassador network for bothacquisition, but primarily learn product
learning and user research so that when wewould go to a school in a new market, new geo,
we didn't we didn't, empathize with the usersas much as the northeast public schools where I
grew up.
So we would work with them.
We would understand, what is important aboutthe product for them.
(26:38):
You know, whether it's building more socialfeatures, whether it's doubling down on
utility, and then they would, you know, plantthe seeds and saturn grows year over year.
So if you get the app, you're maybe moreexcited to get it as a freshman sophomore than
a junior senior.
But by the time that that freshman or sophomoregrows up becomes senior, their engagement is
(26:58):
the same, but then you have 3 to 4 other newgrades, new cohorts that get the app.
So that's why the schools grow year on year.
And it took us some time to identify thatgrowth model as part of our business.
But we really lean into it.
And right about now is the back to schoolseason, which is when we, you know, go to the
top of the app store, densify schools.
They grow year on year.
(27:19):
And at first, we wanted the growth to be linearto exponential throughout the entire year.
It's very exponential, but packed into, like, a6 week period.
And we got comfortable with that and used it asan asset, versus something that we wanted to to
work on.
And the ambassador network, we didn't really doany paid marketing for the 1st, you know, 2 to
3 years of the company.
(27:40):
We do a little bit now just to seed schools,given how much time young people spend on those
platforms, which I think is a separate issue wecan get into.
But, it's really about word-of-mouthinvitations, making it a product that users are
eager to share with their friends.
And let's get into that.
Why not?
What's wrong with social media today?
So I think social media is it was built to be aconnector, but
(28:04):
the business models behind traditional
social media and mobile are All contingent onminutes spent inventory and scrolling.
So what I mean by that is every product thatyou might think of when you think of social
media, they're it's designed to get you to keepscrolling for more minutes per day.
(28:24):
Because you you they can serve you more ads andthen they make more money, you know, average
revenue per user.
And they just want that reinforcement loop.
So keep showing you more of the same thingsthat you like.
What started as something that was a, you know,strong tie graph based around friendship has
dissolved into something based on weak ties andshowing you content that is recommended versus
(28:49):
content that you decided to follow.
And that's been great for business modelsbecause you can inject ads and the
recommendation engines behind ads are verystrong.
But it's been terrible for young people andtheir mental health because these products are
reinforcement loops, and they get you to stayscrolling, and you are focused on this, you
(29:12):
know, glass rectangle you hold, not actuallyout in the real world.
You are on connecting with people you don'tknow and connecting with creators and that
creates FOMO.
You are not focused on strengthening ties withyour real friends.
And I think that my my age group skippedTikTok, but we very much had Instagram and I
know from talking with our high school userstoday, just how much of a problem those
(29:36):
products are in school and and how distractingthey are.
They create anxieties.
They, you know, you have to look a like effectwhere you see all these people on the feeds.
And they're not actually your friends, but youfeel bad that you're not emulating them, you
know, as closely as you want.
I think it, you know, we're we're not on theright track where people are using their phones
as a tool to enable them and empower them.
I think young people's specifically, you know,teens are using their phones in ways that just
(30:00):
continue to isolate themselves from theircommunities.
And Saturn did not start out as a product tointentionally solve that.
It started out as the best calendar for myself,my friends, and then now, you know, millions of
high schoolers, but I really think that we giveyou time back in your day, and we don't take it
out of your day.
We don't track it internally as a core businessKPI.
And we think that the calendar should be foryour friends, your community, helping you
(30:25):
discover things going on, see where yourfriends will be, help you spend your time, not
a place where you go when you're bored and justwanna scroll.
And I will say that the business models of ofthose other companies are contingent on
minutes, we feel really proud that we'vecreated a new business model and type of ad
unit where it's not based on minutes, and it'snot based on, you know, the number of times you
(30:50):
scroll in in inventory.
So that's all I can say on that for now.
But I feel excited that, we've kept that ethosas our north star and did not, you know, try
and build something anonymous, creating, youknow, loneliness and bullying.
And instead, we we wanna get you out in thereal world, and we don't really we want you
using the product frequently because it meansyour daily utility, a lifeline that they can
(31:11):
depend on.
But we don't care how long you spend using it.
In fact, if you're successful on Saturn, youshould find what you want quickly and and not
need to, you know, waste time scrolling.
Yeah.
When we've had conversations, you'veconsistently kept at the forefront like you are
now is that Saturn tier to to save people time,not Yeah.
There's no addictive algorithms designed tokeep you on your phone.
They don't wanna surface the content of yourfriends quickly.
(31:34):
They wanna show you random things so that youspend more time scrolling.
Why do you care about saving time at all?
Because technically, wouldn't you think that ifyou were a true capitalist, right, like, you
would try to just try to keep people on theplatform as much as But
I didn't start the product as a capitalist.
I built the first app as a sixteen year oldhigh school kid and then later as a sophomore
in college.
So There was no been set out to build a companyto build a business.
(31:57):
I set out to build a tool and a really funproduct for me, my school, my friends.
And I think that it's challenging, but you canbuild something that users will actually, give
you more credit for and could be a reallycompelling business opportunity.
So, obviously, we wanna do well by ourshareholders, and I think that what we've come
up with is much stronger than trying to competeon the same vertical as, say, the top 4 social
(32:23):
media products, which are all direct response,vertical video ads.
We don't wanna be that.
Users are also fatigued.
They don't need more feeds.
You look at the convergence between platformsof they all have the same content.
They all have the same formats.
You know, the apps I'm talking about theirvertical video feeds, and they all are, you
know, pretty much the same.
And we just wanna build something more unique.
(32:44):
And I do think users will reward us for doingthat.
So what are some of the ways that Saturn nowmakes money.
You know, later this year, we'll we'll be ableto talk more about that.
But it's all through the calendar.
It's about showing you content, that you, willinteract within the real world, not just on
a device.
And be able
to do that with your, community.
(33:06):
So imagine a bunch of people around the lunchtable in a school cafeteria.
Everyone whips out their TikTok.
Everyone's gonna see different ads.
There's no conversation around those ads.
They're very personalized to you, which couldwork well in that type of business model.
But I think with Saturn, we care about creatingconversation around content, in the real world.
And we wanna build something where you open it.
(33:26):
You can connect with others around that pieceof content and form micro communities around
that content.
