How to Become Relentless as an Entrepreneur (Kian Sadeghi, Nucleus)

Alex: What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founder’s Journal and the fourth episode of Founder’s Journal rebooted. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. As I mentioned last episode, Founder’s Journal is back and better than ever with a new format that I believe you are going to love. Each week I am going to curate a world class entrepreneur and interview them about their one thing, their one superpower, that one thing that looks effortless to the world, the one thing that stacks the deck in their favor as they build great businesses. And today's guest is one of the most impressive early stage founders I have met in a long, long time. Kian Sadeghi is the founder and CEO of Nucleus, a business that is trying to revolutionize genetic testing.

Kian is a 24-year-old dropout from Penn where he studied computational biology, and he has built one of the most promising consumer health companies. He was awarded a Thiel fellowship and has attracted investment from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and Alexis Ohanian’s 776. This episode we talk about Kian’s one thing, which is relentlessness, what relentlessness is, how to teach it, and how he employed it specifically to will Nucleus into existence. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Kian Sadeghi. So yesterday I interviewed Keith Rabois, who you know. He invested in you guys? 

Kian Sadeghi: Yes, he did when he was at Founders Fund. 

Alex: Got it. and you know, one of the things, so the thing I focused on with him, his one thing is identifying talent. I feel like that's his thing. Identifying great founders, identifying great employees. The first thing he said is like, they spike on some trait, they spike on some trait that is extremely important for the business that the person is building. And the way he's described that is like, they either spike on one thing or they spike on a few things, and the intersection of those makes them 10x at that intersection.

And the second thing he talks about is just tenacity, like sheer horsepower. And what's interesting to me is like, as we talked about what your one thing is, like your one superpower, the thing that stacks the deck in your favor to build your business, you were pretty quick to respond, saying relentlessness. And to me that is a very high risk one to say. And the reason I say it's high risk is given my conversation with Keith, which is like tenacity is like the standard that an exceptional founder has to have. Your view is that like you have to have like this crazy level of tenacity or relentlessness. So I'm curious, what does that actually look like?

Kian: That's a great question. I think there's a degree of intensity that catalyzed Nucleus that was in like the top 0.1%. And to me it's about giving the entire soul, the entire body, the entire mind into the craft of, in my case, Nucleus. But in another founder's case, their company. I mean, as you know, Alex, like I left school, I was in my bedroom 12 hours a day doing research in genomics, in statistical genetics, trying to figure out, how do you analyze DNA? I did that for an entire year. No, there was no mentors, there was no capital, there was no one, it was just, there was just like isolating just pure, pure craft.

Alex: And you dropped outta school, right? 

Kian: Yeah. At that point, I'd left Penn. I was not even a student. People looked at me like you were crazy. Like, you know, there's a line of going a little bit crazy at some point. Like seriously, the line is much closer than people think when you really give your entire being into something. I mean, I joke internally that, you know, Nucleus is the only company, only genetics company ever started in a bedroom. I mean, it's just like never happened. Like, what do you mean? Like, usually it spins out of like the Broad or you know, Stanford, you know, bunch of scientists get together or something. 

Alex: Yeah, I think it's a really good thing for you to point out because I think people who aren't familiar with genetics, they, I don't think they kind of necessarily have the context on what it usually looks like to build a genetics company. So like, paint a picture of like the typical genetics company, how it would be built and why the way you've been building Nucleus is just so opposite from that. 

Kian: I think running a genetics company is very complicated and that's because it's so interdisciplinary, right? So if you think about Nucleus, there's statistical genetics and kind of computational genomics. Then there's kind of more classic systems architecture, software engineering. Then there's clinical operations, right? Which is like actually, you have to build a genetic testing infrastructure, right? That requires B2B deals. Then there's a whole regulatory component of that. There's communications, right? Because ultimately we do communicate results to customers. That's a whole team. Then there's product, UI, UX, right? Then of course there's like, you know, you can keep going on and on and on. My point is like for if Nucleus operates both as a physical plane company, right? There's an entire genetic testing infrastructure as well as an application layer, right? So that's a lot more complexity. We're not purely software, right? And I think that requires such a diversity of talent. So if you look at the Nucleus team, half of us have a PhD, and I'm not in that half, the other half are below 25, right? It's like, it's such an eclectic mix of people and that's why it can be so hard because there's no established networks either when you leave college and you're like, I'm gonna go build this genetics company. I mean, that's the beauty of naivete too. Naivete is definitely a strength, right? So it is extremely, extremely non-trivial. 

