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$1M By 19, $100M+ By 35 -- Here_s How He Did It [uGjNzErxg0E].txt

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- It was strange. I was pulling up to my university or to college and I would pull up in a drop top Lexus like a $70,000 car and I was like 19, right? Dude so Val Sean He's not making it today, but that's okay. We um So
- Your thing went viral today. How many likes did you get? Like 3,000, 33,000? Something like that. I had to turn off my notifications. I can't do when you work with, I don't know how you guys do it. I don't know how people do it while running full businesses, but I had to turn that off because I just can't concentrate. That thing just, my phone was just blowing up all day. Now you know how I feel. It is crazy, right? It's crazy. So you had 3,000 followers and now you have like nine maybe? 9,000? Something like that, yeah. I mean, it took me how many years to get up to like 2,700.
- Yeah, no, I didn't look to be honest with you, but I'm probably at like 8,9,000 this point. So all right, the background here is I met you through my, like we share like a best friend, Joe, and Joe told me about you. He goes, this guy is crazy. And so, Val, let me tell you what I know about you and you tell me if it's right or wrong and then I want to hear your story, but basically he goes, and I won't reveal too many numbers. I'll let you talk about any number that you want to.
- talk about because I don't know if what I know is confident just or not. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to mention them, but you as a 19 year old, you came from, uh, Russia, or you came from Russia. I came from Uzbekistan. It was back at the age of 11. And then you come here, you get a computer at like 16 or 17, you start this, uh, affiliate marketing, uh, business. You're the only employee by age like 22, 23, you've made something like 30 million in profit from this, like one little business. From there, you parlay that into in, uh,
- a Lyric website that was like one of the biggest Lyric websites in the world, which doesn't sound that impressive, but most of it don't realize that Lyric websites are some of the most biggest websites in the world. And so that made like another eight figures in profit. From there, you partly that into ad network that now is like huge. From there, you've now launched a jewelry business that apparently Joe has said it's bigger than all your other companies, but I don't know if that's true or not. And then throughout all this, you've acquired and sold and developed like a hundred plus million dollars of real estate.
- Is all this accurate? Some of it. Okay, so, well actually my first bit. And by the way, the reason I'm having you on here is because we've had a lot of really successful people on here do interesting stuff and there are like, a lot of them are well known. But you don't, I basically the other day begged you to like tweet something and I helped you write this tweet and it took like a few days and we got it out there. But like besides that, you've pretty much have never done any press, you've never talked about this publicly. And when I met you, I was like, this is a gold mine. This guy has so many interesting stories, we gotta tell the story. So anyway, what was wrong and what was right?
- So, okay, so, well actually, the funny part is that the first business I had was a PlayStation, like a video game website. So, it wasn't like huge, but you know, I was in high school and making like 5,000 bucks a month. That actually taught me a lot of lessons. So the search market... And you actually told me, I actually tweeted another thing about you where you said, okay, my 12 year old son has a website that's making like 2G's a day or something like that. And he needs an email service provider. Which one should he use?
- use and I tweeted that screenshot and it went viral. That was anonymous, I guess it's not anonymous anymore. But yeah, that was interesting. I saw you post that and he still has a website. It's not doing it as well, but not quite a 2000 anymore. But he's working on coding this thing away and he's figuring out all these things. It's actually amazing to see it at his age. So where did you get? It's crazy that you and your family, you just find all these opportunities. Where did it start? So your first thing was a place to go.
- website which what is that? So it was site called PSX Extreme we this is like I launched like a 9899 or something like that actually 99 it was right before the the bubble the dot-com bubble burst I was like about eight months into the the bubble and it was doing really well it was very easy to generate revenue and you know once I got the traffic it was the site was all about anything related to PlayStation so like get cheat codes your reviews screenshots whatever anything for like PlayStation fans so
- It was like a PlayStation fan website. Then the dot com bubble hits. My revenues disappeared 90%. My traffic was still up there, but I had no revenues because all the ads revenue disappeared. Like it went from being $3 CPM down to 30 cents CPM if you could be lucky enough to get that. How many people were going to this website? It wasn't huge, but I had like 10,000 uniques a day, maybe 20,000. In 99 and 98, that's gotta be a massive site. Yeah, it was a good amount of traffic. And it was all free.
- So it was an interesting experience because I had to quickly learn how to generate revenue and I had to go out there and sell advertising myself. And once I figured out that I could sell advertising, I didn't have enough traffic. So I started going to other video game sites and saying who had much more traffic than me and said, hey, I got all these advertisers who would spend more of I had more traffic. Like, I'll let me put ads on your sites. So I went to all these other.
- video game sites and like just was a broker for advertising. So that was kind of like my first you know making decent amount of money. I was making five and like just from the site and I was making probably another 10 a month from being a broker. And then the thing that you tweeted today or maybe last night it basically you told the story about how when you were 19 after this PlayStation site you built in a
- affiliate ad site and it made like, I forget the numbers, but in two or three years, it was like over 30 million in profit. So what were you, you were selling stuff on behalf of half.com or eBay? Who were you, or no, New York Times? You had like 800, basically you had like 800 ad accounts that sold different stuff. So like a New York Times subscription for, which sold for $100, but you were able to sell it for only 30 bucks, so you were able to keep the difference, something like that. Yeah, so, you know, it's affiliate marketing.
- But I use page search, which was very new back then. And at the time, when after the dot com bubble burst, all the advertisers got all sudden advertising, digital advertising stopped being interesting. For a moment, their people thought, and businesses thought, internet might be over height. So all of a sudden, you see all these budgets get, you know, just get pulled back, right?
- especially the brand advertising and but nobody really you know so everybody have to still figure out how to get customers so they say okay you know what we won't do brand advertising but if you drive if somebody drives us customers we'll pay per customer like we can't lose on that right so performance marketing so that was around and it was very accessible and at the same time the media wasn't expensive right because the supply was there but the demand wasn't there
- So that's what I took advantage of. I start buying up a lot of the supply. Mostly with search page search And that's what made everything so Profitable because I was just playing into those supply demand that dynamics that were working in my favor But yes, what I would do is I would find an advertiser that had a product I would test it on At the time, you know, kind of like the modern day Yahoo page search or back then was called go to calm
- And then later Google came around. And so I would test that ad. If it works, I expand on it. If it doesn't work, right, I would think about how to make it work, right? If there was a way to make it work. And yeah, just like, it just, you know, I was able to spend a lot of time in January 3. And what things were you saying? Oh man, everything, everything. Yeah. And all of this, and all of this was making like, like, many millions of dollars of sales for your little one person operation.
- every year. Yes. That's crazy. Yeah, tell us a little bit about like, what was going on in your life at the time? Like, did you try and go to college? Were you doing this while you were at college? Did you drop out? Like, what are you doing with your life? So, I already had the business. And I went, I got into like all the finance. So I was like, all right, so I'm gonna do business finance. And I didn't really feel like I should be, but I only did it because, and I had no time for it.
- You seem like you'd be awful at that. I was actually interested in the topics, especially the topics I was interested in, like law or fire, so business, accounting, all those things were interesting. Like, I couldn't see through biology. But even though they were interesting, I had no time to study, so I would suck the tests. My GPA was horrible. I can't remember what it was, but it was just horrible. Because I just didn't care to get prepared for the tests. I slept in half of the class. I was just catching up on sleep, because I would go to sleep at 4 o'clock in the morning. And then I...
- Don't you still do that don't you go to sleep at 4 and get up at noon Yeah average 4 5 Yeah, so if I go to sleep, but I think yesterday I was to be for today We'll come up at 11 so I try to get a lot try to get seven hours of sleep Doesn't happen all the time. You know a lot of times I have to you know live on 5 6 hours But do you do you recognize that you're a weirdo? I'm used to I'm used to it. You know what? I'm a weirdo
- I know I'm I do I do everything in reverse my wife keeps telling me like like you do everything backwards So you're you're studying? Finance, but you're not doing well because you're running these businesses I'm in school just because I have a Jewish mother and she Wanted me to go to like Being college, right? Oh, you have to go but did they know that you're like hey mom like I bet you I'm making more money than you I Think she kind of knew I don't she knew but what I was making up
- I don't remember, but it was strange. I was pulling up to my university or to college. I went to Baruch, New York City, Baruch, business of finance, Zickland business of finance. And I would pull up in a, I would pull up in a drop top Lexus, like a $70,000 car and I was like 19, right? So 18, whatever I was. I think it was 18 at that point. I think I don't think I even started the paid search of this at this point. So this business is just like crushing it. So like a few years in, you've, in your,
- you said it made over 30 million in profits like three, four, five years in. So it's gone really well. You're paying like a crazy amount of taxes, you said. So you decide to move to the burbs a little bit outside of New York City and you like buy a cheap house and cash. So things are going well, right? Like it's, but you said, you know, I'm a little bored with this or I don't really want to go much further into this in this racket. I want to try something new. And then the next business was mobile fuse, which is
- around today, right? So I actually launched around the same time we launched two businesses. So after so, Han. So I launched the music content distribution company. Oh, that's right. Sorry. Right. So we didn't own. I didn't own actually Libex sites. What I did is I built a service. I built a system that connects, called Ringtone Matcher. And what I realized was that was the
- for ringtones and it was all this traffic for for all this music related traffic especially in lyrics and So what I did is I built a service and the other thing I realized that the traffic was very much international Like 70% of a music site or lyrics site was non-us And I noticed that some of the advertisers like ringtone advertisers were advertised they'll do okay But they would have only they could only accept us customers and it could only accept like Verizon customer only teamable
- customer. So I built this thing called ringtone match. And ringtone match basically integrated like 60 countries into one system. So if you have a music site, you could drive that those users to ringtone match and ringtone match will figure out based on geo like what country you're going to be doing. Right? Based on what carrier you use because it's carrier billing. So it's important.
- that I figure out, like, VFT Mobile, and to match you up to a ringtone service that actually is compatible with T-Mobile. And then the third thing we look for, that content is available. So if you're clicking on, hey, get toxic by Britney Spears, ringtone on your phone, I need to make sure that that song is also available in their catalog. Because some ringtone providers had, like, Warner music and some of them.
- Some of them maybe just had the EMI. They were like four major music companies at the time and You know these ringtone providers didn't have all those catalogs so they might have one or two at a time So I would take all that data and put it into one simple link and And how big did that get? How big did that business guy wasn't a front up the ringtone match it was in front of a half a billion people a month Yeah So
- And it was everywhere. I mean, it wasn't just lyric sites. I was on CBS radio, AOL radio, Yahoo radio, Last FM. Like every, pretty much every music site. I've ever even been talking to music, which is TikTok now, right? I remember even talking to those guys. I was talking to, we were talking to WhatsApp in the early days. Like when they were just two guys or something. Like we wanted to integrate, because anytime somebody mentions music or a song or something, like I want it to be, I want my ringtone hatcher there.
- show up. But you're using the word we again. It's not we. No, no, this company was. So actually that company, I started Ringtone Matching Myself. Again, I was a one man show. At some point, we, you know, there was one little group of guys who were pretty good at dealing with advertisers and or actually Ringtone providers and I.
- I felt like I need help on that front. And so I merged those guys in. So there were five guys that emerged into my company to form how many? When you say merge, who bought who? I was majority owner of the company. And then the five guys had, like they had a third of the company, I had two thirds. How big was it when it was just you? It was just, who's going nuts up, but I think.
- I believe the year, I think the year we merged, it was 10 million. Just again, just you. 10 million profit with just you. Why do you think, so this is the, we'll get to the rest of the minute, but why do you think that you find this weird stuff? And why don't you hire people? Two different questions. But how on earth do you find this type of stuff? You know, it's funny, I know how, I see how organized you are, right?
- You make your goals, you play everything out on paper, right? You're very organized. And you could think about it. You ask people for feedback. I'm totally opposite of that. I just kind of go with, like I talk to test things. And I guess I'm very curious. And I could be very, very focused, but if I get distracted, I get very easily distracted, right? So it could be like sometimes it occurs, but sometimes it's
- a blessing. A lot of times it's a blessing. I think I'm across these interesting things and my curiosity just takes it further. So the way I actually came across this thing was because I felt that there was a point of my life where I was seeing Google was just too dominant part of my business and I didn't like that because I didn't want to rely on any one thing. So I started looking outside of...
- page search for supply. And I came across these music sites and I actually started testing Rhapsody on them because I had such a good deal with Rhapsody. I was like, we start marketing them outside of search. And I did okay. And I had these, you know, I started building these relationships with the music sites. And then I kind of tested a ringtone service and it just crushed. Like it was not even close. Like it did three times better. And I'm like, wow.
- This thing is did three times better than Rhapsody. And that Ringtone provider was just covering US just like one or two music labels and like two carriers out of four. I think there were four major carriers at the time. I was like, hold on a second. If it's already done three times as well, what happens if I start integrating everything globally? So that's how Ringtone Matro came about. Was there when you like that?
- What's your first version like? John like you get the idea and it's a live in 12 hours. It was a kitty script. I wrote This you know guy was kind of freelancing for me a little bit. I just I didn't want to tell him about the idea He's actually a CTO of one of my companies now He was like 15 16 years old And I don't tell him the idea so I said hey, how do you script this how do you script that so I scripted it myself?
- So yeah, so it was pure junk. It was literally just a bunch of if and then statements. In ASP, we were running Windows Server on ASP infrastructure. So I had a bunch of redirects that were just doing a bunch of if and then statements and redirecting people based on certain parameters. And when you're doing it, are you like, every time I've hung out with you. The reason I'm doing this is because I'm not going to be doing this.
- I like hanging out with you and Joe. I could say Joe, one of my best friends. And so I have like his attitude. You and Joe have the same attitude, which is like, he's a little more laid back than you need. And you, I think. He is, he is, I've never seen him lose his temper. He is very calm. And I'm like, hey, this didn't work out for this reason. And he goes, oh, that's okay. Like he's super calm, but you have that too. I think, I think that like, I think that what it is, you have this like, I don't know if it, the right word is like, hutspa, if the right word is like, I don't know what the word is, but.
- It's almost like things, we're gonna get to the rest of the stories because there's this jewelry business that you started, which seems even bigger than all the other things that you've done, potentially. And you do these things where I'm like, but Val, you don't know anything about that and you don't even have any employees, you don't know anything. But you just are like, yeah, but whatever, I'll just go a little bit further and then we'll see what happens. If it sucks, I'll bail. You know what I mean? You have this aw shucks attitude. Like, oh, you know, yeah.
- We'll see what happens. It's very interesting, whereas if I was doing what you were doing and I started seeing those results, I'm like, is this illegal? Am I breaking the law? Am I gonna go to jail? What is going on? Like it's almost like I would have, most people would have self-destructive tendencies when they see this going so well. Yeah, look, I see that all the time. I feel like people tend to overthink things and spend a lot of time analysis paralysis. And the reason I think a lot of people are successful.
- like especially somebody like me is while somebody's thinking about making perfecting one thing which by the way will still have a you know 60% failure right and that one thing that you just overthought I rather test 10 things but within that same time period and I will likely have I have a better accuracy or I'll have a better chance of hitting it out of the ballpark with one of those 10 things maybe more to the
- one of those things. Yeah, how did you get into the jewelry business to start with? So after I sold those two music-related companies, which I took like three years off, I thought I retired. But it was anything but I just got started getting like, my curiosity was just taking me into all different, like I was on all these boards and I was like investing into a bunch of things.
- And I realized that's the three years I need to build something again. So I started looking at, I knew that I wanted to do something where it's fixing or disrupting a fragmented space. I didn't really want to go after corporate America. I wanted to go after like mom and pops that, when I say mom and pops, it could be like, you know, I'm taking like car dealerships, right? They do tens of millions of dollars. It doesn't mean they're tiny. Right, so I wanted to go after something like along those lines.
- And I had some investments in the jewelry space. I had some family in the jewelry space. It's a pretty tight knit community. I just happened to be, I had some family that knows that business. I actually worked as a teenager. I worked every weekend. I worked in a jewelry store. I knew how to fix jewelry. I mean, I would sit in a bench. With a blow torch, I'd like.
- 15 years old, because my cousin taught me, it was a family business, my aunt and uncle's business, they had a couple jewelry stores, and they taught me how to fix jewelry. So I knew a business a bit from the retailer's perspective. It always seemed like a very weird way to do business. I always had questioned everything like they're doing. So the idea was, hey, like...
- these retailers, if we could integrate Bullet Platform and services, and we could integrate into them. And this is a $300 billion industry, by the way, globally. Which fragmented, but controls is actually bigger, independence is a bigger part of the business fine jewelry than the major or the chains. So I knew that again, if I could build distribution, but I had to bring, then there's a lot of power there. But I have to bring value and
- That's where my Expertise in data and marketing digital all that came into for to fruition You know so we basically put this thing together we integrate into stores and help them grow help them bring customers cut cost Increase their revenue How much you do invest to start it? To start it I don't I mean to start I think we started off a couple million So you put two million dollars in the beginning yeah how big is this? And but you've done more I think you put more in since how big is this gonna be I'll put in way more I mean that
- at this point, I put in eight figures into this business. I think it's a multi-billion dollar company in the future. For real? You think it's a multi-billion dollar company, like to sell? Yeah, market cap. I believe that, hey, I don't know if there's a new thing big enough to buy my company or this company. We actually have a lot of people this time around. It's no longer just Val. We have a lot of employees. I believe this company will be, if it's successful, we could do what we need to do and could really help all the customers.
- retailers, step up their game. I don't think that there's really a company in that space that will be big enough to acquire us. But are you the CEO of that company? Is that smart? I mean that doesn't seem like you're just you're get up at 11 a.m. and like you go to bed at 4. How are you the CEO of a company that can be a billion dollar company? Yeah, no good question. Look I am
- We have a great team that is able to execute how many people. It's hard to say we became pretty global, but our offices outside of US are not all mostly, they're not employees, right? So all in, I have to talk about factories, our tech teams, our marketing teams, we're probably talking about 70 people at this point. Wow, and who's like, but you're not running the day today.
- of the business. Oh hell yeah. 95% of the time goes into this business. So then are you like talking with the employees and things like that? I mean you're like running all hands meetings and things like that? Yeah I'm not big on meetings I'll be honest with you but I'm very accessible to all my team. I mean everybody on my teams have access to me. I go into the office in the city. We actually had the, we were in the office June 2020. I mean we had you know COVID. Like yeah.
- It was ghost town in the city and we had to figure out how to be in the office because it's not just a Digital ad business that I could just operate from from work from home, right? We had to have people in the offices and We did all kinds of things we we we we got cars to car to to pull people in to the office, but um, anyway, we yeah, I'm I'm there. I'm in the weeds But it's not like you're kind of downplaying I invested in one of their your properties
- We bought a six plex and green point. I think I forget well, we essentially bought Land right we bought a house because it's gonna be knocked down. We're gonna build a brand new We're gonna ground up construction. It's gonna be like a nice a nice condo building Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean, but I didn't even look at the details I was just like out anything that Val does I'm part of but it's it's way bigger than you're just saying like it's a project I mean, I think you've bought like a hundred million dollars with the real estate, right? No, I haven't I haven't bought hundred million
- We have six projects. A couple of them already completed. Third one is just about to be completed. Actually, the first two were completed and completely sold out. The third one is about to be completed and go on the market. And then we have three other projects and they're all getting bigger and bigger. The value of the combined sale value of those projects would be approaching $100 million. What are you tinkering on now? What excites you now? And someone asked a good question, which is what is the equivalent of ringtones today?
- What's the equivalence of like it's just crazy that it's just like you're kind of like this like digital cowboy You're just like this one guy in the wild west doing this shit with like no rules It's just I just think it's hilarious that you are just a pirate who's taking it to the extreme Where are the digital pirates at right now? It has to be like TikTok What do you mean it's You know you look for like those spaces that haven't been touched right
- I guess people ask me, and I think that's what you're saying, like what can be marketed these days and how to get that kind of scale? And it's hard because what I've seen over my career is that the windows of opportunity, those white spaces, right? The windows windows are becoming shorter and shorter and shorter every iteration, right? There was the
- the page search probably lasted a good six years. After that, or around that same time, there was display that probably lasted a little less. And then there was social media. That window probably, the arbitrage window, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That probably lasted two, three years at best. Now you're talking, now you got Instagram and TikTok, and you got the Instagram reels. I mean, those are probably also one year windows of opportunity if you could kind of catch that lightning.
- and build on it, then you got something. But your window. And it's all rooted in distribution, which is how do you get distribution quickly? And you're saying that you think that's TikTok. Do you think that window is still open? I think if you have a NAC for understanding how to get virality or get content, then you have your own distribution. If you don't have that NAC, you've got to figure out how to work with people that have that access. So.
- There's one company that could work with all the same parts, right? All the podcasters. How much is that worth? Like, we're using a platform here right now, right? That is just smart. They're doing the right thing. Like they're focusing on guys like you who have all this access, but they're not selling anything, right? They're just selling you a platform. If somebody could sell, figure out how to sell a product across
- number of podcasts that's worth a lot and you could sell or move a lot of product. And by the way, it doesn't have to be podcasts. What about all the sicktakers who doing all those dances, right? I know I know like for one company they scaled to like 80 million in sales a few years ago. I'm not gonna mention the name of it but they scaled to like 80 million in sales.
- just on the back of YouTube influencers. What was the product? It was cosmetics. What were they? Product. And they just... Cosmetics. Was that? Cosmetics, it was just like makeup or something or low. Yeah, yeah. The numbers were just insane. And yeah, it was just a long pair. Like it wasn't just the big influencers. Even the thousands of mediocre influencers or the smaller ones that just drove it.
- So stuff like that, like latch on to something that is big, especially if you could latch on to the long tail of it. Because not a lot of people look at the long tail part of businesses. So one thing I wonder, you know, like this thing that Val talks about, of testing out ten different things before the other guy can put his pants on, right? Like you're building your...
- uh, perfect thing that's going to take you six months before you even get to market. Great. I'm going to test 10 things in that time. That sounds really nice, but also like, I guess I'll actually ask Sam first, then I'll ask you Val, like, what do you think it is about Val? What do you think it is about either his skill set or his personality that allows him to do that much testing where other people just like can't figure that out. Apparently the, I think that this is a common thread that I've seen. Uh, I, my buddy Joe is just like this. There's this thing particularly, I find it amongst immigrants or
- children of immigrants and maybe because they've like experienced some type of hardship where they're like Like dude, I've experienced some crazy shit or my family has it experiencing it has experienced crazy shit I have zero fear and looking like a fool if that's the worst if the worst that's gonna happen is that I'm gonna look stupid or lose a Tiny amount of money. I'm okay with that and I don't so I don't have any fear about that That's what that's what I think I've noticed that's the trend. I've noticed amongst people like bow Look, I think there's a
- I think that's a huge factor. And one of the things that I look at, like I'm raising kids now, right? How do I make sure that they kind of, because they're not gonna grow up the same way I grew up, right? They're not gonna come out. The resources they have, the access they have, it's very different from what I grew up with. So what I think I realized is, the power is in resourcefulness.
- Okay, I was able to make a lot or do a lot, I should say. Whether it's money or whatever it is, right? It doesn't have to be just money. It could be whatever excites you, right? But I was able to do a lot with very little, but it's because I had no choice and I had very little. Like we weren't poor, like I didn't come from poverty or anything like that, but again, my parents couldn't afford a computer for me for the first six years of my life here, right?
- So I got to think like how do I recreate that and You can't really recreate that for your kids, but I figured okay. I'm not you know I'm not gonna give my kids everything on a silver platter so So you I mean you just talked about my son like he is He's his DNA is very like my like mine like he's way ahead of me because he has all these tools like you know He has a computer way before me. I Didn't buy him a computer
- I made him save up the money. I don't care how he does it, birthdays, work, whatever. During that time he researched all parts and everything. I think at the age of like seven or eight, he built a computer, bought the parts by himself. He built a computer from scratch by himself. I didn't even help him. That's crazy. So he now built two computers. Like and he tore
- himself out of code and so I I suppress resources for my kids systematically not like I don't feed them like they're they're they're they're they're they're just fine like they're good to hear everything they live in a nice neighborhood but I systematically make sure that they're not given all the resources because that's how you naturally learn to
- to become resourceful. What do you think it is? Fundamentally, it's about doing more with less, essentially, you're saying. Yeah, yeah. But it has to start from day one. Are you driven by money? Yes and no. Yes, because it's kind of like a score. I don't see how money. It's a number in a bank account, right? You don't sound like back in the days where you look, it's not like we're scooch muck duck.
- like can you get to jump through the vault of cash, right? Like I watched as a kid and I was like, wow, I want to be that guy one day. But no, I think what I'm driven really is by just winning. And there is, I think there is a bit of sense in me of that I'm one step from losing it all. You still feel that way?
- I feel like it's a possible. I think it's like an immigrant thing probably. By the way, I feel exactly the same way. I was like in bed last night telling my wife, I was like, I need to go to like a therapist or something. I'm like, I'm freaking out. We're gonna lose everything. This is all going away. I feel the exact, I feel like I, for a long time, I like had a plan on where I would go if I was homeless. Like I, I still believe that it's all going away. In some ways, in a weird way.
- kind of excite you not about homeless but that you got a chance to figure it out from scratch again it yeah because i like it does kind of make me because when you have nothing it's kind of fun to play games because it's just easier to bet sometimes you can't bet as much but it's kind of exciting to be like just like a hood rat with nothing like which which i was um it is kind of exciting but i get fear of like the anxiety i feel of losing
- everything. Like I have so many spreadsheets that map out. Like, all right, when the money gets to this number, then I got to go and panic and get a job and start like ubering. Like I have like a plan for that. The reason why I had you on and Ben, the reason why I wanted to show you this guy is now it's hard to explain. But I wanted people to understand like a truly unique and original thinker. And I don't, you know, I, you're gonna have to come on again, but like,
- Do you, do you understand what I'm saying, but it's very original thinking. Yeah, and you can see that just in the way that like you've out have attacked, have tackled like a, a different set of problems than anyone else I've ever talked to. Just like, I've never talked to someone who's like, yeah, I tackled bring tones and then add networks and then peer to peer lending and then the jewelry business. Like I just think that kind of belies how your mind functions differently.
- than other people. Do you feel that way? Like do you feel that you just have unique perspective? Have you met anyone that looks at the world the way you do? And if you acknowledge that it's weird because in your saying that you didn't you didn't actually realize it was weird until I talked about you in the podcast like half a year ago which is weird because how old are you like 39 38 and you're now just realizing that you're you're you're an oddball. Yeah, so I didn't see myself that way until you did the whole expose with that show. That show on that one episode that you didn't see.
- tell me about, but after our lunch. But yeah, when you still like. I told Joe, I was like, dude, I'd never do that. I almost always asked for permission before I talk about it, but I just was too excited and I forgot. I have a story, but I'm gonna tell you that after. But so to me, like when you said, like, oh, this guy goes from this industry to that industry, he's like jumping all over the place and he's just kind of successful or successful and doing it. Crazy, I was like, huh.
- I never thought of it myself that way, but it makes sense. I don't know, I keep jumping different categories. I guess, again, that curiosity just kicks in. But I go after it instead of just, what if, I just go after it. But until now, I really haven't realized how odd that is. But thank you for letting me know that I'm really strange. I just think that there's just a bunch of...
- unique. There's just a bunch of unique things about you. And I think it's so cool. When I say weird and odd, that's a really good compliment, by the way. Yeah. I know you well enough now to know that's a compliment that. So the funny story about again, before you, I was pretty under under radar, right? Like, yeah, you can find stuff on me, you have to really look like nobody really put it out there, right? And so then Joe tells me like, you're going to do the podcast and.
- I didn't tell my wife and then the podcast comes out. I'm like, hey, Sarah, this guy did a podcast on me. She's like, who cares about a podcast? She's like, you know, but he's going to talk about me. She's like, who cares? Like what a couple hundred people are going to listen? I'm like, apparently this guy has like a million people listening. She's like, oh, great. She's like, did he ask you permission? I was like, not really. So I don't really know what he's talking about.
- So he's like, okay, so the thing comes out as like, so we're listening to it. And he keeps saying, Val, you're saying Val, Val, Val, like never say, right? Never say my last name. And then you, you and Sean go into like this tangent talking about red pill and blue pill or whatever. So she's like, and so we thought like it said, Val part is over, right? She's like, okay, it wasn't so bad. He never mentioned your last name. Who'd have who'd have to figure out whose Val? And then after you went off the tangent with about the pills, and you're like, oh, by the way, I forgot to mention this full name.
- thing. Let me smell it out for you. And you literally spelled my last thing. So she's like, I'm going to kill this guy. Oh, she was bad. She was bad. She's very, she's very, she's very nice. Everything. I thought that everything we said, when you could find publicly and we didn't reveal anything like crazy. And I tried to only like, I just read your LinkedIn. That's basically all I did. Yeah, you can find stuff. But it's, you know, it's one thing to do information to be out there.
- for someone to look for it. Um, but it's another one. When you're on full blast, right? Like, and it's being discovered. Um, so right by audiences. So, so that's all new to be. I know. I, I felt like an asshole when that happened. I, I'm normally always good about that. So like if someone, if we're out with friends and people talking about stuff, I'm like, Hey, is this private or not? Like they have to make sure they say it's private around me. Yeah, it's your, your, your, your nice guy. So I'll, I'll let.
- it slide. Yeah, I blew up your spot and yeah, I that's something I remembered the day that happened. I was like, Oh my God, Joe, I didn't even realize it. Because sometimes when Sean and I were recording, I forget that it's the podcast. I just like, it just like friends talking to one and I forget. I'm like, Oh my God, I forgot that was I just said that on air. I can't believe that. So that was one of those examples. But dude, this was awesome. What do you think Ben? This is this is pretty badass. This is great. It's got me fired up to go. I know you're doing your Airbnb's this year. Sam, that's kind of your thing. But I'll tell you not to do it though. Right before this podcast, he said, don't do it.
- Oh, really? Yeah, I think I'm gonna do it anyway, but he I told him these two ideas that I might work on and he basically said Dude, I was like should I work on going hard on content? Should I work on this job board idea or this Airbnb thing and he goes do content and I was like, oh, that's what I don't want to do I said don't do it now Well, I didn't actually he literally sent me his response like three minutes before the podcast I didn't entirely read the I haven't read the whole his whole reply, but he's he's like the put he's like
- the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, theplayed, that's just gonna bog you down. That's what he said. Yeah. I think, I think something you can do in the future, but not now. I do feel inspired after hearing for about and from Val of like, I need to be trying more things, like just taking more swings and like putting more experiments out there to see kind of what, what lands. I like that. Yeah. Those are against the wall. Like, see what sticks. Um, what's the worst? But when you throw, when most people throw stuff against the wall, it's a half ass attempt.
- When you throw a stuff against a wall like you spend money or you like you said that when you were like when you didn't have much You spent like six or seven thousand dollars on ads to see if this X thing could work whereas most people will like like Oh, that's I'll lose a couple hundred bucks. I don't want to do that It's like you you actually try but that was an accident like like in that thread That was an accident. There were no budget caps back then so I turned it on and go to sleep and I woke up to a $6,000 spend Yeah, but you still did it. I mean I guess just like most people just don't do
- You're your attempts are like good. So When I was going to all these music sites, you know how I get their attention I Would go to a site and I would just kind of through a like so whatever I kind of do how much traffic they have and I knew these guys were outside the country and to get their attention. I Would literally email him say hey, I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars like you fifty thousand dollars I give you twenty thousand dollars prepaid a wire tomorrow Just so you could take
- Test my ringtone match your link for seven days if you don't like it if doesn't make you enough money Take the link off. We never talk again. If you if you like how much it generates We'll sign you'll sign a contract And everybody's signed a contract because those two text links were generating like five times like somebody who was making like a like They were sites that were making like top sites were making like a hundred thousand dollars a month I would pay him four hundred thousand a month
- on top of that. And how many people actually took you up and said, all right, fine, if I had to buy me the money, and then I'll put yours. They all wanted the money first. Oh, the money, my success right on that email was just, I mean, who the hell is I gonna take money, like upfront? I would be like, you know what? I don't need you to do it upfront. I'll give it a try, just cause you're serious. And you actually told the story on Palm's podcast, because you're like bold, but you have high integrity, because I think there was a guy who you owed a lot of money to.
- because they were a customer of your, or they were a vendor. And you just had a bill that you had to pay them and they like changed their address or something and you're like, dude, I can't find you. I owe you $60,000 and you like held on to the $60,000 for like a long time. And you just were seeking them out everywhere. Like, Hey, where'd you go? I need to pay you your money. Yeah. Yeah. It pays off. Like, um, it's, it's, it's, we, because we had so many international. People, um, in the music business, when the great recession hit and they were, they
- There were all these countries and where their banks, a lot of them were, banks were located in weird areas, weird countries like Cyprus. And they would literally tell us, hey, stop, stop wiring this money. We don't trust the bank. We're working with, I got to get a new bank account. Like we held their money for, they told us to hold their money for, I mean, we had millions in our bank account that didn't belong to us. And all these sites basically told me, told me, like I was kind of like their bank for a while because they didn't want to get paid and they didn't
- They didn't trust the bank. It was phenomenal to me. Like I couldn't understand that they trust us, trust me with their money for areas. I think some cases up to a year, we were holding their money because he had nowhere to send it. That's crazy. Dude, this is a good conversation. I'm happy you came on. It's awesome. Listen, you're doing, I told you before I love your podcast. It's very, it's very like, it's very like,
- Lehman terms, right? It's actually takes a lot of intellect in my opinion to dumb things down. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It helps Yeah, oftentimes I wonder like I've all of my friends are English as a second language maybe a It's like I'm always a maid. Can you imagine coming to another country? We don't speak the language at like 12 13 14 15 16 and then like just crushing it. I did so I think that's just like amazing I've got a bunch of friends or ESL's and they'll they'll like I'll help them write stuff because
- They're just a little rough and I'm like, dude, how are you so badass? I'm amazed that you're I'm just amazed at some of these. Yeah, like and you're one of those people. Yeah, well, like whether you are a cell, like my English is pretty good now, but I still can't put my thoughts together in a way that makes it so interesting for people to understand and you know how to break that down. So like, you know, you help me with some of my, you know, one of my pieces on that. So let's.

12 Startups Where Stock Grants Can Make You a Millionaire ｜ My First Million -220 [bgnesKjVcQs].txt

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- Can non-technical people apply there, you think? Of course. Right. Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non-technical roles, whether it's, again, marketing, community, sales, whatever, whatever the roles will end up being. Okay. This episode is going to be awesome. And then there's a story behind this. I don't know if I told you this story, Sean, but basically my wife, Sarah.
- She about four or five years ago. So my wife is like pretty type A, went to an Ivy League school, isn't particularly risk, doesn't like taking risks, doesn't want to like she's someone who's gonna rise up in a big company and be an executive one day. And she wanted to, she was like, I wanna join a new company and I wanna make a lot of money. And she was Sarah's gonna be 29 next week. So she was what, 25. And she said, I wanna join a company where I can make some money. And so we made a list of a bunch of companies where we thought if she was given, let's say, $250,000 of stock that would vest over four years, we made lists of places where that stock could like 10x.
- And that's how she eventually she applied and got a job at Airbnb. That was like five years ago. And now they're, I think when she joined, what was their last valuation before they went public like 18 or 20 billion, I think, and now their valuation's like a hundred, I think. So, uh, it, what's that five X maybe? So it did okay. And we, you and I were talking and I think you're underplaying it. It would do better than okay. Let's just frame this, this fully, right? So joined a multi-billion dollar company that already had 3,000 something employees. No, it wasn't that big. I think it had 1200, but yes, it was big. All right. So I will, I will over a thousand employees. So, uh, really, you know, not joining a risky startup, not buying a lottery ticket.
- And so she knew this is gonna have some gain. It's just a question of like some value. It's just a question of how much got a job and she wasn't like an exec. So it was kind of like an achievable thing. Like she came in as like, I don't know, like a mid-level manager, is that fair to say? Mid-level, yeah, I would say. Yeah, lower to mid. Right, lower to mid. So didn't even come in as a hot shot. And before the age of 30 was worth, it was a multi-millionaire because of the stock that appreciated from this thing, right, from joining Airbnb, right? So self-made multi-millionaire. Self-made multi-millionaire without eating shit as a startup founder, right? Where you're stressed and you're making no money and you might fail all the time and all that stuff and you have to make payroll and all that good stuff. And so had to kind of like cushy, you know, every day got to go in and pick which flavor of soy milk she liked from the company Fridge and like had health benefits and had all the things that you get, the good things you get at a company, plus got to see it grow, right? So I thought. On the way, I cannot confirm or deny the multi-millionaire. I can't completely pull up her spot or the soy milk spot shouldn't drink soy milk. But the point is, the point is, is that Airbnb was like, they pay, you know, they recruit people from Google and Facebook so they pay competitive salary. You get very competitive and wonderful benefits. You work really hard, but it's not a startup of 20 people where you don't have any resources. You know, you have resources to get help. And so the idea with this, we're calling this Sarah's list. We should come up with a cuter name one day, but it's the idea here is that we made a list of companies that are
- Cushier than like a 20 person startup, but still have wonderful upside. So you can make a very competitive salary, have wonderful benefits, and there's like a five, 10, 15X upside. So low risk, great reward. You're not going to become a billionaire doing this. That's okay. Most people don't really care about that. So when I heard this, when we were talking, I was like, oh, wow, like, I think of myself as the hustler, but this is the ultimate hustle, right? You know, not in a bad way. What I mean was like, this was the hack. This was the lowest low effort, low risk way to get a great outcome, meaning didn't have to work 120 hours a week.
