1357: Satlantis: Startup Survival and Winning Strategies for Modern Entrepreneurs with Archeofuturist Aleksandar Svetski

Robert Plank 0:01 Hey, Mr. Aleksandar Svetsky is here, and his website is setlantis.io and we're here to talk about this guy. And he has a lot figured out. He's an author, he's an adventurer, he's an RKO futurist, and he has published almost 2 million words worth of essays in Bitcoin magazine, Zero Hedge and his own blogs, and he has this amazing social network, and he has a book about culture, civilization, virtue, honor, humanity. So we're here to talk about how to perhaps live life differently, and find out what Aleksandar has figured out and just what he has built and what he's accomplished, and what we can learn from him and perhaps avoid some of those mistakes. Although, in life, mistakes happen, but it was good to have that additional guidance. So Mr. Aleksandar, how are you today?

Aleksandar Svetski 0:53 Thank you for the thank you for the kind intro. Rob doing well, man, it's been a big day. You're my fourth podcast for the day, so I'm on doing a big one today.

Robert Plank 1:01 I like it. And sometimes we have those days right with the calendars packed with meetings, and we just have to have that mental focus and have the reason why we're doing things. And so as far as what drives you and what has you like, staying active, staying energetic, to do all these meetings. What are you all about? I introduced you a little bit with a bio, but what did I not mention what's your current focus and passion?

Aleksandar Svetski 1:23 Yeah, so the two big things, I mean, people know me online as a writer, primarily, but the my vocation throughout my life has primarily been entrepreneurship. So I've built businesses, you know, I've succeeded, I've failed, I've succeeded, I failed, I've succeeded, I failed multiple times. You know, I'm sort of like that classic serial entrepreneur archetype, but the the older I've gotten, the more mature I've gotten, I think I've managed to somehow bring those lessons together, and, knock on wood, fail a little bit less the older I get. So I these days, the so to kind of back up a little bit. I, as you said in the introduction, I used to do a lot of writing for like Zero Hedge, Bitcoin magazine, all those guys. I published two books. That was the my focus from 2021 through to about the end of last year, or let's say, middle of last year. That's when I when I published the second book. But prior to that, and currently, it's been more entrepreneurship. So I had a sales company when I first came out of university. I traded the stock market. So I had, like, a small little hedge fund thing going on for a while. And I call it a hedge fund. It was more like a little investment fund, right? I was, I was young, crazy, stupid and trying all sorts of things. I had about 10 shops. Actually, I was in hospitality for a little while. I had a gym. And then most of the last eight years, I would say, eight or nine years, has been in software. So I built my original startup. Was a it was a recruitment app where I tried to match people to roles based on their personality. So it was kind of like Tinder for jobs, but using personality profiling. So it was quite unique, but we failed. We again. I was young. It was my first tech startup. We didn't raise anywhere near enough money to build a two sided marketplace, which are really expensive and really capital intensive to build. So that led me to Bitcoin actually, which is where I built my first real successful tech startup, and that was a bitcoin exchange. It was one of Australia's first Bitcoin exchanges. And then I exited that a couple of years ago, and that put me in a position where I was able to do some writing, and that's when I published those couple of books. And then I got the entrepreneurial itch again about a year and a bit ago, and I decided, You know what, I want to build something and solve one of my biggest problems, which is travel community, being an expat, being a nomad, being someone who is relatively location independent and wants to build community depth and roots in the different places that is in. So that's what's Atlantis all about. That's what I'm building. And that's a little bit about me.

Robert Plank 4:19 Well, great. And I mean, it was entertaining just to hear about all the different trials and tribulations you've gone through. And I want to get to sit Atlantis in a moment, because that sounds like such a cool idea, but you mentioned all these things that you've done, right? And it's like, how do you fit it all in? But how do you make these decisions about, like, when you know you're onto a good idea? How do you know when to build something really, focus on it. And then, how do you know some of these times when you had to jump ship, when it's like, done for like, some all those things you mentioned sound like really scary life changing decisions. So how do you navigate that

