David and Daniil Liberman: Russian-born serial entrepreneurs and twins-in-spirit brothers who live one shared life; founders behind animation/avatar tech acquired by Snap, now running the Libermans Company to make personal income an investable asset class.
What this episode covers
Tim Ferriss interviews brothers David and Daniil Liberman, who grew up in 1990s Moscow as two of six kids of neuroscientist parents and built businesses from a door-to-door ISP to a games studio to a one-week animation pipeline for Russian political satire. They detail navigating corruption, mob investors, and repeated financial wipeouts before emigrating to the US, working in Hollywood, and being acquired by Snap, where they helped diagnose why Snapchat was losing users. The conversation centers on their radical lifestyle (one email, one phone, formerly one bed) and their data-driven philosophy of doubling KPIs and walking away from non-growing ventures. Their core idea now is the Libermans Company: converting individual future income into securities so investors (especially pension funds) can fund people the way they fund companies. They also explore their late father's quantum-biology theories of consciousness and end with concrete requests for Ferriss's audience.
The guest's own work
Code Is a Language
David Liberman and Daniil Liberman
“Because we actually also wrote a tiny book, like Code Is a Language?”— Daniil Liberman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Ultima Online
Origin Systems
“We built our first website for our guild in online game. Online gaming. Ultima Online.”— Daniil Liberman
Ultima Online
Origin Systems
“We played Ultima Online. We were super excited about these type of games. We thought that this is revolution because people just hang out there.”— David Liberman
World of Warcraft
Blizzard Entertainment
“But then World of Warcraft was released, and we were the only ones who were trying to raise for such type of the project.”— David Liberman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
“42. Yeah, it's like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.”— Tim Ferriss
Code Is Poetry
Matt Mullenweg
“A friend of mine published a small book, which was basically Code Is Poetry.”— Tim Ferriss
Big reveals from this episode
- A government deputy offered to have the brothers build an 'anonymous HR agency' to sell government seats, quoting prices like $500K for Deputy Minister of Finance and $3M for Minister of Ecology, with return on investment via bribes.
- After their game studio bankruptcy, gangster investors literally drove them in black cars to an office basement in Moscow and threatened to kill them and their family unless $30M was returned.
- At Snap, their data analysis showed Snapchat's 2018 user decline was not caused by competition or Kardashian sentiment but by a slow Android app where the slowest 10% of devices took up to 40 seconds to load the feed.
- Their core growth heuristic: if you can double any quantifiable KPI roughly 1.6x per year you are successful and ~2.4x is the physical 'godlike' ceiling; they apply this to followers, money, and even hours with a romantic partner.
- The Libermans Company's central thesis: convert individual income into securities, letting investors (especially the ~$40T in US pension funds) fund people directly the way they fund companies.
- They claim their late father's biggest discovery was that consciousness works via quantum computation inside every neuron, each neuron acting as a room-temperature quantum state machine.
- At Snap they ran a 401K experiment: David shifted his identical account toward sustainable companies (away from Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Monsanto) while Daniil left the Fidelity default; David ended up ~30% / $20K ahead.
Worth remembering
- Their first company was an ISP they bootstrapped by ringing 1,600 apartment doorbells in a dense Moscow district to pre-sell internet contracts, then taking a consumer loan to buy fiber.
- To wire buildings at night they shot fiber-optic cable from rooftop to rooftop using crossbows because bribed local officials wouldn't give them roof keys.
- They invented a parallelized production process that produced a half-hour 3D-animated show in one week, versus the industry's 9-12 months (South Park being the fast exception at ~3-4 months).
- A friend who was president of IBM Russia by day and a club DJ on weekends lent them ~$1M in servers for free, though IBM headquarters later refused to brand the political-satire show.
- Their path to Snap traced back to a 2009 meeting with a Tibetan Rinpoche, a flooded monastery visit where the Dalai Lama escaped by military helicopter before a one-on-one, and a follow-up email from Insight Partners founder Jerry Murdock.
- Tim reframes 'adversity builds character' as 'adversity reveals character,' which the brothers apply to why they trust the sisters who stayed through their bankruptcy.
- They cite that per-officer LAPD budget is roughly $250,000/year, but most of that goes to pension transfers for officers who worked 30 years ago, not to current officers.
- They reference a fund that invested in college athletes, offering ~$500K-$1M for 5-10% of future income to 70 athletes; one later signed a 15-year, $350M contract.
- Boomers owned ~21-23% of US national wealth by age 30, Gen X ~7%, Millennials under 3% (~2.8%), with Gen Z on a trajectory to be net negative.
- They argue most US unicorn founders came from upper-middle-class families and never faced real poverty or student debt, undercutting the 'founders must suffer' myth.