- Didn't have to like carry the whole company on their back didn't have to like pick a winner And it's really hard to pick early stage winners It's like no pretty clearly was gonna be a winner and still walked away with a great outcome or you know So it has a great great outcome. I just I thought wow that's that's actually fantastic I think there's a lot of people who would love that path. There's some people who want to be Elon Musk They want to go change the world. There's some people who want to make a billion dollars There's some people who want to just have go sit on a beach and do nothing right? But there's a lot of people who would love this. Hey, let me work at a great company with really smart people working on a cool product And let me build you know, you know financial independence without risking it all like a you know like a degenerate gambler So to me, we got Craigslist
- We got Angie's list. What's the one with the child predators? I don't know what that one's called Molly's list or something like that. We got whatever Molly's list and now we have Sarah's list and Sarah's list is the companies that we think you could go join today. They're already valued, you know over $250 million They have we think a low-risk profile But if you stayed there for four years and you came in as a mid-level person and you got your grants Which is like 50,000 in stock every year or something like that, but that can make you a self-made millionaire or multi-millionaire That's the fan before we get into this everything that we're gonna say It's not like financial advice or anything all the information that we have It's basically what we've just read online or rumors that we've heard amongst friends none of it So like everything is hearsay and a lot of predictions, right? Yeah
- Yeah, we could be wrong, but then we thought it'd be fun. Oh, you know, like we're not gonna go take these jobs But there's a lot of people out there who would love to know hey, what would you all recommend? We know it's not a guarantee. We know it's not set in stone. We know this is just a prediction But hey some prediction is better than nothing. So we'll go on the record and we'll see how these play out All right. So we each did research. We got five Yeah, so you go so we have five I got more than five, but let's go you go I go and then we'll go back and forth Okay, great Okay, I'm gonna save my best one. I'm gonna bring in second I'm gonna first jab just feel feel you out see how strong you're coming in but my best one is coming next my power punch is coming second
- Okay, but for the first one, my first one that I'm going to present for Sarah's list, my nomination is Flexport. Okay. Okay, what's Flexport? So Flexport is a company that you use when you are shipping things. So for example, my e-commerce company, we ship things, we need to arrange between an international supplier, we need our goods to go from their factory to our warehouse. Well, how do you do that? You got to go to a bunch of shipping carriers and you got to say, hey, when do you have a boat leaving? My ready date is August 3rd. Do you have a boat August 3rd? What's the price? They get some quotes. So what Flexport does, this is a job called freight forwarding. Flexport is basically software that does this thing that used to be done pretty manually or with very old clunky software. They made modern slick software that does this freight forwarding thing, right? So you go online, you can see all your quotes, you book your boat with a simple click, you pay the fees, it's all very nice and the notifications come through. And basically it is modern freight forwarding software. So Flexport's currently valued, last public valuation was about $3 billion.
- The SoftBank put in a billion dollars at a 3.2 billion dollar valuation. It's got about 2,500 employees. These are about 2,500 employees. And they're in a huge space. So global shipping is massive. It's only getting bigger the bigger e-commerce kits. And what they did was there was all these small mom and pop freight forwarders. And they just sort of like did what many great companies do. They sort of take a fragmented market with low NPS and they build a best in class product that's integrated.
- And so you don't have to deal with kind of the mom and pop telephone call game that you would have otherwise had to do. And the founders pretty amazing. They was right at Ryan Peterson. I've hung out with them once or twice and I've read a lot of interviews with them. He's very charismatic. He once said that, uh, this company's either going to be worth zero or a hundred billion dollars or something like that. You know, he's like, this is going to be all or nothing. Right. And he's pretty, he's very, very good. We should compile a ebook of quotes like that. That's like talk dirty to me, the VC edition. It's like, what are some offhand things you can say as a founder that just get every investor to like salivate and they, they sometimes sound dumb. Like, why would I say my company's either going to be worth zero or a hundred billion? It's like, well, that's exactly what a VC wants because that's how their economics works. So we should just, and you can just cherry pick these phrases and they're like pickup lines for VCs and we should just make a little e-book out of those, but that's a good one.
- All right, next one. I'm gonna go first, mine will be easy as well. Zapier. So what they do, it's always really hard for me to explain what this company does, but once you use it, you immediately get it. And I'll give you a use case. So basically what they do is they connect API. So for example, when the hustle first started, we had, I didn't wanna buy like Greenhouse or one of these like really $500 a month applicant tracking systems. And so I created a Google form, and then I used Zapier to connect that to Asana. And so every time someone applied to a job, the information was automatically filled into an Asana board, and that's what we use to track our job applicants. Another example, and this is like a really simple personal use case, is I had a scale, and every time I stepped on my smart scale, it told Zapier and Zapier put my weight into a spreadsheet, and I compared it to all my friends' weight, and we had a competition. Now, that's like a really simple use case, but they do incredibly complicated ones, where they'll attach loads of difference. You could build an entire company using basically Google spreadsheets in Zapier. They're interesting for a few reasons. First,
- They bootstrapped it to like 60 or 70 million dollars recurring revenue and they did it very quickly They recently raised a little bit of funding at a five billion dollar valuation by I believe sequoia They currently have 350 people My opinion is this is gonna end up very similar to Ed Lassian and so Ed Lassian is an Australian company that went public I think in 2014 and when they went public it was like a 15 or no Maybe it was like a six billion dollar valuation and they sold Widgets to small businesses software to small businesses
- and people slept on them and it's slowly scaled. I think today at last thing, it was worth $100 billion. I think Zapier's gonna be similar. Wade Foster, the founder of Zapier, spoke at Hauslokan and I hung out with him and he was like everything. He was just like perfect, he was wonderful. There is one downside I've heard through friends of friends that they don't, so their pay is, their remote team, they've been remote from day one. They pay against Chicago market salaries. So they don't pay San Francisco salaries. So that might be a downside, but I would love to own Zapier stock.
- Yeah, okay. So what you're saying is it's a $5 billion company and kind of amazingly, this was at 1.3 million in funding to get to that $5 billion in value. Is that right? Yeah, they basically only raised $1 million in funding and they got that to $60 million ARR. They're probably north of 100 million ARR. They're probably worth, they're probably worth $5. They're probably worth $10 at this point. I mean, it's like an crazy valuable company. That's insane. You would need them to become a $25 to $50 billion company and you're betting that.
- they can and will do that. Yeah, over the course of four or five years when all your stock would vest, yes, I think that. Okay, all right, sounds good. Okay, so. Do you agree? I disagree. They've surprised me every step of the way so far. So, you know, when you first, it's like Zapier, I'd be like, oh, cool, indie hacker project. And then it's like, no, no, it actually got to like a million dollars they are. It's like, oh, you know, that's cool, cool bootstrap software company, maybe you can sell for 25, 30 million dollars. Oh, wow, they're doing 50 million in ARR. Okay, geez, how many times can I get me wrong here? So I'm just debating, do I really want to bet against them again? And I think the answer is no, I don't want to bet against them again. So I think I'm going to give you.
- thumbs up on your one here, I would include it in Sarah's list. Flexport, would you have given it the thumbs up and thumbs down to be included on Sarah's list? Can it be worth 50? Yeah, definitely. Okay, good. So keep in mind, we're talking about like five years from today. Yeah, five years, five years, exactly. Yeah. So, okay, so we have two successful nominations to Sarah's list. I'd like to give you my next nomination. You're gonna hate this one or roll your eyes or something. Okay. Uniswap. Do you know what Uniswap is? No.
- Oh my god, that's insane to me. Okay, so Uniswap, if you go to like, I don't know, because Uniswap.org is how you get to the thing. So Uniswap, what if I told you, let's just play this game. There is a company in the cryptocurrency space, and I have an opportunity for you to join. Here's some of the things you need to know about this. It is, it's bigger than Deutsche Bank Credit Suisse and State Street, all combined. Bigger in terms of what? Current market cap?
- in terms of current market. Okay, let me tell you some other things about it. Oh, is that just market cap? Is that just one of those crazy crypto market cap things? Hold on, let me just tell you a little bit more. What if I told you it has the trading volume of Coinbase with 50 times less employees? Would that be something you're interested in? Yes. What if I told you that this company is doing 10 billion a week in trading volume? And what if I told you it was doing that with less than 35 employees? What if I told you that it took Coinbase eight years and a thousand employees to get to a billion dollars in revenue? And I told you that Uniswap is only two and a half years old, has less than 50 employees and is on pace to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year. Would that be something you're interested in? Because that's Uniswap right now.
- in, in, in. So what do they do? So what do they do? Okay, so let's say you've heard of all the different like tokens that exist. So let's say, have you ever heard of, you know, die or Ethereum or whatever? Like all these different tokens, right? There's thousands and thousands of different currencies. So Coinbase, what they're really good at is to say you have US dollars. You want to go buy some Bitcoin or Ethereum. You want to go buy some, you know, some, some Solana. Great. So we'll take your US dollars, we'll connect with your bank and you can buy this crypto asset. What Uniswap does is it says, thanks coinbase, we'll take it from here. You're kind of slow and expensive. And you, you know, you have all these employees and all this red tape and stuff like that. From here, once you have a crypto token, this is, Uniswap is how you trade any crypto token for any other crypto token.
- So let's you swap between any crypto asset instantaneously and it's what's called a decentralized exchange means There is no central company with a bunch of employees that owns the exchange. It's a protocol that they built And all it does if you go to the website it just says what currency do you have what currency do you want? Here's the exchange rate push go and it'll exchange it for you right there and what they did was the genius of it is Normally for a centralized exchange like Coinbase they have to have a you know Sort of they have they're the market maker they they they find buyers and sellers and they match them together And they have to have you know a certain amount of reserves themselves to be able to facilitate to bring liquidity into the market
- What decentralized exchanges do, what DEXs do, that's what they're called, is you have a buyer, you have a seller, and then you have this group in the middle that I can also come in and be a liquidity provider. So I can just go give Uniswap some money, and I can earn a portion of the revenue that they make, just by providing liquidity into the pool. Oh, cool. And so they have, it's like a three-sided market. And so they have over $5 billion of liquidity that users just locked up into their market to create the liquidity for their market. Yeah, it's like a weird lending club type of...
- type of thing. That's pretty sick. Only 30 people. What type of person would be a good tool? Wow. What type of personality would be good to work there? I don't know. A crazy nut. I don't know. But you know, these types of things that it's like you typically these are going to be engineering heavy life things. And so you can come and be, you know, do all the other stuff. So let's say you're a community person, you're a marketing person, you're a PR person, you're whatever, you can go and sort of say, look, I have this skill set that you probably need. But when you're at 35 people and this much scale, they kind of need everything. They need more of everything probably.
- And so I think anybody could probably fit in. You just have to solve some of their problems. Do you think they give equity? Yeah, so there's a company. So there's a company and then there's the protocol. The company owns some of the tokens using the protocol. But like, so the company raised a series A from Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm and a bunch of others. They raised only a series A. So I think they've only raised $11 million to date. And they've reached basically the same scale as Coinbase on $11 million. And Coinbase is what? $80 billion company?
- So I think this would be a very, very valuable group to be a part of. Now, the economics are different because it's crypto and everything's weird. It's like, what's the valuation? What's my equity worth? I don't know. It's all funky. You gotta figure it out yourself, but there's definitely enough value there and it's growing super fast. It's kind of for a person who's, I imagine the personality type is like someone who's okay with a little bit, a lot of chaos and some risk. Yeah, and like non-traditional. Okay, with something that's non-traditional. All right, I'm gonna give you another non-traditional one. This might be one of my stronger ones.
- So it's called, uh, Andrew. I think that's how you say, do you know what that is? I had it on my list. Aren't you stolen right off? Wait, did you really? Did you really? I didn't see it on yours. Yes. No, it's not written up on here. Oh, so I didn't put my, I have my own little sheet, sheet here that you don't have. All right. Great. So mine's called Andrew. So, um, I'll, uh, I'll tell you a little bit background, but you actually might know a little bit more. So basically it started by the guy named Palmer Lucky. And the reason why this is interesting is Palmer Lucky started Oculus when he was like, 16 or 17.
- and then he sold it to Facebook for somewhat like a billion dollars, just like a ton. And it's interesting because Palmer Lucky is very controversial. So he's a big supporter of Donald Trump, which is very atypical in Silicon Valley. He was fired from Facebook and a lot of people or he was the one who said he thinks he was fired because he liked Trump and he sued Facebook for hundreds of millions in one. So regardless if you think that's cool or not, he is controversial amongst Silicon Valley folks. He's a business company out of Orange County and here's another controversial thing. They make stuff for the government. Their first product was an invisible wall basically. So it was a way to build drones I believe to keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican-American border.
- So controversial, whatever, we can definitely can agree to that. They've raised money and it's worth about $4.6 billion. They have 510 employees. This would not be good for a liberal person or someone who, like you basically have to be moderate or right of center to wanna work here. Palmer seems like a, like a fine enough guy, a little quirky, but definitely it's a right leaning company, which is an incredibly normal in Silicon Valley. I definitely think this could be a Palantir-esque company. The way that I describe what they do, if I'm correct is basically, if you ever see the movie War Dogs, people or the government says, we need blank. And then people bid and they wait to get it. And then the person, they go, we need some type of vehicle that can fly like a plane, but land like a helicopter. And then people go out and build it. Well, what Andrew does, I believe, is they build stuff that they think the government needs and then the government buys it from them and it saves a bunch of time. Is that basically what they do?
- Yeah, so they, yeah, exactly. Their primary revenue source comes from the government. And what they build is like pretty fancy hardware software combinations. So they're like one of their, if you go to their websites, like Century Tower. It's like this solar powered tower. It's like this giant pole that is used to like, you know, basically monitor a border, right, monitor an area. And it's autonomous. And so there's basically like the hardware to be able to do that. So like top flight hardware mixed with software that makes it.
- like smart, intelligent work well. It's like a Nest camera for the government. And so they have drones, they have different things like that. It's not a huge product line because these things are hard. They probably take tens of millions of dollars to make each one, but they're basically trying to be the most technology forward provider for the US defense budget, which I think is like hundreds of billions of dollars. I think you have here 700 billion dollars a year. And the question is, so they're currently worth a little bit over $4 billion. They raise money from founders fund, I think. Can this company be worth $20, $40, $50 billion in five years? Absolutely. 100%. It definitely can. It definitely can. This guy already built a billion dollar company at the age of like 22, definitely. All right, your turn.
- Okay, that's a good one. I had that one on my list, so I like that one a lot. All right, Sarah's list is filling up. We got a thumbs up there. Okay, I'm going to do one that I invested in, actually. Okay, so disclaimer, it's not really a disclaimer or disclosure. This is actually a flex. Yes, I'm an investor. Okay, so this company's called Replit. Have you ever seen Replit? Do you know what this does? Only because you have been telling me for years it's going to be the greatest. So, I'll tell you how I found them or how I heard about them. So, I heard about them from two different places. Anytime these two people talk about something.
- You're like, oh, wait, that's like a winning combination. So the first is like my teenage nephew is like using this tool, Replet, to learn how to code. I'm like, oh, OK, I never heard of it before. Kind of like that's interesting stuff teenagers use. You should probably pay attention to stuff teenagers use because those tend to be big companies, whether it's Snapchat or Minecraft or Roblox or things like that. And I was like, all right, so the stash of the way didn't really pay too much attention to it. Second time I heard about it was from Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, a tweet about it. Her recommendation. A graph of a hockey stick he goes.
- He said something like one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen. He goes, yes, that's over 5 million users. That may not sound like a lot, but when your users are all programmers, 5 million is a hell of a lot. That's so true. 5 million programmers on a network is worth its weight in gold. Every programmer ever. Yeah. So I can't share too much about it. Basically, companies value just under a billion dollars right now. So if you're looking at this, you're like, okay, does this end up at 5 billion or more? What's it do though? What's it do? So what does it do? Okay, you want to learn how to code. It's kind of like a sandbox that does a few important things.
- The first is if you ever have ever like gone on path or like dude, I'm gonna learn how to code I'm gonna I bought this you to me course. I'm gonna learn Python Have you ever like gone down that path at all because one of the most confusing things that happens is you're like oh shit Where do I type this you don't write your code in a Google Doc, right? Like you've got to type your code in a code editor and like then it's like oh great But you need to install these like Python packages. You're like what the hell's that? It's like you need to like install NPM or like what the hell is NPM? And then you're like it's like oh you need to deploy so now you need servers and you're like server What do we get them all those and so it's all just very confused just the environment
- which is basically like the equipment you need to code, setting up that developer environment in itself was like, for me, it was very confusing. Now I'm like, you know, average person. So like if an average person finds a confusing, that means it's too confusing. And so what Ripley did was the first day we were like, dude, look, it's just a website you go to, it's already got all that stuff baked in. You don't have to install anything. You don't need five different programs just to be able to deploy code. Like you write the code here, then you push, run, you test it here, and then you push deploy, and you deploy it here. Great, all built into one. So that was really useful for young hackers, young engineers, and hobbyists who wanted to like, learn this stuff.
- So the first thing was they made all the stuff you need to learn it then they were like okay cool But this is kind of like a social network because we got all these programmers all writing code It's kind of like if you ever looked at github github is this big network It's the part of the biggest network of developers and they all put their code here Well, what github did was like you could fork something so you put some code you make it publicly available I can read it and then I could fork it make my own version of it and you'll get notified that hey Sean Rehmixed your thing so repert does that like on steroids? So they basically it's almost like a game It's like all the different programmers can see what all the other programmers are doing they can get inspired by those They can literally take their code and remix it make their own version of it or they can like contribute to each other And they can take little ports that somebody made somebody made this bouncing ball cool. I'm gonna grab that I'll I don't have to remake it from scratch. I'll just use their bouncing ball Program, you know code and I'll add that to my basketball hoop thing that I'm making
- And so it's like a multiplayer little game almost for programmers to be able to like Not just not just write their code not just deploy their code, but also You know like Find other pieces of code that they can interact with and monetize it so you can actually launch full apps full programs on here and make money It's like all built in so the bet here if you look at their graphs It's like everything is a hockey stick like crazy crazy upwards curve All right, I'm aboard with that. Yeah, so I think that's they do this side-by-side comparison like here's our growth compared to GitHub's growth from zero You're zero you're one you're two you're three or four and they're like outpacing GitHub's growth
- All right, I'm aboard with that. I think that's a good one. Can non-technical people apply there, you think? Of course, right. Every technical company definitely needs people that are in non-technical roles, whether it's again, marketing, community, sales, whatever, whatever the roles will end up being. Yeah, for sure. And in fact, usually those companies, technical companies get built kind of like engineer first. And so they actually need people that are non-technical to be able to join. All right. That's a good one. I'm on board. I'm on board with that one. All right, my turn. This one is similar to Zapier, air table. So air table is a Microsoft Excel alternative. It's a Google Sheet alternative. When they first came out, I was like, why on earth would anyone need this? Like Google Sheets works great. And then I use air table and they realized they're kind of making it their own category. It's very sticky. It's very neat. Right now, they're valued since children 21, they raised money at a $5.7 billion valuation.
- I actually think they could be much larger. There's another company that I kind of compare them to. They're not quite the same, but I think they're a little bit same in terms of stickiness. They came out at the same time, or they got popular on the same time, and that's monday.com. They're worth, they went public at like 18 billion. I think that air table could definitely do really great. They currently have 645 employees. The guy who started it, I think his name is Howard Liu. Howie Liu. He's kind of like this prodigy genius guy. That's how they stereotype him in the media. But I've seen interviews. He went to my hallway with Toduk. Did he?
- Yeah, I saw interviews with him though. He was definitely like a prodigy young genius But he was very like wise and like he wasn't like a wacky weirdo. He was like pretty well thought Well spoken you want to know something funny. Yeah, so seven years ago So we were in a mastermind group I think if you remember me you and a couple other guys we used to get dinner every month or two or something like that Talk startups and we would occasionally invite other people in and so I have a DM Where I DM'd how we back when air table was very you know was a lot smaller I think it was still probably I think it had just raised money maybe
- Under $100 million, I think was the valuation at that point in time. And I was like, how we love air table, think it's fucking great. I think it's gonna be big. You're a fellow Duke guy, that's awesome. Hey, I host these mastermind dinners, you should come to want. And he's like, oh, I'd love to. And we scheduled it. And you were scheduled to go to it. And then I think you and one other person canceled. And you're like, oh, I can't come. And so I canceled the dinner. And so I never met him. And like, you know, who knows what could have been. We could have been homies by now. We could have been invested a long time ago, you know, under $100 million if we. Did you hang out with him? No, that was the excuse I had been. I was like, I do these as excuses to hang out with people, right? I don't want to just say, hey, I love to meet you. It's like, yeah, great. I don't love to meet you. I don't want to ask him to coffee. But I was trying to invite him to something cool. He's like, hey, we do this founder thing. It's great. My bad. Howie. I'm sorry, dude. All right. So I have one of those first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, because Excel is like the there's this great quote which is like every SaaS company you actually compete with Excel you don't compete with other SaaS companies you compete with Excel because people just use Excel for everything and And so yeah, I think that like I don't know what Excel's market cap would be but I think Excel's I don't know what it would be but do excel is like AirPods to Apple like AirPods would be a hundred billion dollar company on its own That's what Excel is exactly so if Excel is a hundred billion dollar company I think that the the best threat to Excel is gonna end up being worth your
- 20, 30 pretty, I think there's a pretty good chance of that. And so I like this a lot more. It was recently at one or two billion. I liked it a lot more there than at 5.7, but like, you know, we didn't do the episode then we did it now. So, okay, so I'll give you one that's very, very similar real quick, Figma. So Figma's idea. Oh, I have that one too. I have that one too. Instead of, you know, I don't do it quick because people already know Figma, but I would put it on the list. You know, the way air tape what air air tables doing for Excel, Figma's doing for Photoshop. So it's the younger slicker cloud based sexier version of
- design software and it's kind of eating Photoshop's lunch and I don't know what's worth it worth now. What is it seven billion now? It's like no it's so in July of 2021 They raised two hundred million dollars out of ten billion dollar Valuation, but here's that sounds like a lot, but to the listeners I do you Sean how much is what's a Adobe's market cap so Adobe? I believe almost all the revenue at this point is from Photoshop, right? Well, it's the creative cloud which is basically a bundle that you're like I want Photoshop to like but buy fireworks and you know like buy all this other shit that we like bundle in with creative cloud, okay, so Tell me what you think it is
- I would have guessed Adobe's market cap is, I don't know, $150 billion, something like that. What is it? It is 315. And if I'm not mistaken, that might be one of the, let's look at it, it might be one of the 50th, let's see, Adobe would be, it's one of the biggest companies in the world. So Adobe is the 30th largest company in the world. So when you think about how big this can be, you think $10 billion, that's so much money. Well, Adobe's...
- The one of the biggest companies in the world of figmas going after it totally should be on this list It's like it's like all the business trends like first unbundling. It's like well creative cloud brings in 12 billion dollars a year Well, let's unbundle the most valuable part of it Photoshop and let's do it differently. Okay, what's different? second trend cloud-based right Third trend multiplayer right like when I'm using figma my mouse is moving around your mouse. I'll also see what you're doing on the same canvas That's really cool, right? And so they're they're piggybacking off all these like kind of macro shifts and doing it right Just just sort of like by the way if you think oh, it's already at 10 billion
- Is it really gonna five X? Last five years Adobe has six X. So Adobe was trading at $100 a share. It's now at 660 a share in five years. And that's Adobe's large thing. That's their growth rate. Figma's growth rate should be in the next five years, much faster than Adobe's was in the last five. And so I think there's a fairly good chance of that. In fact, I should just go invest in all these companies that are on this list. This is a great list to be on. All right, my turn. So I agree. My mind's so I completely agree.
- So we're about 100%. So rippling, that's my next one. Rippling, very boring company. I used it. It's a payroll software provider, but it also manages devices and gives you permissions to different stuff. So basically, if you're a small startup and people sign up to work at your company, I can easily track which person has which computer and I can pay software through there and I can do HR management and issue healthcare stuff to people. Why it's interesting, the founder is named, what's his name, Parker Conrad? So he has the controversial past. He started Zenfiz which was at the time one of the fastest growing companies ever. He got fired because he kinda, the culture was kind of crazy. People were like having sex in the hallways and kind of being bro-y and shit like that. And so this is kind of it.
- He was like, oh, in order to do this HR thing, you have to have this compliance training. It takes 60 hours. Well, cool. I just created a macro that will go through the training for you. Just push the enter key every five minutes or something like that. And you'll be done in six hours instead of 60. Like shit like that. That was a little bit like, oh, that's actually slightly illegal, I think. Yeah. But the good news is he has experienced also good news is that he fucked up. And so you'd think that you'd learn because he got ousted. So I kind of like that. I always like that in a company where someone is like, it's their second time around. And they've already been mildly successful. I think that's actually a good thing. Here's why I think this company's interesting.
- So they were last valued at $1.3 billion. And I use them and they're amazing. I've used them for years. It's an every company problem. Every company on boards new employees and needs to get their computer set up, needs to get them connected to all the systems. It's every person, every company problem. And that's why it's kind of genius. And so Workday, which is in the space, is worth $67 billion. Paychecks, which is just a payroll provider, is worth $40 billion. So I don't think that their valuation is still true. I think they're their own category, which is why it's even better. If you said does Rippling end up, I think Rippling, if it's at a billion now, I think it's maybe one of the best candidates
- to like 50 X on this list, right? It's one of those like, you know when square when public square in public at like I think 3 billion or 2 billion valuation. It's not like a 150. Now it's like a hundred. So square after it IPO'd, which was again, de-risk, de-risk, de-risk. Now it's liquid. It's already had like a 30 40 X since then. And so that's like, wow, that's even, you get some insane appreciation on your stock. And so I think Rippling is one that if you told me this 30 to 50 X's, I'd say of the things we've said on this list, that might be the number one candidate.
- So far. All right. So then we've got a hit. And when I used the product, it did everything well, but it was still pretty clunky. So I think a lot of your product designer, if your customer sports sales, I think these guys are hiring for a bunch of different stuff. So that's my pick. All right, your turn. OK. I'm going to do one that's a little. By the way, I think we're fucking. These are hits, I think. Yeah, I think so too. All right, so here's one. Open store. You know what open store is? It's new, isn't it? It's new. OK, so.
- Keith. This might not, this might not, this might not. Well, no, this might hit, but this might be too early, but go ahead. Yeah. So, okay. So what is this? So first, let me say who's the founder. So the founder is two kind of powerhouses. Now, I don't know how much other times they're spending on this, but one is Keith Reboy, who was the CEO of Square. He was part of the PayPal mafia. He's a big time VC. He's a total dick on Twitter. Entertaining dude. I enjoy his very smart and he's an asshole on Twitter, which I find to be hilarious. And then this other guy.
- Jack Abraham, Jack Abraham was kind of like Wonder Kid, built a company, sold it to eBay pretty early on. Was like kind of a hot shot at PayPal, spun out and he has his own studio. And so they together came together and they made, they made Open Store, which is a riff off of Keith or Boy's other previous last company that's now worth $5 billion. Open Door. So what Open Door did was you want to sell your house? Don't go through the whole like dog and pony show. I will buy your house now. You don't have to stage it. You don't have to fix it up. You're a hiring agent. You don't have to do anything. Sell me the home. I'll just give you a price right now and you could sell it today. So I give you liquidity in this house market instantaneous sales.
- Open Store is the same thing for e-commerce. They're saying, you want to sell your e-commerce company? I'll buy your Shopify store right now. You don't have to go through the whole banker process, make a day, do all this stuff. I'll just plug into your data and I'll just give you an offer right now. And so what they're trying to do is roll up Shopify stores. And so they raised, I think their first round maybe was at a $250 million valuation. So to get your 5X here, you have to bet that it becomes a billion dollar company. With this guy's tracker here, Square, Open Door, which Jack Abraham's track record is a very good shot that they sense up being worth more than a billion dollars.
- This space is very hot. So do you know Thrasio that we've talked about them? Of course. The one that Thrasio was the first hot company that was rolling up Amazon businesses, businesses that sell products only on Amazon. They're called FBA, fulfilled by Amazon companies. And they rolled them all up. Do you know if Thrasio is valued at right now? What? It's like five or 10? They're gonna go public at a $10 billion valuation. I think they might be the fastest company to a $10 billion exit ever. I think they're up there. It's like three years old or four years old. And very capital efficient how they went there.
- They used a lot of debt to buy these companies because the companies already are profitable or producing a lot of revenue. So they're able to use big debt to do this. And so open store is doing the same thing without the Amazon style. It's for Shopify. And so I think that this model, this open store model is one of the fastest, easiest and fastest ways to build a billion dollar company. And I think that this company at 250 million, I see a lot of value in this pick here. Yes, it could go to zero. This could also not work. This has higher risk than other stuff on this list. So that's the disclaimer. It's much higher risk.
- But I think the reward is a lot higher here too. Okay, so this I Agree this could 10x this borderline wouldn't be considered part of the list because they just They know it's because they just launched there. It's a year or less right? It's July 15, 2021 So this wouldn't fit in the category of being like a cushy gig, but I I'm cool with adding it, but yeah, I think I think it might be on the like hey You're on you're in the the batter's box. You're not in the batter's box. Yeah, you're in the on deck circle Right. We're just waiting for you to mature you got to season up a little bit in order to be on this list given the criteria of
- the list. Also, but we could swap it. So Keith and boy has another company that's incredibly interesting. I believe it's called fair. F A I R E. I just invest in that one. Yeah, I didn't add it to the list, but it's a wholesale marketplace for retailers and brands. So you could just basically, it's almost a little bit. It's a genius idea. Dude. I use it recently. For my brand, I was like, Oh, yeah, we should sell wholesale too. I was like, okay, so what am I gonna do? Go contact to every brick and mortar store and say, Hey, would you like to carry my brand, my online brand in your store? It's a good brand. Here's the details. Here's my catalog. I made it in in Excel and I have to update it weekly. And then here's my pricing. And then here, just go to my Shopify store and just buy some stuff. Like it's like you have to string together five tools to set up wholesale. Fair is basically like you want wholesale list yourself as a company. The brick and mortar stores can all like just choose to buy from you. Your catalog is stored here. It just takes for that whole problem. I think it's like a $15 billion company.
- Yeah, I don't know if that can 10x, but it's doing really well. And I didn't do research on it for this project, but I tell people if they want to look whenever people ask me this question of where they should join, I say that company sounds incredibly interesting. All right, we'll do maybe one or two more. One last one. Yeah, one last one. On your side. All right, I'm going to do one that I also, I'm an investor in this one. So there's a disclosure. It's called next health. And the reason why I think it's cool. It's basically the very simple dumb down version. It's almost like Shopify for doctors. So basically when you go to a doctor, you have to fill out a form and they've automated the form. So you just fill it out online. But then if every other doctor uses the same, uses next health, all your information is on that platform.
- And so it's much easier. And so you have basically one medical record. And also they've opened it up to third party developers who can build apps using your health data and your whole health record. And you can see interesting stuff. An example, a very tiny example is if you're on Smile Direct Club and you want to find out where an orthodontist is and nearby who could fit you for your orthodontist, they say, hey, next here's all the doctors and next health that are in that network. Just click here, you're good to go. And that's like a third party app, whatever. They are worth $500 million. Their CEO is young, 26, 27. I've gotten dinner with him. He basically has told me, and I don't exactly remember how he said it, but he was like, yeah, I kind of want to take over the world. Like he was like, I've thought about.
- Yeah, he was like, yeah, he was like, well, I think he's, I think he told me his parents are from Bangladesh. And I think he goes, you know, Bangladesh is an interesting country because it has a really large male population and it has a low unemployment rate. So if I wanted to take over the world, I think I could go there and rally the young men and we could build our own army. And I think that'd be a good place. And it's like, you had this like well thought out. And I was like, your nuts. I love you. I'm in. So next health is interesting to me and they've raised 150.
- $3 million I think and so it's big enough that they maybe they've only raised $50 million. It's big enough that it's a little bit settled and they can pay well. Right. All right. You want to bring it home? You bring it home with one last one. One one that's a little bit unorthodox. I think we said a lot of popular names. Here's an unpopular name. One Trust. So One Trust is a company that specializes in making your company GDPR compliant and- Oh my God. The most boring shit on earth. You get at $5 billion. You have to sort of endlessly keep up with privacy laws are different in all these different countries. You have GDPR for Europe. The US is going to have their own version of this. Other countries are going to have their own version of this and they're always going to evolve. And they have the customers and they're going to basically continue to service these customers and for the companies you have huge, huge risk because it's like if you're not compliant on GDPR it's like fines that are like, you know, multiplied per user or something like that. Your fines can be exorbitant and nobody wants to deal with this. Nobody wants to become an expert of this. Nobody wants to throw huge amounts of engineering and design and policy headcount towards doing this. It's going to be much easier to like buy a solution and pay for pay for somebody else as you're covering your ass insurance.
- to take care of your GDPR needs. I think it's one of the fastest growing companies in the country right now. It's called One Trust. I think they're based in Atlanta, if I'm right. I might be mixing them up with another one. There's actually two companies that are both billion dollar companies in this space. I love these companies. I want to invest in these companies. And if I was going to send somebody to go work at a company that has this profile, this would be one of them. So I think it's a good contender for Sarah's list. All right. I think that's the list. I think this is to a listener applying to jobs could be one of the most life-changing episodes.
- Yeah, this is good. I think this is a really interesting idea. When I used to have this product called just jobs where I would write companies that do this and I would pay users, people would pay to have access to it, this is going to become maybe a recurring segment. We'll see. This is pretty interesting. Well, I told you the thing I wanted to do with this was I'm going to curate 50 companies that meet this criteria and I'm going to basically create a job board from this. And the thing with the job board is you can't just be a company who wants to come list on here. Many of these 50 companies that are curated can post on this job board. They have to pay to do it. But if they don't pay, they're just on the list, but no jobs will show up. And so I want to have a running job. So we take this segment idea. But basically, the reason I had a bunch of these companies list is because me and Ben have been cooking up, oh, we should launch a job board. And when we launch a job board, what would add some value? Well, if I could curate companies that I think people should work for, and this is not an original idea, I think you did something like this, there's just a bunch of people have done things like this curated companies that you think are cool. And you turn that into a product. And so we're going to do that with a job board pretty soon. We're going to launch that for you.

2 Side Hustle Ideas That Could Turn Into A $1,000,000 Business In 2022 [te3oca0fWEc].txt

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- Can I pitch you two ideas and you tell me which one you like better? All right. These are two kind of like side hustle ideas that I think could turn into something big, but their businesses that are not hard to do, they would immediately make somewhere between 500k to two, two and a half million dollars, probably within a year or a year or two year of doing it. Profits. I like that. All right. So the first one is
- I'm going to call it, um, baller doctors. Okay. What's baller doctors? Baller doctors is you're going to go to med schools all around the country and you're going to put fucking, you know, ads slash flyers up and you're going to say, Hey, before you graduate, do you want to know how doctors become millionaires? Um, you know, faster, you know, some, you know, the average doctor becomes a millionaire in 12 years. I can show you how it's done in five. And you basically host a seminar and you, you definitely lean into the get rich quick stuff, because, you know, people are curious, but you, you build in enough trust, but you don't bury the lead. You're like, look, even doctors are greedy. Even doctors are greedy. Even doctors like money might be the, the better name for the seminar. Um, and you're going to host a seminar and basically you're just going to break down the business of most doctors spend all their times with their, all their time with head, you know, heads buried in books and thinking about customer, you know, patient care as they should.
- But at the end of the day, a lot of these guys want to go out, they want to own their own practice or they want to figure out, should I be joining a practice? Should I go to a hospital? Should I, you know, start my own? How do I get the money to do that? How much money did this make? And I think if somebody just made a sort of business in a box seminar, were they just explain, look, here's how it usually goes. You put in this much, it takes you this long. Here's a sample P and L with what your costs look like. Here's how you make money in your practice route. Here's how you could do a group practice. Here's how you join a, if you join a hospital, here's where you are after five years. Like, did you know this, by the way, if you're a doctor and you work in a nonprofit, which most hospitals are nonprofits, for 10 years, all of your student loans are forgiven. You get your money. That's amazing. Same if you're a lawyer, if you're, my sister did it, if you're a lawyer for the government, you get a lot of, you get loan forgiveness. Right. So basically you just do like a personal finance slash business crash course for doctors and you do that all around the country.
- And then some percentage of those, they actually are going to go to you for like you can create that there's they'll pay for the session or they'll pay for like the upsell. So you might do the session for free. And then you say, by the way, I have like the detailed guide with all of the business like templates in the in this thing, you know, plus like, you know, whatever, I got all your I got all your docs and templates and it's all fleshed out in detail. This is, you know, $4,000 and, you know, you could buy that mastermind thing. And with it comes like a coaching call whenever you're ready, you can always hit me up and I'll help you with this.
- All right. I could play off this. So let me tell you about this. So there's this blog that I read. It's called the white coat investor. Have you heard of it? Not that, but I'm in a Facebook group called white coat investors, which is, I think, probably the same thing. It's doctor's investments. So if you go to it, you'll see it's a little stale. It's probably been around for a while. And it gets a lot of traffic. I read it because they just talk about people earning high income and the lifestyle. But it's fun. And a lot of my doctor friends read it. And it's incredibly under monetized. And interestingly- You know how much traffic is from it? I look at this sheet.
- like 400,000 a month. Oh my God. I mean, look at this thing. Maybe 600,000, maybe more, I think a lot, but if you look at the traffic source, it's like a good ass mess. Yeah, 600,000. Should we bleep this out? This is a gem, bro. This is a gem. Why are we, why are we giving this gem? Oh, here. Here, let's find out how much traffic, here's how you do it. So you go to the very bottom, you see where it says advertise with us, click it. Oh man, this is amazing. So they get a 1 million page views a month. So I think, and interestingly, if you go to
- I looked at the stats for the fastest growing YouTube creators this year as well as the fastest growing tiktok creators and something like three of the top 10 were dentists and then a couple other were doctors and it's usually young doctors who talk who make jokes and lifestyle content on tiktok all about like the doctor lifestyle so they make jokes at like you and I probably don't understand but I don't know maybe like a joke about like sleeping at the hospital or something. And they've gotten millions of followers so I think there's a world where you could do that and sell a high-end membership that's thousands of dollars and do exactly what you're saying. I completely agree with you. I think this could be a good business. I don't think you could do it. I think it'd be real if you did it full time you maybe could do it in a year but yeah it's a this is a good business. You're part of a white coat investor. Yeah, I'm looking at the Facebook group. You're part of this Facebook group. Yeah, I love joining random niche Facebook groups like this and just see it.