Aleksandar Svetski 4:51 really good question. So when I was young, it was very sporadic. I I would, I. I get a, you know, an idea for something, and get all excited about and I just like jump into it, even if I was doing something else. Then I'd like add that to my plate. And then, you know, something else comes along, I add that to my plate, if I could go back. And I think if I had more of a mentor, maybe father figure, or something like that, to kind of keep me in line, I think I would have done less of that jumping in with both feet to sort of jump into something, you know. And this is the thing about life, right? You have pros and cons with everything. Everything is a trade off. You know, probably the the advantage that I got from doing so many things was that I lived quite a full life in my 20s, and I got probably more experienced than 99% of people in a more compressed period of time, but for the love of Christ, I put myself under ridiculous amounts of stress and pain. And you know, like I would, I didn't enjoy my 20s, right? I didn't like go out and make friends and all this sort of stuff. I was just like working, hustling, building, failing, starting again, and all this sort of stuff. So to come back to your original question, how I make those decisions? I think when I was younger, was very impulsive, and I would go at something, I was very persistent, and I would go at something until it was, like, dead. So like, if it failed, it failed, like, I lost everything. I'd basically be the last man out of the ship, right? I was the last person in the office, the last person in the shop when it burnt down, like whatever, all this kind of thing. The older I've gotten, though, I think these days, I look for multiple factors before I get involved in anything. I look for timing. I try and take a more rational assessment of my own skill and capacity, I should back up. I should clarify what I mean by timing, timing in the market, timing with technology, timing with the culture. So timing is like a multifaceted element. So I'll look at timing. I'll look at my capacity to do something, in my ability. I will look to see how much it challenges me as a person, because I'm generally driven by something that stretches me, not just, you know, like doing the easy thing, right, right? So those elements usually help me make a decision to do something and then to leave it, I've become better at dropping things that pull me away from the main thing that I should be doing. And I'll give you an analogy. When I was young, the kind of personality I had would be the kind of person that would go to a buffet restaurant and have the chicken, the beef, the fish, the pasta, the salad, the dessert, everything, right? And what you end up doing is you end up getting full on crap that you don't actually like but you want to try everything right, like your eyes are bigger than your than your appetite or than your stomach. Yeah, the older I've gotten, the more I've realized that, wait a minute, no no. Like, I like steak. And even though chickens, okay, I don't actually need to fill up my stomach with chicken, right, you know? And sure, you know, salad is cool, and, you know, so shrimp and all this stuff. But you know what? Like, I want steak, and I'm going to maximize that. So these days, if I have, if I if I'm doing something and it's pulling me away from my main focus, I'll actually drop it, even if it's good, even if it's a good opportunity, even if it makes sense, even if it gets me excited, all of that stuff. Still, what I've come to realize is that we literally have a limited amount of time. We can't see everything, we can't do everything, we can't experience everything. So therefore we have to make the adult mature decision to just say no to things. So you know, if my if my 20s were the decade of saying yes to everything, my 30s have been the era of trying to say no to more things. So that's my attempt to answer that question,

Robert Plank 8:58 yeah, and that's an interesting approach. There's like, three really big ideas in there, right? There's like, Okay, your 20s are a good time where you have a lot of time, and I'm probably more, in a way, a lot different resources than you would have in other parts of your life. So that gives you the chance to sample the chicken and the fish. So that way, later on, you already know what your tastes are, so to speak. And then it seems like there's when you were talking, I had this visual visualization of like five to seven, like green lights or red lights, like just traffic lights. And you figure out, like, well, what are the the factors that make a project interesting to you? Right? Something where it it stretches you a little bit, and all these other kind of things. So that way, if maybe there's five green lights and two red lights. Well, it's not quite it, but if you get all seven of the green lights, you're like, hey, I'll go for that. And then there's also this idea of the if you have different projects, like we're ADHD entrepreneurs, of course, we have all these things going, but you're like, Well, what's, where's the synergy, the overlap? And you figure, like Zuckerberg. Got Oculus and Whatsapp and Facebook and Instagram and they, they're all different, but they all sort of connect. He doesn't have all this wildly different stuff. And like, you know, Elon similar, right? You got the the solar panels, and you got the the boring and you got the Tesla that I get, all it kind of relates. And so it's interesting to think about just how to this, the system to navigate all this. And so it's great to have an insight into this. And I said I wanted to make sure that we talk about your amazing social app, which is called Atlantis and so, and you told us a little bit about it, how it's like, you drop into a city and you want to have, like, not just a place to stay, but the rest of it. And I'm looking at it, and it's like, there's different cities, and you have these, like, kind of, these values of, like, cost of living, quality of life, infrastructure, family, Bitcoin, and so can you tell me about, like, like, what's this all about? How does this differ from other like, travel sites and social networks?