Alex: Yeah. And again, you mentioned that you don't have a PhD, which again, I look as an advantage for you because I think if you did, you would've had this box that would've been really hard to operate outside of. But it's also why it's helpful for you to have PhDs in your company 'cause I think it reveals blind spots that maybe you did have. But I'm curious, going back to this year that basically 12 hours a day you've dropped outta school. You're just spending all of your time on just teaching yourself genomics, everything. How do you act like actually try to break down how you went about that process. You basically gave yourself a PhD in a year. 

Kian: Yeah. So I think the story, to do that one has to understand kind of bit of the story of my life and the way it's kind of, you know, culminated into Nucleus. Because I really think Nucleus is a deep expression of my soul, right? To me, it's art. So if you go all the way back, I think the story of Nucleus begins very unfortunately with a personal tragedy. My cousin actually went to bed one night and didn't wake up the next day. You know, she died in her sleep. I was around eight at the time. You know, I asked my parents, how does this happen? How does this happen? They kept saying, oh, it's bad genetics. Didn't even know what that meant. Eventually I started studying genetics, and that actually led me to a do it yourself genetic laboratory in Brooklyn, I think was one of the first in the country. So it's on like the second floor of this warehouse, right? There's centrifuges and pipettes thrown everywhere. And basically we had a bunch of biohackers, right? Genetically engineering yeast to make them illuminate, you know, edit in bacteria to make them resistant to antibiotics. And it was just such a beautiful thing for me to be able to like actually kind of hack biology. And I loved the beauty and the richness of biology. 

The one problem I had with it was that I want it to be more iterable, right? And the thing with programming was, it was so iterable, you make a mistake, you click the delete button, it's so much faster to me. In the lab, you make a mistake, you know, they have to start the whole experiment again. It can take weeks. The computer would just be so much faster. So with that idea in mind, I went to Penn where I studied computational biology.

Alex: By the way, what does that mean? What does computational biology actually mean to the layperson? 

Kian: It's basically the intersection of statistics, genetics and programming. It could be, it could mean a lot of things. So honestly, it's a pretty broad umbrella. But that's one way of thinking about it. And as I remember before leaving Penn, I was in actually bio 221, and that was the next class. And I remember I was sitting there in the lecture hall and the professor who at the time was the chairman of the biology department, he brought up the picture of the decrease in cost of whole genome sequencing, right? And you could basically see at the time that it cost a billion dollars, right? In 2000. And then at this point, it cost a thousand dollars per sample. And I remember sitting to myself and being like, oh my god, what is gonna happen as this cost approach is zero? It's inevitable that there's gonna be this kind of exponential proliferation in this whole genome data, and someone's gonna have to build this kind of application layer for DNA, of course that's gonna happen, right? I mean, it's very clear. This is turning towards zero. And so I turned to my friend next to me, I was like, can you believe this? This is crazy. And he was like, is this gonna be on the midterm? And I was like, what? I was like, it's gonna be on the midterm. And I just couldn't get this idea outta my mind, which is like, well, I wanna sequence my DNA and I want to analyze it, right?

So when Covid hit, I was like, you know, I thought Penn could be a little bit stifling. And you know, I was just kinda obsessed. I was just consumed with this idea because obviously I had genetic engineering, obviously, you know, my cousin passing away had really impacted me during my life. And I figured, well, what if we can get a human genome in every smartphone? What if we could, you know, sequence and then analyze everyone's whole genome? And so this basically kickstarted me in the bedroom and literally, I mean, I put this up on Twitter there, there became 18 subject notebooks worth of material. And in the very, very, very first page of the first notebook, it says, it's just such a beautiful, naive thing. It's like, you know, I'm going to build a company named Nucleus, and it's going to be this application layer that analyzes your DNA.