- 77,000 members. I can, I would bet my life I could make three to $5 million a year with a Facebook group for doctor investors. Oh, it's a, okay, listen, it's even better. It's a closed Facebook group that gives physicians, dentists, physical therapists, attorneys, pharmacists and other similar high-income, high-income professionals. It basically helps them. But dude, how did you get into this? Did you tell them that you're a lawyer? Yeah, I just said I was a doctor.
- I mean, look at me. I look like obviously because you're Indian. Yeah. Yeah. It's auto except, bro. Yeah. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Right. This way. I mean, waiting for you. That's awesome. This is the I agree with you winning winning idea. So if somebody wants to make a play on this white coat investor site, I would love to, you know, buy this website and do something with it. Or if somebody wants to make a group that's like this and go for it. DM me or email me or email Sam.
- And let's, let's do this. This is a good one. Yeah, and he, they also have conferences. So they have a white coat investor conference. Right. It's a, this is a good, this is, I completely agree with you. You know who could have crushed this niche and they didn't want to, was our buddy, what's the YouTuber, Ali? Ali, I'm done. What's his last name? Yeah, he could have done this. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, he chose like a worse market. He's like, I'll teach people how to become you. He's like, YouTubers had to be better at YouTube. He's like, teach doctors how to be better at money. Like, wait better at YouTube. Yeah, that's way better. If you, if you're not passionate about the other. All right. Okay. What's the second idea? All right. So it sounds like you like the first one. Here's the second idea.
- The family I would say I love the first one we legacy summit. Okay, so basically there's a huge number of businesses That are owned by you know kind of like boomer generation that They would love if their kids Would take on their business and like kind of grow it kids. Maybe maybe interested maybe not the kid kind of feels like I should I guess That's a smart move, but I just don't care about you know Where the you know making treadmills or whatever we do, you know like our family business So they're kind of one foot in one foot out, but even then they're like okay the parents like alright No problem. You don't have to take it over, but like
- I gotta do something with this and you should know how this works in case I croak and like you know, you should know how the books work and like you should know some things. So basically what you do is through some kind of cold outreach to boomerome businesses, you're gonna offer them an invite to the Family Legacy Summit. It is a two day conference in Florida where you're gonna have- It's gotta be Orlando. It's gotta be in or George Lauderdale. Exactly. Like, you know, the local- George Lauderdale or Orlando. Yeah, we get it. There's gotta be a buffet under still. Exactly. The Family Legacy Summit. All you can eat. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. With new balance, white sneakers as a sponsor. Sandals and socks. Oh wow. So basically- Sandals and socks allowed. Yeah, preferred exactly. Sunday, lounge wear casual. No socks, no service. You gotta have your socks on for example. Some of my truck get in. So basically you invite people out there and it's just education. It's just a give, give, give. Maybe there's some ticket thing to cover the cost, maybe sponsors. I think you could cover the whole cost of a sponsor.
- But it's just invite only your business has to be of a certain level of maturity So it's you know doing over a million dollars a year Your family business who's thought about this question of should we pass it down or not you and your kids come out So they come out and at that you're gonna do a couple things This is now this is now the door that opens more doors. So you could upsell them some services So estate planning accounting whatever that sort of thing you could Offer like upsell masterminds or like a kind of a master's program Which is like for the kid to like take it over or whatever something like that You could just buy businesses that like the kids not gonna do it This is lead gen for amazing businesses that you could potentially buy out and you sell those leads to private equity or you buy them yourself
- And yeah, it's a way to build a power network in like one year. You'd have like some amazing connections because there's going to be a guy who owns, you know, a wood furniture company in Tennessee that makes $22 million a year. And like those people will be your buddies because you're actually helping them with like one of their core life problems that they have, which is what do I do with my business and this like Stinking Kid who's not taking action? Do you remember Brent Beishore? He came on our pod. What's his, what's the name of his thing? Permanent equity, I think. Something equity. Permanent equity. He's based out of Columbia, Missouri. He has this conference every year called Capital Camp, which is a great name. And how is he doing? He's basically doing this. Is it? Well, he's buying boomer businesses. How's that going? I think it's going phenomenal.
- I think it's going absolutely great. And our friend, Siaiva, of which I think we're both investors, during ventures, is doing a similar thing. Maybe it's a little bit smaller, but it's also newer. Yeah. And they are buying, can we talk about what they bought? They've come on the pod before, and they're pretty public about stuff. So they're buying companies like pool construction companies. So it's like pools are this amazing business that you could do, and they bought one in like...
- They saw dolphin pools or something like that. They bought it in Arizona. It crushes it. They hired this one operator who's like really good, who took it over from the original owner, the boomer owner. And basically it's grown like crazy. And that's like one of their cash cows now. And I, uh, and they also bought a internet web, like, um, I got in the country, like they don't have like AT&T or time Warner or whatever. They, they have like local providers and they bought one of those and it's doing well. And I have family members. So my dad's an entrepreneur and I was kids. They bought five different, yeah, a bunch of internet service providers.
- And they're all doing, I think, pretty good. And so my dad owns a small business that none of his family is taking over. My father-in-law owns a small business who, and it's a killer business. I mean, and they, somehow, our new brother-in-law is now going to take it over. And seeing the turmoil that he had to go through in order to, he was like, well, I spent 40 years building this thing. And I guess if no one that I love wants it, I'm just going to shut it down.
- And it was like kind of tragic. And it's like, I'm literally willing to give this to a family member and they can make many millions of dollars a year if they wanted to do this. It's free, you can have it. And people didn't wanna do it. And so I've seen this process and it is like an emotional, it's a really, it's a huge challenge. And this is a very interesting market. There's some stats about how many, do you know how many boomers are retiring in like the next? It's like some absurd numbers. It's absurd. It's like a quarter of the country. Or a third of the country. The biggest wealth transfer.
- of all time is about to happen. It's the like that group of people when they pass down their inheritance, it's gonna, it's like many trillions of dollars, I think. I don't know if that's, that might be hyperbole, but I think it's something like that, some ridiculous number. And then that's like a lot of people that are just not gonna have to work, but also don't know what to do with it. And similarly, there's many, many businesses. That was when enduring first pitched it, they were like, they just showed me the stats. They were like, there are this many boomer businesses where they want to retire. They don't want to run their business anymore. And their kids don't want to take it over. And like those businesses.
- are up for grabs and they're like too small, like they're not sexy as a startup and they're too small for big private equity. And so we're gonna be like, basically like permanent equity where they're gonna be, they're just gonna buy it and hold these amazing businesses for a very long time and they keep doing that one after another. Like I think, see, even Zaver, they've rolled up like almost $100 million of business equity off of a $2 million starting equity amount. Like we, yeah. It is crazy. I invested in, I didn't have a lot of money when I first invested in, but at the time, it was like 10 or 15,000 or something like that that I invested in. It was like a big deal for me. Did I tell you what happened? Did I tell you what happened? Like I invested in it? It just been like, it just been growing and growing and growing. No. So they were like, they're like, Sean, you've helped us think through this idea and like they do, like I like this stuff I'll be helpful along the way. So they're like, you know, we wanna offer you, like if you invest, we'll also offer you like an advisor or like an advisory grant that'll just match your investment. And
- And I think they thought I was gonna do like- You forgot to file the paperwork. No, no, no, I think they thought I was gonna put in like 25K or like max or like 20K, something like that. So they're like, okay, cool. You got like 20K of equity will give you 20K worth of advisory shares. But I was like a big believer in what they were doing. So I put in 200,000 and then they were like, they're like, oh, and I was like, look, you don't have to like, I get it. You don't have to give me 200,000 of advisory shares. But Xavier was like, nope, it deals a deal. And I was like, if we didn't sign anything and like, dude, I'm totally okay with it. But he's like, no, like-
- like we will honor that. And also like I know you'll like you'll deliver. And so since then I've had this like immense desire to deliver on that. It was actually the best thing he ever did cause he got me to basically work for him for free for this one like for this act of goodwill. I am like I will, I see your goodwill and I raise you 10 times goodwill on my own side. It's gonna, that's gonna end up being a great, one of your better investments I would think. Depending on I don't know when you got in. Were you with- Very big. Yes, then that's gonna, I think it's gonna crush. Yeah, exactly. I think already, unless I conservatively that's probably up 20X, you know, like something like that, evaluation. You think that's up 20X? Cause if they go raise now, they basically have, I don't know, exact numbers, but like.

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- That's what they do. That's what they do. All right, we're back. Before we get it. So you know how I said leave reviews? Yeah. I think we got two or three or hundred reviews off that. Yeah, it's crazy. And we promised about people cool shit. We got to like fulfill because of people are like, here's my receipt. I left you guys. So I got, I got about a hundred messages of people with the reviews. I replied to all of them. Last night I was sitting on my couch. So I'm just the asshole didn't. Well, I see seeing you on a few. I replied to all of them with.
- The special gift, I just let the, I call them basically. That's great. That's a video voicemail. You know, at YC they have this thing which is like you'd rather have a thousand people love you than a million people just kind of like you. And I think that's the one thing that is now abundantly clear about this podcast. It's like we have these goals of like we're going to grow this thing big, but we already did the hard part which is you get a small number of people to love you where they're like this is my routine. This is my favorite podcast and I've been listening to podcasts for five years.
- Yeah, and so that's very I don't know feels good feels great. Yeah, I had I got I was shown Adam last night I got I don't know. I mean at least a couple hundred Like DMs on my Twitter people with the review exactly and I said them all video So review us a little video or review us and let me know because Sean hasn't been doing it But at least if you let me know you'll get something back. All right, you know, what's my fear in all this though? So I have a fear that's crept up now the fear is I Never want to be the
- a smart person in the room. And so there's part of me, I'm sitting in this red fucking throne and throwing out ideas that I'm admittedly saying are half baked, you know, probably bad ideas, but they're interesting to me. I wanna make sure that we're learning doing this. Like I wanna be learning stuff and sharing it. I don't wanna just be sitting here saying, hey, I got answers, I'm gonna give them to you. And so my commitment to myself really, more than anybody else, but I wanna say it out loud, cause that commits me is, you know, as we do this, it's not about, oh, I have great ideas on me, say them.
- or we're brainstorming great ideas, it's we're gonna learn interesting stuff by talking interesting people and doing research on things, and then we're gonna share what we like. We're gonna share what's interesting to us. So that's my fear is you never wanna be the guru, you wanna be the student. And so that's kind of my little mini rant. I agree, I'm not trying to be a guru, and I'm certainly not. Because some of the DMs we get, people are like, help me. Yeah, help me, you know. I'm like, no, no, I don't know anything. And me attaching my name to your thing does nothing. Like we gotta do the work. And like, you know.
- I'll help you, but I hate when I'm not the answer. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not the answer And we could preface this by saying most of the ideas we get I just steal from other people. Yeah for sure of course All right, you want to get what do we want to talk about you want to talk about? Can I talk about something that's happening recently? Yeah, brandless. So is that what you want to talk about brainless and I want to talk about? These new credit cards that are popping up. Yep. All right. Pick one. Let's do it. You go ahead brainless All right, so brandless people don't know they went out of business what they were trying to do was
- They were like, look, don't pay for the name brand. You should just have high quality products and they should just be brandless. And because we take away the name brand, we can lower the price. That was like the initial promise or the premise of the business. Awesome idea. Awesome idea. I'm glad you said that because a lot of people are shitting on them now because they like failed. But I still think fucking awesome idea. And actually, of course, ironically, brandless is a good brand. And so I think that that was really cool. They raised a shit ton of money from SoftBank, like $200 million before they really achieved any product market fit.
- And that sort of like was the death net for the company because it was just a the expectations when you raised 200 million is You're gonna be you know a billion dollar plus company And if you do that too early and you haven't actually proven out your model you haven't figured it all out what expectations crush the business I actually so I didn't prepare because I just thought about this, but what do you what's the biggest grocery store chain in America? Albertsons maybe safe way. I don't know. Okay, let's see safe Can you look up try and find this just a headline try and tell me
- What the revenue or how many sales like? Generic brands for grocery stores or like the Kirkland brand or whatever how much revenue the Kirkland brand does Oh, I mean I bet you it's astronomical and so actually it would I mean if you think about what brandless could become it is the generic The generic trusted Kirkland brand. Yeah, I think and I think it's a great idea Yeah, the problem was that they raised all that money route that I have a problem. There was some Incompetence with leadership. I don't actually know this. Yeah Kirkland brand sells 39 billion dollars of products
- I like that. What's that source? What's the sort you think he's lying? You think he's making this up? Wow, $38 billion in one year. So one thing I loved is I... And that's just Kirkland. Kirkland, crazy. So I listened to her on a podcast Tina Sharkey, I think, is her name, and she's like an Internet OG. She's been around with a bunch of companies, all of which I think have not done super great.
- But she went on this podcast, she said this thing that I liked, which was she was like, think back to when you were a child and like, let's walk from room to room. You're in the laundry room. What brand are you going to see? You're going to see whatever. Yeah. Tied. You're going to see whatever. Go to the pantry. What are you going to see? You're going to see roll up and pop tarts and all this stuff. And then open up your fridge. What are you going to see? And you see these brands and actually it's kind of like you've seen these stats where the S&P 500 turns over like, I don't know, 20% of the S&P 500 turns over every, every decade. Basically the same thing happens with these household brands.
- These brands that seem like staples of your home, a lot of them are like minute made. It's like fuck minute made, you're out. Like, you know, now, you know. Or a tang. Yeah, tang, you know, like these brands just like, like they are not. They can come and go. The generationally, they don't all make it from one mom to the next mom. And I actually believe that premise. And she was like, look, the moms of this generation, they don't wanna pay for this, like, the consumer package good brand in the same way. They wanna know it's high quality ingredients, sourced ethically, and they don't wanna overpay. They wanna be, you know.
- value conscious. So I liked a lot of the premise. I'm sad it didn't work. But somebody I believe I believe you should just go out today and pitch. I'm brandless without SoftBank. And I think I would I would invest in incredible entrepreneurs. I agree with you. I think I had three people reach out to me that said, Hey, can you ask? Can you introduce me to the people who are selling brandless? I mean, I don't know them, but I just tweeted it. And I got an intro. And I introduced three different people who are wanting to buy the assets. And what are what are the assets? What are you getting? You get the name?
- Maybe a little some inventory probably okay the name and an email list and then Unfortunately probably a bunch of an incompetent team right notice respect But look if they couldn't pull it off there by definition well you'll need to restart for sure right you'll need a clean slate And you need to lower the burn yeah I Think it's cool. I would probably charge a map. Do they do membership? They did a subscription because they started off with everything was three bucks. I forgot to mention that That was like a key selling points like do not take that Three bucks three dollar store and people
- People say the CAC was too high, they cost too much to acquire customers, that's probably true, but like Wish is doing it. Yeah, you know, I don't know the economics, but this brings up an interesting half-baked idea. We got a DM from your friend about like, businesses that are in the spot brandless as in, where they're doing essentially a closed down slash fire sale. And do you want to share the idea that, which one? Norenda shared this good idea this morning. Yeah, that was a great idea. Okay, so we actually should bring this guy in. I have an investor and a good friend of mine. I called him on them and we became friends, he invested. He started a company called Web Shop.
- And I think he sold it for 80 million dollars and then he bought it back Yeah, if those guys come in you can bring them in he bought it back for pennies and then sold it again for 20 or 30 million dollars and then now has bought it back again and he was like you guys Or you know what something would be interesting is if you could be like a graveyard or an unwinding service undertaker you're an undertaker Where you can just buy these dying things and that exists. It's a service to basically wind down your company
- You take a fee and you do the sort of fire sale and I'm sure there's services out there like this But somebody could specialize in tech companies Wind down both you have talent you have hardware you have You know assets that you're trying to fire sale off and then you have all the normal business closing stuff You got to do so you don't get like taxes next year Because you have to actually shut down your company officially and nobody wants to do that It's not fun and investors want to make sure that that process is done with no like funny business So that they like maximize the value and this kind of reminds me of something
- that I wanted to bring up, which is I think that now that private companies are staying private for long and not going public as much, what I think needs to happen is I think the venture capitalists, a lot of VC firms need to start buying companies and just need to own them for the cash flow versus wanting something to go public or get bought. And so what I think is going to happen is I think a lot of these VC firms are almost going to turn into hedge funds or private equity funds. We're going to buy and operate a lot more than they are now. And that's related to that. So I don't think
- will do it, but the sort of new age VCs that are going to be hybrids. So like, Andreessen Horwitz shifted their model whether or not a VC, they're now, I forget what it's called, but like they wanted to be able to just own cryptocurrency is buy and hold it. Yeah, I actually do. So they needed to reclassify. And then the Scott Chamath, he basically has a fund called Social Capital. It started off as a traditional VC fund. And then like he had to restart it for all kinds of reasons. But one of the things he does now is he has this thing called a SPAC, which is his special purpose vehicle.
- for taking companies public. So you're a company, you don't wanna go public, he's already public and he just acquires a stick, you know, a stake in your company, I believe is how the mechanics work. So they just did this with Virgin Galactic. And so it's like a fast track to being public and getting that liquidity without having to go and be your own independent listing. Yeah, I'm into that. I know Andrew Wilkinson's probably listening, he owns Tiny Capital and they've been doing this at the companies that they own collectively, I think do about 100 million in revenue. And he, I think, takes dividends and buys companies with a cash flow. Right. And it's an awesome model.
- But a lot of these companies like Brandless, there's no cash flow, right? It's going to be a cash sink. It's one of these go big or go to zero. And in this case, it went to zero. Yeah, but it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be, but it's also that is also valid, right? Like to do the do what like jet tried to do, which is like, you know, they never made their core business work sold for $3 billion because they went for the plow money in today, try to get the scale and then be the first to have scale doing what we do. I know. It's a model.
- No, I'm into it. Well, it's the other one you want to talk about, credit cards? We can mention it just for a second. But ramp. Ramp capital, right? Ramp, let's ramp something. It's based out of New York. It's Brexit, but from New York, right? Yeah, I'm into it. It launched today. OK, so I went, my company, we do, let's say, eight figures a year in revenue. We have seven figures in cash. I have been using one big bank for a long time. And to get us to raise.
- our credit card limit from 30,000 to 80,000 was a nightmare. Oh my god. A nightmare. Yeah. I had to go meet them in person two or three times. I had to show them my personal San Paras tax returns. It was stupid. I signed up to Brex and I got three or 400,000, some hundreds of thousands of dollars in like 12 hours. Yeah. Awesome. And I told these guys and like, yeah, we can't compete with that. They basically admitted it and I go, OK, well, this conversation is over. Thank you. So I really like this new business credit card space. And I'll explain how I think they're making money, but ramp just launched. And what they're going to do, what they said they're going to do.
- is they're gonna analyze all your credit card spending and they'll tell you where repetitive purchases are coming through. And I actually mentioned this on the podcast three months ago. I was like, I'm telling you that businesses are wasting so much money by buying multiple subscriptions of things. And I think something amazing can be built by helping you save a little bit of money. That's what this is. That's like a side feature they have. That's not like, the main feature is the same like Brex, right? Like it's like, here's a business credit card. That's how they're differentiating. Brex is advertising.
- as we will get you better rewards. Right. And this is, we'll save your money. Yeah. And I think it's cool. And I'm really bullish on those things. And I think the way they work is whenever a customer, when I have my credit card and I go and buy something, the merchant pays a 4% fee. And what Brex does is they go to MasterCard and they go, hey, you guys are getting 4% fee for all this stuff, give us a cut of that. And we'll create more credit card users. And I think that's how they're making.
- money I'd imagine. I think so. I don't know for certain but FinTech companies are very interesting. I know a couple guys are deep in FinTech. We'll bring them on. A lot of people are not deep into that and a lot of go like Wealthfront and Betterment. A lot of people hate those like buyers. I don't know how they're ever gonna get bought. I don't know who would buy them. We'll see. Alright what else we got up here? I feel like Sean when we come for the last few times I've been the one doing all the research and I have a feeling that you're the one who's
- done all the research. I did some research this time. So first follow up on last time I was talking about corporate universities. I'm going to keep talking about anything education because I just love it. I had a lot of people reach out to me about that. Really? Okay, so I went back to my notes. I already had these notes, but I just wanted to mention a couple of them. So Hamburg, you, that's the McDonald's one 19 full-time professors. I thought that was interesting. There's, I don't know how you say this, Crotonville, that's from General Electric. So Kaiser just opened up their own med school, which I find really interesting because it's what that's exactly what I was talking about where you want your own pipeline of doctors.
- So you create your own med school. Then some companies do it more like training, Apple University, Deloitte University. I think those are more like just a training program so you could be a better employee. That's different. Can you make it bigger? Another one that I thought was interesting, so we talked about Zoho, so Zoho has their own university and the graduates of that make up 15% of their workforce. Oh shit. Which is pretty insane. So 100, they have about a thousand, maybe they have more than a thousand people. I'm not sure exactly how many total that is. The Google IT support certificate has 75,000 graduated students.
- is pretty crazy. So I think this is gonna be a big trend. So where's the opportunity to be a company that can create these education? So I think what you can do is, so there's these companies that are called, what the hell are they called? I know one is called To You or something like that. That's the name of one of their companies. So there's a set of companies that what they're doing is, they say, hey, university, hey Berkeley, you should have an online degree. And for years, universities were not so interested in this, and then they saw how much money gets made by online degrees. And so they were like, okay, we'll take that money. And so Berkeley doesn't wanna have to sit there and build out an online degree portal that has the technology.
- the service, acquire students, Berkeley doesn't know how to do any of that shit, right? So there's a couple, there's three big companies that basically go to these universities and they say, hey, do you want to offer an online degree we think it brings this much incremental revenue to your university and we will run the whole thing for you so you don't have to lift a finger and here's what we want, you know, 30% of the tuition revenue. And right, so what happened is all the universities said yes. So there's a billion dollar company that's doing this that basically offers this to all the universities. If you go look all these, you know, traditional
- universities now have a online degree or certificate program that they offer and it's run by these other companies. I forgot the name of what these companies are called. There's like some generic term. But I think you could be that for corporations and so I think you could go to a corporation and say, hey, would you like to basically have your own developer boot camp or university for essentially we're gonna pop out people who are like management consultant types and it's good for your brand to get students early.
- and anytime you hire one of them, we take essentially a recruiter fee and we'll run the whole thing for you. And so I think that's one way you could take advantage of this trend. So VaynerMedia does this thing called 3Ds or, I don't know what it's called, something like that. And it's 10 grand and you go to their office for a day and you learn how their business operates. So if you're an agency owner, you get to hang out with Gary Vaynerchuk for an hour, but then they also have the head of each department for an hour and they come in and they explain how their companies run. And you have Book in a Box. You have Book in a Box here. Can you answer this actually? No. Special guest. Special guest. Just go out, can you just go out here and answer it? He's just like,
- outside. We'll show who's coming in in a second. But anyway, what was I saying? You're about to say book in a box. Oh, book in a box. So Tucker who's on here, he is thinking about doing the same thing as well, where users can pay a fee and they can come in and see how the company operates. So book in a box itself is a little bit different. Book in a box is, you want to write a book. This is book in a box. We're going to help you write it, promote it, do the cover work, all that stuff. And they do this for like high profile business type people.
- who want to have their own book, right? And that business does good, it's a good business. Yeah, he bootstrapped it. They have a, he was telling me he was like, Amazon's gonna buy us for so much money. That's what the joke that he has said. So who knows? And what they wanna do, which is different, which is talking about an idea is, give you exposure inside these companies to the leadership of these companies, is that it? Yeah. Like take you on corporate tours, essentially. Yeah, because Book in a Box, what they're famous for is,
- their culture is really good. Like their own company culture? Yeah, interesting. And so that's, and we thought about doing it as well. I mean, we're not big enough that we have something to offer, but it's kind of a cool idea is where, like I would do it for other companies. I would pay money to see, like, if Barstool did a thing where you could see how they operate their business, I would pay money and go, right, and VaynerMedia, if you guys want to research this, we want to, like, if you think that your company is special and people would pay money to do it, to see how big VaynerMedia is, they put all of that stuff in.
- their events on Eventbrite, and you could see how many tickets they're selling per event. So you can actually reverse engineer this and see how much revenue it's bringing in. I like it. Okay, I have two ideas that are, I've talked about this before. I'm in a big company right now, and it's my first time ever in a big 2000 person company. And so I'm seeing all this stuff that I'm like, either are problems that need to be solved of a big company that I never saw before, or homegrown solutions that I'm like, dude, that could be a standalone company, this little homegrown thing we built. And so I want to share one of each with you on the
- on the podcast today. So without further ado, the first one I'll do is something that I wish, I wish we had. Now this is a, I'll call it, this is kind of a far-fetched idea, but personally I think it's valuable. So I'm sitting in a meeting and the way meetings work at any Amazon company, I believe is you have this like heavy written culture. So you write a doc, you write a memo before you come in. And it basically says, you know, here's what we're here to discuss, here's the context, here's the potential solutions, here's what we believe is the recommended solution type.
- thing, right? You write a memo that basically does a lot of the pre-work of what you would normally discuss in the meeting. And the first 20 minutes of the meeting are everybody reading this thing. So it's silent. There's like 15 people on a long boardroom. Yeah, it's like a big Amazon. You read the memo and nobody talks. And then after 15, 20 minutes, somebody basically says, like, hey, is everyone done? Anybody need more time? And they're like, no, we're good to go. And then probably somebody needs more time, but they don't say anything. And then you start the discussion. And the discussion, the problem with meetings is
- You guys like me who are like want to say stuff all the freaking time and so they just talk way more than anybody else So we have a special guest we're recording right here, so if you're listening to this you don't have video Lance Armstrong just walked in As he does, you know
- at certain times. And Lance, Lance, you wanna pull up that chair for a minute? Just come sit for a year for a minute. Here, you can take this. We're swinging this around. Yeah, go over here, go over here. It'll be easier. Actually, you know what? Take the red chair. I'm gonna sit on this. We did not play on this. I know, Neil Dempsey suckered me. He said, not sorry. He just said middle here. You don't have to sit in here, by the way, either. Wow, this is what I'm doing.
- I do so Lance we were so we have this podcast here yeah every day three days a week at this point it feels like every day right our goal is to get to a hundred thousand daily listeners yeah per episode push a button and get to the hundred thousand ear bowls right right and we're doing a good job yeah we're getting close good I bet you are you have a big big following I'm we have a big following and so the back story behind this podcast is and and now we're doing videos and we're chopping it up like you do with
- forward the forward the forward the forward the forward the forward and the move so the second one this you know yeah the tour ones called the move and so what what we've been doing is you may as well do video you get that'll get you that that'll get you that 100,000 quicker it's helping a lot and so what we've been doing so Sean had a company that he just sold to twitch and i've got companies and all we've been doing is scheming out loud and for some reason people love listening to it we started off with interviews it was like all right you know like a classic podcast i go here's what we do yeah people like those but then me and Sam just started shooting the shit and people like that way more jamming we're just like yeah we're just spitting out ideas that are pretty bad honestly usually and how long are they uh maybe an hour they've been 40 minutes hour it's been working um and we have like everything
- who wants messaging us saying they're starting little things that we've been riffing on. Good. Have you been in any podcast? Or you make the content don't listen? I'd listen to a few. You know what I kind of get, I do get, I'll occasionally listen to Rogan if it's a guest that I'm interested in. The whole thing or the clip? No, he goes along, man. Three hours. I'm like, when I did it, he was like, I was like, so how long do you think I'll be here? He's like, oh, three hours? I was like, what? I've never talked to anybody for three hours. He's like, no, I'm not talking for three hours. I'm a man.
- I'm not that interesting, but Yeah, no, so I'll get into these crime ones me too me too. I got sucked into this Root of evil. Yeah, it was just super fucked up. I've been listening to that one Yeah, you're trying not to and then what was the other one that was I do serial killers, you know that one. No, but they're all about serial killers, right? No, there's one called serial killers Yeah, and it's awesome. We crashed about we were kind of crime. I Listen to all those ones as well. Wow the Wondery and Park House. Yeah And they just one of them one of those companies just sold to Spotify a couple hundred million dollars
- bucks started the ringer the ringer Bill Simmons just keeps making money yeah apparently I think he owned I bet you he owned the majority of that company Wow so he probably walked away with a couple hundred million bucks for him we got to get you off the La Croix you have you seen the Austin brand I just leave him here you seen the new brand at Austin Waterloo what's water it's what it's like a sparkling water but it's better so this is what the podcast I'm an investor full disclosure okay well this is what the podcast is not but they're crushing their absolute
- What is it? It's a, it's looked at, what is it? It's sparkling water, but it's, it's. Our Austin office buys it. Yeah, I'm sure they do. I mean, it's all the rate. Well, from the Austin office, it's on, their, their HQ is on, is on, is on, is on EC's or Chavez as well. So from, from where the hustle is, or at least where it's always not moved. We moved into a bike shop. Yeah, we're, we're on a seven now. Okay, so you guys used to be on, on Cesar Chavez, you moved up. But so they're still on Cesar Chavez, which is where our studio is. But no, they're just, they're cool guys are killing it. You know, how much did they raise? They just did a new round. It's like 30 they raised, I want to say, I'm probably.
- getting that wrong. But they did 50 million sales last year, they're going to 100 this year. Holy shit. No, they're they're knocking. Yeah, it's it's it's it's lighter cleaner. The can has they have all these different. Yeah, they're the ones that are cool looking can like it's like past our it's like a white. Well, they have a lot of flavors. Now it's probably up to 10 or 12. But it's like a retro looking can retro. Yeah, it's real sort of groovy looking. They brought in the guy that ran Smart Pop and sold that off. And so he's the CEO. So they got real. Austin has a lot of ventures is the big who's the cab who ventures out of Austin. That's the guy from the vodka company. Is that the T? So he Clayton was was from Deep Daddy. He did sweet leaf tea deep. Eddie. And then went and started Kavu with two other guys. He's now since left. But anyways.
- He's still on the board at Waterloo and Highbrook Coffee, which is a big advertiser of ours. Do you like bestings? It's kind of boring. No, I love what he was doing. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with this guy? He doesn't like making money? I like it. There's probably some charity right down the street where you could go give them all your dough from Twitch and give them all your time. You know, investing sounds fun and the initial pitch is fun, but once you give them a check, it gets very boring to me because you're still hands off and I like it. I like being a part of creating stuff. Dude, it's like being an uncle.
- fun stuff and not I knew that hard work. I see we that's actually good enough. Yeah, I mean, we we we launched a fund and we almost, you know, probably 90% of the companies were super involved with in what way. Well, either do the board or being on the board or just they just need help. I mean, you know this, I mean, young entrepreneurs, they might have a great idea and and be smart people, but they're going to come across things. They just need help navigating and and or
- connecting them in our part. I went to pitch and investor, a founder's fund. And founder's fund is like a top fund, whatever, and he offered us a term sheet. And I asked him, I said, we have this other capital source right now, like self-funded by my business partner. We could just keep self-funding or we could take this. I said, you tell me, how much value you had, do you guys really bring? I'm ready to hear the sales pitch. And he goes, honestly, the worst companies need the most help, and I can't save them. The best companies never need my help. And so, and then there's everybody else in between. Yeah.
- If I'm giving you this term sheet, I hope you're one of those that are the good companies that I really don't have any influence in. I just get to take credit in the end and I was like I did that honesty that is true to me. The best company is truly like I've only made a couple of investments but Lambda School is probably the best one. It's done pretty well. You know that one? I'm like a needy girlfriend. They're like one of the hot Silicon Valley companies doing super well. I'll text the founder to be like hey what's up? You want to jam on ideas? You want me to help you with this problem? And he's like dude I'm just busy with all this fucking growth. I hate looking at it.
- We have I hate when investors ask what what I need anything We won't tell Neil when he gets here well I what I do is I send monthly updates and they're very clear and succinct and I'm very transparent and they're like How can I help? I'm like you can't unless you have ideas and you can tell me how you can help do it But I don't I can't think of anything. Yeah, like it's like I don't know how can you help? You know what I mean? It's like what do you got to come in here and write emails for me and do work for me? I mean like I don't know they're like you need interest anyone. I'm like who do you need?
- No, I don't know. That's, I mean, I think the intro part is big in our world. And so, you know, in health and wellness, fitness, nutrition, I mean, it's, it's, you know, I've been doing this for 30 years, just as an athlete. So I've gotten to know everybody. I mean, if, if we make it invest, these are just examples of, we make an investment in a company like AMP Human. And they need, and it'd be very obvious that they'd be connected to Strava and vice versa. It would take them a month to get a call. I think you're different though. That's your, thank you, Sam.
- Well, that's your value is that's our value. Yeah, everyone knows that you know everyone I mean your celebrity like you could get touched with everyone, but like if You know, I'm an investor. You're an investor. It's like they don't know who I know Yeah, and I probably don't know that many people who they can't just call the email. Yeah Is that what your angle is gonna be is that you have there's that and we call I mean We we refer to it as the flywheel just because you know now the one show the second show the move is about 15 million downloads a year And so you know once that started to really tick off then I I was getting all this interesting deal flow. I thought
- to myself, we should just start a fund and invest in some of these companies. And then what happens when we reintegrate or occasionally integrate some of our companies back into that audience, right, that core sticky group of 15 million people. And so that's, that's what, here's Neil. That's what we bring to it. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, there is the connections, there is the flywheel, there's the audience, and then we got a pretty kickass advisory board that we pull into whether it's, you
- researching deal flow or sitting on boards. And we won't take up too much time. This was impromptu. He said we're going to get a sandwich. We already ordered you food. Oh, yeah. I already talked to Neil. Well, Neil texted me this morning and he's like, hey, can I use your guys's office? I go, yeah, we got a conference room. We'll take care of food. So we already have everything for you. Dope. Can I just say, like, all these parking garages around here with the sign on that says open? I went into like three up in the dude's like, we're full. I was like, well, why don't you turn off the fucking sign then? Like you've got 10 cars in here that now all have to back up.
- Because the sign says open. Which garage you parking? Well I ended up parking right around the corner right here. I hope that's the parking thing was yellow. Is it a rental car? Yep. What type of car did you rent? Well hang on, let's first figure out if I'm going to get a ticket. So the thing was yellow, I put my car in, bought an hour. Well I'll hook it up, we'll make it happen. No I know, I got a great garage down the street that I parked in. Okay well it's too late now, I gotta go to the airport soon. But I know, you really want to know what kind of car I rent in it? Yeah. They gave me, it's like a suburban kind of thing.
- Yes, you drive a suburban anyway, right? I drive that at home, so I didn't mind. I know where everything is. I'm back in, I can, you know, it's like my cockpit. So let me run one thing by it. Then is Neil here? Not yet, but who's ready? So you were doing a thing. So we've talked about hotels out here. I've been riffing on hotels. I'm really interested in hotels because they're growing, like the biggest hotels at top 10, they're growing at a really high clip right now because young people are doing experiences more. You, George, Hank Happy, has this thing called a Domestique. And you were doing a ride there where someone could pay a fee and hang out with you for two days. Well, we call it a camp.
- Yeah, it's probably four days of riding. Right. And something that's been interesting to us, me and I've been bringing up, is hotels that offer more experiences. And so it could be as small as being filled with peloton bikes, which I have found myself going to more hotels just because they have a high quality gym. Are you, did you see that his hotel or the Domestique, did it get increased bookings because of that? Because of that? The camp that we sold? Yeah. And what was the decision?
- Yeah, I mean, it's an inch his hotels. It's only I think 12 or 13 rooms. So it's pretty easy to fill up So if we announce and we he and I are doing the same thing in my work in September, but it had a separate hotel But obviously But when we announced that camp it just kind of fills up, you know, it would it'd be a different jam if it was a 200 room hotel And that's his problem right he can either sell he either has one room full Or two rooms or he could sell 200 rooms right 13 is a tough number I would love for that to happen and that's what I told you. I think my phones are
- And by the way, I think it might be Neil. You can answer that. He wants to come up. That's what I told you. I wrote an email to you one time. I was like, you need to become the Jimmy Buffett of weekend warriors. Right. And you need to have a hotel where people could come and. Dude, Jimmy Buffett, I mean, hey, Neil. I guess I couldn't answer your call. I got roped into a podcast. Neil, you're big filmed right now. Just say hi right there to the camera. Yeah. We'll wrap up here in a second, yeah. I mean, Jimmy, he's branded everything.
- Whether it's Blenders, he's doing nursing homes now. Jimmy Buffett is? Yes. So I mean, he's got, I mean, when I talk about Jimmy Buffett, I mean, if you think about a Jimmy Buffett fan, like a parrot head, right? So if it's the day of the show in Dallas, Texas, which I say that because that's my mom and stepdad go every time, from the minute they wake up, he's owning them, right? They're listening to Sirius XM, they're listening to his station, right? Probably at some point pregame, they're drinking his beer, the land shark beer. And then he, they buy the ticket, which is again, his. They get to the show, they're buying his swag, they go back, or they pregame, they like...
- pregame or tailgate out there. They're using this margarita blender. He's got everything. And then he has a hotel. He's got the. And then his clothes, right? I mean, it's just so endless. Why is Lance Armstrong not the Jimmy Buffett of Weekend Warriors? Hotel. Jimmy, Jimmy, I don't know if you paid attention the last seven, right? We're getting back there. No, it could happen. I'm telling you. Yeah. Like the world that I want to live in is like, these UFCs. Cannabis, he's all in a.