I I think it is a different take, but
it reminds people maybe of an earlier internetand of in real life, you know, advertising and
and content.
Are there, I guess, any period of time whenwhen you're building the company or even in
your business career,
(33:50):
that was more difficult than others are reallydifficult that you had to push through.
If so, what was it, and how did you pushthrough?
Yeah.
So COVID shut down every high school in thecountry.
And for a product that
operates mostly during the school day.
That was really challenging.
And we had capital in the bank, but it was, youknow, not good for for morale when all the, you
(34:13):
know, the DAO basically, daily active userswent to 0, and we didn't know when people were
gonna come back.
We iterated.
We built a Chromebook app.
We built a virtual yearbook.
We did a bunch of things.
I think in retrospect, it was good for morale,but it was not we didn't know what's happening.
So with the information we had at the time, Iwould not have changed our course, but I think
(34:34):
that for a company that's about getting peopletogether, leveraging their community graphs.
When you're at home, you aren't with yourcommunity, and it's harder.
We saw the rise of the friend finder apps inthe app store kind of died off and saturn
again.
We didn't wanna pivot.
We didn't wanna build anything anonymous.
We didn't wanna connect you with random people.
(34:54):
So we stayed the course, but it was reallychallenging for that period.
And then luckily, the world has bounced back ina big way.
What do you wish you knew when you firststarted the business?
Things take time.
And that we had a lot of momentum early on,from going from one school to 12 to 24 to 50
and we also raised capital very quickly becauseinvestors were excited by this new, way of
(35:18):
connecting people through the calendar and thatwe were building a calendar that was not an
enterprise tool, but that resonated with Gen Zand young people, but keeping laser focus is
important.
And there are a lot of products, which I won'tname, but you probably know social apps that
have exploded virally and then, you know, diedin a, you know, kind of big way because they're
(35:39):
ephemeral and they're fads.
And we had a lot of pressure from investors tofollow those apps and to build features like
that.
When crypto was huge in 21, there was pressureto put NFTs into Saturn and builds our, you
know, product
on the blockchain.
But for the application, for the user.
There was no benefit to that, and it would havebeen a lot of engineering lift.
(36:03):
And I think in that respect, we stayed thecourse, but in other areas, we got distracted
trying to replicate messaging apps and buildfeatures that weren't core to the ethos of
Saturn.
So I would give myself the advice of just, youknow, Hadi, again, the person I mentioned
earlier has set it well, which is build thecalendar infrastructure for every high school
in America.
That's your remote.
(36:23):
That's your retention.
The rest will follow.
And that has paid off, but I wish we maybedidn't zigzag as much, but you gotta do it as
part of the learning process.
You mentioned much earlier in
the podcast and you you that you were meetingwith advisors and and people and and mentors in
New York City.
And they were particularly interested in inSaturn because they haven't seen an explosion
(36:45):
in in
growth in the consumer sector in a long time.
What do you think that
you or the team has figured out when building aconsumer company that other consumer founders
haven't been able to figure out.
A few things.
There's a cold start problem in consumer.
And if you build something for utility, you canguarantee retention.
(37:08):
And it's not good enough to be a product thatpeople use once a month, once a week, even,
like, couple times a week.
You wanna be something that they're using 10plus times a day, because then they put you on
the home screen of their phone.
They depend on you, and you are, you know, partof their daily rituals.
And I think that you can count the apps on onehand that you use on a daily basis.
(37:29):
And for us, Saturn is one of them for our highschool users.
And, building single player utility has alsodifferentiated us and allowed us to stay
focused and not get distracted.
Obviously, we're not a single player utility,and the product grows virally.
So it's not something like a calculator.
But it's also not, you know, a random messagingproduct.
(37:51):
And by building in utility, you can guaranteethat retention, which gives you enough shots on
goal to test consumer features to see ifthey're gonna work or if they're not gonna work
without worrying about churn.
Most consumer products, they're betting on thegraph and the multi player features from day 1,
and then you deal with the reverse k factorproblem, which is if you tell me to join a
(38:11):
product, I will join.
That's a k factor.
Think about the letter k, user in, user out,but the reverse k factor is when you stop using
the product, I will stop using it.
Think of products like Clubhouse, bunch ofother photo messaging apps that kind of came
and went well built, but they, you know, interms of Clubhouse's case, easily, you know,
repeatable.
(38:31):
Twitter did it.
Spotify did it.
And then with, all those other products, theyrely on your friends using them.
There's 0 single player retention.
So if your friend stops using it, or maybemisses a day taking a picture, you're gonna
turn.
Interesting.
For a couple of closing questions, but beforewe wrap up the interview, 1, what is your
greatest failure and what did you learn fromit?
It's a good question.
I think
(39:00):
During 2021, it was it was easy to get temptedand not stay grounded because you
were getting sky high valuations and investorswere flying you around the country in private
jets and
you were, you know, kind of told your king whenYou're not.
And it was more about what if then actuals, soI think getting distracted is something that
(39:23):
the last couple of years
have been really humbling around just stayingfocused, staying
in the trenches building.
The Saturn team is amazing.
And I'm extremely grateful and privileged tolearn alongside them every day.
There have been people we've hired that didn'twork out.
I think you always learn from that.
It's an iterative process.
So those, you know, definitely a lot oflearnings failures along the way.
(39:43):
Product features aren't always gonna work, butyou wanna bounce back and make sure that the
core value prop is
is strong.
And, you know, I think sometimes not takingthings personally and being a little more
lighthearted and fun along the journey
is, is advice that I would give myself manytimes.
How do you stay grounded during some of thosemoments?
(40:04):
I would just look at the big guys and say we'renot that yet and, you
know, focus on the unit economics andfundamentals around the product and just say,
look.
We got a long ways to go.
Never get too high.
Never get too low.
And and, you know, stay the course.
And for our last question, if I slid you over
(40:26):
a phone and you could call your sixteen yearold self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
What do I call?
I would not change
advice.
I
it's kind of a freaky question.
I don't think I would call because, you know,he would have to figure it out for himself and,
you
(40:54):
know, I think back then, all I wanted to do isget into Stanford, and that didn't happen.
So I feel like, you know, wouldn't wanna spoilthe surprise.
And, I'm happy with the track.