And even looking back and reading that, it's so interesting because I don't think I would've even described Nucleus as the application layer. The vision was very clear, right? It was very clear what I wanted to do. But of course, at that point in time, I didn't have the kind of intellectual foundation. And then one, one of the beautiful things, one of the beautiful things about Nucleus was that during that time period, I could build this intellectual castle, right? I think of Nucleus as building your understanding up to the frontier of a discipline. It's sort of like if you're kind of high in the sky and you look at a forest and there's a sea of green, then as you start coming down, it gets more and more granular. And when you start realizing it's basically there's a huge gap in the forest, right? There's a huge kind of intellectual gap. And that's what happens when you get to the frontier and then you say, how is no one here? You look around, can't believe it. So then you start planting your seeds, right? So it's this kind of what I think of as this productization of intellectual alpha, right? Taking the frontier of knowledge and productizing it. 

And what people don't, I think, understand or have a good intuition for is that when you get deep enough into any scientific discipline or any field, you start seeing old intellectual cracks. So you understand two things. One of the things you understand is, what are the kind of outstanding questions that we just don't know the answer to? And the other thing is, what is the gap between what could exist and what does exist? And that was very true and very apparent to me in genetics, where at some point I was like, wait a second, there's all this research, there's all these insights, there's all these innovation, right? But we're stuck with, do you like chocolate or not from 23andMe, like, what's going on here? And then that of course kind of birthed Nucleus. 

Alex: It's actually such a good point you make about just this trait of relentlessness. There's the obvious benefit of it, which is just simply the more kind of guided effort you put into a business or a project, the faster you can make it move. But also, I think the second piece of that, which I would argue is more important, is it gets you by just going deeper and deeper and deeper, you just go to where no one's gone before… 

Kian: Exactly. 

Alex: Intellectually. Which is kind of the only way to have an insight that leads to building the whole thing. 

Kian: Exactly. And you see, you literally see something that no one else sees. And if you think about relentlessness, to me it's kind of, it means like a pathological motivation. Like you’re pathologically motivated. And what does pathological motivation come from? It comes from, I think, two things. It comes from love and fear. There's a lot of fear in the early days of Nucleus. A lot of fear. But there's also so much love, love of the crowd, love of creating something from nothing. Love for trying to solve a problem that was so kind of intimate and personal to you. And then those two things, if you can actually harness them appropriately, I really think, I'm a big believer in the kind of Joseph Campbell quote that's like, you know, the goal, bliss in life bliss is matching your inner being and inner plane to the physical plane. And I think people have, they deep inside their soul, they know what they wanna do. And you just need to have the audacity to be able to channel that fear, 'cause that fear's not gonna go away, to channel that fear knowing, okay, I don't wanna do what I'm doing right now. Or I'm really scared of this specific thing, but I'm gonna channel that into your craft, right? So you both have a push and a pull. You both, you know, the fear inspires you and then the love kind of continues the journey. So that's kinda the way I think about it. 

Alex: Yeah. Have you ever read Mastery by Robert Greene? 

Kian: No. I've not read Mastery. I've read the other ones. The Laws of Human Nature, Power. 

Alex: I'm reading Mastery right now. And a lot of what you're talking about is kind of one of the key theses of the book, which is that, it's funny, I see a lot of what he describes in your journey, like if you look at some of the highest performers in society, whether it's, you know, da Vinci or Einstein or Mozart, first of all, they go through like an apprenticeship period. They go through kind of a, usually an eight to 10 year period where they're digesting all of these disparate inputs in life that leads to ultimately connecting them into dots where they can actually do their greatest work. But the second is, he talks about all of us have this life force in us. And this life force is the thing that we, every one of us uniquely has that we are pulled toward. And usually it's as children, as like young people, and he calls it life's task, where masters of a craft, they are able to find their life's task, which is basically matching what their life force was as a child with what they spend all of their time on as an adult. 