Aleksandar Svetski 10:55 Yeah, sure. So let's, we'll, we'll take a 10,000 foot view of the broader space first, and then I'll kind of zoom into what's Atlantis is. So if we, if we back up a minute, people these days, let's put it this way, travel, the whole travel experience and building community and all this sort of stuff is, is has become extremely social. Like, you know, these days we take photos of our food, you know, we sort of, like, check our Instagram to see the five top things to do, like, socialism, sorry, travel has become this kind of, like, social experience. Like you, you know, you go to meet expats, and you Nomad, and you're meeting people and all this kind of thing, right? But if you look at how travel apps have evolved. They've remained static. Like, you know, the primary travel apps are things like TripAdvisor. TripAdvisor hasn't changed in 25 years. It's still just, you know, reviews by people you don't know, and you know city pages where they're trying to shill you overpriced tours, right? Yelp is reviews by people you don't know for restaurants you don't care about, like meetup.com, Eventbrite, like, everything has remained static. On the flip side, you've got products like Instagram and Twitter and everything. Like, all the social products have made our experience of the web very dynamic. But none of the social apps are really travel apps, you know, they're too ephemeral. Like, you know, you sure you see cool stuff on Instagram, like, you know, five things to do in Dubai or whatever. But even if you bookmark that, you're never going back to that bookmark, like it's gone. Maybe we use Google Maps for bookmarking and stuff like that. But even Google Maps bookmarking isn't great, because you just end up with a map full of pins. So what I've sort of, what I'm trying to do with Atlantis is build something in the middle, build a travel app, but with the power and dynamism and personalization of a social app. And what I mean by that is the reason social apps are so relevant to us, like the reason you and I have a different feed on Instagram is because you and I have a different interest graph, and what that means is the things we engage with, the things we're interested in, and we have a different social graph. We're connected to different people, we have different friends, and all this sort of stuff. So the question I'm trying to answer is, can we apply that interest graph and the social graph to your discovery of anything from food, gyms, restaurants, event spaces, massage, health and wellness, like the whole discovery element. So you land in a new city, and let's say the algorithm we build so the feed that you have of places to eat or things to visit or experiences to have or events to go to, is influenced by your social graph, your interest graph, so the things that you may have engaged with in the past. So like, let's say you're in New York and you, you know, you went to this cool diner, and you, you liked it, you left the review, or you left the recommendation, or you bookmarked it as part of your favorites. Then you decide to go to San Francisco. It's your first time there, the app should give you a similar place based on that. And if there isn't similar places that you might have bookmarked or whatever, maybe you have a friend there that you follow, and you guys have similar interests. So therefore the places that he's recommended will come up to the top of your list. So this is, sort of the idea is like, can I make content, people, places and events more dynamic and relevant when you're traveling, discovering, exploring? So that's kind of like the big idea, and that's the magic we're trying to create. I think we're truly I want to build a TripAdvisor for the the new, the new sort of generation, like 2025, and beyond. You know, the current TripAdvisor is still for the boomer generation, like it's, it's built for the 2000s I want to build something for the 2030s

Robert Plank 14:59 Well, this is. Is amazing. And I love what you have going on because, I mean, you're so right with these review sites, the strip advisors, the Yelp, it's like, you it's so based on someone you didn't know left to review four years ago, right? And it's like, and there's all this talk about with the the AI, and all the storage and all the data, like, they have all of our data, and it's like, almost connected, but it's not quite right. They, for sure, put it to use, to serve us some ads, but it to make our lives better. I mean, this, this needs to exist, or this needs to be put into better use, right? The idea of, like you said, there's your interest graph and there's your social graph, and then you take you with you, and there's still those groups of friends, and you go to a new location, and it's like, it's the algorithm should be put to work right, to give you not exactly of what you've had and are not exactly what you want, but close enough where it's something that you'll like, and you get that blend of, it's what you're used to, what you've expressed you like in the past, but also something new. And so this sounds like quite a nut to crack. And so what has the struggles been like? Like you mentioned earlier about the problem of, like, getting the two way, marketplace in use, right? There's like, you can build the software, but to get usage of the software. Man, that's like, such a slow process. But you tell me, like, what have the difficulties been like getting Atlantis in use?