- Yeah, the the coral reefer. That's what it's called. That's what it's called the coral reefer These UFC guys are kind of doing it where you could pay money and go and work out with them and live at their gym. Yeah Laird Hamilton's doing it You know I did for a sec and I did not dancers now. I just I don't know that's how you can I just I just didn't I don't know I didn't feel right
- Do you want to like how much of yourself? Yeah, how much do you think Jimmy Buffett spends on that shit? I wouldn't do cameo. That's how you could tell which celebrity is broke by how much they're how much their stories Like oh Like Gilbert Gilbert Godfroys charging $50 for two-minute slot this guy's broke by the way that Nice
- Nice people I talked to them, you know when I they're great, but no, but you're doing well But yeah, but like it is more reality TV youtubers find it's like uncle Joey from full house is really hurting He's only charging 50 bucks for a three minute spot like these these broke I feel this is horrible. We're a snoop is charging to grand. He's the one who's doing good snoop charges to grand on cameo No, something like that. Yeah, I got TJ Lavon from the max or whatever He's the max I got TJ Lavon to say hi to my wife for like a hundred dollars I don't even know how that is. He's like on the real road
- Stupid but that's how you could tell who's broke is by what they charge a cameo The more they charge the more broke they are or less if they charge a little bit of money Then they're really yeah, and I said mine high and it was just you know, it was to be boring Why would anybody pay that? Anyways, I would pay can I I thought Neil and I were gonna go have lunch. Oh, yeah, well You mean lunch with us or you're gonna keep podcasting. I'm gonna wrap up here in a few minutes Yeah, we'll still move here. So why don't you guys I don't want to take the seat the whole time
- We were just kidding. Lance, I didn't expect to do this, so we were just killing time. Whatever. I just want to ask you to go and have me on here. Quick fella, we're paying for this year. The group's getting to take on this. No, that's mine. What do you got to take on this? Wait, let me get up in this chart. I had you in. There you go. I'll be out. We'll see you out. Yeah. And then Jack is going to be here in a few minutes too. Thank you. We'll talk to you. Yeah, and that conference room over there is all yours. That was a good surprise. Yeah, that was fun.
- I don't know what's gonna happen with this podcast gonna be interesting. It's gonna either be great or not great Water to the other right be okay not gonna be in the between so Okay, so are you gonna wrap up because if you want to wrap up we can we can either do two minutes of more stuff? We can do two minutes. I don't know what can you pull up the sheet again is it's got like email on this was a crazy For those listening Sean and I had this thing planned out and we were gonna do a normal so no this is great Life happens you take life we had Lance Armstrong just show up
- and come into the... If Lance Armstrong walks into your podcast, you do exactly what just happened. You get the fuck up, you let Lance Armstrong sit down and you talk to Lance Armstrong for 10 minutes and you don't worry about anything else. So if it matters, I mean, this is what our office is like, we do get a lot of cool people coming by. Yeah. The guy that Lance was with, the gentleman you maybe just saw on camera, his name is Neil Dempsey. He won't ever tell me this. I'm pretty sure Neil's a billionaire and Neil's one of my investors. And Neil... He felt like a billionaire. I felt that billy energy. We'll have him on the podcast sometime, but basically he was trying companies and kept failing and up in his late 30s, early 40s, he was failing, failing, failing. He's got a job out of VC.
- and met this guy starting a coffee shop, brought to the VC, everyone laughed at him, they said, no, we're not investing this stupid. So Neil invested his own personal money into it and that company ended up being Starbucks. And so Howard Scholz, CEO of Starbucks, says that Neil's one of the people he looks up to. And he's one of my investors. They named the stadium, one of the stadiums at Washington, is it Washington University or University of Washington? They named it, it's called Dempsey Stadium because he donated and so he's a big deal. That's cool. That's legit. Our office. That's a great story. Wow, how to follow that, okay.
- I think that we should probably kind of wrap it up and hope that there's some value in here for people Yeah, okay, okay. Let me toss out one idea because we owe people ideas and let me toss out one good idea Which one okay, I'm gonna do the I'm gonna do the one I started so I started off talking about okay these meetings are our meetings basically are like the bread and butter of big companies and so I calculated we have
- on every floor, we have like 20 meeting rooms, say, and nine floors, so let's call it 10 floors, there's 200 meeting rooms, and every hour, let's assume, I don't know, 80% of it is occupied. So I basically did the math and saw how many hours, and then you think, oh, every meeting is on average five people in it, and so you start to realize how many people hours are spent in meetings, and then when you look at a meeting while it's happening, there's basically no technology. So the only technology in a meeting is like video conferencing, typically. I think that's kind of crazy.
- And so I actually believe that there's someone out there who could build a meeting kit of some kind that makes meetings more effective, more efficient. And I'm not talking about transcribing, although that's one possibility. What I'm thinking about more is the ability to give, so I'm imagining a physical device and you push it when you want to say something. So this doesn't reward interruptors and loud voices because you sort of buzz in when you're ready.
- to talk so it just has a little light next to your thing that says Sean it sounds like you have something. If you are ended at the memo thing that alone is worth it. Well the memo doesn't require any like there's no business there right like companies just adopt that principle of the process. You know I think you're wrong and here's why I think you're wrong is Axios is coming out with this and there's another a new product called recess that just launched and all it is is a software SAS it's a service you pay money and you get this internal emailing tool that helps you write internal emails better to your company and it tells you who read it and who didn't. So it's more concise or what does it help?
- Yeah, because Axios is a super concise as is. Yeah, I think that there's a meeting tech that will sound really boring, but if you just think about how much of business happens in meetings, how many hours, how much salary is spent every hour in these meetings, if you could make a 10% lift and how good the communication was, or how well that meeting ran, that's a big, big lift. And I don't think anybody's really doing much interesting stuff there. I think people only really worry about like, how do you schedule the meeting and how do you conference into the meeting? There's a lot of people.
- I don't know how many built just have to have any meetings. And those are successful, but I think the meeting itself could use some improvement. Anyway, so trying to throw in an idea here, but this will be known as the Lance Armstrong podcast. Yeah, we'll actually get them in here in real time. This, I hope that people will get value from this. I think we should publish this, but we'll apologize that it's only I maybe. And we have a ton of ideas to go through for tomorrow. You have a few on here that I'm like, what? You're curious about.

2.13.2020 My First Million ft. Furqan Rydhan [wtHfe6IAQe4].txt

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- All right, we're here. We're back as we do. We got a guest. Furcon is here in the house. How's it going guys? What's up? So background who's Furcon. Furcon is my co-founder CTO at Bebo before we sold. And we've been working together, I don't know, five, six years now, maybe six, seven years. Yeah, it's getting towards seven, I think. It's one of those things where you just keep saying five years, no matter how long it's been. But he has an interesting background before that. Very good background. You want to give us like the give the highlights. All right, the highlights, I grew up here in the Bay Area. I got started just programming as a kid.
- I had a unique experience where I worked at a dot com when I was 15 And that was kind of like were you going to high school at the time or did you drop out? I was going to high school I had just finished my sophomore year and I was really into computers and my dad was like hey I know this guy they need to hire some people they're looking to make like a website at the time They had a router for hotel rooms So it was like hotels wanted to put in DSL and kind of like good internet And they're like oh you got a we need to this interface like the Nolinxous interface for your router now just the HTML side of things yeah, and HTML at the time was really nothing It was like you could put some stuff and I
- I showed my dad how to make a menu and he was like wow this is like ground breaking There's no JavaScript how much are you getting paid at 15 to do this? If I had worked the whole year would have been about a hundred and twenty K Wow pretty ridiculous. This is a dot-com boom dot-com boom probably because they're hiding 15 year olds, but right And then that happens then you did a e-commerce thing. Yeah, and so that company didn't work out obviously You know spending money paying 15 year olds 120 K exactly And so I kind of was back at high school and then I'm bored and I'm really into computers and gaming and you know I had this idea that like hey people like to kind of trick out their cars Like they like to put lights and you know fun things in their car Like why don't people do this with the computers people are really passionate
- I looked it up and I found some forums online and people were doing this. It's just there was nowhere to buy things There's no where to do things especially here in the US So I started a e-commerce store kind of accidentally I was like oh like these things are really expensive if I buy them in bulk I just get them cheaper. I'll sell off some I'll have some more cash on this item. I think we started 800 bucks of stuff in the corner of my garage and then within the first year We did a million dollars of revenue Wow and it was like how old were you? Oh 17. So holy shit High school at the time and so that was pretty crazy because it went from you know
- one corner of the garage to full three car garage to living room family room like there's boxes everywhere my parents were super supportive of this obviously and so that was kind of the early days I would say and then we'll fast forward because there's a lot more to the story but we'll do the highlights so if I'm listening to this you know whenever I ask people with their background really what I'm trying to say is give people a sense of who you are and also it's kind of just like credibility say why should you be interested in what I'm trying to make you're trying to impress people yeah it's like this is the time to basically brag so I'll brag for you because you're a pretty humble guy you don't brag a lot so the other interesting parts are took a couple years off played poker professionally kind of
- in Europe traveling around. That was fun. When you came back, did your own startup failed, but then the next startup, which you started with Adam and a couple other guys, you guys tried and failed on a bunch of ideas. I think probably nine ideas. Yeah, it was about nine ideas across two or three years that we tried. Kind of, you know, one idea was it was real serious. We tried that for about nine months. And then you're going through like three month chunks of like really bad ideas and attempts and then. And my favorite anecdote of this whole time, because I think this is very, very, you don't hear people talk about this was sometimes when you guys were in between ideas or you just.
- It wasn't working. What did you do? You'd come to the office knew what we would just play people all day I mean literally that's what you guys did at monkey Inferno Yeah, we would do it for like an hour these guys would just like That was the day. Yeah, it was like eight hours of people. Oh man That was a tough day when we get back home and kind of get back to it But did you think that was weird like Adam and those guys had had success? So if part of you was probably like look if if these successful guys think this is alright This can't be too bad, but like I would be anxious if we were doing that There was some anxiety, but they were super calm and collected so that kind of was like well why am I worried like well so Adam was
- Pretty wealthy. Yeah, he previously worked on a couple of ad tech companies and they had grown to be pretty big I would say like no one was worth maybe 50 million and you know the one before that might have been in that range too And so he had done some stuff John who was the other co-founder there Had worked at like Vm were early and he had worked at ad products like that got bought by a neighbor self-funding the company Yeah, they were self-funding and so I cannot believe how I would be like no we're getting to work I think we were apart. I mean the cool thing was you sat around you talked about things. How many people?
- What were you like five or six people at that time? So it was pretty small. It wasn't, I mean, we had a good office in Palo Alto bigger than we needed, but you could tell they're not worried, I shouldn't be worried. You sit around for a week, you get some ideas, then you go and work on him and it all felt pretty natural at that point. And the outcome of this was what? Yeah, so you cracked the nut finally. Yeah, so we had, you know, they had a previous background in AdTech, we had made this product called AppLovin, that was an app where you could see what apps your friends were using. So it was like a social network where if you're playing Candy Crush, it says, hey, Sam's playing Candy Crush, and you should play.
- to. We're like, wow, this is pretty interesting. People really convert with this. This should just be an ad product. And then that kind of drove it and said, wait, we should just make a real network out of this. And then we sat down, we built that for a couple months, and then it kind of skyrocketed after that. And how big is it now? They're really massive now. It's been a while since I've been over there, but a couple years back, they had a big liquidity event over 1.4 billion. And I think they've probably grown in multiple since then. I mean, I heard that.
- It sold like only three years after it started. Yeah, it was really fast. And it was doing like six or seven hundred million in revenue, like some crazy number. Yeah, it was magical to see what product market fit really looks like. Like, I always thought, oh, these things are working. No, they weren't working and this was what working looked like. And it was probably one of the best versions of it. So maybe my view is a little skewed on that. But the first month, it was like, man, we just jump up to like 10,000 plus in revenue a day. And then you just kind of keeps guyrocketing up from that. And like, it's pretty crazy as an engineer too, because now your servers are being hammered. You're like running around all night, like pulling all the nighters just because money's flowing and you got to kind of keep it up. And so that was kind of crazy, but fun. So the Apple oven story is four million bucks.
- in self-funding initially. Then they raised a small strategic round, or I don't know exactly what the total is, but about five million bucks total funding, right? Yeah, I think that's exactly what it was. And then the first liquidity events, they sold a portion of the company to a Chinese company for over 1.4 billion. And so that's like massive capital efficiency. You were, you know, CTO kind of co-founder there. So we met after that, we started working together, became, you know, you know, really good friends and have built a bunch of stuff together. And what I like about you, which is why I wanted you to on the podcast is.
- Not necessarily we're not even gonna talk too much about Apple oven. That's just establish who you are You are like me. You're an idea guy. You always have a bunch of ideas You see interesting stuff, but you're deeply technical But then get the business side and the product side too and there's very few people who do I'm definitely gonna ask about App 11 and a little bit before we even get to the ideas Let me I gotta tell you something real quick because this is related. So my best friend started fun goal Which was app 11s competitor? They raised 16 million dollars when they got acquired they had a hundred million cash What did it sell for 750 half of what you guys sold for very successful yesterday? Jack was this was after you left. Okay, so we have to apologize a little bit yesterday Lance Armstrong popped in in our episode
- got ruined, kind of ruined. Or made. Or made whatever it was hectic. And we did this thing it was cool. Sean you left. Jack was here. It was me and Lance and Adam and Jack just chilling right here. And Jack's kind of savanti. Like he's like real smart, but he doesn't pay attention to a lot of things. And we were talking about the podcast. And I was saying Lance, how big is your podcast? He said it's like whatever 100,000 listeners. He goes, it took me a long time to build that up. You know, after I got cut out or cut off and Jack was like, what cut out? What do you like what happened? Like Apple shut you down or something?
- He goes, no, you don't like from the incident that happened seven years ago. Like everything dropped off. And he goes, Jack was like, what do you mean? And Lance looked at me. Lance looked at me and he goes, he's like, is this guy serious? I'm like, yeah, dude, he's like a business of ours. What happens? He doesn't know. And he goes, this is awesome. Sam, you gotta bring more people like this around me. And he goes, Lance goes, Jack, I basically went from hero to zero overnight. Like, I lost everything. And Jack was like, oh, OK.
- And it's like from you know like it was hilarious. That's amazing. That's awesome. And if you Jack did a whole episode and you can kind of tell he's like and the stuff he cares about he's so deep in the rain man and then other stuff he's completely oblivious to which is awesome. Yeah it was it was so funny. And Jack started your guys's or maybe their first I don't know but competitors so it reminded me of that. So what do you want to do? I want to hear some ideas you said you have a story or is that the story or you know I'll tell it tomorrow. Okay cool.
- We want to have guests that come in and bring their ideas stuff. They find interesting so either little phenomenon They've observed ideas. They've been cooking up something off their list. They have on their phone Whatever it is. So do you have stuff like that? Do you have a list of ideas you do or no? I wrote I wrote down some ideas for this I mean I usually just keep them up here and like you know the important ones make their way out Let's talk about the process. Where do you get a lot of like where do when do ideas come to you? Usually when I'm not trying to come up with an idea like in the shower or whatever I'm just kind of around not really thinking about anything and then something pops up the second one I would say is like
- when I'm reading online, if you read something interesting, you're like, wait, that's cool, but it would be cooler if it was, and then that's kind of where my mind wanders. I think that the best idea is you just steal. Oh, yeah. So it's kind of like that you're like, oh, but what if you applied it? The way this restaurant industry is, this restaurant's working, they should actually apply that to Indian food, and it would be way bigger. Right. Yeah, it's like remixing, right? It's like, I want to sample some ideas real quick, and then I want to turn it into my own idea. Right. So what you got, what's interesting to you? OK, so I'll start with one that we went go carting a couple weeks back. And so.
- I'm really into kind of VR AR. I mean, you know this I've kind of gave you an oculus Yeah, you can you know feel my you gave him one Yeah, I gave him a great gift right? That's awesome. Yeah, I was like John you got to do this You're never gonna buy one on your own. You're gonna be a skeptic forever. Here you go. Are you using it? Yeah, because he was telling me he's like there's just one thing you're cuz I was skeptical I was like is there any good games like what am I gonna do with this? And he's like dude you gotta try this poker stars thing and I was like, okay, what a VR poker. Why do I need that? It is fucking amazing Have you tried this thing? Well, I've done boxing I played all the games, but I didn't gotta try the poker one
- It's incredible. I'm gonna go buy an Oculus just to play. Yeah, seriously you should they're sold out So it's gonna be tough, but you know, maybe we can get you one too. You really can't buy one right now They're out dude. They're totally from from Christmas. They just completely sold out And then they haven't been able to refill it. They said it was January then February now It's March and then they're talking about all these delays from that's a good sign for VR Yeah, I mean they totally it's the first device where I looked at it And I said I can give it to somebody that's not a VR junkie and they would actually get excited about it And I think the poker one is great because You actually people want to build these really immersive
- like boxing, but actually you don't really want entertainment like that all the time. I actually want more sit on the couch experiences. And so, you know, some of the things I've been thinking about in VR, what can I build while I'm on the couch? And so, this idea I had is not about that, but that was attention in VR. But we went go-karting. And you know, when you go go-karting, it's really about how quickly you make these turns, how fast are you, how good of a driver are you, you know, how aggressive are you, you know, things like that. And afterwards, we were just kind of talking about some ideas. And it would be cool if we could, you know, go to a go-karting place.
- But it's like Mario Kart instead where you have these AR goggles over your head and it's not about quick turns And it's like a longer track where you can kind of like have some space But I you know would digitally go over this box and I now have a weapon But I could shoot at your car and if I hit you successful your car kind of shuts down for a second and you're stuck So the real life Mario Kart go is this like the sandbox thing So this would be like sandbox or like Museum of Ice Cream would be a place you go Put on this thing and play with a bunch of friends. I'm big on sandbox like laser tag It's like modern-day laser tag. Do you think that sandbox is a big business?
- I think sandbox is fantastic. I mean It's hard to see if it's gonna be successful or not because retail has all these problems and having space has all these problems But if I read hell well, yeah, it's not retail, but they're they kind of have retail spaces, right? Like they want to be frickin mortar, right? Yeah, they want to be like in a spot where there's a lot of yeah I mean just it's just an activity. It's just like a staep room or something It's like escape room, but it had escape room and I know I know guys who own like 200 escape rooms It's an amazing business because escape rooms are super lightweight. You don't do anything you just have a room You have one person you buy the kit and you just keep like reassembling the room
- And you have these like very small. How big is that company? Well, it's not one company, but it's like like you can just own a different You can own a McDonald's franchise. They still report revenues as one. Yeah Private I've never been in I would I will never go to an escape room. That's my fear. I don't want to just like claustrophobic I'm really claustrophobic. I don't like flying. I know I will never go in general VR or AR Experiences are gonna be I think fantastic and you could see theme parks going to this Like I heard about the impark that has a roller coaster ride in VR where they give you goggles You're in this kind of mechanical thing
- But then you're actually in a dungeon and there's lava and like it's a totally immersed experience And I think that people are gonna experience it first like that And I could totally see you coming up with all kinds of different content types and whether it's Mario Kart or Escape Room. That's a great point. So here's a cool model of this I have a buddy who worked at this company called Two-bit Circus. We've ever heard of them. No, so the guy The guy the founder his dad started Chuck E. Cheese as Nolan whatever that guy's name is Atari guy Started Atari started Chuck E. Cheese now his son started
- called Two-Bit Circus. And I love the concept. I think the sun kind of, I don't know the guy, but like my read on the situation is just sort of like, ADD wants to do a million things, not really like executing on this business as he should, but the concept is amazing. They go city to city, traveling circus, like Cirque du Soleil or whatever. And they pop up this thing and it's like a weekend thing where parents bring their kids and all the attractions are like digital wonders. So it's like VR thing. How big is that? It's like a hologram thing. And they were doing really well, every city they were going to, they're selling out like crazy.
- But he was also getting distracted. They were doing things like a company would be like hey We'll give you half a million dollars to do our company retreat Yeah, and then boom the whole company Nick the CEO comes in and says hey We had to go do this corporate retreat and the companies is like dude. We need like one direction But can you do this amazing content Henry? Can you look up? Dave and busters revenue and look up Chuck E cheeses. I bet Chuck E cheese owned by private equity And if you've gone to a Chuck E cheese They went right down to shit. Well where I'm from in Missouri where they were probably popular. It's like we're like like
- trashy poor people go. I mean it's pretty it's pretty whack like like I wouldn't go there because it was famous for like the parents would fight. Get drunk and fight. You don't get divorced. Yeah like Chuck E. Cheese. It was like Peewee hockey and Chuck E. Cheese. That's like where parents get drunk and fight. What's the number? Dave and Bosses is $32 million. And by the way does it pick up Henry when he says this? No Dave. We have to repeat it. Yeah repeat what he said. $332 million for Dave and Bosses and $896 million for Chuck E. Cheese. And your revenue so Dave and Bosses $330 million. Chuck E. Cheese almost a billion dollars.
- annual revenue, but definitely ripe for doing something new, because these things are stale. Is Chuck E. Cheese public? It just needs a public company? Trying to buy stock? Well, I want to see what the income is. Trying to buy Chuck E. Cheese, you know? No, I'm into this. I think that these things are cool. I think I'm terribly into it. When I tried Oculus, I was like, I'm going to quit my company and only do this. By the way, random story. I found this YouTube channel once that was talking about all these old brands that are just gone to shit, like a Chuck E. Cheese. And he was like, this guy just short stocks.
- And he was like, my short pick of the year is Tootsie Roll. And he was like, you ever met anyone who likes Tootsie Roll? I love him. He's like, people who like Tootsie Roll are all 35 and up. He's like, no kid wants Tootsie Roll. They go out for Halloween. They're a public company. If they get Tootsie Roll, they throw that shit away. He goes, Tootsie Roll has no other products. It's just Tootsie Roll and their population is dying. He goes, secondly, the owner is like some 76-year-old woman who will never sell the company. So nobody can turn it around. Nobody can change it. That company's just going to die. It's a public company. And so he was like, you sure it's the stock? So I watched this two-minute YouTube video.
- And I was like I took out a short position. It's been great. It's been awesome That's badass. Is it public? Link over here. Yeah, this guy. No So another thing that I would do I love this I would also look six flags has had a hell of a turnaround a positive so The guy who there's this guy named Bob Pittman and he was one of the inspirations for me starting the hustle because Bob Pittman Was he created MTV when he was in his 20s and then he went and started the things
- called this thing called the pilot group, which launched a loads of different email newsletters, including Thrillis, which is like a huge thing. It's like a billion dollar media thing. Anyway, Bob Pittman is now the CEO of iHeart Media. And formally was also the CEO of Six Flags. And he turned it around. And it does, it's really good. It's been around forever, you know, and it ebbs and flows, but it's good. Yeah, I think entertainment can always level up. And we are leaving the house to go do something. The more immersed, the more exciting it is. And like, that's what you want.
- I can get all the rest of the stuff at home, but like that's why I think sand box is fantastic Like the only negatives I've heard is hey, I've gone to it twice. It was similar content But yeah, they're gonna work that out. They're gonna keep growing it. I think it's gonna be amazing I'd love this the spin-off of this idea for the lazy people that I have so I was like, okay You got to go to this place and go go car. I'm like, all right. What's the other yeah? Why can't I stay at home correct? So if you replace the carts with drones And you let people sit at home on a controller and control these drums real life drones I'm flying around this warehouse and I'm fighting you and again same thing is all digital So I can hit something shoot you your drone just like flies and breaks you got to go and start over again So there's a pit of people who just go pick up okay, so all right. I have I can add to this. There's this guy I know I don't know if they're public so I won't I won't talk
- talk about him yet. But anyway, he's got what they did was in Vegas or in Nevada where it's really cheap. They bought something like 100 or 1000, a significant amount of claw machines. You know claw machines? Like for arcade machines? Yeah. And you download the app and you pay a certain amount of money and you control the claw machine remotely. Fantastic. And it picks up the item and drops it down to the thing. And then you just get. Huge in Japan. You just get emailed like a gift card. They'll use the thing, yeah. I don't know if they, I don't know what the mailing system is. I don't know if you actually get mailed that thing or if it's a gift card that you get sent. But I saw my friend doing this on his phone.
- I was like, what are you playing? What game is that? He goes, oh, there's an arcade in Japan and I'm controlling the claw. So this is like what? You showed me. Crazy. We had talked about it at some point. Okay, but here's how my buddy's building this business. He's building it to be like, like H, he's building it to where it's gonna take off and they're gonna capture all the value and it's just gonna slowly die. I guess he's a known fad basically is what you're saying. Like he knows it's a fad. Yeah, which I love. I like that, those things. But that's how he's building it. You could do it on like Wish product because they're so cheap that you could kind of like have some description thing where it's like, hey, you have to get.
- one random witch product. That's what we should do. You're browsing Wish, and after two minutes, it's like, enter bonus round. You have the claw in our warehouse. Pick something up. I'm into this. I think it's cool. All right, what else you got? OK, so have you guys used that? Wait, hold on. Here's what we'll do, actually. In the next couple of days, I'll come prepared with some Six Flags and Chuck E. Cheese numbers. OK, that's cool. I'm interested in this. I want to hear these numbers, too. I want to know what the startup costs are for sandbox VR. And I'm curious to tweet at us if you like, because we nerd out online.
- I wonder how that business does and we go look up the numbers and figure out who this guy is who's Bob Pittman and how much Income to they make I don't know if we're unique in that But if you like that stuff like either in the Facebook group Just my first million or on Twitter tell us if that's like just be like more of that or less of that just be honest Yeah, that's great. You know you're gonna get your listeners tell you what we'll see what happens Yeah, cuz that's the weird thing with podcast. You don't know what they want. Yeah, what else? So in general like I look at theme so it's like okay Apple releases a bunch of random devices So I'll call them AirPods not really random, but this Apple pencil. I don't know if you get
- I have one. Yeah, it's what's a hundred twenty five bucks. It's expensive and like the iPad bro is expensive But then I'm like great this new capability is there what product exists for it and so You know recently I've been kind of playing around a lot with the iPad and I'll kind of try to show you guys I can hold the mic or do you use? Are you one of the like computer you get rid of computer only use iPad? I'm I'm I think that's weird. I think it's fucking weird It's I like this in certain cases like what I'm traveling. It's a lot better than me lugging around my laptop. Did work pay for that? No, this is mine
- So I just for kind of like to submit expenses. Oh, yeah, reimbursement really bad It was like when we sold beba. How many un reimburse things how much dollar amount did you have? I bet it's like a tens of thousands Yeah, yeah, it's definitely in the five digit range. I should be better at that But you know Adam did that I had a paying five grand up because he didn't like submit shit life has been good to me So I'm not really gonna press anything. Yeah But So the general theme is
- like new hardware comes out, what can I do with this? Yeah, that's the general theme. And so one of the things I've been playing with is this app called Flow. And it's basically like this kind of whiteboard app, right? And so it's kind of hard to show, obviously. But the idea for me was, you know, you sit in a meeting room, right? And you love the whiteboard. You love getting up and moving. Yeah, he does that shit all the time. You love the whiteboard. You like getting up. I like to get my Steve Jobs on. Well, he always has like analogies over shit. He's like, we're trying to build a race car, but let's start with the buy school. Yeah. It is the analogy that we go in. And so the idea was, OK, you take this kind of experience with the iPad and pencil, but that's
- So this whiteboard over here should just be digital, right? So if I want to show you something, I just started drawing here and it just shows up there. You're like, no, no, and you want to kind of feed off of it? And like, we could just have our own. Okay, so for those who can't see what he's saying. So he's basically saying, you got a little iPad in front of you, a little tablet, you're in a big meeting room. If you should be able to quickly sketch something or write something or draw something, and it just use the whiteboard as a display, like it's a TV, basically. Correct. And then it's remote friendly. So everybody can get the same whiteboard experience. Cause I mean, what happens if you're remote? That happened to me yesterday. I was remote conferencing in. The guy gets up, he's like, here's what this really means. He drew something on whiteboard. I can't see. And everyone in the meeting was like, oh yeah, that makes total sense.
- I'm just the you know I've talked to a bunch of people so do you know this guy named Wayne? Forget his last name. He sold something to Twitter. Yeah, they're doing digits now ma or ma I think it's ma ma. Anyway, I was talking to him He said they're 100% remote and I was like how do you do that because we're struggling with this whole whiteboard thing? And he was like man There's this one app that they never update and that's kind of what we've hacked together to use this is a problem that Yeah, I think people are going to remote work both because there's really good talent elsewhere that you're like man This is a perfect fit, but you're not here and that's not a good enough reason anymore
- And then the second thing is just cost. Like if you're in the city, like people, they kind of don't like, you know, they don't want to pay that much for their housing. So just basically making the whiteboard to work for remote workers. Yeah. Or even if you're here. Yeah. Yeah. Like I still want a big view of it. If I'm here, like if we're all here, we want to get that. That's badass. I'm into it. So the pencil and the iPad, I think, is a good combination to where people will have that around. I think it'll become more common. Now you can kind of connect all these groups together. So last podcast, I was saying, meeting tech. Stuff that makes meetings more effective and efficient because all.
- like so many billions of dollars are spent in people's time in meetings. Do you know how cheap, I mean, it would cost way less than anything to make this. You know, okay, this is a screen. This is a 55 inch, I think out there we have a 65 inch TCL 4K or no, we didn't get the 4K, 1080p. You know how much that costs? It's like $3.99 now. It's pretty cheap. No, no, no, it was like $2.50 or $1.80. It's like- It's probably cheaper than this whiteboard. That's the retail price. Yeah, like on Amazon, I bought it for, I think for sure less than 300, maybe less than 200. Yeah, I believe it.
- are really cheap and so where else can you put screens and I think you can actually enhance the meetings if somebody puts up slides I want to write over the slides like I I think you unlock more capabilities than just supplement what you have today and I think that that's where this will become superior than us going to the whiteboard with you know those expo pens and kind of writing there right so meeting tech yeah meeting tech I didn't get it yesterday I mean I was but now you're getting it you didn't have you I didn't have a good example he said I'm meeting in a box yeah it was it was bad it was bad I was trying to get to that but then I fumbled the initial thing I said meeting in a box and then I sounded stupid to me and then I had to show up yeah lance i'm sure like a jump it's a meeting in a box that was fuck that guy the other one I like is uh everyone has airpods on now right and I think airpods did one thing like I
- Apple does really well is nobody wanted to walk around with the Bluetooth headset, right? We think we all agree you didn't look cool. You look like tacky. It was a known douchebag thing. Yeah It was like having the cell phone on your belt Great analogy perfect, and so I was like great people have air pods now and so what else can you build with this? Again, Apple's unlocking capabilities and hardware. So what software can you build? And so there's two ideas ones of mine's want somebody else's, but I'll take it as my great Yeah, exactly whoever says it. It's theirs. Yeah, by the way Apple or AirPods How much 10 million units?
- Yeah, it's a crazy X amount of time. So what's that? Is that 10 billion in sales? Yeah, just multiply by, let's say, 100. It's just a billion plus in sales, right? Yeah. Yeah, it would be a Fortune 500 company. Yeah, I agree. It's fantastic. And so one of the things I was thinking about was great. If I have these on all day, can I just have this on, kind of connected to my wife or somebody, right? And so whether you do it for work or for a personal, you always have it on. There's no audio flowing. But then if I'm like, hey, Sean, what's up? It knows, do you have your AirPods on? If it doesn't, it tells me, hey, he's not there. But you can record a message. You'll get it later. Right. But if you're there, you'll just hear my audio. And you still aren't on yet. You kind of opt in again to be like, yo, what's up, man?
- And it's like how do you take the phone call away from like that? And you're like, I'm not going to give this capability to everybody. There's a couple of cool people in my life. Like my wife that I'm going to be like, great, I just want to have this on and this capability that's there. And so it's like in the office, they do this in the TV. Yeah, Jim and Pam have their name just constant. Yeah, but this is good because it's not, it's not on when you don't want it on. So let's say I have my earpods in, you have yours in and I'm walking around. I'm at lunch. I have this idea for the podcast. I basically just say.
- Yo Sam what we should do is we should do this and then you basically receive but you're not sending back Unless you say whatever the keyword like though, you know, like how Alexa works, right? Like it's like Sean or whatever it is and that's way more lightweight than me Picking on my phone and starting to type or phone call like who wants to do that, right? So phone calls feel weird 100% right now. Yeah I'm I'm less bullish on that than the first two. Okay, okay We'll do that the second version of this idea with AirPods was you know far as I write. Yeah, what is that? Oh, you're homey. Yeah one of our friends and we're doing a small hackathon
- at the house and he's like coming up with this idea again for AirPods. Wait, wait, wait, wait, you're doing a hackathon at your home like for fun? Yeah, just for fun. Damn, maybe you do this like every week, right? Or like two weeks? Like, so what do you guys do? Like Jake's here, Jake, did you go to the last one? Yeah, we just kind of sit around a table. We're on our laptop. We're talking about ideas. We come up with something and we just kind of try to make it. Usually you don't end up finishing on the first one, but then just second one, you try again, the third one, you try again. And it kind of fucking nerds in the past. Jake, what'd you build? What'd you build at the last one? You want me to talk about it? Yeah. Yeah. So Jake was making this thing where he was like, it'd be cool if you could test your website.
- from like locations around the world, but it would like video record what it looked like and how it loaded. So not only do you get this like technical work form. Not a number. Yeah, and you can show people that this is how crappy our website looks like from some random country or in the US and what it looks like for other people. And so. That's awesome. Yeah, that's really awesome. Everyone's kind of testing numbers, but I mean, we're a visual. Yeah, what you care about is, oh, look how long that took to load. Look how shitty this looks. Have you heard of user testing? Is it user voice or user testing? You know user testing? That's like a $50 million your business.
- Shout out to my mom works at user testing really it's it's that it's huge right big It's they're trying to go public and you know so that means they're at that scale where they're doing a hundred hundred million plus Yeah, and all they do is there's someone in the Midwest who's cheap who? Record all right. Well, let me look at your website. Okay. I'm scrolling down. I don't really know it's that's more about like confusion This is more about performance. No, but they but they but they there's you both they're similar. They're similar issues Yeah, and I think you know today he's looking at it like a performance tool like how do you kind of make it load well? Well, but I think you could
- totally look at it and apply some machine learning to it where it's like, this doesn't seem to work well, it's below the fold on these devices, right? Like some of those things when you design it and then you like put it together, you're not thinking, oh, what does it look like on the iPad? And then you kind of just show it like that and then you have a video, but also it could detect and say, man, this is like your main button. It's showing up down here and you know, you could offer. What are you gonna do with this? Good job, Jake, I like that project. I forget about it. Like it's a little more recent than this, what was the other project? So this idea was around cooking and you're like oh, I wanna like hear these recipes and things like that. And so, again, your hands are dirty and the...
- kitchen yeah what do you do you pull out your phone your laptop doesn't make sense right like and so the idea was you have your airpods on it kind of walks you through this dance and you can go next go back and it's like you know a little recipe thing I forgot the name that he came up with for it but I think you could come up with a better name for it but you know kitchen in a box yeah kitchen in a box there you go I think you call it like kitchen pods or something and I was like ah that doesn't right that's how to have you okay so this guy named Andrew Mason you know you know that name he started Groupon he um a few years ago his second act he started this thing
- Detour detour there it is they shut it down and he pivoted to Descript the script a podcast thing Anyway, what was the first detour it was awesome. It was so cool. This was before AirPods So explain what did you do? Oh, I used to do them all the time, but I understand how it wouldn't be huge But I was a poor product not a great business Yeah, and so what it was is you know how when you go to a museum and you have a guided tour That says like all right when you get to this point
- press this thing and then you press the button. You're like, all right, you see this painting. You see there's a small little smudge that you'll see up left. That will happen when you got angry. He did whatever. So what they do this, but they do it for cities. So it's guided walking tours. That's interesting. But you know this American life, like you know how it's like really highly produced podcasts where you can hear noises and they did that, but it was GP. It was worked at your GPS and what they would do is they would say, all right, walk past the street, past Bush Street. Keep walking and then it would play music and then it would tell when you got there.
- And it would say now look down to your right you see that hole that was there that actually came here from this time and it's It's awesome. It's so cool. He shut it down. Anyway, what you're describing is almost like the cooking version of that Right the utility version which would be significantly Larger than the detour version because the detour because you cook all the time the detour version I would do it on like a my wife is out of town And it does suck to have your hands covered in food and then be like oh let me go to my iPad or my phone and like try to like scroll and click and zoom and like figure out this recipe how many tablespoons?
- What's it supposed to be? Has there ever been a big business built around recipes other than an ad-based media company? Not sure. There's a problem with a lot of these ideas. You start thinking too far ahead, you're like, I don't wanna go do this thing. Cause what does it turn into? But I think generally the concept, if you took guided tours like that concept and you said, what else in my life could be guided? That's interesting. I think there's a couple of very interesting businesses there or at least interesting products, right? Totally interesting products. Maybe interesting businesses too. Totally interesting products. I think there's a workout version of this that's doing alright, which is like, you go to the...
- the gym and it's like in your ears and it's music telling you what to do. I use it all the time. Aptive, you know what that is? No, I haven't seen it. It's similar. I use it on a regular basis. I pay $100 a year for it. Ethan spoke at HustleCon. Tens of millions in subscription revenue. It's what you're describing, but it's for working out. So I think if you have a great product in a space where a lot of people are doing it, you can come up with a business plan, like a hundred bucks a year that matches some. I agree with you. So people cook, people go to the gym. Like what else are they doing day to day? I think guided meditation is another one that loves to really take a lot of time.
- There's probably five others in that space, but I think AirPods made it different than Bluetooth headsets and headphones, you know like so here's a Little guy in the fire one yeah, that's why we For got it for meditation a lot of people don't like to sit and meditate Like it just doesn't do it for them their mind races all the stuff and like the answer right now is like no That's the point do it and like sure that's that might be true But for a lot of people what it means is like fuck this I'm gonna do something else and so there's all these other types of meditation
- like transcendental, whatever where you're chanting. It's like a little more active and there's all kinds of meditation. Hiking is meditation, exercises is meditation because you're controlling your breathing in a certain way, you're clearing your mind space and you, you know, you're freeing your mind. And so I'm curious if somebody can do this sort of detour version that's about walking and you know, it's basically got in meditation, but it's active, not sit down on a pillow and do nothing for 30 minutes or whatever it is. Yeah, like when I would do those detours, you did them, right? I never did one. Well, we did. Well, I did one where I went to the cash show and it was all about the
- AIDS epidemic and you got to know Harvey Snow, Harvey Milk, the gay activist that was killed, whatever. He was a gay activist that was murdered and it was during the 80s when the whole AIDS thing was going on. The guy talking, he was like, no, this is the last time that I hugged Harvey before he died. And then he's like, now this house up here, these guys lived here and on top, these guys lived here, they all died. And I was so emotionally... Okay, that gets me thinking, you know, I think this would be...