Maybe I would just say, you know, don't worryabout the future and the unknowns and but I
probably wouldn't make that call.
I'd probably just, you know, stay the course.
(41:15):
I think that, I use this analogy a lot.
I think, rather than think about like a nowplaying bar with the music app, your track of
life is not written.
You're always at the end more like a livestreaming track.
You can't just skip ahead.
It's not predetermined, so I wouldn't wannareally tempt fate
there.
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thanks, Dylan, for taking the
time to show.
(41:35):
We'll have a link to Saturn in the episodedescription down below.
If you haven't yet checked it out, it'll bethere.
And, thanks for joining.
Thank you.
You were getting sky high valuations andinvestors were flying you around the country in
private jets, and you were kind of told yourking.
This guy is Dylan Dimond.
He's a twenty five year old who built thenumber 2 most downloaded app on the app store,
saturn with millions of users.
Last month, I had a Matter Studio and asked himto teach me everything he knows about how he
(00:21):
became the youngest intern at Tesla and createdone of the most viral apps in the US.
There was no marketing, and I didn't reallythink much of it at the time.
What do you think that the team has figured outthat other consumer founders haven't been able
to figure out.
A few things.
It's not good enough to be a product thatpeople use once a month.
You want to be something that they're using 10plus times a day.
(00:41):
How'd you become the young intern at Tesla.
So I hacked together this Apple Watch app,Iphone app called Tesla toolbox and posted it
in the Tesla Motors Club, and it went viral.
How did they originally reach out to?
I remember on the phone, my age did not come upuntil the end, and I said I'm about to start
senior year of high school.
And they're like, woah, you're young.
When did you decide to drop out a pen and leaveTesla?
(01:04):
We took a trip out to California, and we werereally fortunate to meet general catalysts.
He gave us a term sheet the next day.
It was for $2,500,000 And I was like, wow.
Before we begin this episode, I have a quickstory to show with you.
The other week, I was interviewing this guynamed Kianzadecki, super cool kid, teal fellow,
(01:24):
etcetera, and made an interview.
Something really embarrassing happened on myfront.
I'm not sure if you guys want that included inthe episode because I've never really included
blupers before.
But if you do, let me know by subscribing tothe show and sharing this with 1 or 2 friends
who you think might find value from us.
If you do that, I'll make 2 promises to youtoday.
1, include the blooper at the end of that nextepisode, and 2, I'll continue to level up the
(01:48):
production quality and our interviews everysingle week.
Thanks so much.
And now on to my interview with Dylan Diamond.
Dylan, I wanna start this interview with yourearly context.
If I was around you, when you were a teenager,would I have been able to know that you would
be on the path that you are today?
Definitely with engineering and coding a lot.
(02:09):
I think, starting my own company probably, butback then I was I was just building tools for
myself, building a lot of apps, super nerdy,and, I don't think you'd be surprised.
I'll say that.
What were
some of those apps that you were building andwhen you were younger, and how did she get
interested in building apps?
(02:29):
So in 4th grade, I got my first MacBook, like,the plastic 2008, white polyphane macbook.
And I was browsing Safari, clicked view sourcecode, and discovered this whole new language
that was, you know, completely foreign to methat later turned out to be HTML, JavaScript,
and CSS.
(02:50):
And I was immediately transfixed that as my dadexplained, you could input instructions into
the computer and it would output graphics andit would output whatever you want.
And while my friends were playing Xbox and, youknow, a ton of video games, I was not
interested in that, but I started learning webdevelopment, and built, a web design company in
4th grade around, static sites for therapists,nonprofits, friends of family.
(03:12):
And I loved doing it, but I think the theclients at the time felt bad that I was just
coding these sites for free.
So they'd pay me a couple hundred bucks.
I soon realized I could make a business out ofit and started scaling that up.
And then later started building more dynamicweb applications.
Think, you know, content management systems forblogs and newsletters and things like that.
(03:35):
And then my first iPhone app was a it was for aproject in 8th grade, to educate younger
students about the moon phases and people madeboard games, videos, and I decided to make an
iPhone app, that told you the moon phase.
Sounds very trivial, but it was my firstproject in objective c first app on the app
(03:55):
store.
And then my real my real first app that gotmore scale was called my hack, and it was a,
online portal to or integrated with an onlineportal to check your grades.
So I went to a public school in Connecticut,and it used a software called home access
center.
You probably went to a school where you couldcheck your grades online.
(04:18):
At the time around 2012, it was not mobileoptimized.
So I had to learn web scraping.
I had to learn objective c and and build a toolfor myself that allowed me to check my grades
versus, waiting in line at the desk cops in theschool library.
So I built that for myself, and then my friendsstarted saying, hey, Dylan.
How are you able to, you know, get thisinformation in the classroom versus at the
(04:40):
library?
They wanted the app.
So I put it on the app store.
My entire school, you know, 2000 kids got thatthat 1st week.
And then later, I scaled it up to, you know,thousands of, schools across the country.
One of the app set you built early on was a webapp.
It ended up turning into the Saturn that weknow today.
What was the story behind that?
(05:00):
Why did you decide to to create, a schoolcalendar app?
So that was a couple years later.
It was a schedule sharing website as simple asthat sounds.
Yep.
And I was not the first kid to do this in theworld.
I was the first at my high school.
But we all used Facebook really heavily at thetime, and there was a moment twice a year in
homeroom.
Where you would get your, paper schedule forthe upcoming semester.
(05:25):
And people would take a picture of it and postit on Facebook and say like or comment if you
have class with me.
And this was a common ritual across every highschool in the country.
You know, and even before Facebook, people werecomparing notes about who they were sitting
next to in class, because there's a lot ofanxiety over, you know, you're a freshman,
you're at the high school.
You don't know where to go, who to talk to.
(05:45):
So I built a web app.
It was really simple at the time, but it wouldauto complete your courses, auto complete your
teachers, and you'd input the period number,and it would match you with your classmates.
And I, you know, posted a link about that sitein the school Facebook group.
Every single kid in the school got on that wasweb app.
And it was used for, you know, the next year orso, at the peaks of the semester.
(06:07):
And then later another problem that I had wasthe calendar was a mess in my high school.
It ran on letter days.
They were constantly rotating.
There were early dismissals.
And I thought there had to be a bettersolution.