Aleksandar Svetski 16:14 Man, it's, uh, well, I mean, first of all, I'll say that we are technically not live yet. We have, we built a sort of like a prototype to and that's what you're seeing on the web now, and that was just to help us raise our first round of capital, and just to show the the investors in the market and who we're going to work with, like, Hey, this is what we're doing. This is the vision. This is the direction we want to go. Where we take the app is going to be in a much deeper and more multifaceted direction. But the big challenge, I would say, is this is a behemoth of a product. I'm practically building four products in one like my ultimate goal in 10 years is to obsolete TripAdvisor, Yelp, meetup.com, and Eventbrite. I think those four companies suck. There's no other way to put it. They are incumbents. They don't care about the users anymore. I mean, TripAdvisor, I couldn't believe it. They're worth four and a half billion dollars, and the product hasn't changed in 20 years. I don't understand these people. So, like, you know. So you've got these massive incumbents, they're lazy, they don't care. They're run by boomers. You know that? You know they're making money hand over fist because there's no other alternatives. They're just selling you crap. And you know, people, because they don't have an alternative, that's what they're buying. So for me, I think, all right, I want to, I want to build something that these guys don't have the energy insight or care to build, and I want to, you know, do it over the next 10 years. I told my investors, when we raised up, when we raised our seed round last year, I said, you're not investing for a, you know, three to five year exit. I said, you're investing for a decade business. This is a long term play, and it's going to take us a while to really get some traction here. I said, you know, don't expect a lot from the first 123, years, while we really build the product and get that initial core network effect. I said, that's going to take some time. So in, you know, my investors, knock on wood. They're fantastic, and they sort of understood, they're like, all right, Alex, you know, we're investing in you. We're investing in this vision. We're investing for the long term. But to tie it back to your original question, like, what is the what is the challenge here? I'd say it's two things. The first challenge is getting all of these different parts of our app. Because we have an events component, we have the food and merchants and places to go. We have the people, the social element, the feed, getting all of that to sing together is, is a big task like this. You know, every single day, you know, I'm like, up at four o'clock in the morning, writing out features and adjustments and amendments and this and that, and this will just as a mammoth project there, once we get that somewhat right, and we will look to release like a first proper public version of the app in July. The next step is then going to be presenting this vision and the product and everything that we're doing to the market. It's going to be like, Hey guys, look, we built this really cool thing. Come and check it out. Come and try it. And that's going to be, yeah, effectively, the next step is like, how do we get that out and get people excited about that? So I, you know, my wife said, you know, did you bite off more than you can chew? And I was like, Look, I don't know. We will find out, but I've got a good feeling about this. Honestly, I everyone I talk to about it, it kind of clicks to them. They realize and they're like, You know what? I didn't think about that TripAdvisor actually sucks. Yelp really sucks. Like, you know, the status quo sucks. And, you know, Instagram is not a travel app. It's never going to be a travel app. So they're like, sort of, they realize that they're stuck between two extremes that don't exactly do what they want. So when I explain it, people love it. It's just now I've got to deliver and we've got to get it out into market. And I'm pretty confident we can do this.

Robert Plank 20:08 Very nice. Well, I think you're touching on the secret to life, which is to find the proper fit, right fit. You mentioned that, like you know the marriage or relationships, you find the right person for you. There's all these solutions exist, website, app, you figure, there's Instagram, there's super advisor, and they don't quite fit of what's needed. And you figure, when you try to get some traction on software or some kind of service, and it's like you got to give people like the right fit, right they need to say, like, this is exactly what I want and what I need. And that seems to be like just such a hard problem in life, right? Like a lot of guys like you and me, we use a lot of AI, like the chat GPT, and so much of the work, especially when you're like, programmatically going to bounce stuff, is like getting the output to fit what you want your input to be, right? Getting, getting all that that formatting to be standard and proper. And it's like one of the hardest problems, like, what's the fit of something when you work with anything mechanical, how does this piece fit into that part? It's like such a problem to solve, but you think about these hard questions that you're up to, and it's great to hear you promise, different levels, right? There's the level of the kind of the mechanics of your business. There's that kind of mindset, entrepreneurial, and we've got a limited time, but you say that you appear in lots of podcasts, and you spelt some great knowledge, and you've already given us so much to think about, right? You told us about the importance of finding a mentor and knowing what you're good at, and being a visionary and a leader and getting people behind you. But I'll leave it up to you in this conversation we're having here, Mr. Aleksandar, what is the missing hidden question in our conversation? What should I be asking you? I just don't know what to ask you.