Kian: Wow. Yeah. That's beautiful. 

Alex: And it's kind of what you just expressed. Yeah. Just in different words. 

Kian: And I think on the point of kind of apprenticeship or like really diving deep into a craft, in the world of Silicon Valley, where frankly I find it something that's amazing that, you know, especially for younger founders, they just like start something. To me, there was such a long time before we had any capital, and by having no capital, by having no resources, the only thing you can do is pure, authentic, deep, deep work. And I think that gets missed a lot where sometimes a lot of founders will be like, oh, how do you do this? How do you do this? And it's like, it's almost like when someone's like, oh, you know, how would you become like an Olympic weightlifter? Well, you should probably go to the gym 12 hours every single day. But then like, it's the most obvious thing. But who's gonna wake up literally the next day and be like, 12 hours, I'm going to the gym? No, you're not gonna do that. Of course, I'm not gonna do that. In the same way when someone's like, oh, how do I start this deep tech company? Well, lock yourself in the bedroom. Like, I didn't see anyone. It is just every ounce of your being into the thing. And then I think in doing that, by the time you actually get to investors, it kind of shines through in a way because it's so authentic. And then also talking about relentlessness, you know, basically the vast majority of investors in the seed round said no. But it didn't matter because I know I see something no one else sees. So who cares, right? Of course there's always uncertainty, but you have a deep sense of conviction and that deep sense of conviction drives the relentlessness. And it drives the audacity. 

Alex: I want it to like literally give our listeners, try to paint a picture in their head of what relentlessness looked like in the 12 hours a day for 12 months, what I would argue was like the period of you going through the intellectual maze of your business. Do you remember, like some of the biggest questions that you needed to answer in order to push forward this business? Like basically what your biggest intellectual gaps were, or like the questions that you didn't have an answer to that you needed an answer to push forward your business and what you actually did, literally what you did to get answers to those questions. Like what I mean by that is like, was it reading like 70 page academic papers? Was it like getting in touch with a geneticist at a lab? Like what did that actually look like? 

Kian: Yeah, it's a great question. So, al lright, let's go back. Let's see. The first thing I wanted to do was I really wanted to build up an elemental understanding of it, right? So I was a big believer in kind of being able to independently drive everything, which is like, how do I go from what is a probability to here's a genomic model of analyzing DNA. That's the level of depth of understanding I wanted. I didn't want anything to be superficial because in my mind I wanted to kind of have this bark as a foundation, right? And then all the branches that kind of stem from that, you know, you can then figure anything out, right? If the intellectual fundamentals are strong enough, you can drive anything, basically. 

Alex: Yeah. Like basically you wanted to get to a place where you were making no assumptions. Like you were taking no one's assumption as fact. All of your assumptions were actually facts that you had verified for yourself. 

Kian: Exactly. And the beautiful thing about kind of statistics and probability is that, you know, you can abstract away genomics as just another attribute in a model, right? So you can kind of have a more generalizable way of understanding things and then incorporate genomics in, right. So I basically sat down and the first thing I did was I picked up a scientific paper that was relevant and I figured to myself, okay, anything I don't understand in this paper, I'm just gonna figure it out. 

Alex: Do you remember what the paper was?

Kian: Yeah, it was actually, it was our chief scientific officer, our now current chief scientific officer’s paper. Which makes sense, right? 

Alex: Which I feel like had to be like the most badass full circle thing. You ultimately had this person who wrote this paper that clearly mattered to you be your chief scientific officer. 

Kian: Yes. And of course we actually acquired the thing he was talking about at the time, he ran this academic site that gave people kind of DTC polygenic scores. It's kind of a genetic analysis. And of course, I don't know, maybe a year later, a year and a half later, we actually acquired it and bring him on. 

Alex: So wild. 