So I I built an Apple Watch app.
The Apple Watch had just come out at the time.
An Apple Watch app to have the schedule on myphone and then later paired it with the
(06:30):
database of, classes and and sections that, youknow, from the other web product, that everyone
had.
And that is what became I Staples.
I Staples was a rudimentary calendar schedulesharing tool.
And friend finder, for my community, and italso like that it spread word-of-mouth,
throughout the entire school.
(06:50):
Yeah.
I heard that about 90%, of the campus was usingit.
How did every day.
Yeah.
And that was that was by the 3rd year.
The 1st year, it was like, you know, 40, 50%and it kind of, it was all word-of-mouth and,
still Saturn today grows mostly with theyounger grades.
Getting it as they get acclimated to highschool.
(07:11):
It's a rite of passage.
It's a ritual.
And in the schools where Saturn's really deepand staples back then, it was something you
find out about from your older siblings, upperclassmen, it's the way to get around.
You are lost without the product, and you cometo trust it multiple times a day as your
lifeline to know where to go.
You walk in a a new classroom.
(07:32):
You don't know who to talk to.
You pull out the app.
It shows you where everyone is.
What mutual classes you may have with them, andit contextualizes it a little bit.
I think on a lot of other platforms, like, youknow, people try and pretend who they are and
and fabricate, with fancy photo editing and youknow, very polished content and videos, but on
Saturn, it really is who you are relative tothe community.
(07:54):
And you can't fake that.
You you know, it's your classes, your groups,your activities, your friends, and it tries to
be very much at that utility and and friendfinder and communicator.
And that's kinda how it's spread throughout theschool.
And I was on doing a few other, you know,college and, working full time, but in the
background, it was spreading all byword-of-mouth, no marketing.
(08:15):
I think if our podcast got 2000 listeners offthe bat day 1 and just started expanding
rapidly very quickly.
I probably would have put the pedal to themetal.
I thought I was a genius and and start growingthe show pretty
good.
I did not think that.
I was a, you know, I got lucky and I was usedto every app I had built at that point just
growing on its own because it was I it wasbuilding for myself, but it turns out that I am
(08:39):
a stereotype of, you know, high schooler in myhigh school and many others.
So whether it's checking your grades, yourschedule, your friends, there was no marketing,
and I didn't really think much of it at thetime other than, hey.
It's cool that my friends and my school are areusing this app.
So you mentioned you were working full time.
You're actually working at Tesla, I believe.
Right?
So building out their their superchargingnetwork, doing some of the back end engineering
(09:01):
stuff for them.
How'd you become the youngest intern at Tesla?
So around the same time that I was buildingthis Schedule Sharing product.
And again, I just got the Apple Watch, so I wasreally eager to build, you know, new products
on that surface.
I also, was, I was kind of introduced to Tesla.
My parents had gotten a model s at the time2015, and there were only, you know, a 100,000
(09:26):
vehicles on the road back then.
And I thought that it was more of a computer onwheels than in a vehicle.
And I'm not a car buff, but I am, you know, ahuge nerd.
So this was really exciting to me that it was,you know, this really sexy vehicle with an API
and and with an interface to the internet.
So, I, you know, I got they got this car.
(09:49):
I was really excited.
I think I had my learner's permit.
I couldn't even drive it on my own.
But I hooked it up to my wifi network and wasreverse engineering.
A lot of the API calls that the vehicle was,communicating to mothership, which is what I
would learn was Tesla's servers.
And I discovered that there were a lot ofundocumented, endpoints that were not in the
(10:11):
the their iPhone app at the time, like,summoned so you could move the car in and out
of your garage, home link.
And at at the time, Tesla's app was prettysimple.
It was a bunch of buttons, flash the lights,honk the horn, open the sunroof, but that was
about it.
No map, no data, no sharing, and the API gaveyou all that data.
So I basically built a strava or Garmin forTesla on the Apple Watch.
(10:35):
You could track where you're going, share rideswith friends, talk about energy consumption,
max speed, fun stats.
And at the time, the community was really tightknit, and everyone was sharing online in a
forum called the Tesla Motors Club.
So I
hacked together this Apple Watch app, iPhoneapp called Tesla toolbox, It was one of the
first Apple Watch apps for Tesla
at the time and posted
(10:55):
it in the Tesla Motors Club, and it went viral.
It was like, you know, 20,000 something peoplebought the app in the 1st month.
Was it free or what?
App was free and then later made it paid.
But I always thought, you know, make it free tostart because you just wanna learn and talk to
the community without any, you know, negativefeedback.
I, you know, was connected to Tesla, and Ithought at first that it was gonna be like a
(11:16):
cease and desist interaction, but, actually,they were really intrigued with what I was
building.
How did they originally reach out to you?
Did they call you up or send you an email onyour on your school email?
Or I'm trying to remember.
I think it was an email.
And I got on the phone through a recruiter,then as I would learn, they forward you
internally to whatever team they think makessense.
And the supercharger analytics team, had arole.
(11:37):
And I was like, I'm just gonna get my foot inthe door.
And I remember on the phone, my age did notcome up until the end.
When I said, I'm about to start senior year ofhigh school.
And they're like, woah, you're young.
I have 17 during that phone call later turned18, and started working for them in May of
2017.
When I got to Tesla, I was able to take a lotof their back of house data software and
(12:00):
commercialize it and build it into internaltools, build it into customer facing software.
So things like inputting your destination intothe supercharger network and seeing, you know,
where you have to charge along the way,building out dashboards for real time
monitoring of sites, and we were expanding soquickly at the time.
I think we were, you know, launching model 3.
The supercharger network was doubling year overyear.
(12:23):
It was a really exciting time to be at thecompany during hyper growth.
Especially when the entire world was bettingagainst us.
We were building cars on the weekends trying tohit 5000 vehicles a week.
It was so scrappy and taught me a lot.
But the people I worked with were incredible,and I had such free reign.
If I had an idea, like, building out this suiteof software, that that now powers a lot of
(12:46):
Tesla energy called network maps.
They just let me run with it, and you were ableto build whatever you wanted.
So it was a really fun opportunity.
That's funny.
I try not to mention my age too much to Yeah.
Potential clients unless they ask where if I'mgoing to school because I found is that if I
mention my age, then they automaticallydiscredit a little bit, take a little bit off
(13:07):
of my knowledge.