- I don't think this would work, but like you know yesterday you and Lance Armstrong were both like the podcast I like best are these true crime ones What if you did a true crime version of the detour thing where it's murder mystery? Kind of creeps you the fuck out as you walk around That's cool real crimes from your city. Yeah, or you have to so we'd untrench me that We did a report on this these app. What are those? What are those calls again? The you know I'm talking about Give me a real no like these serialized video apps That
- fucking the lady who started it she sold her thing to Songify man I gotta remember what it was anyway you you you get it's like choose your own adventure app okay for thriller novels watching things basically we did a report on it our hypothesis was that actually the erotic novels romance novels is the biggest segment you're talking about hooked hooked yeah hooked right anyway I think it's a I don't know if it's a great business but it's an okay one they scaled up revenue hooked was doing I think 20
- million plus in revenue if I were working for a reform. Yeah, but I think turn was stupidly high. Yeah. Anyway, we're describing is, and when we did the report, it was romance novels and thrillers had the highest performance. Here's a general principle though, like hooked is the modern day goosebumps. So when we were growing up, we would read goosebumps books, and that was what hooked us as a kid and you love to read. And hooked said, well, now every kid's got a phone. What if we delivered this through this kind of SMS format, but it's these like scary stories goosebumps style. And, and what you were talking about earlier with like
- like Chuck E. Cheese, Modern Day. If you're trying to brainstorm ideas, this is one format to think about. What did I love as a kid? What's the modern day version of that? And because people's desires tend to stay the same. It's the tools of technology that updates and opens up new opportunities. That's a good framework. Can I ask you about AppLoven? Yeah, I got one more idea. Oh, go for it. I'll kind of plug a company invested in two. So I invested in this company called LucidDrone. I think I told you about it. They have, they basically created a drone that can window wash big buildings. And so instead of sending like a 5% crew and a scaffold and whatnot, it's a giant. Where did you find that?
- They were a YC company. So you know YC produces still fantastic companies. I like these guys because it was like We got this, you know, it's not just drone tech and then it's not nowhere, but it's like that is awesome specific application Yes, specific application and then you think about it You're like yeah five people hanging from a building or one guy working the drone from the bottom and washing it and are those legal Yeah, and so they're out there in a couple of cities I think there's gonna be small regulations. They're gonna have to go But this makes sense. It's a lot safer and a lot better when did they go come out and watch You money for the building
- owner safer than having humans up there trying to wash windows. Sad way to lose a life. What a bold idea. Great idea. And what they did is they actually stopped. So they tried to go to the building owners and they were like, Oh man, the building owners are like, well, we have a service like, you know, that's too complicated. So they went to the guys who were servicing the building. They're like, Hey, I can make your business more efficient. So they're sending five guys out per job. You can do five more jobs. Instead of renting this crazy scaffold, you just lease our drone. And it's like you make their business more valuable. You're not taking their business and then you don't have to go do all the building to building. Oh my God. I love this way of looking at it was.
- Oh, we're going to put those guys out of business. Instead, no, you're my customer. Correct. We make you more efficient. Exactly. And I think that's some of the best tech I see is that. It's not about replacing the whole workflow. It's like, how do we make these people more efficient? How do we allow them to have more capabilities? And then they can do more. They can do a better job. And that's kind of like, I think, what I look for in the emerging tech, especially over everything. Lucid drones. Lucid drones. So the other genius thing about that is if you wanted to do this, you would either have to go sell every building. And that's a lot of sales. Or if you go to the company, like you said, the company that already does the window, why?
- They might have already 50 clients. So now one sale gets you 50 man. That's bad ass We I'm big fans of boring things like window washing. I think it would that would be wrap my alley and to add this Thing to it would be neat. I never know if you told me that someone had that idea. I'd be like It's really interesting and so my spin off the remix of their idea was Probably you guys. I don't know if you got you have a car, right? Yeah, I'm sorry great You guys both have cars out. I thought maybe none of you guys would have cars out here in the city But I never wash my car. I never go to a
- car wash me either you know if I could just have a little drone that sits in my garage that can come up wash my car for me every so often or if you're in a place where it snows like how do I pour some water on the windshield I don't got to go do that and I can get into the car like that's what I want to know I like that you know this was like a huge failure cherry but that was humans yeah so yeah that that this is a Roomba yeah no I'm not that washes your car totally that that failed but I looked at like the background of why I was like that's so stupid who would unearth think that was a good idea it's a big thing in a lot of different countries
- That and check this out bringing gas to bring gas to you. Yeah, bring gas to you in foreign markets That's like the way that gas works. So car washes. I say wash funny. I always have to correct or tell people I say funny get prepared part washing Can you not say why I can't say it's a Midwestern thing wash? It's easy hard watching than giving the disclaimer No, I can't say I can't say car. Why no Mouther it's like
- car cleaning somebody says like what's your greatest weakness like the cancer wife ours roga ours that just make their way into my words it's a bit lesser thing a lot of people say it anyway that's interesting but I never would have thought I'm I that's kind of cool but how on earth could you build a machine that does it I mean that's the thing is the drone need to be pretty smart to do that or no you know I think the thing I like about this technology space right now is a lot of the research work is done and so people have made drones that can fly that can follow you like there's literally skydia
- Yep, I said thousand bucks you go running in the woods. That's their like demo video and it follows you if you haven't seen this demo video search Skydio is that bullshit though? It's amazing. You literally go you like throw the camera The other one failed. Yeah, these guys say they can do it How about this go on YouTube and look up the users who are doing this and they're recreating it and you could see it works Okay, and so like snowboarding and skiing and stuff. Yeah snowboarding is another one I mean GoPro was like one step up but now if you got this drone that can color around I love this shit man drones and
- VR just we need a drone filming this that's just whoever's talking it just turns to them Oh, and just does the cat just picks up the right mic and the right I had one of the first dgi ones and it followed a sky at a thousand feet Oh, yeah, just ruined it that happens But a lot of this technology There's been so much research work done that's moved it forward And I think it's at the spot now where it needs application engineers and not that same, you know, you don't need to be a PhD With computer science and all these math degrees to go create this technology You take the work that they've built and they've kind of established and then apply it to these things and so Flying a drone is trivial enough
- Building the drone is trivial now. And then the software is easy to program a drone to fly. Object recognition and computer vision is easy now. And so you combine these two, it's called easier technologies now because of all the research work that was done. And then you can kind of create this product from it. And so I built these small drones. They're like these little four inch drones. They're able to fly around. You have? Yeah. Yeah. I programmed my own flight controller. That one didn't work as well. I used a pre-programmed flight controller. That worked a lot better. But I get really excited about these technologies when I
- without a college degree, without a deep technical expertise, can go and learn about it. And I really just use Google. That's my source for everything. How old are you? I'm 35. You're one of the more interesting people I've ever met. OK, great. I'll take that. Wow. He met Lance Armstrong yesterday. He's blushing. Look at that. He's not interesting. He's cool. I mean, he's interesting. But he's bad ass. He's badass. What's interesting to you? He just, my interests align with yours, but he's more intelligent and more technically savvy. And he could actually make the things up.
- I think I wish I could make yeah Can you talk about app 11 because you said something so the other day I was talking to someone about Businesses and I'm like when when it's working. Do you know it's working? What's that feel like and? You've made a comment earlier like it's the first time I've ever seen we're just This is what working feels like right what what what was that like it's the feeling of like Like when you when you're you know slamming when your breaks in the car and the car's kind of doing its own thing And you're like I'm not controlling the car. It is just flowing on its own. It's like it's that feeling where You know you build all these products and even at Apple and we did nine ideas before that I've done this for a long time where I'm just trying idea after idea
- I try to get people to use it and you're looking for all these good signals and you're trying to spot it and Then when it's really working, it's not about spotting it It's so obvious that there's no question that it's working and so it's all the charts are flying up But then every day you're not even like man is it working or is it not it's so obviously I got to do x y and z to solve you know These problems that are coming up kind of day in and day out and so it's definitely a feeling where the pull from the market is so strong That there's no there's no middle ground. It's I always thought it was like oh, I'm gonna kind of realize when I'm close to it But it's actually very binary. It's like you're here and it's not
- Working and you're trying to push into the market what you need to do but when it happens it just kind of takes off and you know, I just I don't have really good analogies for you yet except for that like It just it's like the loss of control the market is in control Almost and you're just like trying to catch up and like, you know get into that mindset of like okay great This is working. We're gonna keep like pushing whatever we need to do to kind of support this case What was the revenue growth? I mean you guys read zero then was it like one month? They could have been like 20 grand the next month. It was like a million. I mean was it that substantial It wasn't that crazy, but I think the interesting thing that I learned was There you know, there were a lot of players in the market
- where you'd go to this weather app, right? And the weather app would do like, you never realized the scale of some of these apps even at that time. It's like, man, this thing is doing 200 million impressions per day. And I'm like, a weather app? Really? Why is it so big? And then you're like, great, if we get this customer, these things can happen. And so I think the weather app does how many impressions? I think I forgot which weather app it was, whether it was a weather bug or the weather app. But it was like 200 million impressions a day. And I was really surprised at some of the scale of some of these apps. And like,
- Yes, we had the best ad platform. Yes, we made all these small tweaks to the product to make it work better. And we made our server scale and we did all these things. But I think to me the fascinating thing was there were all these major players. You didn't actually realize how big some of these opportunities were. And kind of working at Apple Oven, I was like, wait, I want to go do this. And when I left there, it was like, I'm not like a huge fan of ad products. Naturally, it's not the product that I get excited about. I love money, so I like, great, it's a fantastic business. I like that. And then I was like, oh, I'm going to go make these apps and games that are going to go do this. And actually, that's how I ran Tishan. I think he had checked out one of my games after, can I turn AngelList? Was that right? Yeah, someone AngelList.
- And I was like, something doesn't add up. Either this guy's full of shit, because who would leave this company that's crushing it? Like most people, when you finally hit a grand slam, you want to do the victory lap and people stay for seven years and then they write this cheesy letter about how great the journey has been. And they're finally ready for their next chapter. He basically left after three years. You weren't even fully vested, right? Yeah, left a little bit on the table. Again, I'm not complaining because everything's been fantastic. And but it was something counterintuitive. I was like, why would this guy leave either? He got kicked out. He got fired. He's not good. blah blah blah. I was like, or this guy's amazing. He really just does love.
- And his story was like, I just love startups. I want to build something that consumers use, not really an ad tech platform. And he was like, I was interested in mobile because I saw how big these mobile apps were on our ad network. So he locked himself in his bedroom. And he's like, I'm going to learn mobile in the next six months. And he just built a bunch of Android games. And then I saw him on Twitter tweeting back with people who played his game. And I was like, dude, none of my developers, all the developers I have in my company that are great, none of them would ever go tweet at a customer and be like, hey, you know, I'm going to fix that bug. I can make this better. Hey, what do you think about this? So I was like, there's something different about this guy.
- What apps were you shocked at? How big they were? A wide app? The casino game apps. That's not shocking, is it? The size of it was definitely shocking. Just because you all assumed they're big and they're addictive. But then Candy Crush and their initial rise was the first time in the industry where I heard like, man, this thing is a money printing machine. It's like, you know, they would, you know, and not all this was at App Love. And it's like, once you're an ad tech, you're like learning about the industry, you're meeting other people, and you're like, hey, these guys are willing to just blanket pay eight bucks for a user in the US. And I'm like, okay, well.
- That seems pretty expensive. Like why are they doing that? And like, how much does it make out the other side? $8 is what they were spending. Yeah, I think at that time it was like, hey, if we're like a male, you know, 18 to 35 or something, it might be eight bucks or something like that. And then on the other side, I talked to somebody over there and I'm like, they're like, yeah, we make like 20 bucks on them like in like seven days. And I'm like, and maybe those numbers are slightly off, but like they were making a multiple to where you were like, wait, so you just have this machine where you just press this button and you put in money and you know, seven days later, three times the more money come out. And I'm like, wow, like how do I get that? I don't even pay my bank account every single day.
- You guys had that a little bit with Apple oven. Yeah, I've been had that. I mean, I didn't have that right I don't have the same mechanic. Obviously you're at this company you're vested you have a shared interest in the long run But you know me being me I was like I want that like I want the ability to have that and then the freedom to work on things that I'm really excited about And so I tried that obviously so a lot harder than just you know one person in their bedroom doing it, but What did Adam at love and say was he like this just we had no idea or was he At methodical and enough to see them is So fantastic at execution that is just like he's like a machine. It's like, you know, what?
- when the thing I really loved about him and the things I learned the most from him were like, when you wanted to go do something, like sometimes you're like, oh man, man, this situation isn't working. And Adam's the CEO of AppLovin. Yeah, he's CEO of AppLovin. And you know, you have these situations where it's like, I gotta go do X or you really feel like you gotta go make this move, this deal's bad, maybe this higher was bad or this higher was good or something like that. A lot of people kind of wait on it a little bit after deciding and you kind of create some time. What's a good time to do it? For him it was like, okay, we'll just go do this now. Like, we'll stop in us and then, you know, the other things like that were, you know, I started there as kind of an engineer and then very quickly he was like, oh, you could run this team, you could run this team.
- and manage the whole team. I was like, great, we talked. And then that's kind of always been my experience that like that never really gets communicated. And then it feels like, cool, I'm like the manager, but not. I think a lot of people end up in that situation, especially in companies. And then like the next morning, it's like a meeting with the whole team. He puts the org chart up. And then every time we changed it, it was the same situation happened. He was so clear and effective with his communication and execution that I was like, I really need to be like that. That's what like, I think, plus execution looks and feels like day in and day out. And it's like, it's not emotional.
- It's very logical. It's very quick and I think speed in these situations helps create clarity because when you Or read the other way around clarity help create speed. Yeah, we're both right like, you know And I think clarity in the sense that if you delay it your team becomes unclear and then it gets a little muddy And then you're like wait, what is what's going on here? Why is this guy kind of acting like that and that person not and I think just being very Fast and quick in that execution once you decide you should go and execute it And I think that that's that's the thing that I learned is like how quickly can you do that and how? Effectively, can you do that whether it's an email and I?
- I'm really not good at this. It's kind of one of the reasons I pointed at it, because I see myself kind of like, oh, wait on this a little bit, or send this email tomorrow. I don't want to open up this kind of worms right now. And then it's actually that's the exact opposite trace. Just go have a bias for action and kind of go do that. And so from him, I learned just an amazing amount. And how do you operate at this level? And I mean, since I've left, Dave grown so much that it feels like I was only at the 1% of it. I feel like I don't know 99% of the story anymore, because.
- They've grown well beyond that. They've expanded into other areas. They're really big now from the revenue side. They're really big now from what their marketplace is and they're very well known. And I kind of get all the benefit from being there a long time ago, which is great for me. But I'm sure there were more learnings that I missed along the way. Just hold monologue on app love and that's going to be our clip. Nice. That was a good one. Cool. We should wrap for today. That was awesome, man. Fircon Wars with me across the street. So any time we want to do this again, we can do this again. So we'll have people.
- We'll put your Twitter handle in the notes of this, and so people can follow you, get tweeted to you whatever after this as well. We don't know. I'm so uncertain as to how many listeners we have, but I do know that last time I asked for reviews, we got a few hundred of them in a handful of hours, 24, 48 hours. If you like this one, tweet at him. You could say your handle in a second, and then let us know and we'll figure out what next to do. Yeah. My handle is FurconR on Twitter. That's F-U-R-Q-A-N-R. Awesome. Thank you.

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- the hospital software guy. Here's what he said. You'll like this. It was simpler. He said, yeah, like, agree with all that stuff. Here's what we thought about it. We need to have 500 salespeople that can sell a million dollars worth of product a year. Or 250, oh, sorry, 500 that can sell half a million a year or 250 that can sell a million dollar as their sales quota per year. So we just work backwards from that. All right, what features products and like people do we need to like let a sales per year, like get 500 salespeople that can sell half a million dollars a year like sales quota. Like first, is that even possible? Can the, can this market support that? Yes, the market is very big. Hospital spent a lot of money in healthcare. And in our category, they spend more than, much more than that. Yeah.
- All right, we're live. So look, you said Sean that you didn't want to do an event because you didn't want to travel. I decided to host one anyway. It's just like a meetup. But do you see the link that I posted? Like the event bright thing? It's no big deal, but you see it? Yeah, you posted like an event in New York with you and a bunch of our like kind of tech buddy friend. No, just me and Sahal. I was just like, I want to get out of the house. I want to do something. And dude, a thousand people have RSVP'd and I have no idea where we're going to host it. I have no idea what we're going to do. I don't have a plan. I know nothing.
- I don't know it sounded like you had a plan you were like we're moving it to this other place and blah blah sounded like something's in the work some guy DM me on Twitter and said I'll help you find a video of venue and I said great you're in charge I don't know his name but. Cool you're it. No check facts. Hope it works and then I got Nick Gray the the small party guy to come and I was like dude just come and organize this and you can sell books there. But I don't know what I'm going to do.
- Would it be lame if we're just stand around and just say hi? Yeah, kinda lame. Well, what the fuck what am I supposed to do juggle? I don't know should have thought of that before you posted it, bro Like we did the live pod thing in Austin Miami and Honestly, I don't think it was very good. I don't think listening to a podcast live is that entertaining and the energy like a Planned like comedy skit unless like we like planned like we had a bit you know what I mean It did like yeah scripted stage play. Yeah, well, no just like that's what comedians do right, you know It's like scripted, but they also kind of flow a little bit, but yeah
- Or you're just so big that people like simply the idea of seeing your life is that entertaining. Like, I don't think we're there yet. Like I went to Tim Ferriss did a live thing once and it was just him sitting on a chair as a fireside chat. I've seen the guys who do whatever that political thing is like John Favreau or whatever they have like a political podcast. Pod saves America or something like that. They do live shows and people just like geek out about meeting them and seeing them. I don't think we're there yet. And also just in general, I'm a big energy guy.
- Basically, my idea of a good time is where the energy is like steady up and rising to the right. And like, you know, my idea of any kind of bad time is a dip in energy. Like the same way people feel about awkward silences in a conversation. I feel about energy dips. Like if I sense the energy going low or hang out because that's what happens when you do, Hey, we're two dudes from Twitter or a podcast. Let's talk in front of you or let's say hi, like, it's just kind of lame, isn't it? Well, maybe the say the say hi is helpful though. I don't know what to do. I got to I have these people coming. I hear what I think is going to happen. I think that they're not actually coming to see me. I'm just the excuse for all these Twitter dorks to see one another.
- So I got an idea that I think would be dope, that you could use for this, or we could use for something else. But basically, I was like, okay, like, I'll tell you, I went to this event in LA just now, that my buddy Romine threw. And it's like, whatever, there's a conference, but the day before the conference, there's like the dinner. And now this was like a baller dinner. It was like at the home of an NBA team, owners like on his rooftop looking at the beach. It was like beautiful, right? But like, even if it wasn't that baller of a surroundings, like the house wasn't that sick, this still would have been awesome because it was basically, the table was full of like, basically there was two tables. Each table had like one really famous person.
- and then like two kind of famous people and then the rest were interesting but not famous people. And just simply like there was a conflict. Which one of those were you? I was the just interesting person. Got it, okay. I just started to understand like the level of fame we're talking about. No, no, I'm talking about like real fame. Like professional athlete actor, that level of fame. Which actors were there? I can't say the names of anybody that was there. It was more of an athlete. It was an athlete event, not so much actors. Like A-list people.
- of athletes, it was like former A-list. It's like a former B-list, let's say. It's like, you know, you're not on the cover of the video game, but like, you know, I remember your name, I've seen you play, I had to make a new video. You know that gamer's attributes. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, exactly. I could tell you, exactly. I have memories of you playing the game, not like a bench farmer. So anyways, but my point is these dinner table, like basically just like a table. And whether that table is like, you're playing poker or you're eating food or something like that, just like a round table of like eight people, where the expectation is that, hey, we're all here to get to know each other. Like we're all here to talk. And then you kind of can rotate. I think we could do one of those for the MFM community where we take the like 10 or 15, like most baller guests. So it's like Andrew Wilkinson has his table and you have your table. I have my table and then Steph Smith has her table and Ben has his table. And like, we just do this with like kind of like,
- Well-known business people, we take, you know, we get whoever, you know, our famous guests, a Rob Deardak or we get biology or whatever, we get some of these people to show up and then we curate the rest of the guest list is you are interesting, but you're not necessarily famous. So maybe you got a really interesting business. Maybe you're really like knowledgeable about some science or domain or something like that. You're just like a nerd in your own right. But they're all fans and we basically just set up these tables and it's like whatever, there's room of 10 tables and whether it's food or poker or something, there's some activity to do while you're there, just casually while you're talking and you get to hop. So you get to rotate between, I don't know, three or four of these tables while you're there, random draws and like that's the event. I think people have more fun with something like that because they participate than sitting and watching other people talk. That's my personal guess. So I would do that for an MFM event. Bro.
- Great, that's cool, but I have a thousand people coming on a lot. Can we have 10 people and a hundred person tables? It's just a lot. That's a lot of a lot. You don't have to let all thousand that was a get interest list. That wasn't a you're accepted in, right? I don't know. I made this was a toilet event. I made it on my phone. I was on toilet and I tweeted it out and it didn't work. Here's what I think you should do. I think you should whatever you do something the same way. You're like, all right, everybody. We're all meeting in this junkyarder. We're gonna look for scraps and like that'll filter out people you want to hang out with. It'll be a no headache event and then separately I will host this cool event. That's well planned. And you just show up to that. You don't have to do any work. Whatever. We'll see.
- Can I talk to you about one thing really quick and then I want to hear about your event dude have you listened to the full send podcast? Like not regularly, but I've definitely seen clips like when they had Dana why or mark Cuban I see a bunch of clips I don't exactly understand what full send is but I know they're incredibly popular like I it's I don't know if it's like a boy Band where it's like four guys doing something or if it's just the two main guys and the rest are co-host But it's basically a group of like yeah, go ahead explain what it is roughly
- So I'm also not an expert, but it's basically the group is the milk boys. That's like the main name of the group. Full send is like their brand and one of their podcasts and stuff like that. But these guys are basically the way I think about it is they are like what Jackass was when we were growing up. That's what the milk boys are now. So Jackass back in the day was basically guys doing stunts, pranks, you know, punching each other in balls. Basically a group of guys who are kind of like, they're willing to go all out for your entertainment and for their own amusement. They kind of, they live a certain lifestyle and it's kind of like the like.
- If you take a boys like fantasy, you just like crank it up to 12. It's like, that's what these guys do. The milk boys are a little bit like that. They make YouTube videos. They got big on YouTube. They also have a bunch of brands. So they have one brand that's basically an equivalent of Girls Gone Wild. It's like a paid membership club that's like for photos or videos or something. I don't know. I'm ready to know about that. What's that called? That's called, I don't know, Ben, find the name of that one. So that's one of their businesses that I think is really smart, probably Prince Bunny. They have merch that they drop and they've done merch drops. They like share the live stream when they're like doing it. Obviously, this is a little bit of hype, but like whatever. They're basically like the Shopify drop shipper bro on steroids. They'll do like two or $3 million worth of sales in like five minutes when they do a drop. So the New York Times, well, New York Times had last year they did about 80 million in revenue.
- Which is pretty good, but right 50 million in merchandise this is I think Yeah, and then it's other on try to do eight or maybe at 70 the next year and this article's a year old And then they have this new stick going on and F T They all types of crap But then if you go to that link that I sent you each guy has like a video page and one of these guys His name is Steve and I think this is like a point where I realize I'm out of touch He's just like giving away a million dollars in every video Like Mr. Beast playbook, but he's like giving two issues. He's like here I just gave this guy a hundred thousand dollar watch I just gave this family two million dollars and in all these videos He goes yeah, I'm gonna go give this guy a car and then he was with Dana and he goes I'm gonna Dana. I just got this four hundred thousand dollar van made it's yours On one of the videos they gave a guy 250,000 in cash for his birthday on another thing They're giving away two hundred thousand dollars just to her family in need like so whatever fine videos But he's doing these multiple times a month. These guys are gonna run out of money, right?
- I have no idea how they give this much away or if they actually give it away. It's so much. It's actually just like, you know, you know, like a stage thing or if there's some like caveats or whatever. I have no idea. They show the apartment. They show the guy's apartment and he's got his watch collection and I know a little bit of watches. It's literally $3 million worth of Rolexes. And then it's like in a four million dollar. Well, I believe that they could have dope stuff but literally giving away millions of dollars. And if I look at his YouTube channel, he does do that sometimes but like he has other ones like, here's my $3 million man cave. Here's, you know, here's me, you know, whatever buying this car or racing this car. So that's a little different than giving it away. But I know like, so did you watch when Mr. Beast was doing this when he would go and he would basically give away $30,000, $50,000 or he'd go into a Twitch stream that has like two viewers. He would just drop 20 grand in a donation and the person would freak out and that clip would go viral. Like, did you see those and do you know how he was doing those?
- I know they exist and I saw them. I don't know like anything behind it. One of the things that he was doing, I don't know if this is the full story, Ben, maybe your friends with Mr. B. So maybe you know, he seems to consider you one of his top three closest friends. That's a plan. You may know better, but I remember meeting one guy who worked at this site called Quid, Quib, some of that Quid I think it was. And basically Quid was like these like, I don't know, little collectible stickers and cards or something like that. It was kind of like aimed at a teenage audience. And what they did was they would go to Mr. Beast and they would say, hey, we'll pay you $50,000 for a sponsor video. And the genius of Mr. Beast was he was like, cool. But here's what we're gonna do.
- That's not you paying me for a shout out midway through one of my videos. Let's make the video about using $50,000 in an interesting way. How about that? And so he would do these videos where he would be like, I'm going to go to this coffee shop and I'm going to tip the barista $15,000. And let's see her reaction. And he would go and he would tip her. She would have this crazy reaction. But thanks so much to our guys at Crib who made this possible. Go check them out. They do this thing, right? The video would get like 5 million or 10 million views. And so for the for quid or whatever, they're like, dude, this is great. Like we're getting way more bang for our buck than any other influencer shout out we're doing. So then they would up the ante. They would do 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 because each video is getting like 10 million views. And it was this like perfectly like, I forgot what it's called in biology where like the parasite actually helps you. It like sucks out the toxin. So the parasites getting food, but you're also getting healed. It was basically like a symbiotic relationship like that where the brand was basically putting up loads of cash and he was using that to create huge amounts of views and subscribers to make himself the biggest. I don't think these guys have that's cool. I don't think these guys have sponsors.
- Well, they must have it somewhere, right? Like the model must be that either it's the same thing. The money comes in one door, then they reinvest it in stuff like this, because they know that seems to be a pretty good formula. I give away, you know, I'm going to give this family in the hood $100,000. You know, let's see what happens. And it's him standing with like three, you know, three banks of people from Home Depot. That's literally the second most recent video. And it's got 2.7 million views. So clearly that works. This video will monetize. No, on top of that, that's, that's their whole shtick because they got banned. They can't monetize their videos.
- Okay. Yeah, I don't know how it's sustainable. Maybe it's not sustainable. But by the way, and it's also explicit. I don't think you could put ads on an explicit channel. But just like the economics behind what these guys are doing, it's outrageous to me. Something is crazy. I don't think I'm though I think when I see this and I predict that they're going to go broke, I don't think I'm the crazy one. Yeah, baby, I could see that. I could also see these things being money printers. So like in the same way that I think the Jackass franchise ultimately was successful, right? You see like
- Oh dude, there's like a midget in a thong, you know, kicking this other guy in the balls. You're like, well, this doesn't seem like good business. But in actuality, as long as they have a good man, as long as they have their Kris Jenner in the background, that's like, yeah, go act the fool. Like this is, this is what drives ratings, then this will work. And like the New York Times headline about them is what won't the Nelk boys do? And this is like, how's it like that's a brand, right? That's a really powerful, valuable brand to own is the question isn't what do they do? It's what they, what won't they do? It's like they do pranks, parties, crude humor. They get in trouble, but the backlash is the brand. That's literally the headline. Now, would they go crazy? I don't know. I don't know enough about them, but you know, I'm, I'm actually a fan of what they do. I think they're pretty cool. We should get them on the pod. I want to hear hear their business. I agree. I think one of the, their manager asked to come on, maybe we can talk to them. I heard a story about a friend, a person I know who made $60 million a handful of years ago living in, living out of their car now.
- I learned that this weekend. Wait, what? So I know a person who made $60 million, like 10 years ago, and now they are homeless. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. That's not even crazy. That's normal, bro. Like, Jack Dorsey starts two multi-billion dollar companies and then actively tries to address a homeless guy. That's the thing you do when you get rich. You can then go on some journey to find the meaning of life. In fact, I was telling somebody this the other day, we were reminiscing. It's like, dude, at the event, I was like, dude, I haven't seen you in so many years. Like, when was the last time I saw you? It was like, remember, we were advising that kid on his company and we were both afterwards like, yeah, but that's never going to work. Like, you know, but yeah, good kid, but like, you know, he'll be, maybe he'll be successful in like five years.
- And then his company currently is like a multi-billion dollar company and I was like now that motherfuckers 25 years old Running around like with a huge beard trying to like figure out like basically trying to figure out the meaning of life Like oh shit. You're on a spiritual journey already. Damn it You're like you are so far ahead of us now after we kind of were joking around about how you know You don't have this thing figured out that is the part like the classic tech cliche is to like Be like get I made all this money so that I'm gonna live like somebody who has no money That's like the stereotype. I want to get to your event but really quick one more thing because this is the new cliche So I hate talking about these guys, but Elon
- In the Wall Street Journal it came out yesterday that Elon Musk slept with Sergey Brin, the guy who started Google, his wife. And Sergey aren't friends at all. Elon tweeted two things that were hilarious. The one he goes, this isn't true, I've had sex in forever. I've had sex in months, yeah. And then the next thing he's sigh. Like a little girl. And then the next thing that he tweeted was, here's me and Sergey hanging out right now on a boat. And it's them like drinking wine together like partying. Did he post a picture? Yes. Or, yeah, either he did or someone did it. He replied to it, said, yeah, that was us literally yesterday.
- That's so funny. Yeah, funny. Here's what I here's how I was feeling about this. I was like, all right. I Saw the saw the news break or whatever. It was like scoop on the Wall Street Journal scoop exclusive scoop Elon Musk sleeping with whatever blah blah and And I was like, okay, that's kind of interesting. I guess like all right. I got some TMZ shit and I was like well pretty sad for like, you know, the Wall Street. It was the Wall Street Journal Feel pretty sad that that's like the Wall Street Journal's thing. But of course I get it if I had that story I'd publish it to no doubt
- Then he tweets out like the thing, not true, and have had sex in months, sigh. And I was like, ah, now another sad thing. Like first, Wall Street Journal disappointed me. Then Elon Musk disappointed me. Like dude, I want my billionaires like being cool, not like, dude, that was like my MSN, like a way message, you know, just a cry for attention back in middle school or high school. I was like, ah man, wouldn't be nice to get a, like I wonder what a kiss feels like. You know, some shit like that. It's like dude, lame. And then it was like, well.
- So did the washerders make that up because that's even so it was just like a lame sandwich that I was not into Hilarious how he tweeted a picture of him in Sergey just hanging out. I Enjoyed the drama. I'm here for I don't care about the cars. I don't care about the solar stuff. I just like this type of crap Yes, somebody had this great tweet. They were like Elon Musk is like, you know He's on some pirate shit. He's taking over companies like Twitter He's trying to like conquer new lands like Mars. He's sleeping with his friends girlfriends like he's he's on that pirate shit I was like, yeah, it's true. That's cool if true, but it sounds like maybe this one's not actually true
- All right. What's this? What's this event? By the way, we forgot to say on the milk boys, they have like their beer, which I think is also like a big thing. They're happy dad, like, celcer or beer, whatever the heck that is. Happy dad is like everywhere on Instagram. Like, it's like the main brand. I've seen a lot of people drink it. Yeah. I've seen a ton of. All right. So I want to tell you some things about this event. And these are going to be kind of rapid fire little nuggets. You can choose to say the following. You can either say, that's stupid and I'll simply move on. I won't defend it. You'll say, that's cool. I have nothing to add and I'll simply move on. Or we could talk about any of these things.
- All right, so I go to this event in LA. My buddy Romine, who we run our fund together, he hosts this event and is basically like athletes and big shot investors. So at this event, we're like three or four owners of like sports teams. So these are basically like billionaires or billionaire families, like legacy families. How did he get these people? They just wanted to come, I guess. I don't know, he just cold reached out. He's not paying anybody and it's a free event. So there's like no money to be made, but this is just like in network.
- Then there's pro athletes, mostly retired athletes, but some active players like kind of like some guys from the Lakers, some guys from other teams that are younger guys, but then some older guys that are retired and they're like on to the next phase of their business life. And they maybe are doing content now, they got like a media brand or they're doing real estate or whatever. And so the idea was let's get together like 50 people from the world of sports and 50 people from the world of like tech and business. And let's see what happens. So I went last year, I went this year again, and I have a couple of like little stories.
- So the first is, I'm going to tell you there was one talk that was good. There was like a bunch of talks on the day of the conference. There was only one talk that I thought was good. And by the way, that's shitting on myself too. I hosted a panel too, I didn't think was very good. But the one was really good, it was basically lessons from billion dollar founders. So on stage was the CEO of Carta. So Carta, they do cap table management, they're a multi-billion dollar company. Something called
- Oh, shoot, what was it? It's like a therapy app. And then they will come to me. It's basically like mental health. It's like a better hope, but it's not them. It's like some other comparing to them. Talk space. Another one. But basically they basically do like therapy and mental health through telemedicine, like online. And there's another one that was like some hospital software, a Thelos, and then there was this most interesting one just in the called Relativity Space. And by the way, you could basically tell, you know, I wouldn't say that the most interesting person at a conference is always the one who dresses differently.
- But somebody who's dressed very differently is almost always very interesting at these conferences. Last year when I was there, I told you I saw this kid who looked like a breakdancer, wearing this like tie-dye shirt with like a black stud earring. It looked different than every other, you know, suit in the room. And it was the founder of Bolt, who now has become a lot more famous because he like, you know, went on these Twitter tirades and Bolt as a multi-billion dollar company and all this stuff. But I met him there and invested in his company because I was like, this dude's just really interesting. So that happened again. This guy is the founder of Relatively Space. He's competing with Elon. His two competitors are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Like, you know, the big deal. I'm competing with the world's richest man and like second richest man, basically. Is this Tim Ellis? Tim Ellis, yeah. And so I'm just going to share with you two things. One is this dude's company is insane. So Relatively Space, what they do is they 3D print rockets.
- and then they send them into space. So basically there's a huge demand for rocketry. So the ability to take satellites up to space to do some scientific missions, whatever. And right now SpaceX is like the number one, Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos company, is number two, and Relativity Space is number three, but they kind of have a differentiator, which is all those other companies like to build a rocket, they need like, whatever, hundreds of parts, like specialty parts. And they might 3D print individual parts, but like the whole thing is like a very expensive, complex structure that where a million things can go wrong. Whereas these guys basically 3D print the entire rocket.
- with only a couple extra parts and And so because of that they're like, you know cheaper and whatever he said this line this throwaway line He's like so he's explaining. He's like, you know our mission is to make humanity like humanity multi-planetary Through 3d printing rockets or one of only two companies on earth that has a mission of making the human race like multi multi-planetary The other is SpaceX he goes the launch market today is 8 billion a year So 8 billion gets spent launching things into space and is growing to 30 billion There's really only three companies that possibly can serve this right now And he's like, you know, we in the last three months we have we've sold over 1.2 billion in launch in launch sales
- Dude, he started the company was 25. He's 32 now. So he used to work at Jeff Bezos' company, Blue, or as an intern. His Wikipedia says, as an intern. And he was trying to do 3D printing there. He was like, hey, I think this is like one of the ways we can dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of rockets. And it was like, yeah, nice R&D, but like it wasn't the main way they were doing things. So he left and he starts this thing. He goes, we have 850 employees, 500 are X SpaceX. I thought that was literally the funniest shit anybody could say. I was like, what kind of absurd statement is that? That's so amazing to me. And he's like, you know, we have a launch site now. That was like the big progress last year. We have a launch site. So we're going to be doing our first big, like, I don't know if our first big or next big launch there. There are only four launch sites in the country. None have been built since 1960. And we now have exclusive rights to one for the next 25 years. It's like, you know, he's basically because in this talk, he's like, what makes a company worth so much? People see me. Okay. I'm a young guy. I'm a young guy. Company's not that old. And it's worth how many billions of dollars? Like that's crazy. And he's like, well, here's what we did. He's like.
- We hopped into an emerging wave. So we basically, there's surging demand for going in for missions into space for satellites and more. There's not enough supply. No, there's basically not much competition. Everybody's sort of scared away. So in actuality, just going into the space, we're not competing with most companies. The next one is, basically like defensibility, we have a launch site. There's only four of these. None have been built in like 60 years. And we have one of them. And so like, we should even do this. We should even do this.
- What does that do with the billionaire lessons? Well, these are lessons. What does it take to build a billion dollar company? These are the core elements, like defensability. That's one of their modes. The next one is like this extreme imbalance and supply and demand. Dude, how lame must you feel if you're like a software guy like Carter, like following this guy? You know what I mean? Well, they each had to say their thing. So I'll tell you what each of them said. So this is what this guy was saying. All right, the next guy, the telehealth guy, there's not telehealth, sorry, the hospital software guy.
- Here's what he said. You'll like this. He's a little simpler. He said, yeah, like, agree with all that stuff. Here's what we thought about it. We need to have 500 salespeople that can sell a million dollars worth of product a year or 250, oh, sorry, 500 that can sell half a million a year or 250 that can sell a million dollars as their sales quota per year. So we just work backwards from that. All right. So we have features, products, and like people do we need to like let a sales per year like get 500 salespeople that can sell half a million dollars a year like sales quota. Like first, is that even possible? Can the can this market support that? Yes. The market is very big. Hospital spent a lot of money in healthcare and in our category, they spend more than much more than that. Okay. Cool. So it's possible then he's like all of our product team, they know they work for sales. And I thought that was very different than what most people say. He's like, Silicon Valley loves to preach that like product is king, product is the God, you just need a great product. He was like, we build great product if it's going to help us sell better. And like we build great customer support so that it helps us sell better. Everything is in service of sales. So I really like that guy's kind of like one minor approach.