Kian: So talk about relentlessness. I think at some point we exchanged 200 emails. And this is another point before I go back to the story, which is like, sometimes people are like, oh, how do you recruit scientists? You know, all of the frontier of knowledge in any domain is out there. So If you understand it, you become a peer. And that's a very powerful thing. You guys both know the same amount up to the knowledge. It’s a weird thing 'cause it becomes like independent of each. 

Alex: I think we talked about it last time, which is like, it becomes your currency. The title doesn't matter. If you are rich with this depth of knowledge, anyone will listen to you. 

Kian: Exactly. And the depth of knowledge with the vision, in other words, combining the investigativeness with the enterprise-y-ness, I think that's a super rare characteristic where people are both extremely investigative, because usually if you're sufficiently extremely investigative, you become a scientist. But then to combine that with enterprise, some people are extremely enterprising but not investigative. You get all hosts of companies, which, you know, maybe are fine, but they're nothing as I think profound as like a Nucleus genomics, which is, you know, changing the fundamentals of healthcare and society, of humanity, you could argue. 

So anyway, so going back to the bedroom. I remember reading this paper and I remember being like, oh, well what's this, what's this? What's this? What's this? What's this? And the thing is, you ask enough questions, eventually you get back to, well, what is a probability? Right? And then I actually, and this was actually one of those things where I became probably a little bit too obsessed in this, but you could see in the notebooks, I would basically try to, you can really start from the very, very, very, very, very beginning and then just slowly, 'cause it was a mix of different textbooks and academic papers, YouTube videos. A whole host of things. I actually had, I wrote myself an essay that was like, the essay title was “One Man Revolution,” which I love retrospectively. 'Cause it's like you're literally in your bedroom just like kind of messing with yourself. One man revolution. And now it's no longer one man. I mean it's just a revolution. And that's what I find so beautiful and the kind of arc of the journey. But in it, I kind of outlined the transition and kind of the plan of what I was gonna do. And I was like, oh, well, you know, there's like the statistical genetics and kind of computational genomics and here's like a bunch of resources. It was like, it was so freaking long. And also, yeah, I can build the web app too, you know, the full stack development. Oh, that won't be a problem. Of course I should have just focused on only the statistical genetics, but I was trying to do both at the same time at the time. Because again, you have no resources. And that's another beautiful thing, which is that no resources. You're like, I have to do everything. But in trying to do literally everything, you get a good intuition for, and then you can start having this kind of foundation, which you can start pulling people in and you know exactly what to tell 'em to do. 

Anyway, so then I would basically do this and basically each and every day I started getting kind of a deeper and deeper, it's like almost like I was in a cave shining a flashlight. And then every day the flashlight got brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter. And until I couldn't even believe certain things. Like for example, you know, 23andMe, it got started in 2006. The cost of sequencing the genome at that point was around $20 million per sample. So they couldn't actually employ the technology to read the entirety of someone's DNA. Plus 6 billion letters. They opted for a much more naive technology called microarray technology, which was the best it was at its time.  And that technology looks at around, you know, less than 0.1% of someone’s DNA. And I just couldn't believe that people didn't know this. I mean, it's one of these things like, it's like literally like a horse and a car. Everyone's like, well, why would I need a car? Like, I can get around with a horse just fine. It's like, what? This is crazy. And I think it's also partially based on people's reference point. Like the reference point to 23andMe was nothing. 

Alex: So it wasn't like a horse versus a car, it was like a horse versus like walking a thousand miles. 

Kian: That is exactly right. That is exactly right. And so then I think over time what happened was, I had more and more granularity, which then I could ask the best question, the next best question, the next best question. And then it became a point to your point of like, did I email anyone, where I was like, hmm, I have these very technical questions, but at the time I would've loved if ChatGPT had existed, honestly. That could have been super interesting for me. But, you know, nothing like that existed. I was like, I kind of need, like someone who actually is at the frontier too. And so this is a funny story, but I emailed under a pseudonym, just to be honest with you, our, again, current chief scientific officer, and I asked him like, you know, 50 questions, right? And he was kind enough to actually, he answered all the questions. 

Alex: Wow. And you hadn't spoken to him prior to that? 