And then if I mentioned I'm going to school inthe fall in this case, then they're like, oh,
well, are you sure you can run the businessfull time while you're in school?
How did you think about that?
Cause I think you were over at Tesla, you werealso in school, and then you're also building
out I
would later learn that your age is an asset,and that people have been here to talk to you.
(13:29):
Now I'm twenty five.
Feel very old.
But, what happened was I was at, Tesla andloving it.
I was learning the most I would ever learn insuch a short amount of time.
Engineering, business relationships, product,technology, being able to, you know, see Elon
up close.
It was just such an incredible experience foran eighteen year old.
(13:53):
And I was in a dual degree program at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, the M and T
program, which is an amazing program, and thehead of that is a Saturn advisor, and he's the
best.
But the it was Wharton And Engineering, sobusiness and engineering, and I think that it
was such a, you know, rigorous program.
(14:14):
It really forced me to prioritize, what Iwanted to do because you had to take double the
amount of classes of any other pen student andmost, you know, any other college student I was
learning more at Tesla than in the engineeringclassroom.
And I always wanted to optimize for learning,and I didn't feel stressed like other, students
for, doing on campus recruiting because I hadthe job at Tesla the colleagues at Tesla were
(14:38):
teaching me so much, and I was, you know,writing, like, you know, production level
software for arguably the coolest company inthe world from my dormer.
And that was really exciting.
And I would be in the classroom VPN ing intoTesla writing code, and there were some great
courses, but I was just like, hey.
I'm not gonna give up this opportunity atTesla.
(15:00):
I wanna take it with me even though I'm atschool too.
So I was flying back and forth between Phillyand San Francisco to, Tesla working around the
clock had no free time.
It was really fun, though.
What word would you say?
You you mentioned you were learning a lot atTesla.
Yeah.
More than you were an Ivy League program.
What would you say are, like, some of the mostimportant things that you learned that you
(15:21):
implemented when starting your own company?
The bar of talent at Tesla for engineering isso high, so being able to look for that.
Tesla didn't have, you know, excess capital.
So you had to really be scrappy and being, youknow, and when Saturn started, we were we're
self funding it.
My, you know, Max and I.
So learning learning to, really be scrappy andfocus on one problem at a time, and then all
(15:47):
about engineering fundamentals and, you know,being technical, a Tesla when I was building
software, there was no designer.
I was the designer.
I was the tester.
I was the user.
So it kind of not and typically in a productcompany, you have PM, you have designer, and we
have all that now, and they're great.
But back then, it was a one man show.
So, at least what what I was building.
(16:07):
So I took a lot of that with me, and was ableto, you know, make sure that want it's a best
in class product, and Tesla's look really good,but they're also best in class engineering.
Oftentimes you have one or the other.
So it kind of taught the the marriage of thatand on the business side.
And school also taught that.
I just thought that a Tesla It wasn'tsimulated.
It was cutting edge.
You were innovating.
(16:27):
You were, you know, years ahead of anycompetitor, and it was a fun place to be.
Your co founder, Max, how did you meet him?
What what's the story?
He actually pinged me on LinkedIn, as Whartonkids would do.
And he read an article in the daily,Pennsylvania, the school newspaper about, I was
the youngest player Tesla.
(16:47):
I built a, you know, an app for pen.
And he said, hey.
I'm the youngest, you know, managing directorat Havas, big marketing firm, worked with
brands like Coca Cola, Beats, T Mobile, and hewas also not in a frat prioritizing his work
over school and thought we would bond.
So he invited me over, and we just talk forhours.
Spitballing ideas back and forth, talkingabout, you know, each other's different
(17:10):
careers, very complimentary skill set.
He was all marketing and, you know, up and out,and I was very much an engineer much more kind
of introverted at the time and very focused onjust building things that I like to use.
And it was a good good mix.
And we didn't know right away what we weregoing to build.
But eventually, we started looking at theGoogle analytics data for that scheduling
(17:33):
product, I Staples.
And he saw that step function of, you know, 50percent daily active users over enrollment to
about 90%.
And he said, Dylan, you have to bring this toanother school.
And it took some convincing because I was doingthe dual degree in Tesla.
But on the weekends, we would build this and wewe decided to take it to my cousin's high
school.
And that was when we kind of got signal whenhalf of that school downloaded in the first day
(17:57):
that we had something.
So when you realize you have something, youstart picking up traction from additional
schools, like like the one you mentioned.
Yeah.
What are
the next steps do you go to?
Do you decide hey, I wanna raise capital, or orwhat do you go to?
Definitely not.
And I would, advise any young founder listeningto delay raising capital as much as possible.
And we were lucky in that we were we were bothworking full time, so we were able to self fund
(18:21):
the business, for server costs, for interns,for, you know, operations, things like that.
And we got to it was, like, one additionalschool from Staples, then 2, then 3, then 4,
and they kept seeing the same type ofperformance in the first, 48 hours.
And we we didn't have any validator.
I didn't even know metrics like D 30 retention,DAO Mau, the stickiness, and the, you know,
(18:45):
penetration in each campus.
I just thought it was really cool that aproduct that I built for myself had spread not
just to my school, but started spreading todozens of schools and that people loved it as
much as I did.
But Max was much more commercial.
And we went to New York, and we met with somementors and advisors, and they thought that the
growth was really explosive.
(19:05):
And they hadn't seen anything like that inconsumer for a long time.
So the goal was not immediately to raisecapital,
although we were contacted by a lot of thestudent run arms of venture firms on campus.
But we put that off as long as possible.
And we, you know, didn't, take any of theiroffers because we were able to sell fund and,
(19:27):
you know, we didn't really need, like, a 25 kcheck or anything.
What would be your advice to maybe otherfounders in the audience?
Cause I see a lot of founders that sometimes Imight be at an event every once in a while.
And the founder would come up to me.
I asked what they're building.
And, like, oh, no.
We're we're raising capital for what we'rebuilding right now.
And, like, can you build anything yet?
It's like, no.
We need the money to build.
And I'm like,
so you have all the tools at your disposal,especially now with you know, AI and LLS
(19:53):
building for you that we did not have backthen, that you really don't need capital in the
beginning.