Aleksandar Svetski 21:49 That's a good question. You've actually stumped me. I have not been stumped on a podcast for a long time. What is what is, what is the hidden question? Okay, maybe that was the question. That was the hidden question that you should ask me, so that you could stump me, so that I could not think of a question. Fantastic.

Robert Plank 22:14 How about this? What are you really struggling with? Of course, there's always, like, business problems to solve and things you're working on with yourself, but like, you know, in the next year or two, what do you wish you could, like, really achieve, as far as, like, your own personal, internal goals?

Aleksandar Svetski 22:30 Hmm, so let me I might actually read a note that I was taking literally half an hour ago. I was putting together a leadership memo for my for my leadership team, right? So I've got, like, I'd say, five or six guys on the team that are really senior, fantastic, like devs or product people. And what I've found myself, and this is very necessary, it's a hard thing to balance as a founder CEO, is you need to be in the product, especially, especially, especially in the early days, because you are the visionary, and you're driving not only the vision, but you're driving the pace. And you're, you know, you're constructing this from inside your head, and you're somehow like trying to send the signal into all of your team's head and mind meld everyone and make sure everything sort of is running right. Yeah, and that's very important, but at some point you spend so much time in the weeds and in the trenches with the team that two things happen. One is that they become dependent on you to actually solve and crack a lot of these problems and a lot of these nuts that they technically need to handle. Because, you know, this is a massive product. I can't, I can't be the product owner of 10 different products and solve everything, right, right? So one thing I think I have a tendency to do is spend too much time in the trenches with the guys, which, as we said earlier, everything has trade offs. You know, the the upside is that you know that the product moves faster, but the downside is the product gets more dependent on me, and the ramifications of the second piece being more dependent on me is that I need to now shift gears and prepare for raising our next round and for getting the bloody word out about the product. Now I can't do all three things. It's impossible, so I need to start extracting myself. So I think to as a long way of saying this answering your initial question, I think I need to get better at playing the game of, kind of coming into the weeds when I need to, but stepping back out of the weeds and get getting back to, like the the high level view, and just delegate the shit. And if it goes wrong, it goes wrong. Having sort of the faith that the guys will figure it out, learn from it, and actually get better themselves, because you know that that part is just so hard to do as a as a startup sort of product founder, I am still not good at it, and the price I pay for that is I spend way too much time working. Like I'm doing 100 hour weeks, and I don't think that is long term sustainable. Maybe my 20s, it was fine, but yeah, I don't think from a from a health perspective, from a sanity perspective, it's a good thing,

Robert Plank 25:36 yeah, well, yeah. And it's like, temporarily it works, but eventually something has to change. And it sounds like you're basically talking about nurturing, right? That you to like, there's managing and there's leading, and you want to be a leader. You want to empower the other leaders in your company and be there to help them, but you don't want to be the bottleneck. And it's, it's like you're literally raising a baby, right? If you have a child, well, you want to keep them safe and keep them safe and keep them out of trouble and raise them right, but then you also want to stay out of their way. And it's like it takes so much like, focus and recurring thinking about it. And I'm sure you being on not just my podcast, but other podcasts helps, right? You kind of can think through these thoughts and write your leadership memos, and just like, consider these important questions, because they're not easily solved and they are long term, but it's and it's all different for all of us, right? The same way that the social graph is different for everyone, everyone's kind of entrepreneurial trajectory is different, but it's good to consider these questions. And so you've given us so much information. You've helped us out. You shared these stories, you told us about, say atlantis.io, and so if someone was impressed on what you had to say here. What's the next step? What are some resources? What's the call to action?

Aleksandar Svetski 26:46 My call to action, I've got two calls to action. Actually, let me even ask you. I'll ask you live, is this gonna is this episode gonna go out soon, or is it gonna go out in, like, a little while from now?