Kian: No, I had no idea who he was. He was a cold email. But he actually didn't know it was me. I told him years later that that, you know, that guy was me. Again, that's part of kind relentlessness, I think. And just like, honestly, there's like an audacity to it. 

Alex: Why, why did you use a pseudonym if you were already operating at the intellectual frontier? 

Kian: Because honestly, I probably thought to myself, and this might sound crazy 'cause like, how did you know this? But I was like, I might need to acquire this one day. Actually, I swear to god, yeah. 

Alex: So you just had this fear of like, if feels like you're gonna be fishing for information, 

Kian: Exactly. I didn't wanna start like accidentally start negotiation. I just wanna collect information. And so that worked pretty well. So he answered all these questions. He answered all the questions. And that kind of really helped me and helped me see, like at some point it was like, wow, okay, this is like the frontier. Like people don't know that. Like someone doesn't know the answer to this question. And then I think what happened was I could build a kind of a generalizable model in my mind of like where genomics is and what's like the fundamental problem a genomics company's trying to solve. And once you have that, again, that framework in your mind, you become pretty like invincible in a way. Because, you know, I like to joke, someone could raise a lot of money, but if they don't fundamentally understand it doesn't matter. One of the reasons why Nucleus has been so quick and I would argue we've been, there's been almost this like, sort of like a spiritual coming together of people and things and and B2B partners and all these things together. You have to wonder, it's almost like by having that intellectual conviction, by seeing the matrix, the people who kind of were in the field that kind of had an intuition for this and then someone just like, this is exactly what we do. They're like, yeah, that is exactly what we need to do. Like of course this is an obviously good idea and you're unburdened by traditional more conservative scientific class. 

Alex: Yeah. It's funny, like as I'm trying to kind of create this model in my head of the way in which your brain worked, like to me it is relentlessness, but it's also the way in which you got to like the frontier of knowledge without having a PhD and with dropping outta school is like in my mind, what basically happened and add anything that you would change here is you basically understood that there were like these fundamental fields that you, or like topics you needed to understand if you were to go gonna build this business. And it was like, it was basically statistics, it was genomics, but like, let's just focus on statistics for a second. It was like, you then basically asked yourself a lot of questions around the intersection of these two things. And you did that by finding a paper that sat at the intersection of these disciplines. You wrote down every question you had. Which potentially at the time, let's just say from like a 101, like your first level in college to like a 901, which is the frontier. There are probably like 201 questions. Yeah. And then you started answering these 201 questions, which led you to more resources to ask those 201 questions that led to more questions, which basically had you go to 301, 401, 501. And so basically…

Kian: But here's the thing. You knew what the ultimate vision was, which is so important. You can see the end goal. But you just don't see the between. And I think sometimes, you know, it's having that vision is very important because if someone can both have the vision and then have the execution, right. Because anyone can kind of sit back and be like, oh, there should be this thing. Like, oh, you know, that's kinda the easy part. The much harder part is to have the clarity of vision of what you want and then actually figuring out the maze of how to get there. How to go from 101 all the way up to the frontier of knowledge and then to actually productize that information. Because there is a completely different skill set too, right. Talking about the investigative enterprising dichotomy. 

Alex: Yep. Totally. And what's interesting to me is like, there's kind of two key traits here. One doesn't have to do with relentlessness, it's more of how to be a good question asker. Like how to ask the right questions to explore answers to. And I think one way to do that is to know what your end goal is. Then that kind of acts as this constant, you know, magnetic force of keeping your questions within what's relevant and important. But then there is the aspect of being relentless. Like to me, the fact that you spent 12 hours a day for 12 months doing this, it was the only way to get to the intellectual frontier. 

Kian: A hundred percent. 

Alex: Because I think what actually happens to most people intellectually when they don't go as far down the rabbit hole as you can go is I would actually argue that what happens is they, whether consciously or or unconsciously, they realize it's gonna take a lot of time to answer these questions. And so instead of answering these questions, they stop at the assumption layer. They just stop at assuming a truth of why it is versus investigating. And you literally have to spend years to answer every question there is to be answered. 