And I would argue capital makes finding productmarket fit harder because you have more
stakeholders and people and you have to worryabout you know, shareholders and company
structure, capital structure.
Whereas with us, it was just do kids like it?
Do they not?
And each additional school we would go to, wewould modify the product to suit their needs.
(20:18):
And it was not scalable at all, but it wassomething that really helped us.
And I think that with, you know, in the earlydays, it was Max, myself, Mason, who's
incredible, our first kind of intern later tooka year off schools, fellow student at Penn,
couple other interns.
And, you know, we were just having so much fundoing it.
(20:40):
The the the, you know, huge TV in the apartmentwould have real time analytics, and we'd see it
go from, like, 0 to 500, you know, concurrentusers at one school.
And that was, you know, so thrilling to us.
And I'd never raised capital before, so itwasn't even a consideration.
I think a lot of kids think, do I need to go toYC?
Do I need to raise capital?
(21:00):
I knew 0 venture capitalists I had not eventhought about going to YC.
It was either school or Tesla full time.
And, this was a fun weekend project.
When did you decide to drop out a pen and andleave Tesla?
And then how did your parents and and people.
How do you think about that?
So I was coding day and night trying to keep upwith school, Tesla, and what would become
(21:26):
Saturn, and and that was taking up increasinglymore time.
And Max was starting to talk to a lot of VCs.
And we took a trip out to California with nointention of raising capital, went to LA, and
then went to SF and just started pitching.
We made a deck before and, you know, working onthat in the hotel room late at night before we
(21:46):
raised and we were really fortunate to meetgeneral catalyst.
And Nico Banounces there.
Did Snapchat series be one of the, you know,really good consumer investors.
And we met him, and we just had a goodconversation.
It didn't feel like a pitch meeting.
And he gave us a term sheet the next day.
It was for, you know, I think, 2 and a half$1,000,000.
And that was like, wow.
(22:06):
We, we'd not expect that before because all theventure checks were, like, you know, 25 k,
whatever.
And we didn't take any of those.
There wasn't really a decision about leavingschool or not.
I think back then, the decision was, are wegoing to work on this during the summer or not?
There was this big decision about do we, youknow, stay at our full time jobs, Tesla and
(22:27):
Havas for throughout the summer, or do we dothis?
And then when we got that term sheet, it wasmuch more clear that, wow, we have a big
opportunity and people who are really goodinvestors find this exciting we should keep
working on it.
And, you know, we thought that we couldn't hirea team around us if we weren't fully in it
because that wouldn't be fair if the foundersweren't committed.
(22:50):
The founders were doing school and you wannahire people who are gonna put their life on the
line to build this with you and be yourteammates.
And, you know, leaving the school school waskind of the easier part.
At least putting that on hold.
Tesla, I stayed around for another 2 to 3months for, like, a transition period.
Still talk to those guys today.
That's amazing.
People of company.
They're off doing great things, but the termshe kind of implied that this was gonna be the
(23:13):
full time focus and the traction from Saturn,the product kept growing.
And, we were really excited.
Yeah.
You talked a lot about having to spend a lot oftime working at Tesla, also at school, also
trying to build out the company.
I know about 2 years ago, I spent time doingalso multiple other projects all at once.
(23:35):
I was working at Columbia Business School.
Was also working at a venture fund part time.
It was also trying to scale out this podcastand then was also working at a startup running
operation for them for a little bit.
I thought I was genius doing trying to doeverything at once, but I soon figured out that
by spending so much time on so many differentthings that sacrificed, the quality of work for
(23:57):
all of those things, I realized I wanted to tryto be number 1 in at least 1 or 2 of those
things, but I realized to do that.
You can't really have a lot of balance, atleast not in your life.
How have you thought about balance in in yourlife, or or do you think it can exist start a
founding.
So, look, we we say time is the most valuableresource.
You cannot buy more of it, and it's whatdemocratizes every single one of us on the
(24:21):
planet.
So the most important decision that one makeson a daily basis is how to spend their time,
and that's the whole mission behind Saturn.
Give people the tools to empower them withinformation so that they can make the best
decisions on how they spend their time.
And I think balance is really important.
And at school, it's something I struggled within that there was zero free time with courses,
(24:43):
with Tesla.
As I said, my cofounder and I, were not in, youknow, Greek life, and we really were strapped
for time.
And now it's something that is really importantworking on personal relationships, fitness.
It makes you better at the company.
And then within the company, balance isimportant.
For the 1st, you know, few months after raisingthat 1st round and later than when Kotoo joined
(25:06):
in, I wasn't recruiting.
I should have been.
I was coding day and night until 5 AM everynight.
Go home, sleep for a couple hours.
Go back to the office.
Actually, right around the corner here.
And it was helpful, but I wasn't building, youknow, a company.
I really, I was just building a product and themoney was sitting idle on the bank account.
And, you know, you wanna be conservative, butyou also wanna scale yourself and you wanna
(25:30):
focus on the things that only you can do thatother people can't and empower them.
You work for them.
So unblock them.
Hire people better than you at engineering, atmarketing, at design, and then, you know,
continue to unblock them and and spend yourtime wisely.
That's been certainly a learning over the lastcouple of years, and I've, you know, plenty
more to learn and keep going.
But that's also helped create more balance andtime, you know, focusing on yourself
(25:54):
professionally.
I have a great executive coach that's been withme for 5 plus years as a great mentor.
So those are just some ways to create balance.
And now Saturn has millions of users, allacross the United States.
What were some of the things that you and theteam did to grow from maybe the few thousand
users that you had at a couple of those schoolsall the way up to the scale that you're at
(26:15):
today?
So we leveraged an ambassador network for bothacquisition, but primarily learn product
learning and user research so that when wewould go to a school in a new market, new geo,
we didn't we didn't, empathize with the usersas much as the northeast public schools where I
grew up.
So we would work with them.
We would understand, what is important aboutthe product for them.
(26:38):
You know, whether it's building more socialfeatures, whether it's doubling down on
utility, and then they would, you know, plantthe seeds and saturn grows year over year.
So if you get the app, you're maybe moreexcited to get it as a freshman sophomore than
a junior senior.
But by the time that that freshman or sophomoregrows up becomes senior, their engagement is
(26:58):
the same, but then you have 3 to 4 other newgrades, new cohorts that get the app.
So that's why the schools grow year on year.