- The card a guy basically was like, you know, we, he's like, here's how I think about it. He's like, you need, you need to, he basically is like, you want to find a multi-billion-dollar wave if you're going to be a billion-dollar company. He's like, so find an emerging wave. So for example, the telehealth guy, his is that, his was that mental health coverage was now required. So like a bunch of, I don't know if it's like insurance companies or companies, they were now requiring that like mental health is part of a healthcare package. He's like, that change. He goes, second thing that change was mental health is getting destigmatized. You're seeing all kinds of famous people talking about mental health. It's not like this taboo subject. I call it an inflection. So there's like regulatory inflections, which is like, all right, now you can do telemedicine. That's a new thing. There's cultural inflections, which is, wow, it's not weird to talk in front of your camera anymore and like make a video. There's technology, technology, technological inflections, which is like, oh, wow, our phones all have GPS's. So you want to like look for different inflections.
- Right. That's exactly what he was saying. And the last one he mentioned was like, the pandemic was another inflection because it forced everybody, if they needed a doctor visit to do a video on. So it's like everybody had to try it for this two year period. And so video visits and telemedicine, now the hospitals know they need to have it. Doctors know they need to be willing to do this and patients have like tried it once. All right, the next thing he goes, he goes team, he goes, billion dollar companies are almost never bootstrapped. So you kind of have to know that going in, like if you're going to build a billion dollar company, you almost certainly are going to raise money because you're going to hire A plus players. They need to have an A plus mission. And secondly, you need to have a high velocity customer acquisition model.
- And I just thought that phrase is very good. High velocity customer acquisition model is something you could just kind of ask yourself, do I or don't I have a high velocity customer acquisition model? Every business wants one pretty much. And you got to say like, okay, what's our current velocity? So at what rate are we currently adding customers? How high would it need to be for us to get there? And like, what are we going to do to make this, this little wheel spin faster? All right. But let me have those good. Those four guys, those four people, right? Four guys? Yeah. Yeah. So we're very tired and exhausted looking and be, do you think they're happy?
- All right, we'll give you the scale. The mental health guy honestly looked not tired and happy. He was like fit. He didn't have like crazy bags under his eyes. He like spoke with energy and he was like sitting upright. That makes sense. That checks out. Cardi guy. He looked calm. Like he didn't look like he was facing death, but he looked like he like had been facing death for some extended period. Yeah, he's really has five lives. Yeah, like, you know, I could tell he wasn't in bad shape at all, but you know, like.
- didn't look like, you know, he was springing around with energy necessarily. Right. Space guy, that guy looked like he just walked in. It looked like he just walked out of a room. You know, like the scenes in Game of Thrones were like, Oh, shoot, we're going to war and the guy that gets up and out of his bed scramble, like four nude women. And he's like, Oh, okay, yeah, let me just go do my next thing. That's how this guy looked. He had the swagger of a guy in Game of Thrones who was just sleeping with four women, four beautiful women. He had the Tyran Lannister energy. He and that's when he was like, yeah, a billion dollars in sales in the last three months. And like, you know, we have 500 X, space X employees. Yeah, they leave Elon to come. So he seemed like he was happy. That's the energy he was carrying. He looked happy. Damn. Well, fuck you guys. Right. I was sitting with him at lunch and he was asking questions to everybody else. And like that was one of the most that was one of the coolest parts of this event. I don't know how they did it, but nobody had an ego. Like, everybody who was there, I don't know if they just filtered people out who had egos, or they just like everybody got the vibe, which is like, everybody here is equally valuable. Be curious about others. You're not just like the star. And all these people are used to being the star. It's like, yeah, you're, you own that NBA team. You own that football team. Or like, you're like this superstar, like, you know, the guy on my panel with me, I think he had like, you know, 90 million dollar hit a 90. He just signed like a 90 million dollar contract. He's like one of the highest paid NFL players.
- And the guy was like, dude, I'm just here to learn, man. I would love to subscribe to your newsletter and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, wow, this is incredible. You are going to go so far in life because you are obviously skilled and successful, but you're so humble. It was crazy. Damn. How many people were there? About a hundred, 120, maybe. Romine organized this. Yeah. So basically Romine and then tribe, which is like a VC fund. Um, uh, tribe was one of the hosts and then TPG, which is like one of the biggest private equity companies in the world. Like, why is this guy working with you? $120 billion. What? Why is this guy working with you?
- Bro, I always have that tear in linear, I understand energy regardless of what my situation is. Holy crap, this guy's amazing. Well, that's badass. That was in LA. Was in LA. I'm gonna give you a couple of other things that I took away from this. Ben, so Ben Levy, who's not producer Ben, a business partner Ben. He has a superpower that we talk about. Now, have I told you about his superpower? His superpower to me is people just tell him shit and he just smiles and laughs. And then he uses it against none.
- if if he needs to fucking trust magnet. Yeah. I don't know what he does. Everybody trusts him. Like me and you I've known you for I don't know how long like eight years. We spent time together. We've gone through ups and downs adversity. We've I've seen each other. Whatever. We know each other very well. You might have met Ben twice in your life. But even you will be like if there's something interesting or something going on. You like text Ben like do my new business doing awesome or something like that. And he just has that pull with people. Everybody wants to talk to Ben. Everyone wants to tell him. So enthusiastic.
- I don't know what it is, but I saw a super on blast. So I'm gonna tell you a little story here. And I don't even know how much we can take away from this. I'm just gonna kind of explain that it happened just so that, just cause I think it was amazing. And because I think that if there is a way to learn this skill, everybody should learn it. I'm trying to learn it myself. So I'm gonna talk a lot about it. So we go to this event. At the event, I get a text from Ben, Ben sitting across the room. We split up at the events. We don't always just sit together and just only talk to each other cause that's kind of defeats the purpose. And he's like, yo, the dude next to you, is awesome. And I go, who? He goes, that's Chris Johnson. That's this guy who, he trains like some of the best NBA players on the planet.
- And I was like, oh really? Like I'm a big NBA fan. I was like, I don't know this guy. Like he must follow him on Instagram. Like Ben's is like even deeper down the rabbit hole. So I was like, oh, cool. But I was like, I don't know what to do with that information. Like I guess like if the opportunity kind of presents itself, I'll go introduce myself. Like, you know, I have nothing to, you know, I don't know how to force my way. And he seems busy right now, but okay. Ben does something where he, I don't know what he did, but he approached this guy, Ben approached this guy and he starts talking to him. And I think two things happen. I think number one.
- in a room full of the guys who are usually on screen. This guy who himself is obviously like a heavy hitter in his space, the average Joe did not know who he was, right? Like every tech nerd who was in there doesn't know who this guy is. Even people who like sports probably didn't know that this guy's like the skills trainer for all these top guys. And I'm talking about like this guy will train with Dwayne Wade and LeBron James and like other guys like that, like the top of the top. And Ben goes up to him and he's like, dude, I'll follow you man. I love your videos. It gives him a compliment.
- They start chatting a little bit. I Don't know what Ben said next but I think I'm gonna skip to the end that will fill in the middle the end is The events over everybody's leaving people go on to the airport this guy comes up to me He's I'm talking to man. We're just figuring out we're gonna get our uber. He goes I Knew I was coming to this event for a reason, but I didn't know why This man was the reason he points away And I go what? What do you mean like what did he do? He's like I don't even know man. He goes this I am so happy I met this guy Ben. I will always remember our conversation. He goes. He said something he goes like he goes He's like he's he's like bro brother anything you need anything you need I got you And I was like and he this is not the type of guy. He's not schmoozing. This is not this is a guy where when words come out of his mouth they mean something and
- And I'm just like, I'm just in there. I'm not even laughing. I'm not even asking questions. I'm speechless. I get this look on my face like, what the fuck did you do Ben? How did you do this again? And Ben still, he's just smiling. You don't even say anything back to this guy. He's just smiling. And I go, I go, what? I go, what did he, I go, what happened? Why? He goes, I guess I don't even, he goes, I don't even know. He doesn't even know the spell he's under. He goes, I don't even know. But he goes, you know, I'm a trainer, man. I work with athletes when they need something they call me. When they're, when they're slumped, they call me. When they're trying to get better to come, when they want their next contract, they call me. I help these guys get paid. I'm always helping. I drive to this guy's house. I drive here. I fly there. I do this. I do that. I'm always pouring into other people. He goes, Ben, you filled me up. You pour into me today. What the hell, man? And I was like, what just happened? I was so amazed.
- And the guy goes the guy goes when you flying out and Ben's like tomorrow he goes come train with us tomorrow Ben goes with him the next morning to his facility and does a session the guy spends two hours correcting Ben's form There's other NBA players there. He's locked in the bed Ben sends me this video. He's wearing like a fucking weighted vest He's got a glove on his hand because this guy like invented a shooting glove He made a experience out of it for Ben and I really appreciate like this guy didn't have to do that That was incredibly nice of this guy. He was just a very like I don't know It was very like you could see why this guy works to so many people because there's something magnetic about this guy's personality What's his name? But two magnets met dude, and I don't know how I don't know what Ben superpower is I don't know how he does this consistently these sorts of things happen where people are just very Attracted to him in this way. I don't know what it is, but he's amazing. It's you know who else is really good at that
- Me who I'm fucking good at that I'm good at that you are good at that. I'm not that good, but I'm good. Yeah This data is wrong every freaking time Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Well, I can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and Here's a test from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot, grow better
- So yesterday, we'll talk about a second, but yesterday I did an interview with Martin Shkreli. And I wanted it to go well. I was like, yeah, okay, you know, I think people can be interested in this. Let me do a good job. And I'm five minutes into the interview. And I find myself doing the like bullshit socialize. I'm like, ha, ha, ha, yeah, I'm like smiling, I'm laughing. I'm like, so that must have been hard for you to blah, blah, blah. And what would you say? I'm just like falling into some fucking like script. I don't know. I like became some character, this like generic podcast character. And literally the thought of my head was Sam would never do this. Like he's he said something he was he was talking about like how he like he's like, yeah, dude, I got a contraband cell phone. I was on the internet the whole time I was in prison.
- And I was like, and I was like, I was started to, and I was like, dude, if Sam was like, you know what I would ask, right? What? What websites were you using? Like what were you, what were you going to? You would have been like, wait, what? How do you get it in there? Do you like get it? Like you had to put it between your butt cheeks? And like you would have said something like that to kind of disarm him to get him to share an interesting that you would have just genuinely been like, wait, what the hell? Like, hold on, no. And you would have just reacted like a normal person rather than like, that's fascinating. You know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on a bubble. It's like, dude, that's podcaster versus real person. And so I like literally switched into Sam mode and I started being like, I was like, what do you know? And then he shares this hilarious thing. He goes, yeah, dude. And you would have been like, how much was it? I was like, how much did you get the phone for? He's like, dude, he's crazy. He's like, you have to buy these things for like thousands and all he's like, I paid $1,000 for one phone. And I thought, shit, this phone must be made out of gold because he's like, but you have to do it because to get the phone in, they got a grease, you know, one guy to get one guy to get another guy. You know, bribe five guys to get this in. And so like, you know, you gotta pay that big. And he's like, most guys, I was like, so what do you use it for? Exactly your question. He goes,
- He goes, yeah, most guys just use, it's for porn. And he's like, he's like, but me, I'm on GitHub and like Khan Academy and porn, I did that too. But like, yeah, I was with all the guys using this for like advanced math also, you know, under the covers, listening to this. And that little magic moment that came out. Yeah, it was great news about it. That doesn't happen, that doesn't happen unless you kind of act the way that you act, that Ben acts where it's like, yours is a little different. Yours is like, you get to like real talk really fast. Ben just kind of like seems so curious and earnest. I think that people really like, they like how genuinely interested he is in their life and how helpful he tries to be without like.
- Seeking anything or talking about himself. Have you read the book how to win friends that influence people? I read like the first chapter where it was like the people's favorite word in the name. Yeah, and I was Yeah, this is great. I never read that book that book like changed my life and in one of the chapters He talks about how There was a story of a man like sitting with the with a young guy and the young guy like wanted something like a job Or something from the from the older guy But the young guy, you know used Dale Carnegie's practices and basically like he just listened to him The entire time and you know the older guy did all the talking and at the end of the
- The end of the conversation older guy goes wow this is the best conversation I've ever had with anyone ever and the younger guy was like well I didn't say a word so but like that that's funny how that works and the older guy goes like you know You should we're friends now. You should come in like apply at our company You know like things like that and that like changed my life when I learned when I learned that strategy And so when I want to get stuff from people I usually amp them up So I'll do one of two things one I'll either insult them a little bit like if I know that their business is doing above a hundred million in revenue I'll be like that's that's a nice little business What do you guys do like 50 million like and then they're gonna like tell me the exact So I'll like make them a little or the thing that would do more often than that is I just encourage them like crazy like wow You did that you are so amazing. You're my hero, dude How did you do that? You know and they'll like start like gushing and I just make them feel really good about themselves This sounds manipulative which I guess it is but I don't think it's a bad manipulative, but yeah, it works
- Yeah, the way I put it is like you go to these events to make connections with new people, right? That's the point. Oh, we wouldn't go to an event if it wasn't for that. But it's kind of hard to do that. I find myself like feeling uncomfortable in a lot of those situations. You know, like, okay, I introduce myself to this person. I don't like quickly, you know, like, are they interested in me? Am I, it's very much like a like a dating component to that, to this like a speed dating component to these events. And you sort of see their eyes start to wander. It's like, oh, they're clearly like looking for the next conversation and like, you know, the bathroom or some excuse to get out of this sort of thing. Or you're like, or you find yourself tuning out because you're like, Oh, shoot, I'm just kind of judging them like really quickly. Like everybody's got something to offer. I just want to, I should be in the mode of like finding out what that is rather than like looking at their badge and trying to figure out like, are you, you know, valuable at this conference or not? That's sort of a stupid way to do it. But like, I am fascinated with Ben and this guy, Chris, their ability to connect was so strong. Like,
- The way Chris talked to me too, I felt like a friend of his within two minutes. And it's not because he was manipulating me. No, he's just like, that's his energy he carries around. So if I think about why has he been able to connect with these athletes who everybody wants to connect with them? Everybody wants to connect with LeBron James. Everybody wants to connect with Kevin Durant. Everybody wants to connect with Dwayne Wade. How does this guy do it? Well, obviously he's got to be good at his job, but that's not enough. You also have to have the people skills. He told me a story. I think I could share this on here. By the way, he wants to come on the part. I'll tell him to come on. He's the only the story. So I don't know if you probably don't pay attention to this, but... Did any of the people who you met listen?
- Oh, yeah, there were some people who listened to the pod. That's got him. Yeah, not a ton, I would say, but like definitely a few. One of the franchise owners listens, which is kind of... Really? And so, he had listened. I don't know if he's super regular, but... Okay, so basically this guy was talking about the trainer. He was talking about like fear. And so he was like... Somehow we got on the topic of fear. He's like, yeah, man, I work with these guys in the gym. They can hit like, you know, whatever, 90, 93 pointers in a row, like 80, 90%. But in the game, it's obviously lower. And sure, it's the speed is there. The defense is a little tighter. But like...
- Take free throws. There's no defense. There's no speed still the guys in the gym form one way and in the game They form another it's because there's a huge mental component to this He's like so I trained their mental just as much as they're physical. He's like, you know LeBron recently went to play at this thing called the Drew League. I don't know if you've seen this but it's like yeah It's in downtown LA. It's like in the hood basically Truly LeBron I don't think has ever played and it's usually like kind of like former players or like fringe guys journeyman guys who want to make a league they're very good at basketball, but they're not like stars
- And LeBron was like, I'm thinking about going on and dropping in and just playing. And this trainer was like, that would be awesome. And that would mean a lot. Like, I think it would mean a lot to the people. I think you would have fun. It's a legacy thing. Like, it's like one time Kevin Durant went to Rucker Park and he played in Rucker Park. He dropped like 50 points or something like that. And the crowd like mobbed him. They just like ended the game because the crowd just rushed him because he was being so awesome. And they just like hit it three from half-court basically. And like, he just gets mobbed by people. It's like this very memorable thing. And so the guy was like, you should do it. But like, LeBron has a lot to lose at something like this, right? LeBron's already one of the best players in the world.
- already one of the richest, most famous athletes in the world. So he doesn't need the fame. He's not going to get any money. He's not going to get better, like just by playing in this one game with people who are worse than him. Like, um, and there's plenty of things that could go wrong. Like he could get hurt. He could get dunked on our embarrassed and some way crushed over in some way. Like, you know, that sort of thing, or he could just like miss shots and like, uh, man, he went and it was like, dude, you couldn't even like, you weren't, you ain't all that. Like, you know, it wasn't like hype. So he had something to lose. And, um, when he decided to go and then the trainer was, she like pulls up his cell phone as like the NBA all-star game is his eye message. Like just one star after another. He's like, he clicks the text message with me. He's like, he told, he's like, I told him your victory is in your vulnerability.
- Like this you felt you were vulnerable. That's why this was a win for you because he went it was amazing Everybody loved it. He played Superwell drop 40 points and like it was awesome And the clips go viral on Instagram and people really respect him for it He goes you remember that your victory is in your vulnerability and he looked around the circle He was just like remember that and all of us were like nodding like yes, sir I was like I will I what do I need to be I will take my clothes off right now and be more vulnerable if it helps me You know like but he was really inspiring telling these stories and so I love meeting people like this I love hearing stories like this and I love getting these golden nuggets these little things you can take away That like you can use in your own little your own life. You know what my takeaway when I hear this shit is is
- Damn, these guys are cool. I want to be fucking cool like like I want a stick. I look fucking you had to be cool I just google it Amazon how to be cool. Where's this book? I need one of these books. I didn't want I want men to want me Yeah, how do you be cool dude? Where's that book and how to be cool? I want that this guy read it I want to read it too. Yeah I'm so envious when I hear people like this. I'm like damn they got a good stick I meant tell you one other little nugget here
- Do memorable things. I wrote this down. All right, what does that mean? I went to the conference last year, I went this year. In between, I've launched a business, I've, you know, the podcast has grown, blah, blah, blah. Guess what the number one thing people remembered me for at the conference this year? Like e-commerce stuff? Oh, last year, this year? This year, when they're like, oh, I remember you talked about X. Probably investing. The Michael Jordan house thing that we talked about on the podcast. Wait, really? The idea of buying MJ's house.
- So two things happen. That went kind of semi-viral in the sports and sports media and sports agent, OLD. People shared that clip. Like remember the Twitter clip has like 100,000 plus views? People shared that with important people. I think like the TikTok thing was like millions. Maybe you got share with a lot of people. They were like, oh, I remember, you were gonna buy Michael Jordan's house. What happened with that? And they were like, it's like, dude, you remember that from over a year ago? And like, I'm doing a bunch of other things way more seriously. That was just one brainstorm with Sam about this. Like, that's crazy. That was the first thing.
- People were remembering me for that. Then we, while we were there, Ben took a call to potentially invest in this company. And I'm like, cool, what's this guy's background? And the guy's done many things. Ben goes, you remember the Taco Bell Mexican pizza dish? I was like, kinda, I guess. Like, yeah, I know it exists. He goes, they took it away off the menu and people were outraged on social media and this guy got like a million people to sign the petition to bring it back and they brought it back. That's what he was known for. Well, that's what Ben remembered. This guy's done about two interesting things and he had like three stories like that. And once you have like three stories like that.
- It's like all right. I need to know this guy and I feel you do that really well, too Well, you have these little things where it's like the hot dog stand like calls, you know, Sam's weiners is biggest baby's arm Or it's like, you know, the pond star pond stars guy the pawn shop thing or like I feel you have these things that are like that These little nuggets are stories that are like They're memorable, but not for the thing you actually spent years of your life building Yeah, but dude the problem is is that I'm like trading on old stories. I need to do some cooler shit now I'm like, you know, we gotta like do some stuff. I gotta do something Well, I think that's the thing is like do more memorable shit Because these punch above their weight
- You know, they don't take that long and not that hard to do but I was gonna do like a the other day I thought maybe I would like spend three weeks running around on a motorcycle. I was like that's lame I already did that I gotta I gotta think of some I gotta do something cool You know, I think I'll maybe I'll have kids next year. I could do something. I gotta go out with a bang Let's do something cool, man, we gotta do something cool Yeah, I think there's a bunch of things that would be cool to do but they don't make any sense and what I'm learning is that Those things are awesome. Just on a different timescale
- And you gotta land it in a different weird way. And having that little collateral of cool shit that you could talk about is worth it. I thought about walking across the country and I was like, that'd be pretty sick. And then I kind of like thought about playing it out and I'm like, it's pretty far. It might take like six months. Like, I don't know. Like you just listen to audio books all day. Like I don't know. Like you know what I mean? I gotta think of something like...
- Kind of you're authentic right like extreme for extreme sake doesn't work because again You don't know if these are gonna pay off or when they're gonna pay off So you got to do it where the the the act of doing it or talking about it or like that has to be itself enough For you, I was like maybe I'll just like use Twitter and like see if I can hitchhike from like New York to California I don't I got to figure out something I'm gonna figure something out, but this stupid podcast. I gotta be here all the twice a week to record It holds me back. I thought about walking across the country by gonna be like gonna carry on this lame-ass mic for this stupid podcast But I gotta figure something out
- Yeah, let's do another topic. Um, you remember how I tweeted out that thing about his son? How do you spell out pronounceings? I'll say Mihaj, the comedian. Yeah, I tweeted out this thing that basically I like saw him walk by me and I went and grabbed him and goes, what's up, man? And it wasn't him and it was really embarrassing. Uh, you know, I've never like really talked with him. Did you give him my number? Yeah. Oh, he texted me. He was like, this is funny. Uh, he's like, give me Sam's number. Uh, and I'll text him and then I send him your number. So I'm getting dinner with him. Um, and, uh, it's going to be the first time I didn't get to meet him when you do that podcast, but I thought that was also a cool example of just like these cool things just happened when you, when you take all of the chances. Wait, would you say that maybe your victory was in your vulnerability here? By sharing this embarrassing story. By sharing this embarrassing story where I look like a racist. Yeah. All right. Your victory was in your vulnerability, baby. And it was, you hooked it up. So I appreciate that. Yeah, it was, uh, I'm going to, I'm going to go hang out with him. You, you guys are like homies, right?
- Yeah, I really like him. We you better be funny dude. I'm not Isn't that like you got to go one way or the other if you're gonna hang out with the comedian you either got to be like Funny or just like blatantly unfunny. Is he funny when you're like just hanging out with him? Yeah, he's a funny dude shit. I'm not prepared at all. I gotta go read a book. This is why I did that cool book Fuck it try to be hot instead. No, I can't do that either That's still a far I'm average at boat. I'm average at best like Still a six out of ten on that too
- I'm just like a six across. Panic of meeting the panic of meeting. Famous people is so funny to me. Like, I just think it's like a hilarious thing that happens with people. People be funny people, people be famous people. They're instinct is like to just like throw all good, common sense out the window and start behaving like an idiot. Dude, it just sucks being a seven at everything. You know what I mean? I'm just a seven at everything. So. Always the bridesmaids. Yeah. Always the seven. Like a jack of all trades, a master of none. I'm just as fucking seven. And you're like, it just doesn't work out. Yeah, but you're you're a hard seven, though. Yeah, I'm a hard seven. All right. That's the pod. We'll talk to you all later.

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- And we did it and he tweeted it out and he went from 20,000 followers to I think close to 100,000 followers at this point in 24 hours. Andrew, what's going on? The return of Andrew, we promised that we promised that you would come back. And sometimes that's just something we say. We're like, oh, we got to do this again sometime, but this was a real one. So we're like,
- like, all right, when do you want to do it? If we had like, what, like 20 things to get through, we got to be like four. So what do you guys say? We also bullshit around this time and not address half of the topics again, and set it up for a third part, or? I wanna, I do wanna bullshit one thing. And this kind, maybe Andrew, you'll know a little bit about this, but listen, let me tell you guys a story really quick. Andrew, do you know a guy named Chris Pronger? No, he is a hockey player. He played in the NHL for like 20 years or something. It's from Canada, I think Ontario. And he played in St. Louis Blues. He's like the fifth or sixth or seventh highest paid player of all time. So for some reason he reached out to me on Twitter and I started talking to him and then we went and got dinner and he wanted to, he's like, hey, tell me how this Twitter thing works. Like, it looks cool. Should I try this? I was like,
- Yeah, dude. Here's what we're gonna do. Tomorrow call me on Zoom and The day before you call me send me five titles of what you think a tweet could be and we'll just sit And I'll just kind of like write while you talk and I'll just find the interesting stuff That you that you're saying and we'll go from there and we did it and he tweeted it out and he went from 20,000 followers to I think close to a hundred thousand followers at this point in 24 hours And the tweet was read by 10 million people and got 30 something thousand likes
- And this is the fifth time I've done this. So I did this with my friend Ramon, and he got featured in all this. He got on the How I Built This podcast and business started because of that. I did it with my friend Val, who had same thing. We did it with, I helped do it with my friend Anthony, who talked, do you guys see the tweet thread about him living in Africa and eating like only meat with like his, the tribe he was staying with? Anyway, this is crazy. If you just take interesting people, and it's not like I did any of the work. They were just talking to the story, I just helped him write it. It's pretty wild how this game works.
- And what were the stories? What did you share? Chris's was easy. Let me tell you one because let me tell you one of them because it got picked up by bro Bible. So the bro Bible headline. Did it really? X NHL star Chris Pronger. X NHL star Chris Pronger shares traps that pro athletes fall into including spending one million at a strip club. And so why do you how did it get so many like so much traffic right away? I think because the story got picked up by bigger outlets like bro Bible to so that adds a lot of fuel to the fire.
- It's hilarious. Yeah, and I retweeted it early on and but I think it's just like a he's already somewhat famous and cool and like I think sometimes they like I'm not trying to say this to brag because the reality is is like it's not that hard because the Guys are already like a big deal and has an interesting life and like Who's if you earned a hundred? He's not that big of a deal like well, but I mean is not that many people know Chris Pranger But what I mean is if you earn a hundred million dollars in as a professional athlete you have like one you have There's only a thousand there's only a hundred people who have that insight that you have
- So like the insights that are already there. Like if you think about the value of what you did for him, that's insane. Like if you went to someone and said, hey, I'm going to get you 10 million impressions on a tweet or I'm going to get you a hundred thousand followers. What's that worth? People pay like that's like honestly, I'd say it's like a million dollar tweet or something that you gave him. Well, yeah, but you can't guarantee that, right? So it's like a hard service to sell. Oh, dude, you should do it right here right now. You should say I will write, I will write tweets for you, but depending on the outcome and the number of followers, you have to pay me a certain amount. So it's totally variable. Um, yeah. That would actually be worth your time. So Andrew, I, um.
- I had a right before this. I was on a Twitter spaces with Logan Paul. I was talking to Logan Paul this morning. So you're only the second most famous person I've talked to you this morning. You're only a little bit more famous, holy crap, that's crazy. What's he doing these days? He just launched a marketplace, like a fractional ownership, NFT things. So he basically created this thing called liquid marketplace where like, I don't know if you've seen, but he's really into Pokemon cards, like Charizard cards and stuff like that. That's been his thing over the last few years, is like these collectible either sports cards or Pokemon cards.
- And so what he did today was he launched a fractional, like a rally road style marketplace, where he would put up like, you know, his Charizard card and you could just buy like a share of it rather than, he bought the thing for two million and you could buy, you know, a piece of the pie there. So that's what he launched today. So that's why he was kind of doing like a promotional thing. And I was like, I'll just shoot my shot. And so I just like, you know, to raise my hand or whatever and went and talked to him. That's what he did. It's crazy the power of the, the moat of a personal brand and a following, right? Like those guys, they can build, they could build a hundred businesses off of their following and that Chris Pranger guy, the reason that's so valuable is he can now start his own business, doing whatever he wants, selling shirts, selling NFTs, starting a consulting business, managing money for other hockey players, you know, whatever off of that hundred thousand people. The optionality of it is insane. Obviously the downside of it is, if you're Logan Paul, you're Logan Paul and you've ultimately got to be the face.
- Did you, um, did you just say Sean that you tell him? Go ahead. Sorry. We got a little delay. Uh, yeah, I was just telling Andrew I talked to a local ball this morning. That's the, that was the phone or in front of people in front of people on a Twitter space is just randomly. I saw that I was listening, but I didn't his name on Twitter is not. I think it had a nickname on it. So I couldn't tell if it was Logan. Uh, was he cool? Yeah, he was cool. I mean, he was like promoting this thing, which is, you know, he was so hit. That's why he was, he was on there.
- like, because he launched a new like rally road competitor, basically. And so I was just joking around with them, basically. I know you guys covered it in the mill road. About different things. But that personal brand thing, Andrew, you kind of got that early on because you built your personal brand back, I think, before a lot of people were doing it. Because you kind of built it, I would say pre-Twitter, even. Was that right? Like, did you kind of have a blog following before Twitter or was it all on Twitter?
- Yeah, I had a blog and stuff, but honestly, like we're pretty quiet until COVID and then during COVID, I was bored and lonely and wanted to talk to people. And so going on podcast was like a way to socialize. And then I realized the power of it. Like once I started getting, you know, 30,000, 40,000 Twitter followers, I realized that when I talked about a business, I was incubating. I had our first thousand customers in a split second. And so from my perspective, you know, I talked to the last time about being like a dust bull farmer mindset of what if you lose everything, there's such power in that you could literally go bankrupt. You could lose all your businesses. You could reboot in two days with a business idea if you have a Twitter following and no one can take your Twitter following away, obviously.
- Dude, you were not low-key before Twitter. You were famous before that. Yeah. Thank you. Well, no, no, no, I'm saying like, I was never, I was not a single major podcast. And I was well-known like when I went south by Southwest, there'd be people all the time recognizing me from Twitter. But that was a very small, nerdy community or whatever. So I was well-known within like the design community, but that was it. All right. Well, whatever you say. I feel like before COVID, we had you on the podcast and it was already one of the more popular podcasts because you were on it and people were like, people already knew your story. So I don't know. I feel like you might be, the timeline in your head might be a little bit different than
- Then kind of at least the way I proceed You were famous you were famous when we started the podcast. Yeah, we started the podcast before covid So that's so weird. Yeah, my perception is like all of it has just been last three years or whatever Can I give you guys saying is true that like You your personal brand does like kind of give you it's a door that opens more doors But the downside is you have to say you're you have to say to yourself I'm building my personal brand which is one of the lamest statements you could say So, you know if you can live with that if you can sleep with that at night that it works out for you I know that it's hard for me and Sam to do that Can we give you that's what that's gonna why I haven't started my own podcast or consistently tweeted or anything All right, I like to be honest like I'm hacking your audience, right? I'll come on here once in a while when I have things to say but I don't want to have to always Come on and always tweet and when I was tweeting consistently I was driving myself crazy because I was constantly going like okay. What's my big tweet today?
- Can we, let me give you, let me give you guys an update on the pod. I don't know if I told you this, Sean, or you Andrew. So, and then we'll get into Andrew's stuff. When we first started, I think I told Sean or he told me, I was like, let's just get to a hundred thousand downloads an episode and I bet we can do that. So Sean, we are now not consistently for all episodes, but they just told me that a lot of a couple of our episodes are now getting over a hundred thousand downloads, which is like pretty, it's pretty good. Wow. That's been the goal for a, like, a while. Like, I feel like I've been, that's been the north star of
- What would it mean to like kind of make it in podcasting? It was like if we could do it where a hundred thousand downloads per episode because everybody else bullshit's like and we do this too Like we get this many million downloads a month But it's like yeah, you just pump out volume and like you know great the only test that really matters for pockets How many listens per episode do you get that's like the best metric you can get and? I remember we were saying the hundred thousand number back when we had like under I feel like a slightly under ten thousand per episode at that time That's when I first kind of put that out there and then it's just been like climbing since it That's kind of crazy that it even happened without us Like it's kind of like when I looked away from it and stopped paying attention to it like sure enough Compounding just worked and it like got there, you know without me I have to stress it in December or no January one of the one of the last couple months We crossed two million downloads per month that year prior that same time I think was five hundred thousand and so I my prediction is I think we can get hit three million by December I've got no math or anything behind that, but I think that seems like it could happen
- So anyway, just want to give it a big podcast do what's like it. What's the what's like Tim Ferris do per episode? Do you know I have to imagine he's in the 500,000 to million range. I Think he's probably even a little bit higher than that. I know that Bill Simmons or Joe Rogan I forgot which one it was I was looking to at the time there there to the biggest I remember they were getting like three or four Million downloads per episode. I I think it was Bill Simmons at the time three or four million downloads per episode is when he was getting and he was like Consistently at the top five podcast you should do you should track though think about like So Tim Ferris has been podcasting for what eight or nine years or whatever and that's how long it took him to get to that scale You guys might actually be growing faster than Tim Ferris if you charted out
- Well, I'm already six over six feet, so I did outgrow him wildbacks. Yeah. Get out. You are a dead. You're a dead. All right. Let's do some of these topics. You got a bunch on here. I'm just going to say them out loud and I have no idea what these mean, but I'll just pick the ones that sounds most interesting to me. Well, we were having a text thread. We were kind of texting about the idea of getting rich fast versus getting rich slow, taking a big swing versus doing something boring. Dude, I forgot. I thought that was on the podcast.
- No, that was a text message. We should do that. Andrew, can you frame it? Because I think you had a good take and I'm also going to give you the advantage of framing the debate a little bit as to what is the debate here. So I think anyone who's in the tech world, generally you read headlines about people who swung big and they won big like Jeff Bezos. And I always say for every Jeff Bezos, there's 100 Jeff Bezos, right? So the guys that tried, they failed. They didn't raise the convertible debt in 1999 that allowed Amazon to survive or they timed it slightly wrong or they were in the wrong market or whatever it is. And so if you think about it, on one hand, startups are like a house. Would you buy a house that had an 80% chance of being worth zero, a 10% chance of making your money back and had a 10% chance of making you rich, right? And then let's say there's another house and that house, there's an 80% chance of giving a pretty solid return, 10% chance of zero and a 10% chance of a poor return. Which of those houses are you going to buy? And if you think about it, you know, when you start a business, you're really saying, I'm going to put five to 15 years of my time into this.
- right? So I am, I've certainly chosen, you know, the boring house, the 80% chance of solid return, 10% chance of zero, 10% chance of poor return. I'd be curious to know, you know, how you guys think about it. Sam, you want to go first? So I think your numbers are, I think your ideas right. The problem that I had when we talked about this was I think your numbers are wrong, like the whole 80%, 10%. Now I'm going to let you talk about any numbers that you want to talk about with your life. If you don't want to talk about anything, then don't even bring it up. But let's just say that, so everything I'm saying right now is just made up. Let's just say that you
- You want a business that makes $10 million a year. Okay. Or no, let's say that you want to get a net worth of $50 million by the time you're 50. How much do you think that you would need to make a profit to get a $50 million liquid net worth? How much profit do you think that you would need if you started that business at 30? I would think that you would need a profit. So I actually go. I did the math on this actually before and I wrote it down. So if you have a million dollars at age 30 and you can produce profits of maybe 300 to 500k a year at between 10 to 12%, you can have a hundred million dollars by 60.
- with compounding. So, okay, so break that down. Million dollar net worth is just- So let's say you have a million dollars at age 30, and you start a business, and that business produces 500k a year. And you just take that 500k a year, and you reinvest it, and you manage to invest it at about 10%, which is a little above historical market returns. Let's say that you're a good investor, you're a Nick Huber, you're gonna just put it in steady at Ereal Estate, that outperforms a little bit or something. But there's a flaw. You get to $100 million by 60. Yeah, but there's a flaw here, which is, you're assuming that you have zero living expenses.
- Sure, yeah, I'm not talking, I'm not really addressing that for sure. So you're just talking about, I guess the point is the number you need, the number you need to start with, it doesn't need to be that big. Like a small number can compound into something staggering if you have a long enough time horizon, especially if you're outperforming 10%, I think is quite low compared to what you can or with skills. So let's go backwards. You said 100 million by 60. And I think the trick with most compounding is it all kind of comes to you at the end. The last two cycles, three cycles is where you make all the money. So, so, so backtrack, what do you add at 50 and 40 in that world?
- I don't know. We don't do public math. I just did the headline. Well, like you can kind of guess if you're at a hundred at 60, you're probably in the range of 50 at 50. So, yeah, you basically double every seven years, right? At that pace. So you're at 7% doubles over 10 years. Ish. Which is sick? That's right. That's sick. Okay. Well, here's the question. So, you know, everyone loves to point at people who are sitting on massive paper gains. Like, let's say, let's say that Sam started a startup and VCs invested at a $5 billion valuation. In reality, that doesn't mean Sam. Sam's a billionaire on paper, but he's not going to realize that until the company IPOs. Maybe he takes a small secondary. He's got a $10 million, $20 million liquid net worth, but he's really not a liquid billionaire until that company IPOs or sells to somebody.
- And typically the timeline, even in a tech startup, is 15 years. And so my argument is, you can take a big swing with a venture bet, but statistically, you can argue all you want, but most venture businesses fail, at least an 80% failure rate, and maybe 5% at most go on to be something at scale and large. So I think what I advocate isn't go Uber conservative and go get a salary or go buy a dry cleaner and work there for the rest of your life. It's more what's in the middle, what's the third door? And I like to look at somebody like Nick Huber, who found a niche, and he said, look, I'm going to go buy a bunch of self-storage businesses. These are businesses that have been around for 100 years. I have a very specific view on how to make them more profitable, and he knows he can earn between 15 and 40% buying a bunch of those. He just does that for the next 10 years. He's going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Yeah, I'm actually with you. I think I did this rant on the podcast that nobody liked, which was that you're an idiot if you go for the Olympics. Like going for the Olympics is a trap that society has tricked you into giving up your entire life to like turn yourself into a human tool that can just, you know, Bob's led at one tenth of a second faster than anybody else. And you know, people didn't like that because everybody likes the Olympics and we're supposed to honor our athletes and blah, blah, blah. But basically venture, like venture back startups is the same thing. It's the Olympics of business.