Kian: Yes. And then if you do that, you have the true alpha, right? I really don't know how to communicate this to, you know, all the future like younger entrepreneurs. Everyone wants to build, everyone wants to build. Before you can create anything, you have to understand, you have to understand so deeply. And then at that point, again, no one can catch up independent of capital. You can do entire downstream operations, which is things you can learn like raising money, you know, recruiting, building product. All that is downstream of this extremely strong intellectual foundation. 

Alex: Do you think you can teach this? Like, do you think relentlessness is a teachable skill? 

Kian: I think if you define relentlessness as pathological motivation. And pathological motivation comes from fear and love. I think you could, you can teach it. I think people have to learn how to channel their fear, channel their hesitancy. And then so there's the push from kind of channeling the fear and then there's the pull from doing what you love. And I think too often, you kind of see this sometimes in universities, like people, you know, there's kinda like a stagnation, right? You know, the freshman class is so excited, they come in so ready and then, there's, you know, everyone ends up becoming a management consultant. There's just like almost like this like sad rotting of the soul. And you're like, what's going on here? And you wanna have the courage because it's not a matter of intellect. You wanna have the courage to escape that, to channel your fear and then to tap into your love, your love of whatever it is. Whether it's writing, programming, cooking, it could be anything. So I think it is teachable. 

Alex: Yeah. And outta curiosity, so you define relentlessness as pathological motivation? 

Kian: Yeah. 

Alex: And you explain that motivation is this combination of fear and love. For you, what was the fear? 

Kian: I think there was a lot of fear. One was definitely a fear of kind of petering out and just stagnating. I felt like, honestly my time in college, it felt a little bit suffocating for me personally. It felt suffocating. It felt like this, this drip by drip losing of just like, you know, what am I doing here? Like, this doesn't feel right for what I wanna do, which of course was my soul speaking to me. Which, you know, thank god. You listen, close your eyes, you listen carefully. I always think there was a fear of, I mean, you know, my parents are immigrants from Iran. They did not come to America and struggle how they struggled…and you know, I think as any first generation can say, your parents give you sort of the immigrant drive. Combined with the opportunity of America and, you know, to go to a school like Penn and then to leave…

Alex: The fear is this doesn't work. And you're going back to your parents and explaining to them why you left school after two years. 

Kian: I mean, you'd be dead. You'd be dead. They'd kill you. I mean, they'd kill you. No, there was intense, intense fear in that way. Oh. And also there's a sense of a fear of kind of even like letting yourself down. Because you're ultimately, when you're in the bedroom, there's this like, psychological game. Can I do this? You don't know. And that's why you need almost this like delusional self-belief. Because if you had looked at things practically, if you had looked at things with the conservatism of a maybe, you know, a parent or professor, whatever it is. Like this is of course never gonna work. Like you're one person, you have no money, you don't have a PhD, you don't have even a college degree. How would you even help? What do you mean you start a company? This is crazy. So that's the fear side. 

Alex: Yep. One question on that is, did you always have that irrational sense of self-belief? Or was it the fact that you basically learned as much as one could possibly learn about a subject matter that instilled that self-belief in you?

Kian: I think unfortunately I've had too much self-belief. And that can be a fault sometimes, right? 'Cause you just believe so much in yourself. And you know, I played a lot of sports in high school. I mean, talking about relentless sense, like you need to have this pure raw belief that you're going to win. And that I think definitely does apply to business. You really believe you're gonna get the job done. 

Alex: This is a hard question to answer, but how would you recommend someone gets to a place of pathological motivation? 

