Had the chance to interview the infamous Nathan Ang (Nang) during his last week in NYC, before he and his co-founder Duke Pan moved to San Francisco to join Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch. After launching PearAI on X, they faced immediate backlash from the open source community for a number of mishaps. Here's the original tweet that stirred up controversy: https://x.com/CodeFryingPan/status/1840203597478539477 You can check out PearAI here: https://trypear.ai/ This episode was filmed two weeks before any of the controversy happened, and I had no context of the specifics of the situation at that time. Their legal team asked for me to hold off on posting until things smoothed over. I appreciate your patience and hope you enjoy this episode. More to come soon. Nang's IG: https://www.instagram.com/not_nang Nang's YT: https://www.youtube.com/@nang88 Ben's IG: https://www.instagram.com/benswolfson Ben's TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@benswolfson

00:00 Intro

0:10 Nang’s YouTube journey

2:12 Why Nang quit his job

6:19 Expectations Reset

11:18 What does PearAI do?

14:07 How Nang met Pan

16:42 Decision making process

18:11 Finding an idea

20:25 Why they pivoted

22:27 CMU

24:40 Work life balance

29:57 Importance of self care

31:40 Sacrifice

34:48 Social Meter

37:35 Innovation

40:30 Cursor?

45:48 When Nang learned to code

46:48 Big Tech or Startup?

48:30 Financial security

50:17 Game Plan

52:30 Jensen Huang

54:45 Personal advice

1:04:46 Nang Family Lore