And it took us some time to identify thatgrowth model as part of our business.
But we really lean into it.
And right about now is the back to schoolseason, which is when we, you know, go to the
top of the app store, densify schools.
They grow year on year.
(27:19):
And at first, we wanted the growth to be linearto exponential throughout the entire year.
It's very exponential, but packed into, like, a6 week period.
And we got comfortable with that and used it asan asset, versus something that we wanted to to
work on.
And the ambassador network, we didn't really doany paid marketing for the 1st, you know, 2 to
3 years of the company.
(27:40):
We do a little bit now just to seed schools,given how much time young people spend on those
platforms, which I think is a separate issue wecan get into.
But, it's really about word-of-mouthinvitations, making it a product that users are
eager to share with their friends.
And let's get into that.
Why not?
What's wrong with social media today?
So I think social media is it was built to be aconnector, but
(28:04):
the business models behind traditional
social media and mobile are All contingent onminutes spent inventory and scrolling.
So what I mean by that is every product thatyou might think of when you think of social
media, they're it's designed to get you to keepscrolling for more minutes per day.
(28:24):
Because you you they can serve you more ads andthen they make more money, you know, average
revenue per user.
And they just want that reinforcement loop.
So keep showing you more of the same thingsthat you like.
What started as something that was a, you know,strong tie graph based around friendship has
dissolved into something based on weak ties andshowing you content that is recommended versus
(28:49):
content that you decided to follow.
And that's been great for business modelsbecause you can inject ads and the
recommendation engines behind ads are verystrong.
But it's been terrible for young people andtheir mental health because these products are
reinforcement loops, and they get you to stayscrolling, and you are focused on this, you
(29:12):
know, glass rectangle you hold, not actuallyout in the real world.
You are on connecting with people you don'tknow and connecting with creators and that
creates FOMO.
You are not focused on strengthening ties withyour real friends.
And I think that my my age group skippedTikTok, but we very much had Instagram and I
know from talking with our high school userstoday, just how much of a problem those
(29:36):
products are in school and and how distractingthey are.
They create anxieties.
They, you know, you have to look a like effectwhere you see all these people on the feeds.
And they're not actually your friends, but youfeel bad that you're not emulating them, you
know, as closely as you want.
I think it, you know, we're we're not on theright track where people are using their phones
as a tool to enable them and empower them.
I think young people's specifically, you know,teens are using their phones in ways that just
(30:00):
continue to isolate themselves from theircommunities.
And Saturn did not start out as a product tointentionally solve that.
It started out as the best calendar for myself,my friends, and then now, you know, millions of
high schoolers, but I really think that we giveyou time back in your day, and we don't take it
out of your day.
We don't track it internally as a core businessKPI.
And we think that the calendar should be foryour friends, your community, helping you
(30:25):
discover things going on, see where yourfriends will be, help you spend your time, not
a place where you go when you're bored and justwanna scroll.
And I will say that the business models of ofthose other companies are contingent on
minutes, we feel really proud that we'vecreated a new business model and type of ad
unit where it's not based on minutes, and it'snot based on, you know, the number of times you
(30:50):
scroll in in inventory.
So that's all I can say on that for now.
But I feel excited that, we've kept that ethosas our north star and did not, you know, try
and build something anonymous, creating, youknow, loneliness and bullying.
And instead, we we wanna get you out in thereal world, and we don't really we want you
using the product frequently because it meansyour daily utility, a lifeline that they can
(31:11):
depend on.
But we don't care how long you spend using it.
In fact, if you're successful on Saturn, youshould find what you want quickly and and not
need to, you know, waste time scrolling.
Yeah.
When we've had conversations, you'veconsistently kept at the forefront like you are
now is that Saturn tier to to save people time,not Yeah.
There's no addictive algorithms designed tokeep you on your phone.
They don't wanna surface the content of yourfriends quickly.
(31:34):
They wanna show you random things so that youspend more time scrolling.
Why do you care about saving time at all?
Because technically, wouldn't you think that ifyou were a true capitalist, right, like, you
would try to just try to keep people on theplatform as much as But
I didn't start the product as a capitalist.
I built the first app as a sixteen year oldhigh school kid and then later as a sophomore
in college.
So There was no been set out to build a companyto build a business.
(31:57):
I set out to build a tool and a really funproduct for me, my school, my friends.
And I think that it's challenging, but you canbuild something that users will actually, give
you more credit for and could be a reallycompelling business opportunity.
So, obviously, we wanna do well by ourshareholders, and I think that what we've come
up with is much stronger than trying to competeon the same vertical as, say, the top 4 social
(32:23):
media products, which are all direct response,vertical video ads.
We don't wanna be that.
Users are also fatigued.
They don't need more feeds.
You look at the convergence between platformsof they all have the same content.
They all have the same formats.
You know, the apps I'm talking about theirvertical video feeds, and they all are, you
know, pretty much the same.
And we just wanna build something more unique.
(32:44):
And I do think users will reward us for doingthat.
So what are some of the ways that Saturn nowmakes money.
You know, later this year, we'll we'll be ableto talk more about that.
But it's all through the calendar.
It's about showing you content, that you, willinteract within the real world, not just on
a device.
And be able
to do that with your, community.
(33:06):
So imagine a bunch of people around the lunchtable in a school cafeteria.
Everyone whips out their TikTok.
Everyone's gonna see different ads.
There's no conversation around those ads.
They're very personalized to you, which couldwork well in that type of business model.
But I think with Saturn, we care about creatingconversation around content, in the real world.
And we wanna build something where you open it.
(33:26):
You can connect with others around that pieceof content and form micro communities around
that content.
I I think it is a different take, but
it reminds people maybe of an earlier internetand of in real life, you know, advertising and
and content.
Are there, I guess, any period of time whenwhen you're building the company or even in
your business career,
(33:50):
that was more difficult than others are reallydifficult that you had to push through.
If so, what was it, and how did you pushthrough?
Yeah.
So COVID shut down every high school in thecountry.
And for a product that
operates mostly during the school day.
That was really challenging.
And we had capital in the bank, but it was, youknow, not good for for morale when all the, you
(34:13):
know, the DAO basically, daily active userswent to 0, and we didn't know when people were
gonna come back.
We iterated.
We built a Chromebook app.
We built a virtual yearbook.