Kian: I mean, this might sound a little bit crazy, but, you know, go to the woods by yourself, close your eyes. And the answer is right there. I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, but I really believe that there's so much noise. And it's funny 'cause Covid actually was a good time for this too. Like there's the whole joke about Thoreau in Walden, right? But there was some sort of clarity of, imagine if old infrastructure of society temporarily halted. Right? Basically, like to say this sometimes when, when a new person joins Nucleus, which is, they might not realize it, but they're walking around in an intellectual castle, there's been, you know, 10,000 assumptions that they're on operate under that they come into the system and the job of the founder is to relish it and enjoy seeing that structure. It's almost like, you know, a child is born and the parents like, you know, they come in the middle of the story. Right? And the child doesn't know that. And as they grow up, they see that, wait a second, I was actually operating under someone else's thinking. And this gets back to your question because I think you need to kind of strip away all those assumptions, right? And one good example of this is early on in the bedroom, the weirdest thing, the weirdest thing was waking up and just doing 12 hours of work. That might be weird 'cause it's like, literally I'd wake up and just be in my bedroom all day just writing notebooks. I never did that before. Think about it. Oh, there's soccer practice. There's, oh, this class, that class, again, like even, even in college, there's classes, it's like split between many subjects, potentially, right? There's like such a fraction, oh, this extracurricular, oh, you're dating someone. Oh, your best friend wants you to get dinner, right? There's this, oh, your parents are pushing you to become a medical doctor. 

Alex: It's a combination of distractions and ways of like being that have been just created…

Kian: …for you and that you don't even realize you're operating under. I made a joke in the One Man Revolution essay. There's a line in there that says, I think I've spent more time thinking about going to [inaudible], which was like a food truck at Penn, than I thought about should I go to college? Because one was already set for me. The most important assumptions of life are already set for you. And that once you realize that, you realize, wait a second. 

Alex: There's this kind of like crazy thing that I'm thinking about now is like, I imagine what your experience was for those 12 months, which is like, of course there was something so profound in the content you were consuming and the intellectual maze you were going through. But actually I think there's even something as profound about the environment you were in, meaning like the container of 12 hours a day. Reading without distraction, where basically all of this static noise from society, you cultivated an environment that didn't allow for that, which allowed your brain to operate on a different frequency than it had been. 

Kian: No, a hundred percent. And again, a very important point, which is that it was almost spiritual in nature, right? When you go become a monk, what do you do? You strip away everything else, right? You let go of all your possessions, you basically commit to something you eat and you meditate. And that gives you clarity of mind. And so one of the most underappreciated things about that year was how, frankly spiritual it was, it felt sacred. And this is very important because when people would ask me early on, what are you doing, Kian? What are you doing? I wouldn't say anything about companies. I would say something like, I actually had a rule to myself. The rule was I would not say anything about a company. It's a project. I'm just doing research. And there was a sacredness to it. And so by the time I think, and there was a sacredness to it, there was no kind of noise to it. And this is really important, because, you know, 99% of the podcast listeners listening to this, right? It may be a couple of them have some deep, profound conviction, or maybe all of them feel, you know, a mix of, they have some conviction, et cetera. And they're like, okay, maybe I could take some time and, you know, go do this kind of journey, this like sacred journey. Now, retrospectively, you know, it's great, you know, you're in this podcast, you know, you've raised a bunch of money, that's all great, but in the moment there's a brutality to it. And I think this is really important to say to the entrepreneur that is on the grind right now, right? That is on month nine, right? That parents are like, no, this is not, you know, this is stupid, friends, you know, whatever, significant others, everyone is like, you, you are insane. To that entrepreneur, they're going through such a psych, it's like a psychological hazing, right? And that gets back to relentlessness too, because if you can get through that, let me tell you, you can get through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. You know, because that is the hardest thing. That is the hardest thing. And there's no glamor to it. 

Alex: Well, this has been an awesome discussion. I think it's probably for our listeners, not only, it's such a good tangible example of what relentlessness looks like in practice, but I also think for them it's probably gonna be like the most distilled version of what relentlessness looks like in its component parts and how to build up those parts. So I've loved this conversation. Thanks so much for joining the show. 

Kian: Thank you, Alex. It was a great time. 

Alex: This was awesome. That was my conversation with Kian Sadeghi and I would love to know what you thought about it. Shoot me an email to Alex at Morning Brew dot com and let me know what you thought about the episode and about this new format of going deep into a founder's one superpower in general. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal and I'll catch you next episode.