Tim Sweeney

`3:55:24`

Tim recently revealed that it has cost well over a hundred million dollars in legal fees to carry on this battle against Apple. We, for a hot moment, considered suing Apple when they were threatening to kick us out. We shopped the case around with a few law firms and perhaps of course they would tell us you have a good case. I mean they're trying to sell a product here, but they would also tell us. — It's gonna cost a minimum of $10 million and it's gonna take five to seven years through all the appeals. Now we now learned the actual price tag was 10 times higher, right? Epic spend over 100 million. It would've destroyed us to take on Apple in the legal realm. Only a company like Epic could do it and only a company run by founders Like Tim, like Mark could risk the business in the way that they did, the audacity they had to provoke the fight in the first place, which I thought was just incredible. And to stick with it for the long term,

`3:56:25`

no board would've signed off on this lawsuit to a professional CEO, no freaking way. So the fact that they've been able to beat Apple in also the most hilarious way possible, I think it's just incredible. 'Cause remember their first victory in the case was actually not much of a victory. There were about 11 counts in the trial. Apple basically won 10 of them and the judge awarded Epic this one little win that Apple couldn't tell 'em not to link out to the internet to be able to do the payment processing. So they won this one little thing. And Apple, instead of just taking the 10 out of 11 wins and going fine, you can have your little links but all these other rules stay in place decided to essentially commit criminal contempt of court as they've now been referred to for prosecution and angered the judge to such a degree

`3:57:26`

that the rule of law in the US now is that you can launch an app in the app store. And you don't have to use in-app payment, but you can have a direct billing relationship with a customer if you just link out to the open internet when you take the credit card and then hop back into the app. And we owe all of that to Tim and Mark. We owe all of that to Epic. We're gonna launch new apps any minute now, I hope actually next week to take advantage of this that revamp the hey apps so that people who download the Hey app off the Apple app store can sign up in the app and can then use the web to put in their credit card so we don't have to pay 30%. Instead we have a direct billing relationship and such that they can take that subscription to Android, to PCs, whatever without any hassle. And we have Tim and Mark to thank for it. — Yeah, Tim, I mean, like you said founders but also specific kind of founders. 'Cause I think maybe you can educate me on this, but Tim is somebody who maintains.

`3:58:27`

to this day sort of the unreasonableness of principles. Yes, that's what I love. I think sometimes maybe even with founders you can get worn down. It's a large company. There's a lot of smart, quote, unquote, people around you lawyers and just whispering your ear over time and you're like, well just be reasonable being a, you know, this is a different thing. And to be the sort of maintain, I mean Steve Jobs did this. Still are the asshole. Who' says, "No, I'll sink this whole fucking company over this." — That's the exact language basically I used in our original campaign. I will burn this business down before I hand over 30% of it to Apple. And that sort of indignation, that actual rage is something I try to be a little careful about tapping into because it is a little bit of a volatile compound. Because I mean I have a bunch of employees, we have a bunch of customers. It would be pretty sad if the journey of 37 signals