Pete McCarthy: Internet Evolution, Dot-Com Bubble, and Earthships

Pete McCarthy is an experienced tech entrepreneur with a wealth of knowledge in various industries. In this conversation we explored the evolution of the internet, his experiences during the dot-com bubble, and his insights into agile and waterfall methodologies, crypto, bitcoin, and Earthships. EPISODE LINKS: Pete's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedromccarthy/ Fucked Company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company TIMESTAMPS: (00:00:59) Intro and Background (00:03:31) The internet in 1995 (00:04:30) Seeing the internet for the first time (00:05:56) Making a huge shift from entrepreneurship (00:08:42) The decision behind shifting to different industries (00:10:01) Going different paths and learning (00:10:19) Enjoying travel, then deciding to settle down (00:12:03) Why move to San Francisco? (00:13:27) Learning the business while working with OpenTable (00:14:05) The learning process as a beginner (00:15:31) Silicon Valley in 1999/2000 (00:16:37) The dot-com bubble (00:17:08) The beginning of the dot-com crash (00:18:04) OpenTable surviving the crash (00:18:25) Beginning a career as a tech (00:19:19) Dot-com bubble burst aftermath (00:19:44) Fucked Company, the pastime for most startup company employees (00:20:39) The silver lining and resurgence of startup companies (00:22:15) The beginning of solving problems - product building (00:24:16) Opening up bigger opportunities (00:25:59) Gaining experience: Working for companies before launching his own tech venture (00:28:14) Opportunities and innovation with the release of the iPhone (00:28:57) Experiencing big shifts in technology: Cloud and mobile (00:30:19) Foreseeing Google and Apple taking over (00:30:49) Agile iterative approach, ship fast: Ruby Rails, 37 signals (00:32:20) Being comfortable with the uncomfortable: The Contrarian way of thinking (00:34:20) Fundamentals of product management, Factors builds a great process: Great product people and design (00:35:21) Enterprise software (00:36:06) Waterfall project (00:36:54) Agile methodology as the better approach (00:38:23) A big aspect of product management: Identifying and reducing irrelevant data effectively (00:40:16) Don't be committed to one answer (00:40:28) Direct user feedback for making changes (00:40:44) The difficulty of getting into true agile methodology (00:41:29) Sprint planning (00:42:22) Intentionally saying "no" to achieve better outcome (00:43:02) Shipping makes it easier to figure out what to do next (00:43:42) Living the corporate America life, working remotely (00:45:50) Resilience: Rising better after a fall (00:47:29) Starting CheckWise (00:48:51) Offering a solution (00:49:34) Learning how to code (00:50:24) The transition from product management to the technical side of things (00:52:49) Trying to pursue a coding career, going back to product (00:53:52) Working with a development team in Italy, festivals (00:54:26) Letting go of the coding dream, and enjoying building operational software (00:56:26) Electric forest and the Blissfest (00:58:40) Van trip (00:59:10) Earthships (01:02:53) Emergence of Bitcoin (01:07:13) Crypto, Blockchain (01:09:52) Part 2: Xero knowledge proofs, DAOs, AI and where this goes from a long-term perspective (01:10:15) Closing CONNECT: Website: https://hoo.be/elijahmurray YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@elijahmurray Twitter: https://twitter.com/elijahmurray Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elijahmurray LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elijahmurray/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-long-game-w-elijahmurray/ Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/elijahmurray RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/3e31c0c/podcast/rss