- Where you're basically saying okay, I am going to swing for this billion dollar prize Which only point one percent of the the startups are gonna be able to you know like to achieve this type of outcome And if I miss I get essentially zero That's kind of changed nowadays because you get to maybe take second areas along the way if you make progress But like a lot of times I would say the average you know the median result is essentially zero or you know you've underpaid yourself by 50 to 75 percent of market salary during those you know seven years that you seven to ten years you spent trying to do it
- And you worked way harder and you had a worse lifestyle the whole time. So you know, like the venture, the venture thing is like the Olympics thing. You sacrifice your lifestyle for this very rare and often like, you know, like at least in the Olympics case, sort of a trivial, you know, here's a piece of metal. You know, at least at least with startups, if you hit big, you do become a billionaire. So, so that, that does pay off. But I'm, I kind of think that the venture path is that and you really only do it for ego is my like, my current understanding of it, which is like, either you do it because it's your calling meaning.
- You stumbled into a business opportunity or a problem you tried to solve. It just so happens to be that the way this looks is going to be like a winner take all massive, massive business if you do it right. Or you are like, I want to play the ego Olympics and I want to prove that I am the toughest smartest entrepreneur in the world. And so I'm going to go down this path. And like everybody will cheer you on. The media will cheer you on because hey, what's it to them? You sacrifice yourself for their pleasure. The investors will all cheer you on and call you a hero because what's it to them? They get to go home every day at 4 p.m. and to their house in Atherton. They don't care how many hours it takes you for your low probability of success. They have a portfolio. So really it's the entrepreneur who in some ways I feel gets tricked into it. And I say that as somebody who in many ways was tricked into it. Not by anybody's evil just by the way that the game is set up.
- And now I've come to the realization that like more nimble, small, lightweight businesses that provide like a lot of cash flow or businesses that you just buy instead of trying to start a new genius idea from scratch is definitely the way to go from a logical, rational perspective. You could still choose to do the other one because you want to do it. It's more fun to you. But the logic and reasoning is so far on the side of going for a cash flow, you know, cash flow business that promotes like, you know, it gives you an awesome lifestyle from essentially year one or buying a business that's already working and just using your intelligence to grow it is like a far better path on paper than the venture path. And I say that as somebody who.
- My natural inkling is to go towards that venture path because it's so sexy. Well, and also, I mean, it can all go away on the venture path that can all go away so fast, right? And I think the reason why it's not done as often is people are attracted to get rich quick, right? Nobody wants to get rich slow. And like Sean said, the only way to get rich right now is like someone is in crypto and they're liquid and they have a massive gain, but those stories are so few and far between. If you want to get rich by building a business, even if on paper you're a billionaire and year two, my argument is you're not liquid until 10 years, 15 years anyway, right? It's very rare that you start a business on year one and in year five, you're a liquid billionaire. And to me, ultimately, liquidity is what matters so often in these things, right? Either you have cash flow or you can sell your stock or you can use it in some way.
- Have you met Michael Acton Smith I've heard his name. He's the co-founder of calm, but before that he had What was the name of his brand? Moshe monsters? I think it is. It's either me or Moshe Monster I think it's Moshe monsters. So he was in the UK and he created essentially like a Pokemon Type of phenomenon. So like I think Moshe it was in the UK. It was like this children's kind of like There's like these characters and then you would like
- I don't know, it was like a game or something like that. It was like this online little world you would go into and do this. And that turned into many things. It was a brand that turned into many things. They put it, they slapped those characters on Champ who had started selling it over there. And he dreamed of having a theme park. And he's a really big dreamer, big thinker type of guy, super creative. You wouldn't have created that in the first place. It's like phenomenon, like a Pokemon or a Digimon. Or these brands that just catch fire. I think at one point, like one in three kids in the UK were playing it. So it was like just an insane cultural phenomenon. And it was valued over a billion dollars. And he was the fucking man. And he looks like Russell Brand, if you see him. He's just like this good looking like, wait, does this guy have sex in public? He seems like a guy with a sex in public. And it's like, he's got this free love energy. And if you meet him here, like,
- Yeah exactly he's got like you know he's got scars you know maximum two buttons up on a colored shirt so like you know the guys the guys walking around with two buttons right so he's just living his best life. And so he had the persona and then he had the movement to back it up and it just seemed like this is a guy this is the type of guy. Who create is like a Walt Disney type of guy creates this type of phenomenon. And you know rich you know rich brands loves every loves it. And then sure enough you know they kind of got ahead of their skis and all of a sudden you know like whatever third grade came around for those second graders and they were like you know what. I don't care about motion monsters anymore I have moved on to the next thing and it's like overnight the business starts losing relevancy. The characters start losing relevancy and like nobody's buying nobody's buying the plush toys and the TV show doesn't want to get made anymore whatever they started to unwind essentially. It was very hard for them to like reverse that cycle because.
- You know, like as fast as you can climb as a like FAD phenomenon, that's as fast as it can unwind. And so I don't know exactly what his net worth was, but you know, he was the main guy and it was the company was worth over a billion dollars. I'm sure he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper, but never got to realize it. And then basically had to start back over from scratch as like, you know, just a guy in his, you know, just a guy who's like went through this went through this like roller coaster, but like didn't have the money to show for it.
- Which makes it even more amazing that they you know he went and helped seed calm like co-found calm and then join calm and help Grow common to like a multi-billion dollar brand. So he's kind of done it again and I just think that's amazing I had the original agency and in the early days the agency barely made any money but it was a couple hundred thousand dollars and I read about the Basecamp guys, you know doing these SaaS products and stuff and I was like man, I want to make money when I sleep that sounds amazing And so I started just taking most of my profits and starting you know SaaS software companies
- You find the way you ended up. 90-10, right? You put 90% back into the business into new stuff or whatever. And 10% you lived on. In the early days, it was probably 80-20. But then over time, I ramped it up. So basically, I was taking the majority of the profits. Anything I didn't need to live on was almost all going into incubating businesses. I incubated a bunch. And some of those businesses ended up being worth, one I sold for $7 million bucks and was producing 600, 700K a year of profit or something like that. So I made a lot of bets with that money and it ended up compounding into something significant. But then I ended up continuing to take that money and just do the 80-20, 90-10 strategy of always investing. And I really started making a lot more money when I went from starting businesses.
- to buying businesses and investing, which I started about seven years ago. Hold on, those numbers don't make sense. Yeah. You sound really good. It sounds really good. It's really good. 200% in income. Yeah.
- I mean, you need $20 million to get another number in there, but that gets a little bit out of it. Right. Well, no, I mean, no, no, no. So it's like, you know, let's say, let's say, let's say metal app revenue is a million dollars. We made 500k of profit. And so that's what's left over at the end after we pay taxes and stuff. I take 80% of that 500k and I'd use it to start more businesses, right? And I would just do this on a monthly basis, whatever was left over in the bank account that I didn't need to run the business. I would go and I'd use it to start yet another business.
- And I've been doing that for 15 years now and we're, I think, all of our businesses together are worth over a billion dollars. Did you know how much you were compounding? So for example, you took the money and you either started a business or bought like controlling share in an existing business versus just saying, I'm going to put this into real estate or the stock market or angel invest or whatever. How much additional lift do you think you've got? Meaning like at what percent were you compounding?
- By doing the extra work of like identifying and buying businesses and owning them versus like if you had done a more kind of like hands-off strategy Which maybe let's say I think somebody like you could have got 10 to 15% consistently. I Think I could if I was passive. I could have got eight to 12% right putting it in real estate stocks that kind of stuff by buying businesses You know, there's a lot of advantage in that we could use a little bit of debt because we controlled the whole business Right, so you can get the bank to give you 20 or 30% of it Which adds a lot of lift on your return and then we were buying these businesses Anywhere from three to ten times earnings and then we would usually within the first two years We would find ways to double the business within one to two years. So you start to think about it and you go Okay, well, that's a kind of two to five year payback depending on what's happening That's based on cash and then the actual value of the business as you grow the earnings increases over time Right, so the numbers start getting very big very quickly when especially when you've done that, you know 20 times So what do you think was the
- What do you think was the compounded rate? Well, I don't know how long the last, but it goes back to, at the end of the day, when I started, I was making 200K a 100K a year, and today our businesses make over $50 million of profit across everything. So what percent rate do you think you were able to generate? You think you were compounding at like 40 percent? I think probably in the end, it's something, we did the math a couple years ago because we raised a fund, and I think it was like 40 some percent. Now keep in mind, that was at a time where not that many people were doing what we were
- we were doing. So, you know, it's gotten more competitive over time. And those were small deals. It's really easy to compound at high rates when you're doing small deals. As you do bigger ones, I think we'll probably slow down on that. But it's not a number I think about. I, you know, I never was like, I want to compound at 44%. I was like, I just want to make my money back in a reasonably safe way. I want to buy great businesses and I want to feel good about what I do. That's crazy to me because you're Andy Munger. You, you know, the whole buffet Munger like philosophy is based on compounding over a long period of time. And the number one variable is time how long you're going to do it for. And what's the rate, right? That's like the two key things. But even if you jump, you know, okay, let's drop the rate down to 15% or 10%. It's still hundreds of millions of dollars, right? That's what's crazy about compounding is you don't need to outperform massively.
- need to do a little better than everybody else. And if you do as well as everyone else, you're still good. And all right, let me just ask this question, which was two things. Of your businesses, how many of them do you actually think in last 20, 30, 40 years? And also, if you can buy any company right now, internet related business, what are a handful that you like, just to give an example to me and Sean, the listener of things that you would look for, not actually something you can buy, but something that like, this is what I want and name a very specific one.
- Yeah, so think about Accenture, right? So Accenture, I forget it was part of one of the big five consultancies and then it got spun out. But basically they help people do consulting, strategy, digital transformation, that kind of stuff. That business will definitely exist for the next 30 years. I don't know why I wouldn't. And in the same vein, I think like Metalab and our agency services businesses, we're really early in every business turning into a tech company, right? Over the next 20 years, more and more companies will have to build software and go digital. And I think there's only so much talent. So I think those are tremendous businesses for the next 20 years. I don't know how to predict over very long times. AeroPress is a business that I think will exist in 50 years. I don't see any reason why I wouldn't.
- Will it have the same competitive advantages it does today? Will it get a bunch of copycats? Probably, but Kleenex still exists and it's 100 years later, right? So, I don't know. I mean, we also own, I own like a bunch of restaurants and a bakery and, you know, if people still like their food as they have for the last 30 years, those will probably exist in 30 years. But we do own businesses that their, you know, platform dependent or, you know, technology dependent where the seas can change and there's no way to predict how long they can go. But I've been surprised how long some of our businesses have persisted in
- grown. It just goes back to like, you know, not not underestimating anything. And Andrew, I'm going to give you the, the, like the devil's advocate to the don't go for the big, big home run strategy, which is something else I believe is true. I believe it's true that kind of like lifestyle business and a big business like a lifestyle business and a moonshot business will both basically take up all of your time. So might as well go big. That's another way of looking at it. Right. So for example, I've, I've run a restaurant. I've started a tech company in both cases. It was on my mind all the time. I was working on it. You know, five, six days a week, you know, at minimum, as many hours as I could, I was trying to do it to make it successful. A restaurant was going to be able to spit off, you know, $150, $200,000 of profit off that location. And you know, a tech company could be worth $100 million in two years. And so like those are just different size of the prize for the same level of effort. Probability of success, I would say, you know, you can do better restaurants. Not a great example because they fail a lot, but like, let's say dental clinic or something. Yeah. Dental clinic. You'd probably do great, but you'd have agency or whatever. So probably that's different, but also with a bigger, more ambitious project. You also, every day you get to be more excited about it. You get to recruit better people because they're going to be able to do it. You get to recruit better people because their great talent is really excited about it versus like, I know, like, for example, my online course business. I know I could do better for hire people, but like, not everybody wants to come work on that project for, you know, and then I'm going to get somebody who wants just that with, you know, is willing to accept a salary that I can afford. And that's usually not the A plus person I like to work with. So, you know, you get stuck in that middle, middle zone. Yeah, I don't, I'm not advocating for some Tim Ferriss lifestyle work for our work week kind of thing. I think, you know, Warren Buffett is not a lifestyle. He doesn't have a lifestyle business. He has a business he loves to run. And he does exactly what he wants to do. But personally, you know, I like incubating businesses, starting new businesses, getting excited about stuff. I just go, I do that off the side of my desk. Right. So that's 20% of my time, 30% of my time. I also like buying great businesses and letting them run and choosing CEO.
- and doing the Buffett thing. But I need excitement and all the other stuff, but I'm in no way saying it's any less challenging. I'm just saying your odds of success are higher. And let's be real, if you go to the gym and you try and lift 800 pounds on your bench on day one, you probably will fail. That doesn't feel very good. But if I give you an 80 pound bench and you lift it, you're gonna feel really good about yourself, right? And so I just wanna jump over the one foot hurdles, right? I wanna feel the sense of success. And I think when people start out in tech and they do a startup and they fail and it's brutal, a lot of those people turn around and say, well, I'm never doing that again. When they might've been great entrepreneurs in some other format, right? I just think it's the hardest lift, it's the Olympics, as you said.
- Let's do one of these other topics. All right, so I'm just gonna name it and you give us your riff on it. So doing it wrong before you do it right, what's that? Yeah, so I finally put my finger on this because people always criticize me because I'll hire the wrong person, right? I'm a big advocate of if I have an idea and I just wanna get moving, I will just go and I'll hire whoever's in front of me and I'll say, hey, let's go do this. And that does not work that well, obviously, but what it does do is it forces you to make it real, right? So, you know, for example, when I know I wanna go in direction, I will do this. So I've always loved food in restaurants. I always dreamed of starting my own restaurant. I did, I started my own restaurant. I went and I signed a lease, I shouldn't have. I hired the wrong manager and I lost 800 grand, right? Total learning experience. Here's what it did though. It forced me into that industry. It made me learn it. It made me make a lot of mistakes and then I found the good people through that. So actually, via, because I was in that restaurant that failed, I met the guy next door who ran a very successful restaurant and when he wanted, when his partner wanted to sell the steak, I ended up buying it and now I own this wonderful restaurant and I know it's good because I've owned a bad restaurant, right? So, directionally moving into something and I think people are way too precious with their hiring. Like, they just need to do it and then let people go and it doesn't work out. So that's kind of what I mean by that. Too many people think they're measuring twice but cutting once and they just never cut. They just measure forever.
- Do you just have to fire people all the time? No, not all the time. I've gotten really lucky with lots of these. It's like 50-50. The pattern that I've seen, the best thing to do when you're going into a new industry is look for somebody who's actually succeeded within it. The problem is that when you're the rub at the table, when you're the newbie to the industry, even a moron looks like a genius. That's the hard part. I've certainly made that mistake before. You've got this new business called Mailman, the Gmail plugin.
- I've had that. I've actually had that for a couple of years, but yeah, basically, it makes it so that you only get emailed a couple of times a day. So you're not doing it. It's picking up steam, it feels like right now. And you met a guy on Twitter who you got to run it, right? Like, and that's an example of you just like, yeah, whatever, you're an engineer, you seem like you might be able to do this. Just do it. 100%. I'll do this all the time. So I literally, that same year, I did it twice. I tweeted out, I said, Hey, I've got this idea for a Gmail plugin. I need someone to build it. Who wants to build it? This guy mo hit in India messaged me, sent me a great email, and he said, Tell me what you want it to do. And I'll have it to you in 48 hours. And he did. And over and over again, he just kept delivering. There was another business idea I had where I went to the guy. I did the exact same thing. And he just didn't make any progress. And so I said, Hey, after three months, it's not working out.
- and want a different direction. But 50% of the time it works really well. And now we not only have mailman, but we actually started a holding company in India, and we're looking at acquisitions, and we've got him managing some of our businesses. So it's been awesome. That's crazy. And this kind of like, it feeds into this idea, like I wrote it down here, but taking chances on people, which is the most satisfying thing. Like I don't know for you guys, like when I was like 15, I always had this feeling of like, someone just needs to give me a chance. Like I'm a dog to a bone. I just need the opportunity. And no one ever gave me that chance. No one ever saw that in me. So I had to start my own business. And I've had this experience a few times where I've taken a crazy chance on someone. Like have I told you guys about how I met my business partner, Chris? No.
- So maybe like two years into business, I am a bank balance accountant. So like you, Sean, I don't do bookkeeping. I don't understand what's going on. I don't know how to pay taxes. I would just look at the bank account. And if the bank account was bigger on day 30 than it was on day one, I thought I was winning. And one day I go into the bank and I'm trying to get a corporate credit card. And the teller says, oh, you need to go talk to Mr. Sparling. He'll fill out all the forms for you. And so I go into the back of the bank and I get welcomed into this nice office. And Mr. Sparling looks like the son of Mr. Sparling. He's like this little skinny 23 year old. And we start chatting and immediately just hit it off with this guy. We're joking around and talking about our days and our lives and stuff. And after I was done doing this, I go like, hey, what's your deal? Like, do you want to stay at the bank? Like what are you doing? And he goes, well, I'm thinking about getting my accounting designation or something like that. I don't really know. And I just blurred out, do you want to be my CFO? And he's kind of taken it back and he's like, hey, like let's, you know, let's go get a coffee tomorrow. We'll talk about it. And I convince him to come and be my CFO. He has almost no accounting experience. He worked at a bank. On paper, he's like the wrong guy to be a CFO of a business. Not the time we're doing over a million dollars, I think. And he just shows up on day one and I trust him. I give him my social security number, all my information, banking, wires, everything. And Chris is now my business partner of 12 years. He's responsible for a significant amount of everything good that's happened in my career. And he's an incredible person. Now, for every story like that, I have, you know, someone who is terrible and incompetent ranging from that to fraudulent. But when you do take a chance on someone one in 10 times, it pays off big. And so what I've struggled with is not knowing, you know, obviously I don't want to take that level of risk still, but I got to figure out a way to give people chances. I have a great story on that.
- Uh, I can't tell the story of same thing, same thing that just have, I'll give you a good and a bad cause they both hit yesterday. And, um, so I'll give you the bad one first. So the bad one took a chance on a person who, um, honestly, I still think this guy is a good guy. I like this guy. Uh, he was a, I met him working out. So he was a, he trained with my trainer. He was like a workout partner. Basically he came over to our house and worked out with us one day randomly. Um, nice guy, young guy. He was like an apprentice plumber at the time. So he's a plumber in training.
- And with, and like we had a issue with our three P.L. for our e-commerce business, which was like, we had a theft issue at our, at the warehouse that we were working with. And then the owner was kind of like, oh yeah, I don't know. You can't prove that we stole it. I'm like, dude, you have the goods and now they're gone. Like who else, who else stole it except for someone at the warehouse? He's like, oh, let's check the cameras. Oh, don't keep the footage. Sorry. And so I just got so pissed. I was like, we're leaving like fucking tomorrow. And so I was like, all right, we're not using this three P.L. anymore. We're going to just do our own warehousing. I didn't know the first thing about.
- warehouse thing, but I was like, okay, whatever, I don't know, we'll figure it out. So I hastily sign a lease of this like 8,000 square foot warehouse near us. And I was like, all right, I definitely don't want to run this warehouse, but it's like the stuff is coming tomorrow. So we need to find somebody. So I'm working out that day and I'm like, Hey, you want to run a warehouse? He's like, what? And I was like, you know, you're kind of like a hardworking blue collar guy. Like you want to try this? Anything like this. I was like, don't worry. Like I'll take a shot on you and like you're going to make a bunch of mistakes. That's okay. I understand because you've never done this before. I've also never done it before. Let's figure it out together. And like, you know, you'll learn from this and who knows, like this might lead to a future you want. We had talked about what he might want in the future. Like he wanted to one day own real estate on his own business. I go, you know, this could become that. Like if we open up a second warehouse, like.
- We'll buy that one and you know you could be a part owner in it. You could run a basic area or our own in-house 3PL like you could Fulfill not just our brand but other brands too. So I had kind of laid out this vision. He was super excited about it And in my head I'm already I do this thing all the time. Samuel. I appreciate this. I always imagine the hustle-con talk This is like a phrase I use all the time ago. All right, imagine two years from now. You're on stage talking about how we growth hacked our way to success What are the stories we're gonna tell or like how we survived chaos and like absolute like you know disasters But still made it so I always work backwards from like I imagine telling the story on stage and it just gets me more excited about the current moment
- And like, so I was already imagining like this plumber, this like apprentice plumber that we hired that now is this amazing guy. And I'm like, imagine all these great things. And it started off good, it was going good, but then like, here we are. And you know, a year later, nine months later, something like that. And you know, all of a sudden, balls being dropped on a couple of things and not really growing at the rate we wanna grow in terms of his growth as a leader of that part of the business. But I'm still holding that hope. And then I find out he's kind of like scamming us, like trying to like start his own thing. He like sees us growing and like trying to start his own version of it and like.
- You know what like it's okay to be want to be an entrepreneur start your own thing But like if you do it above board I'm cool with it if you're kind of are on company time company time like trying to steal our idea like that's not cool to me So so anyways had this like kind of that all came to a head yesterday I was like look this is not working I guess they'd I like my bet was wrong here this like my hope that we could help this plumber guy become like this like star like Throw that hustle kind of talk away. That's not happening And I'm feeling kind of bad and then the afternoon I get a call from this guy Johnny and Johnny's a kid who I hired at I think age 13 or 14 He called me one day at the office and he goes hey is this Sean? I was like yeah How'd you get this number? Who's this he goes my name's Johnny? I met Pete who works at your office at the at the dog park Okay, and he's everything okay with Pete. He's like yeah, yeah, he said that you know I'm in eighth grade. I'm a programmer and he goes and I don't know any other programmers
- It's not to be summer and like I just want to hang out around other programmers. I've never met one. Can I come hang out at your office this summer? And I was like, I can't get a swimmer. So I'm like, I'm like, okay, this cold call is a yes. So he shows up and like the idea was he'll just like, he's just going to be over there in the corner. He just wanted to like shadow the environment or like whatever. First day I was like, we're in a meeting. I was like, oh, you know what we should do? We should do this like viral little quiz. We don't have enough people to do it. I was like, hey, Johnny, get in here. Johnny, can you build a website? He's like, oh, yeah, like you didn't know how to, but he's just like, yeah, I think I could. And I was like, all right, build this today. And he like literally stayed there until midnight that day and like had a version of it working by that night. Probably was under like such an immense amount of pressure now that I look back at it. Probably poor guy like, you know, age the guy probably five years. So anyways, he just joins us full time as an eighth grader.
- By 10th grade, it's like Johnny needs to be here full time. Johnny's the man. Johnny's the fucking man He's like hanging out with a bunch of like old neckbeards like us and And he's like and I want to drop out of high school And I just want to do this and his mom is so worried about him dropping out And I like go and I meet with his mom and I'm like man. He's not dropping out. He's going pro It's like when LeBron James he skipped college because he was going pro. He was just that advanced and like she was like Okay, if you put it that way, that sounds good like I don't feel bad about my kid anymore You know like okay, if you say so and so and then he became when we got acquired He became the youngest Amazon employee. I think in the in all of Amazon at that during the acquisition And now he's like starting his own now. He's I don't know 19 or something like that and he's his name Johnny Dallas, I don't know. I'll pull up his So he has his own startup now, and it's like he just called me yesterday. He's like yeah It's going pretty good like we just got a term sheet from you know, I guess I probably shouldn't say the firm but it's like
- The best VC firm. So he's like the best VC firm. Just gave us a term sheet, you know 38 million dollar post valuation. I was like Johnny You know, have you had puberty yet? What's going on dude? Like this is crazy to me But that was and I told him I go dude because thanks for just making the time I go bro You don't understand. This is the best feeling I can get it's like I feel like I bet on you You were my personal angel investment and like we became friends and then you're actually doing the thing You like actually did the thing that I always hope somebody does which is like take the opportunity and just fucking run with it and Become a superstar and like when it happens, it's so worth it And you're like alright I'll do this 10 more times even if I whiff nine more times if there's another Johnny in there like this is this is gold for me
- Totally. There's nothing better than when it does work, but it's so painful and it doesn't because you're just going like, dude, don't you see this, right? Like that guy you gave the opportunity to, you know, he could have owned the business with you and done the real estate and all the other stuff. One question, what was, what were the warning signs that that guy wasn't going to be the guy? Because Chris has this thing about, he calls it Gumption. It's like, if you say to them, hey, balls in your court, do they follow up within 24 hours? Do they move the ball forward? Are they, do they have a case? If you, before you even gave me that example, you go, what were the red flags or the bad signs? It was exactly this.
- During one of the workouts after we brought him on board, we're still working out together and I go I go dude Here's my vision for you like what was the dream? He gave me this idea like I want to own real estate It's like dude you haven't at the moment you have no pathway to real estate right you have like you're just making enough to live Let alone and you don't know anything about real estate. So like you know He didn't really know his path and I told him I said here's the plan. We're gonna open up another warehouse I want to own real estate. Let's buy it I'll give you a piece and you run it you you and we turn this into a business where you actually are running your own business Inside that real estate as our own 3PL because I know this that e-commerce is booming. This is a good idea
- And I didn't hear from him. Like he was in the moment, he was like, oh wow, that's awesome. Yeah, that's great. And then there was no follow up for three months. And then I met up with him and he was, and he was in the other boat, he goes, yeah, like I wanted to like talk more about that, but I didn't hear from you. And I was like, give me a beer from me. He's like, you know, I thought maybe he would like, you know, I've really been excited about that. I've been thinking about it. I've been, you know, I was researching, I was googling some places I go, bro, if that was me and somebody's late, somebody gives me a window into a life I want. I'm like, knock, knock, knock. Hey, about that thing he said.
- Well, you know, here's what I'm planning to do to move the ball forward. Hey, here's a couple links. Hey, I put together a spreadsheet Hey, I'm making a checklist of like we can do this if I hit these goals and like you got to do the work at that point And so the biggest red flag was that he didn't follow up on that opportunity It's not that he didn't want to he just didn't know that that's what you're supposed to do And it wasn't his natural inclination to like to do that and I noticed that with Johnny. It's the opposite It's like tell Johnny something he'll if you give him an inch He'll take a mile type of guy They'll tell he'll text you at nine o'clock at night and say hey check this out check out the website I'm working on this guy that I gave the other opportunity to obviously won't share any details about it But he he I emailed him and I said dude I haven't heard from you in two months. What's going on and he goes yeah I've I redesigned the website take a look and I was like you should have sent me this on day one when you had a Design show me there's momentum instead. We've lost all this momentum and yeah, it's it's crazy But there's no better high by the way, I just found another guy like this And I'll tell you the signs that I know I'll bet right now this guy's gonna be a winner
- So this guys, I didn't know this until I hired him. He's just graduated from college. He's got like a dot edu email address But he had emailed me being like hey heard you on the pod talk about something like you know You want to give you want to be do some philanthropy he goes here's a better idea Let's create a micro grant where you give out like whatever it is someone out of money That that's you're cool with and like write a grant for people who who do something I know you're all about action and making shit happen. So like Give it away to people who are gonna make shit happen. That's better than charity It'll feel better for you. So the guy like knows me. He reached out intelligently He says he's doing the thing he doesn't pitch his company Which by the way is meant to be who's trying to start like a micro like angel is for grants instead of like startups It's like a way to quickly spin up like a grant program
- And I was like, you got my attention, but I was like, yeah, I mentioned it, that sounds like a great idea, let's whatever. And then he followed up like 10 times in the next like 12 days. He was like, hey, here's three ideas for what your grant could be. Tell me which of those three you like, just send back the number one, two or three. Then he's like, hey, I saw your tweet about this other thing. Remember the grant thing? You should do this instead of that, right? And he's just kept following up intelligently each time. So I was like, already like this guy's a winner. And I told him, I go, hey, dude, I don't have a ton of time for this grant thing, but like, you're awesome. If you ever wanna like do something like.
- And he was like, no, no, I want to try this grant thing. Anyway, as long story short, like six months goes by, he ends up graduating. He takes a job at like a, I don't want to say which place, but like takes a job at like kind of like a hot startup that we know of. And then I get an email out of the blue three days ago, subject line, I've made an irreversible decision. So another great sign is like his copywriting is good. For like a 21 year old, he knows how to like frame it. He goes, I made an irreversible decision. I quit my job yesterday. Even though it was a great job and they offered me whatever, because I've decided that I want to come work for you and make XYZ happen. He goes, he goes, you know, I have a couple other ideas of what I might do, but you're the top of the list. And you know, so it makes you feel good. Does the flattery thing, says exactly what he would do? He goes, I have two ideas for how I would make the milk road better. Let me know if you're down to hear them and I'll send them over. All right, so he baits me. I'm like, yeah, of course, send the ideas, send the ideas. And I just reply, I go,
- I didn't honestly I didn't care about your ideas. I just want to hire you and now he's working with me And he's already awesome and this we're on dude three So I can tell you this guy his name stuff one So if one is gonna be a winner and I bet you like six months of now I'm gonna be talking about how amazing this guy is so the problem that's awesome my problem with with all this though is all three of us I get so much inbound and I'm like I don't wanna I'm not in the mood to figure out who's legit and who's not and also I don't want to have to train someone. I don't want to have to manage someone at the moment So are you guys getting exhausted managing people? Are you getting worn out like having to talk to people all the time and tell them what to do or Do you feedback Sean?
- Sean, I would love to know how you do this. You've kind of alluded to it a few times that you have a team helping you kind of manage channels or at least looking at opportunities and stuff. How does that work? Because I have that same problem where people email me ideas all the time and there's nowhere for it to go. There's no one to help. Yeah, that's okay. That's by design. It's like it's meant to be a bottomless pit of like no reply, but then we like cherry pick interesting things and just like pull it out of that well dripping wet and we're like, oh, you know, maybe we should reply to this. But basically my version of Chris, right? Your business versus Chris, mine is Ben. And basically Ben has the keys. He has my email and he has my Twitter. And that's the two biggest forms of inbound. And basically he's the wall. And it's like, if you can climb the Ben wall, then like you've made it. And like Ben knows what's interesting and what's not. And so like, and that's like one of his main things is like,
- He likes he gets energy from that whereas I kind of like I lose energy doing it like you Sam Like I kind of I don't enjoy doing it whereas he's like oh yeah, this guy sent me this thing So I checked it out and then I chatted with him. I'm like dude I would never check it out or chat with him. He's like yeah That's what I like checking things out out then if it's cool Then I like to chat with them. I'm like you make it sound normal But like dude I fucking hate doing that and so and then he just replies basically as me to them They said something called and all half the time. I don't show up on the goal It's just like they're like Sean coming and it's like Ben's like nah It's just me go Because like if they're like you know offended by that or whatever It's probably not gonna work because I don't have enough time to dedicate to each individual person if you're if you're just gonna meet me That's one thing versus if you're trying to
- like advance your cause, your mission, your project, or whatever, then you'll take help from Ben or anybody, right? You shouldn't be on your high horse about it. So to me, the secret answer is basically Ben, and Ben knows the tight filter of what's interesting and what's not, because we are so in sync with each other. We talk all the time about little nuggets or hooks that are interesting, and if you find something, he'll hang it on that hook. Sam, have you ever explored delegating your email? Yeah, yeah, I've explored it. For some reason.
- I'm not pounced on it like I should, but I probably should do that shouldn't I? I mean, I miss so many emails. I just don't read Chris and I did it about six months ago We we started using front and so our our assistant actually reads all the emails and it goes into her Inbox first and then she chooses what we need to respond to so it's like oh here's a docu sign that goes to the general counsel Here's a venture deal it goes to the rolling fund So I don't actually see any of it and it's really reduced my email by you know even though the volumes the same But for me, it's reduced it by 70% because in the end that every single email you have to even archive is like mentally taxing My thing is that once after I sold the business, I didn't have A business I didn't have a business. So I was like, I'm not I don't want to justify. I couldn't justify having Someone you know doing stuff. I didn't want to have like a higher burn Just for personal reasons now that I do have some things brewing maybe Maybe I can actually have cashflow coming in from a business Then I think yeah, it's worth justifying it which is crazy because I don't understand Sean how you set all your stuff up because you got like
- It seems like a lot of different things coming in. So your accounting must be horrendous. I mean, must be a huge headache. Huge mess. Yeah. You gotta go to the bank and find your CFO. Yeah. But by the way, that little thing you said, that's so true. I always say this. Hire your favorite vendors and your favorite salespeople. So like anytime you have an amazing account, like experience of account manager or a banker, like I had this one woman who helped me with my mortgage. And I was like, hey, if you ever want to like switch careers, like you're amazing. And like the same thing with like, you know, my trainer, different people, I'm like, yo, you have this like great way with people or like the guy who manages our rolling fund. He's like, he works at AngelList. But this motherfucker handles like such a shit. We'll send him. We'll be like, hey, we're doing this deal. We don't know like half the terms. And it's going to we have to sign now. And why are the money in three months? Is it Connor? Yeah, Connor. He's amazing. Do you like it? He's amazing. I don't know how he tracks all this. Yeah, we the same thing will be like, 100k into this. And then like he handles everything. And I'm just like, this is insane. Connor's an absolute magician. It's so funny that you have the same guy. Because he's he is so on top of it. And I'm just like.
- Connor you are like like I need to basically like as soon as I have enough operational shit to deal with I'm like Connor's the first call because this guy handles the messiest most disorganized thing And he's just like yep got it never makes me feel bad about it He just like solves the problem and if you need something he tells me and then I give it to him like it's so nice What do you find somebody like ultra competent like that? It's four seasons service, right? I don't know if you guys are kind of you go to the four seasons and you you know you say oh like I really you say I'm fussy like oh I want you know a dinner blanket and at some hotels They grumble and there they just say oh yes We would love to sir and I feel like and then they'll never complain or anything and I feel like Connor is one of those people and my assistant is one of those people those people are just they're they're amazing when you Find one you just got a I'll tell you one more single
- Somebody who thinks bigger than you, especially if they aren't the one in charge of the company. This is super rare. It just happened. So I've wanted this. So I brought him in to work on the Milk Road NFT projects. We're going to launch an NFT as part of Milk Road. We're brainstorming what it could be. And we don't want to just do some bullshit thing. We want it to be really great. And he was like, his first or second day, he just goes, you know, just a thought. Like, right now, we kind of think of this as like some sub little project, like a cool add-on to the Milk Road. He's like, but there's no reason this shouldn't be like as big as Board Ape Yacht Club or anything else. Like this could be...
- one of the biggest best NFT projects around. I just want to say that out loud because like, I don't want to limit that. And I was just like, you know, if you can make me feel like a little bitch, then like you are my favorite employee, right? Because I'm like, oh yeah, if I'm not thinking sufficiently large enough or aggressive enough about either a timeline or a size of the prize, that's the, you know, that's my favorite type of person to work with is somebody who pushes my thinking on like, couldn't we do this faster or couldn't we do this bigger? Because that's normally like, normally people will just accept whatever the leader sets as the frame. They'll just set that as this invisible walls around how good or how big or how fast something can be. And somebody who breaks those walls is like a winner.
- Dude Sean, how much more hyped are you around milk road than some of your other things? It seems like this is the most hyped you, like it feels good. So you're 33, it's taken you of 33 years to finally find the thing where it's like, this is what I should be doing. It's the, you know, icky guy. It's like what you're good at, what the world wants, what the world's willing to pay for, and like what you're passionate about right in the middle. You've seen like you've found that, whereas before you found things that made money, but it was like, it's kind of interesting. Then you found things that you were passionate. It didn't really make money. Now you've got, you're in the center.
- Yeah, I think that's true. Made the podcast is also a good example of that. But yeah, on that note, you have this thing called five pillars of happiness. What are the five pillars? This is funny. So Chris has all these shticks and stuff. But one of them is, Sparklings five pillars of happiness. And it's very simple, but I think it's really, it's really apt. So he's at the bank. And he counts them out for you. So he'll say, see family every day, right? Obviously, see friends and loved ones multiple times a week, be in nature once a week, new and novel experiences once a month, and then feel like a man or woman, go with your buddies, go hunting, sports, whatever makes you feel tough and gritty and tick that box for your caveman brain, once a quarter, right? And it's like kind of this very simple model. We built this little circle of it where you can rank yourself on it. But I was like, this is actually like kind of a thing. I feel like more people should use this system. Sam does it in the reverse. He sees his family once a quarter and every day he does his caveman shit. He does. He's doing it right. I do think that it's kind of interesting. Sean, do you do any caveman stuff?
- Yeah, for sure. The workout is that I play sports. I'll put basketball like compete. I think that's kind of like the version of that. And then sometimes I'll just do like manual labor. I'll just like, okay, I'm going to fucking assemble this thing that's been sitting here. Like, it's not the most manly thing, but it's like, right, you know, something I don't really need to do. And I'm just going to like just put my full focus into using my hands and like trying to like make something or build something or do something. That's more rare. It's so weird. Like, I have a trainer. I do powerlifting as well. And it's so funny. Like, you're basically paying someone to come to your house to have you simulate doing labor. And it's amazing. Like, I always feel, you know, my happiest in the hour after my workout or whatever. And you just go, Oh, even that's caveman brain, right? You would have been building a log cabin or doing something manly. And now we're so pathetic that we have to pay other men to have a simulate that for us in our houses. Right? But yeah, it's doing brain stuff too. So boxing, Sam, right? I got into boxing. Does that for me? BJJ, if you've ever done Jiu Jitsu, it's like wrestling. They're like so primal and like, it's such a good feeling when you're done.