We did a bunch of things.
I think in retrospect, it was good for morale,but it was not we didn't know what's happening.
So with the information we had at the time, Iwould not have changed our course, but I think
(34:34):
that for a company that's about getting peopletogether, leveraging their community graphs.
When you're at home, you aren't with yourcommunity, and it's harder.
We saw the rise of the friend finder apps inthe app store kind of died off and saturn
again.
We didn't wanna pivot.
We didn't wanna build anything anonymous.
We didn't wanna connect you with random people.
(34:54):
So we stayed the course, but it was reallychallenging for that period.
And then luckily, the world has bounced back ina big way.
What do you wish you knew when you firststarted the business?
Things take time.
And that we had a lot of momentum early on,from going from one school to 12 to 24 to 50
and we also raised capital very quickly becauseinvestors were excited by this new, way of
(35:18):
connecting people through the calendar and thatwe were building a calendar that was not an
enterprise tool, but that resonated with Gen Zand young people, but keeping laser focus is
important.
And there are a lot of products, which I won'tname, but you probably know social apps that
have exploded virally and then, you know, diedin a, you know, kind of big way because they're
(35:39):
ephemeral and they're fads.
And we had a lot of pressure from investors tofollow those apps and to build features like
that.
When crypto was huge in 21, there was pressureto put NFTs into Saturn and builds our, you
know, product
on the blockchain.
But for the application, for the user.
There was no benefit to that, and it would havebeen a lot of engineering lift.
(36:03):
And I think in that respect, we stayed thecourse, but in other areas, we got distracted
trying to replicate messaging apps and buildfeatures that weren't core to the ethos of
Saturn.
So I would give myself the advice of just, youknow, Hadi, again, the person I mentioned
earlier has set it well, which is build thecalendar infrastructure for every high school
in America.
That's your remote.
(36:23):
That's your retention.
The rest will follow.
And that has paid off, but I wish we maybedidn't zigzag as much, but you gotta do it as
part of the learning process.
You mentioned much earlier in
the podcast and you you that you were meetingwith advisors and and people and and mentors in
New York City.
And they were particularly interested in inSaturn because they haven't seen an explosion
(36:45):
in in
growth in the consumer sector in a long time.
What do you think that
you or the team has figured out when building aconsumer company that other consumer founders
haven't been able to figure out.
A few things.
There's a cold start problem in consumer.
And if you build something for utility, you canguarantee retention.
(37:08):
And it's not good enough to be a product thatpeople use once a month, once a week, even,
like, couple times a week.
You wanna be something that they're using 10plus times a day, because then they put you on
the home screen of their phone.
They depend on you, and you are, you know, partof their daily rituals.
And I think that you can count the apps on onehand that you use on a daily basis.
(37:29):
And for us, Saturn is one of them for our highschool users.
And, building single player utility has alsodifferentiated us and allowed us to stay
focused and not get distracted.
Obviously, we're not a single player utility,and the product grows virally.
So it's not something like a calculator.
But it's also not, you know, a random messagingproduct.
(37:51):
And by building in utility, you can guaranteethat retention, which gives you enough shots on
goal to test consumer features to see ifthey're gonna work or if they're not gonna work
without worrying about churn.
Most consumer products, they're betting on thegraph and the multi player features from day 1,
and then you deal with the reverse k factorproblem, which is if you tell me to join a
(38:11):
product, I will join.
That's a k factor.
Think about the letter k, user in, user out,but the reverse k factor is when you stop using
the product, I will stop using it.
Think of products like Clubhouse, bunch ofother photo messaging apps that kind of came
and went well built, but they, you know, interms of Clubhouse's case, easily, you know,
repeatable.
(38:31):
Twitter did it.
Spotify did it.
And then with, all those other products, theyrely on your friends using them.
There's 0 single player retention.
So if your friend stops using it, or maybemisses a day taking a picture, you're gonna
turn.
Interesting.
For a couple of closing questions, but beforewe wrap up the interview, 1, what is your
greatest failure and what did you learn fromit?
It's a good question.
I think
(39:00):
During 2021, it was it was easy to get temptedand not stay grounded because you
were getting sky high valuations and investorswere flying you around the country in private
jets and
you were, you know, kind of told your king whenYou're not.
And it was more about what if then actuals, soI think getting distracted is something that
(39:23):
the last couple of years
have been really humbling around just stayingfocused, staying
in the trenches building.
The Saturn team is amazing.
And I'm extremely grateful and privileged tolearn alongside them every day.
There have been people we've hired that didn'twork out.
I think you always learn from that.
It's an iterative process.
So those, you know, definitely a lot oflearnings failures along the way.
(39:43):
Product features aren't always gonna work, butyou wanna bounce back and make sure that the
core value prop is
is strong.
And, you know, I think sometimes not takingthings personally and being a little more
lighthearted and fun along the journey
is, is advice that I would give myself manytimes.
How do you stay grounded during some of thosemoments?
(40:04):
I would just look at the big guys and say we'renot that yet and, you
know, focus on the unit economics andfundamentals around the product and just say,
look.
We got a long ways to go.
Never get too high.
Never get too low.
And and, you know, stay the course.
And for our last question, if I slid you over
(40:26):
a phone and you could call your sixteen yearold self, would you call?
And if so, what would you say?
What do I call?
I would not change
advice.
I
it's kind of a freaky question.
I don't think I would call because, you know,he would have to figure it out for himself and,
you
(40:54):
know, I think back then, all I wanted to do isget into Stanford, and that didn't happen.
So I feel like, you know, wouldn't wanna spoilthe surprise.
And, I'm happy with the track.
Maybe I would just say, you know, don't worryabout the future and the unknowns and but I
probably wouldn't make that call.
I'd probably just, you know, stay the course.
(41:15):
I think that, I use this analogy a lot.
I think, rather than think about like a nowplaying bar with the music app, your track of
life is not written.
You're always at the end more like a livestreaming track.
You can't just skip ahead.
It's not predetermined, so I wouldn't wannareally tempt fate
there.
Awesome.
Well, I think that's a great way to end it.
Thanks, Dylan, for taking the
time to show.
(41:35):
We'll have a link to Saturn in the episodedescription down below.
If you haven't yet checked it out, it'll bethere.
And, thanks for joining.
Thank you.
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