Robert Plank 26:58 We're about a month and a half ahead, so, we're about 45 days away. Okay, excellent.

Aleksandar Svetski 27:03 So in that case, by the time people are listening to this couple of things, they should be able to actually sign up, download the app and check it out. So that'll be that that should be ready, because we plan to go live, as I said, with the first version in July, and we are technically about 45 days away from July. So people should be sweet to check it out. Create an account, have a play around. Go through, you know, you can select all your interests, the things that you're interested in, all this sort of stuff, and then, you know, pick a city and see what it gives you like join the community. Check it out. If that's interesting to you. It is very much like a traditional social network, in the sense that you can build a profile, you can post content, you can connect with your friends, build followers, all this sort of stuff. So, you know, there's an opportunity for people that, you know they're getting into something relatively early, and hopefully it will become a place where it's not just like, you know, the click bait social media sludge that we're all just drowning in today, like everything's turning into slop. So I'm hoping this will become more of a social network. Instead of social media, there's a big difference between the two. Social media is just about blind content consumption. Social Network is actually about building a network of people that you share values with, right? So I'm trying to take us back towards the age of the social network. You know, people may remember when Facebook first came out, it was more about friends, less about just how many followers you have. So So I encourage people to check it out. And number two, also, by the time this comes out, we will have launched our equity crowd fund. And what that means is people can actually buy a piece of the company. So we're going to do another big capital raise. So we raised 2 million last year. We're going to be raising somewhere between five to 10 million in the next in the next six to nine months. But before we do the next big raise, I'm going to carve out a small amount for the public, basically. And I'm a big believer that these kind of products that are really consumer focused, that the users get to use and build and all this sort of stuff. I'm a big believer of having the actual users, or the people that are interested in this kind of product, own a piece of the pie. So we're going to partner with timestamp financial, and they allow people to buy anything from $100 worth of the company up to $50,000 so whatever they want. So, you know, you can buy a piece of Atlantis, and, hey, it's one of those things if, if I can execute this right, and I can build this, who knows, like buying a piece of Facebook in the early days, or a piece of Instagram, or a piece of even TripAdvisor, whatever turned out a pretty good idea. So my goal is to offer that to people, and that will be that will be available, as I said, on timestamp financial, and they'll be able to find it through atlantis.io as well. So they're my they're my two calls to action, and I. Let people jump on those.

Robert Plank 30:01 I hope so too. You're quite the world changer, Mr. Aleksandar, and it's wonderful to just hear about your life and business philosophy. You've educated me quite a bit. And we'll put those links in the show notes. That's timestamp financial if you want to buy into a piece of say, Atlantis, and for the app, the service itself, that's S, A, T, L, A, N, T, I, S.io, satlantis.io, and before I let you go, I know I've really grilled you real hard in this, but before I let our podcast go, I kind of get to the scary moment of the show, which is where I try to put you on the spot, and I ask for a quote or lesson that has served you, and you've already dropped so many but what do you have for a big episode? Ender for a quote or lesson that has served you.

Aleksandar Svetski 30:44 Okay, one of my favorite quotes, and this is the opening quote of my of the book that I just published. It is, it is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. And that is a that is a old Japanese proverb, and the lesson behind that is it's similar to the Latin Parabellum, which means, you know, if you want peace, prepare for war. So the idea is that you are better to be prepared to go to battle and never have to then battle to come find you and you not be prepared. And that's sort of, it's a philosophy that I live my life by. It's something I like, I am always in a position where I'm like, ready to build, create, you know, conquer, do something. And I hope that people find that inspirational, because I definitely have,

Robert Plank 31:45 I like it, stay in shape, basically, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, be ready for war. And so we've been speaking with Aleksandar Svetsky, and that last name is S, V, E, T, S, K, I, and you can find out more about him and his app@satlantis.io man, like five podcasts in one. Like, I feel like there's a whole book's worth of material here. We just discussed you made me really think. I think you help our audience think and people need to use setlantis.io for their travel needs, so that way they can just experience life in the world a new way. And thank you, Mr. Aleksandar, for showing up, blowing our minds and being you. I really appreciate you.

Aleksandar Svetski 32:24 Thank you, Robert.Really appreciate it. And this was a fantastic, fantastic interview. Really.