- Boxing has been awesome. I love like fighting. I think it's it's awesome. It's in a controlled environment It's badass and that's awesome And then I'm at this ranch now and I I have been so happy like I'm trying to figure out how to build a fence And I'm not literally gonna build a fence But like I'm like you're having like move stuff till you know You're doing a little bit of work to like figure out how's this gonna work or you know We're gonna put a pool and just like shit like that I have found to be so much more rewarding than internet stuff The problem is is that internet stuff is still also awesome and makes so much more money with so little effort Compared to like having to construct a pool But so I think I think
- I feel like you're similar to me in that you're looking for shortcuts. You want to delegate everything, you know, everything's door dashed, assistance, chef, you know, all that stuff, right? I'm the exact same way. And I did this thing where I did a, I had a psychologist do a 360 on me. I heard about this. One of my favorite investors, this guy, Monish Pabrai, did this thing where he hired a psychologist to basically write an operating manual and say, here's what you're missing in your life. Here's the brutal feedback your friends and family have about you. Here's how you need to improve. And so I heard this on a podcast. How much did that cost? I was driving. I think it was 10 grand. And so he spent like four hours interviewing me. We did a whole bunch of testing. And then he talked to like my six, six. I think it was three friends and family members and three, um,
- three people I work with and I got it back and it was absolutely one of the most brutal experiences of my entire life like our brains are not or we're not designed to know what our friends say about us and stuff. But one of the key to the key things he said to me is he goes. You're it's almost like all of your friends have come to you and said Andrew on Saturday let's mow the lawn together and then afterwards we're going to celebrate and we're going to have a cold beer. So we're all going to sit in a circle and you know be all sweaty and pop a pop a corona or whatever and I just say no it's cool I just got a guy on task rabbit and he's going to do that. So I never get the sense of satisfaction of doing the work and I never get the car on doing it with anyone and you're right you're right it is doing real labor doing no I know but that was the feedback and I was like holy shit that's so true and Sean I feel like you're probably similar.
- Yeah, except as my wife telling me at all times to go fucking do the work instead of like hiring a man to come hang, you know, to like literally like hang a poster on my wall, which by the way, I did. Me and my wife, one of our biggest fights over the last couple of years was I didn't like wheeling the garbage out to the street because we'd always be like 10 o'clock a day at me and my boxers, you know. And finally, I was like, oh, there's a private garbage service. They'll take all of our recycling. This is awesome. My wife looked at me like I just like, you know, she, I didn't defend her in a physical fight or something. It was like, I lost all respects. My wife like wouldn't have sex with me for weeks. It was, it's not good. She gave me that Jada, that Jada Smith look. Exactly. Yeah. Except I didn't slap anyone. I just coward. Dude. That's why we did it. We was like, oh, this is the moment. This is, I can get out of the dog house about the track right now. But the worst pain is when do you like hire a cleaning lady or something? When I see her, like try to like move the trash can down the thing and it's like heavy. I'm like, oh, fuck, I can't come on. Come on. Come on. It's all good. Like, you got to feel that guilt. It's so fascinating.
- It's so fascinating to think about like we do so little labor compared to someone 75 years ago And there's a value if you grew up in a farming family Your parents would think you're pathetic if you don't grow your own Vegetables, right? So it's like where do you end where you know? What's what's the right amount of labor and what's the wrong amount because I also know people who they're wealthy and yet They spend all their time doing miserable tasks. They hate you know cleaning the cat's litter box taking out the garbage And I'm like hey just delegate this hire someone and they hate it, you know, they're fighting with their wife over it They know it's miserable. So I think there's a balance
- dude, you didn't need to spend the 10k. You could have just asked your cleaning lady. Nobody knows you better than your cleaning lady and or your, your anani or somebody like that. Like they, they know cleaning lady. Cleaning lady doesn't speak English. I actually have to text her in Spanish. So she does know anything. At least that's what I think. Maybe she's actually she knows where you leave your underwear on the floor and shit like that. She knows how long that couple sit on your desk before you just finally take it to the sink. She knows everything. Alright, bros, I got a bounce. I got someone here, but you guys gonna keep talking?
- that we can wrap it. It's cool. Yeah, that's fun. It won't be the same without you. All right. Let's let's wrap it up. Ben, Ben, what'd you think? I'm making you come on camera here on my sick day, but great stuff. I always agree to episode for Manzru. I anticipate this is going to be one of our top download ones. It usually is. Did we? Awesome. Ben, I said that we crossed 100k per episode. That was like only for a handful or what you know what the numbers are? They just like mentioned. Those are actual average. Like, what's our actual average? I don't know the actual 60, but it depends what window you're looking at. I think most people measure it by a 60 day window.
- Yeah, whatever, 30, 60 is fine. All right, let me just pull up the stats. Have you guys considered building in public and having a graph or something or would that be too? Kind of do. I tweeted out. I'm going to talk about it a lot. Our March numbers, I tweeted out, it was 1.5, 1.6 million, whatever the number, it was something like that. That includes YouTube though. That includes only people who watch full YouTube videos, as opposed to just the clips. If you add in the clips yesterday, Sean, your video about Lamar Ball or LaVar Ball, I don't even know anything. They made fun of me all in the comments because I don't know who these people are. It got 400,000 views in like 24 hours or something like that.
- You do you realize what are your videos right now on YouTube YouTube shorts has like millions and millions of views Yeah, it's got like thousands of comments and people just roasting me and a little bit of you 100 millions of views Does it really have tens of millions of views yeah, you just get bullied by like 14 year olds if you Looking they all wear vans like I got super excited about our tiktok tiktok videos I was like oh sick a million views. They're probably saying how useful and helpful this content was right Is that nothing good in the comments for us right like
- I'm a hairy ugly and dumb and you're like, I don't know what they say about you. I was just too focused on me. What are you? You wanna know the numbers? So I think what you were talking about was the other day, it's for the first time we have YouTube videos with, we have multiple YouTube videos with over 200,000 views, which is good. And these are not like the short TikTok style videos, like actual videos with a couple hundred thousand. In terms of just podcast, our top downloaded episode is at 70,000.
- And, well, from what date rates? All time? Just all time. But if you throw on YouTube, it crosses a hundred thousand. So how much of your growth has come from doing all that TikTok stuff where you're like, oh, we'll give out, I forget you're giving up money or something like that for the person who takes stuff viral? It's hard to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like, I mean, that definitely worked.
- But we were doing other stuff at the same time so it's hard to say how much of that came from that Oh, hey, when are you guys doing this summit? What's the deal with that? I Don't know what I read you the top three top five comments on that video that has three million views of YouTube This is exactly what I'm talking about all right here's comment number one This is what people say when they just read the headlines that comment has six thousand likes Number two there's a guy in the NBA that alone told us everything he has no clue what he's talking about No, a lot about the NBA Reminds me of myself in college when I was giving a talk about a professor taught and I'd only skim Reading ten minutes before the class that has two thousand likes

3 Patterns for Great Business Ideas with Jack Abraham, Founder, Managing Partner and CEO at Atomic [YCq6RjGi-qA].txt

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- that there could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent all the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else. This is like a hit podcast, like we're growing, we're doing good. And yet, Sean, your microphone is the most like...
- Houdrat thing I've seen. What is that? Is it like balanced in there? Yeah, so there's like, you know, there's some way that is supposed to sit and then there's the way it actually sits and You know, don't mess with success. It's our good luck charm. So Jack we're recording now. I think you someone I don't know how much you looked into it But someone sent your team a little update on or a little Description on what we do and it looks like you sent an agenda. This looks awesome So I have a feeling you know, what's up a little bit. Is that right?
- Yeah, I listened to a few of your guys' podcasts. I think it's great, great content. Sean and I kind of go way back. We used to know each other back in San Francisco in the early days when Tech was getting going there. When Tech was in San Francisco. Yeah, when Tech was in San Francisco and excited to be on. Thanks for having me. How did you guys know each other? I was going to ask you this. I didn't know how much you remember. I remember pretty vividly. I was at this time I was running Monkey Inferno, which was an idea lab or sort of startup studio. And
- Jack I don't know how we got connected, but Jack came by the office and I remember sitting in this conference room and He was thinking about launching his own, you know, it's sort of like personal incubator idea factory Whatever you want to call these things. What do you call it Jack? By the way, you call it a startup studio We go with startup studio just given that the industry seems to have gone with that And I remember before the meeting I like kind of googles like okay Who's this guy and then I saw oh wow this guy's like done all this stuff. He had he built Milo he sold it to eBay and this was like, you know, not his first rodeo and And in the meeting I just remember you had like really good questions you had like because a lot of people like this idea of a startup
- studio, it sounds really fun. You get to sit around all day, just think of ideas and build them. And like, if something hits, you know, hooray. And, but you had actually like done a lot of thought, put a lot of thought into it. And so you asked a bunch of questions. And I remember thinking, I haven't do this for a few years, I can share a bunch of insights. I remember everything that I had told you, I was like, Hey, here's a common trap, avoid it, go this way, you were like, Yeah, that's why we're doing it this way. You had already, you were sort of two two steps ahead, I remember, and I remember, I remember walking away, be like, okay, I think this is one of the few starters studios that might actually work. And I think it has done so, I think it's one of the few starters studios that has actually worked, you guys had hymns come out of it, which is like a breakout success public company. And, and what are some of the other ones that have come out of atomic that are big, I know there was the
- There's some that have sort of spiked and I'm not sure where they're at now. They didn't kind of go full like Hampton. We've created a ton of different companies. Bongolay has been doing incredibly well. We just announced a huge raise for that company, Homebound, which is kind of revolutionizing construction and how that's done with the marketplace dynamic replicant, which is using AI to transform call centers, radiant, which is kind of cloud software for screens, for B2B applications. So we kind of touch all sorts of industries we have now.
- actually a few dozen companies that we started. So we operate across everything and a lot of our companies are doing really well. We actually try to keep a lot of our companies stealth because people have started to try to copy them and by the time they announce them, they've usually raised pretty significant funding. So a lot of them are under wraps, but we tend to do a lot in healthcare and telemedicine. We do a lot in prop tech, we do a lot in thin tech, education, AI, and then marketplaces. What is the idea process? Because you're right, you do stay in stealth.
- For a while, I think I feel it feels like when you come out to market you've already like the company's already got a bunch of traction you announce a big raise at that point. But what that means is that people are willing to copy you like if Jack's doing it as an idea it's probably a good market and a good idea let's just that if we just use that and copy that we're already skipping a bunch of potential points of failure. And you know I think everybody thinks they're a good idea person you actually seem to be a good idea person so where does that. What was the process what's the process for ideas.
- How are you coming up with so high number of good quality ideas? You have 600, you have a list of 600 in an Evernote doc, just an Evernote doc, right? Yeah, 600. Yeah, so you have a lot. A lot of ideas, yeah. Yeah, so, okay, multi-part question. So I think the first part of this is, where do kind of good ideas come from? And I have a view on this, which is a little contrarian. And actually, I think where startup studios and incubators can fall apart.
- which is a lot of times if you're incubating companies, a temptation is to brainstorm on ideas. So think about things, get into a room, whiteboard, come up with solutions, and you're kind of coming up with these contrived solutions to problems that may or may not exist. And that's kind of a problem, you know? Versus what we do at Atomic is, we don't have brainstorming sessions. So we've been in business for over a decade. We've never had a brainstorming session on ideas, which is kind of crazy, right? So what we do is we observe problems in the world that could be problems.
- that we have personally problems on our team, problems in our portfolio, that our companies have, that create enterprise companies. And in that case, we observe the problems, we see a pattern, we actually build the product to solve it, we deploy it across our portfolio, we have built-in customers, we dog food it, we make sure that it works within our portfolio, and then once we know it works, then we release it to the world. But it's really a problem first kind of mentality, and then solving the problem that I think makes us stand out and a little bit different from other people that have attempted this.
- And I in terms of the 600 ideas and where they've come from, it turns out our view of the world is like, it's actually fundamentally very broken. There's just a lot of stuff in the world that could be improved. And that doesn't mean that everything's broken, broken. It just means that there is an opportunity in many, many facets of light and many parts of the economy to up level things. And this could be in just like everyday parts of life.
- This could be in going to the doctor's office. This could be in commuting to work. This could be in interacting with a company or running a sales team or something like that. You just observe all of these things and think, wow, that seems a little bit broken. There's probably a better way. And then I just got in the habit of writing those down. And now that list has grown to over 600. And that's a seed that we use to start companies out of at Atomic. And I have a whole bunch of questions that I was telling you. I watched a lot of your interviews. So I understand a little bit about your process. And I want to ask you about that. But before you did this, so you're 34 now? I'm 35 now. You're 35. So before you were doing Atomic, your first big win was Milo. You sold that for like 75 million at 24, right? Yeah.
- Stayed there at eBay for two years Sam. Do you know who his dad is? I do comm score Yeah, so I didn't know that till I was doing research because we had met I just thought oh He's kind of like a Wiz kid and I love comms were behind every Wiz kid is some unique childhood I think where you get exposed to something so so Jax so your dad Started comms score is that right with CEO? I don't know if you still CEO and you were working there like at age 12 or something crazy is that right? Thanks. Yeah Yeah, I had a an interesting childhood where
- I got exposed to entrepreneurship at a young age. My dad was an immigrant. He came to the US literally without a dollar to his name from where? He was born in Lebanon and then he actually Went to college in France studying science and engineering in math He came to the US goes PhD in math at MIT and he literally didn't have a dollar to his name So he slept on a concrete basement floor at MIT in a sleeping bag I was born while he was there in Boston and then you know he took math and he applied it to business. He actually invented
- all of these really cool new forms of marketing, which at the time, a revolutionary, he ended up winning these international marketing awards for them, ended up getting promoted in the company that he joined and eventually became president of it, and then decided to become an entrepreneur. Can you imagine the world dream? I mean, he was basically born at the bottom of the third world, he rose to the top of the first world, started a company, sold it, and then when I was 12 or 13, he said, Jack, I'm gonna start a company that's gonna measure everything everyone does on the internet and make sense of it, do you wanna join it? And I joined it as the third person, as a software engineer, and I learned how to write code. Did he give you equity?
- Well, so he was like, do you want cash for equity? I said equity. I don't want cash. Give me equity. So I took the equity and it ended up working out. Also, child labor laws meant he couldn't pay me cash. So I had to get the equity. And at its peak, it was worth it. Like he took it public. It was worth like six billion or something like that. Like many billions. Yeah, it ended up being worth billions at its peak. He basically, yeah, he grew it on his own, took it public. It did really well. And then, you know.
- two or three years after it went public, he decided, I don't want to be a public company CEO. And he got off of that, started doing investing and being on boards. But I got to see that grow just from like an idea in my parents sitting room to, you know, 1000 plus person company to public company. And I just got hooked. So I started starting companies at age 15. And I've just been hooked. It's just been in my DNA ever since technology has been in my DNA. I'll offer you when it went public.
- Hmm. That's a good question. I was in college, so I probably was Like 19 or 20 or something like that. So he gave you shares when you were 13 when you were 20 What did they end up becoming worth? Were you like the richest 20 year old? Podcast is called my first million you might have been the youngest the youngest person to make your first million If that math adds up, you know My dad was a is a very fair person and that would have been nepotism to give me an unfair amount of share He gave me what I deserved
- which I was a 12 or 13 year old that didn't know how to code. So I got basically paid the equivalent of like close to minimum wage and shares, which is kind of what I deserved. Right. But it ended up being worth a lot of money and it was great. And yeah, it was a good taste of equity. And you start Milo, it's a, was it acquired for 75 billion? Mm hmm. Right. So you're 24. So just massive success. Milo ends up becoming a pretty big deal, like a main part of eBay. You work on a bunch of big parts at eBay. You become this kind of big shot, like you can climb a ladder. Yeah, I'll do that. I'll ask about this because in the last two years, but basically.
- me. So I got acquired. We got acquired by Twitch. So like, you know, go from a little startup to okay, so 2000 person company, Sam just got acquired, his company just got acquired by HubSpot. I don't know how many employees HubSpot have. Probably 3000, I think. 3000 employees. And so, and I know I would say like the default path for entrepreneurs. And I know because I talked to a bunch of them during the acquisition process of like, all right, what's the next year of my life going to look like? You know, what's your advice to me? And I got a whole range of of opinions. But I would say the common, the default path was sort of like,
- Look, somebody who's like you, true entrepreneur at heart, it's going to be hard for you to be in a big company for a long time. You could choose to either like just not play the game, you kind of like coast and just do your own thing, maybe build a couple of interesting products while you're there and then bounce whenever you're ready. Or you like try to play the game, you try to climb the ladder a bit and actually like figure out what this looks like. There's a different game than the startup game. You're not zero to one. You're sort of in the one to end phase of things. It's all about the sort of management of a large organization.
- And I think most entrepreneurs go the first route that I just mentioned, but it seems like you actually kicked ass at eBay Like I remember reading some article where you were basically like the VP or something You were the MVP really you were like the the guy who's helping turn this thing around I think it was like part of a bigger story of hey eBay's turning itself around but You seem to have done extremely well Talk about that. Is that something where you what was your approach when you got acquired? And is that true? Yeah, yeah, how much of that story is true? Yeah, so you know it's interesting
- First of all, it's definitely true. It wasn't told when I was at eBay, partially because I don't like that much attention and I don't claim credit for a lot of things while I was there. I was just catching up with like a reporter that I liked and I told him this story and he was like, this is amazing. Why hasn't anyone written about this? He ended up getting written up and eventually the story got told. But yeah, I'm a pretty impact motivated person overall and I had just heard all these stories about founder friends that it's
- sold their companies and they sell to the acquirer and they languish. And they actually kind of become depressed. They're just kind of like they lose their mojo. They're just like, what am I doing? What's my life becoming? They almost become like robotic. And I was just like, you know what? Life's short. Let me figure out how to use this experience for the good of the company of me. I'm proud of what I built. I want to see it succeed. Let's figure out how to do that. And I went and there's some funny stories about things that we did while we were at eBay to try to maintain our culture.
- at one point I rallied the troops. We had this house. They tried to put us in cubicles. I had the whole company rise up and go and rip down the cubicles and throw it on the front lawn and we almost got in trouble and kicked off campus and all sorts of crazy stuff. But I basically took the approach of like, look, what's the worst thing that can happen? They can fire me. If I get fired, I don't really care. So I might as well just go for it and try to do great things while I'm here. And what's a great thing that I can do? Well, there's a bunch of products that you make.
- can build, I like building products. I'm an entrepreneur. I haven't tried building multiple products at once. What if I use this time at eBay to try to put together multiple teams under me and try my hand at building multiple products at once and see if I'm any good at that versus just working on one product? And I convinced the CEO to let me do that and give me a shot at it. And the majority of what we built was hitting. And a lot of it was driving press cycles and the stock price, the biggest thing I did, I convinced the CEO to do on a Friday.
- that night I convinced six people to cancel their next two weeks, fly with me to Sydney, Australia, rent an Airbnb, turn it into a hacker house, and we built the entire thing in two weeks. There's actually a story written about this online, and it ended up becoming the feed in the homepage of eBay and 130 million people were using it in my own Slater, as like the primary discovery mechanism on the site. And after that, you started a couple things before Atomic, I think, right? And those things, I feel like when I was researching...
- your story, they're kind of like footnotes. Like they're not like major parts. And yet I researched them. They were really successful. Like a couple software companies, right? Yeah, we've started a bunch of software companies that are still successful. They're kind of part of atomic is kind of how we consider them. Everything's kind of been folded into one umbrella at one point or another. The other thing that I would say that is a lesson that we learned and Sean, I don't know if you remember when we talked about
- of studios about this, but one trap you can have with startup studios is when you have hundreds of ideas. And when I left eBay, I had 250 potential ideas for my next company. Is the temptation is to try them all. And the thing that we did at Atomic is we only did one the first year, two to the second, three to the third, four to the fourth, we really paced ourselves. And I think, you know, now we're at the point where we can do 10 or 12 a year. But that was kind of part of that.
- pacing process. I remember three of those traps. I want to say them because I'm sure there's somebody out here listening who, who, who would be curious. Um, I remember one was exactly what you said, which was focus. So, uh, the, the theme is basically startup studios are great. They have a bunch of advantages, but you don't want to lose the natural advantages that startups have. And so startups have desperation and focus. This is two of the core ingredients of a startup. And I said, you know, shiny objects syndrome is a trap. When you have an idea lab, you could do exactly what you said. You could just go in a whiteboard brainstorm. It that's kind of your job. And then you take one of those ideas that sounds semi plausible and program, I think, cause these sitcom startup ideas. It's like you come up with a, a, a,
- a kind of a manufactured story for a sitcom. Like, oh, kind of girl, fall in love in college. And then the jobs take them across the country, they break up, right? You come up with these manufactured ideas. And then the second thing is, because you have multiple ideas going at once when you're doing, at the beginning, when you're doing one, it starts to hit some rough patches or plateaus or just things get challenging like every idea does. Well, that shiny object over there is unproven. That one might be easier. Let's just go either intentionally or unintentionally start to shift your focus away from the hard thing that you should really be pushing.
- through and start just focusing on other shiny objects. The second one was desperation. You had said something smart. You go, we're going to fund the team. I think we've said for nine months, you go, then their job is to raise the series A in nine months. And I was like, that's great because if otherwise in an ideal lab, these things can just languish forever. You could just keep them in this sort of this feeling that, you know, if not this month the next month, no problem. And you're like, the people working on this are only going to work on this one project. Their project needs to raise money or, sorry guys, it's a bust. And like, of course you would probably recycle the best talent into the next idea.
- But I liked that having a sort of a deadline and a do or die moment of like you either proved your shit or you didn't that was the second Second one I remember and the third was you're like We're gonna focus on B2B initially and not consumer stuff because we know a bunch of pain points that we've had as entrepreneurs or our companies Have it so we can kind of scratch your own itch and not try to make the next hit social network and frankly, it's probably So much easier although him's was a consumer company So, you know, you know, but maybe who know I don't want to pry but maybe you're scratching your own itch there, too
- Well, you know, it, no, that was a bunch of, that was a hair loss company. I saw my hair as a hair loss company. He was about to, Jack was about to skip that one over and then he was like, I gotta address that. You know, that a VC told me who are really respect that the way you make your money in the venture business is B to B. Those are your singles and doubles.
- typically and consumer can be your home runs. That can be your lightning in the bottle and you should plan your portfolio accordingly. Who said that? That's a good question. I think it was one of the managing partners from general catalysts, if I remember correctly. And they're great. We do some work with them. They're pretty fantastic. And since then B2B has actually been able to become home runs, additionally, the valuations on some of these B2B companies.
- is absolutely astronomical, but the great thing about doing B2B is you can talk to the customer and you can trust what they say. And that is not necessarily true for consumers. Consumers, you can talk to them and you almost have to read between the lines with what they say. You can't trust what they say. You can trust what they do. You have to kind of run them through the product. You have to look at the data and see what they do. But what they do is actually usually different than what they say. And what works is not always what they say is going to work. Part of that is consumer.
- customers don't know in their mind what they need. They don't know. It's hard. They can't dream it up. So it's a very different practice creating consumer companies from B2B companies. But to address your other point, Sean, of the nine months and having companies raise on their own, that is like a purposeful element that we designed atomic in, which is we tried to design atomic to be uncomfortable at the atomic level. So companies are pushed out and people are pushed out of atomic.
- And there's not this effect where people just stay in the incubator forever because it's dangerous to do that. And then it says, is it nine months and $300,000? Is that right? Or $250,000 or something? So we have multiple stages of investment. The first check that we'll write to kind of get something going and do some initial research and homework is around a quarter million dollars, but it could range from a hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. And then if that goes well, we can write a check.
- That's usually $2 million, but again, it could be $1 to $4 million. And then from there, we can actually write a check that could be $3 to $8 million that sometimes we do with other VCs, sometimes we do on our own. Kind of depends on the circumstances, depends on the needs of the company and what we need to get to the next set of milestones. But that's kind of how it works now. That's been evolving over our funds and our first fund, it was smaller. So we obviously only did like the early rounds, which is what Sean is describing, and then as it's gotten bigger.
- we're able to get the companies further, which is why we can keep them self longer. And now when they come out, they usually have raised these really big rounds. Did you, when you, when you were starting this, how much of your own money did you put up to do this? And when you're like, all right, you know, I made this much money, I'm willing to lose a million dollars over the next two years to see if I can make this work. Yeah, it's a good question. So my general philosophy with things is you shouldn't sell what you wouldn't also buy. So I wanted to prove to myself that this.
- would work before raising outside capital. So the first year or so of atomic, I did it with my own capital, which was roughly on the order of what you described. And then once I was convinced, OK, I think this is working. I think we can pull this off. I think this model is going to work. Then we raised our first fund. And our first fund was roughly the first part of the first fund was roughly a $10 million vehicle. That was primarily individuals. And we had some great founders of venture capital firms involved, like Mark and Driesen.
- and I'd send kid and Peter Teal and people like that that helped us a lot in the early days. And that helped us prove out the model from there. And since then we've raised much, much larger funds. You have a couple of things on the agenda that I wanted to know the answer to. And one is what you just said. You, Andreessen, brought back to your fund, Chris Dixon, David Sacks, Peter Teal. And he said, on here, some of the learnings from some of these kind of like pretty amazing people. These are some of the architects.
- of like, you know, the modern Silicon Valley. I guess, do you have any like fun stories, anecdotes or lessons learned that are, you know, not what's, you know, I guess like just absolute common sense where you just say, we all already know that. But what have you learned from some of these guys that's been that stood out to you or stuck with you? And Adam Josh Kushner on there too, because he interests me as well. He, which he almost has a model like yours. Yeah, he also starts companies. I love Josh. Josh is fantastic. Wow. Well, those are great people.
- The first thing I'd say, and you know, this is just a general thing, is like, there's some amazing people out in the world. I'm surprised how many people don't approach them and just ask them for advice and mentorship. And that's something that was a major way that I learned throughout my career, and I'm so thankful to have had those people in my life and grateful for everything that I learned from them. You know, I'd say maybe going through some of them.
- One of the things that I learned from Mark Andreessen was actually a really interesting story about Peter Teal that led to a really, really big insight that I had that has kind of driven a lot of my decision-making since then, which is this concept that time exists on this massive power law basis. They were having this conversation apparently, Mark was telling me.
- where Peter was talking to Mark and he was talking about this big moment where he made this investment in Mark Zuckerberg and he made this investment in Facebook. And he said, listen Mark, I worked so hard my whole life to be able to get into Stanford. I really worked hard in high school and I did this and I did that and all these extracurriculars I finally got into Stanford. I got into Stanford, I crushed it at Stanford, I tried to get the best grades while I was there. I felt to get him to stand for law school. I got into Stanford.
- for law school. I did really well while I was there. I was really crushing it while I was there because I wanted to get into the best law firm. I got into the best law firm. While I was there, you know, I realized it wasn't for me, but that enabled me to start hedge fund. From there, I met Max Lefchin. I got the opportunity to go run PayPal. I ran that. It went public. You know, ended up being merging with eBay. It led me to start clearing capital. This hedge fund, which was kind of a dream that I'd wanted to do for a long time. All of this effort, all of this time,
- all of this energy, everything that I had done up until this point in my life, got me one hour with Mark Zuckerberg. And that hour was worth more than the cumulative sum of all those other hours that I had spent in my life. And that is a crazy mind-blowing fact if you think about that. That there could be an hour that comes in your life that is worth more than the cumulative sum of everything else you've spent.
- all of the time, all of the effort, all of the energy that you've spent doing everything else. And I think that can be true for everyone. So looking out for those kind of like power law time moments or those power hours can be so important. And I believe that they exist and sometimes they're in plain sight. So thinking about those critically, how do you put yourself in those positions where you can discover those kinds of opportunities? And how do you almost engineer your calendar so that you can create those opportunities for yourself I think it's an interesting.
- question. What's an example of that for you? Do you have an hour? Is there something that stands out to you that's like your version of that hour with Zuck or how do you engineer it? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So this is something I've never met Jeff Bezos. I'm a huge fan of his, but one of the things that he does that I think that I adopted that I think is a really, really cool practice is you take a look at your prior week and how all of your time has spent.
- and you look at your calendar, you look at each block, each half an hour, each hour, and you basically, I basically modified a little bit what he does, but you asked the question, for all of these things that I did last week, what are the things where if I hadn't done this thing, nothing would have changed? And you cross it off the list. And if things keep getting crossed off that list, you probably shouldn't be doing them. You should probably find a way to get out of those comments.
- of meetings or replace yourself in those kinds of meetings or hire someone perhaps to, you know, take those kinds of meetings for you because they're not as productive and then really circle the things that really, really mattered. You know, there could be within a week if in a lifetime you can have an hour that's worth the cumulative sum of the hours. You can certainly have that in a week, right? You can have that in a month, you can have that in a year. So really training your mind toward, you know, what those things are.
- and circling them and having that pattern recognition can make a lot of sense. I like that. So that's kind of I used to have a job that was kind of like a shitty job. It paid really well, but I just didn't like it. And I remember talking to my friend there and I go, he's like, why don't you like it? Like it's all good. Like it's an easy job. We're making great money. We're, you know, they really respect us. They like us. What's the problem? And I was like, the problem is I feel like if I didn't come here today, nothing would change. And if I, and then you boil that down, it's like, if I don't do anything this hour, definitely nothing's going to change.
- We called it, it's kind of like you said, you look at all those blocks and you sort of figure out which blocks matter. And we literally said the same thing and we called it the Django law, which was in a tower of Django blocks. If you remove some blocks, the tower's totally fine. And then other blocks are like the key lynch bands. And there's some point where you remove too many and the whole tower tips over and it falls. And so you don't want to remove those anchors, but there are plenty of sort of useless blocks that are in there. And if you take them out, you make space and then something interesting can happen. And so we started doing that. I first started with an hour.
- I said, okay, every day from one PM to two PM, I did nothing. It wasn't to be lazy. It was to test what happens. And then of course, nothing happened. Nobody noticed your office space moment. Yeah, exactly. And I took half a day off. I was going to do nothing for the second half this day, see what happens. Nothing happened. I just stopped coming to work for like two weeks, right? And finally, by like the fourth week, it was like, they, you know, they were like, Hey, what the heck? Where are you? We noticed that these things were behind. And what job was this? It was a job I had in Australia. And after my first company kind of got like aqua hired, I was working for this day again.
- Yeah, it was a fun. It was again a nice place, but it really taught me that like one thing that matters to me is That my hours matter like I want my hours to matter That doesn't mean I want to work super hard But it when I when I do do something I want it to matter and I started doing what you're doing which is like Recognizing that it's not linear every hour is not equal We kind of get trained this way, right? You're gonna work Monday through Friday 9 to 5 if there's this assumption that Monday equals Thursday that you know The first hour of eight hour days the same as the fourth
- hour, but they're definitely not in productivity or importance. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's absolutely right. I want to ask you about very specific ideas. So in the Pomp podcast, basically, you said something I entirely agree with, which is distribute or I don't know if you said it or if it was discussed distribution over ideas. So you look at, um, you want to know, um, how do I get early customers? And can this actually scale? Some of the ways that you do that is you look at the payback period.
- So you try to see you try to get that as low as possible. So if I acquire a customer, how much how long does it take to get my money back? You said the best in classes three months. You also said that the LTV to CAC best in class is five, meaning you acquire customer for a dollar. They're worth $5 to you. And you also said that you have a very at this point, very strict standards for launching companies. So you said you have 600 ideas. You can launch up to 10 now. And that's many years into that.
- So what I want to talk about is what ideas didn't cross this threshold, but in your head, you think it could have, or if the right person does this, it definitely maybe could work, or maybe it couldn't meet some of those benchmarks, but it's still pretty cool and pretty good. What can you tell me some ideas that keep you up at night? Honorable mention. Honorable mention. Good question.
- That was a good question, by the way. Let me think through that. I mean, there have been plenty, plenty, plenty over the years to think through. I'm just trying to think through some worth calling out. Take out your ever note and just scroll. I know. I know. I just look like click Share and then add Sam at Sampart.com. Yeah, totally. Well, I'll give you some examples. So one example is, all right, so talk about problem solution. So we got this, we got this new.
- office in Letterman and the Presidio for those of you who don't know in San Francisco. It's kind of like a national park. There's like a lot of trees around and we got this new office and I was just a mess in this office. I was sneezing, I was feeling awful like every day and I just had these horrible allergies and I couldn't get rid of these allergies and I like it took me three or four months to get an appointment an allergist. Was it like old or something? Well I had no idea. I was like what could this be? Like obviously there's something new about
- about this environment. So I went to this allergist, I got tested, and of all the possible things I could be allergic to, it was the one tree that was growing outside the window of my new office that I could not move that was protected by the city. Anyway, so I had to deal with it. In the process, what are your options in terms of getting treated for allergies? Well, you can get allergy shots, which are painful. You have to go every week, they have to be scheduled, they're expensive, like they take a lot of, we're talking about time power law. I don't wanna be driving around the city.
- getting these allergy shots every week, or you can do something called sublingual immunotherapy. So basically like there's two ways to get these allergens in increasing quantities into your immune system so that you get used to them. One is through an injection, and others by putting them under your tongue. Both ways they get into your bloodstream. So I said, well, I wanna do the thing under your tongue, you can do it at home, it's a drop a day in the morning, that seems a lot easier. So I did that and I got it, and it completely cured me of my allergies.
- And I was like, this is amazing. Why doesn't everybody have this? Look at all these kids, they're going, they're getting these allergy shots. You go and you look and structurally, it's really messed up because the allergists get paid for giving these allergy shots. That's why there's so many allergy shots. You go to the allergists, they bill your insurance. So every visit you do, they get paid versus every sublingual drop you do at home, they're not getting paid. So that's actually normally the perfect setup, right? For like,
- creating a company. It's like, okay, let's disrupt. There's this misaligned incentive. Let's go ahead and disrupt this. A lot of people suffering huge pain point. People really, really hate their allergies. So we went, you know, we found a compounded pharmacy. We found like supply chain is actually pretty difficult to like source and get bright and treat all these allergies and figure out how to do via telemedicine. And we went and we tested it. And just the economics just don't work. And it's just.
- I think they should work. I think it's dramatically better than getting shots at the allergist. I feel like I don't understand why this isn't the way everyone gets cured of their allergies. We attempted to make the world better by giving everyone this way of getting cured of their allergies, but we just weren't able to figure it out. Then we tried selling it through doctors and the allergists, of course, don't want their revenue stream to be disrupted of getting the allergy shots, so that's not going to work. So eventually we said, you know what?
- We got a lot of other problems to solve and opportunity cost is really high. What about it didn't it work? The meta-to-expective. The unit economics. Just the unit economics. We couldn't get the unit economics to work. Do you remember how much? Like what some of the numbers were? Well, let's see. We were trying really, we tried a bunch of different price points in terms of like the monthly price for these sublingual drops, ranging from like 79 a month all the way up to like 250 a month. Those are our tasks.
- we're testing the pricing, that obviously gets you a gross margin depending on that price. And then, you know, there's a CAC to acquire the customer. And the problem in this case was just the CAC was really, really high. I don't know if it's, you know, a new thing. Customers don't know about it. They need to be educated. Maybe they're skeptical, hard to sell over the internet. I'm not sure, but, you know, we're really good at producing low CACs. We're really good at scaling things. We just...
- couldn't figure out how to get the cackalo on this. We did a lot of different iterations. And you know the other way that can work is if the churn is really low and you just get payments for a long time. This should be it takes about a year to three years to fully cure. But it just didn't work out. The math didn't work out. And you know that's the kind of thing the world should be that way. It should be that way. And like you can be an entrepreneur and believe that and I still believe that. But you'll be knocking your head against a
- brick wall forever and get nowhere. And there are other problems like that that you can solve that can become huge and it's just better in our view to work on this. So that's why I've adopted this philosophy, which is exactly what you said, which is distribution is more important than ideas. And we only want to work on ideas that can achieve mass distribution, because our view is life is short. And you know, up for us and our co-founders, we want to, you know, prize our time.
- and we only want to work on things that can reach a lot of customers, whether they're consumers or businesses, we want it to matter. So we try to validate that as much as possible upfront. What are some other ones that you've done that maybe could have worked but just missed the mark? You have a different, different below here that you can do if it's hard to think of that, which is patterns for great company ideas and accessories ideas to talk about. So I'm curious about those. Yeah. I'm going to throw out another one that was like a crazier idea that we
- we looked into that I'm just gonna put out there as a crazy idea, maybe someone on this podcast will do it. I still think it's a good idea, but there are some problems with it, so I'll disclose it. So, there's all this technology, computer vision, et cetera, that's been developed for autonomous vehicles. So cars, self-driving cars. So cars, they drive around, there's a lot of issues, right? Like you've got stop signs, you've got stoplights, you've gotta be able to identify colors, there's people coming.
- There's bikes, there's all this stuff in the environment. It's 2D, but it's also 3D. You go up, you go down, there's weather, there's all of this stuff. So we were trying to think, what are some interesting ways that this technology could potentially be applied? And a crazy idea that I had that I had us look into was what if you created autonomous fishing vessels that went out into the ocean and just fished 24-7, even through inclement weather. And they have crazy sonar and like
- computer vision underwater, and they could find the fish, and they just automatically did all of that. And we looked into it, and it's still such interesting technology. I hope someone does build it. But there's some structural issues with it around phishing quotas and the industry capture of that industry that we could get into at another time that kind of make it a little bit difficult. But that's another idea. But anyway, yeah, I'm happy to discuss that more. I'm happy to progress into the.
- patterns behind. Yeah, go to the patterns. I'd be curious to what those are. Okay, cool. Sounds good. Yeah, so some patterns that I think are kind of tried and true that are really interesting to think about. One pattern is if you take things that rich people have access.
- to you or rich companies have access to. And you figure out how to democratize them. So you make them more accessible, distributable, cheaper and accessible to everyone. That is a winning formula for creating a really good company. And part of the reason for that, from a philosophical perspective, this is actually something I learned from Mark Andreessen. He has this belief that human desire is infinite, which is an interesting concept. And if you believe that,
- then people with a lot of resources and companies with a lot of resources are willing to spend on the outer limit of human desire. So they're poking around, they're figuring out all of these things of what's the next thing on the human desire bubble that could be discovered. And they might discover something, and if something there really takes hold that you can then take and give to everyone, everyone might want that, and it might be ready for everyone. Uber was a classic example of this, right? People had private drivers.
- Now everybody can push a button, have a private driver pick them up. Yeah, private driver with Uber, private chef with DoorDash, private shopper with Instacart. Those are all really good examples. You could even argue second home Airbnb. It's kind of like having access to a second home in a much cheaper way. And so what's an idea in that space? So what are some of the things that you've seen that either very wealthy people or very wealthy companies have that the rest of us.
- What are some other examples in there that haven't looked into it but might be interesting? Well, I think that there seems to be some kind of a renaissance happening in FinTech partially because the wealthy seem to have access to financial planning, financial resources around planning, access to the markets. There's this whole 99% versus the 1% and people have figured that out. I think that's why you're seeing this boom of new companies. You can give the 99% with the 1%.
- has access to and the ability to generate wealth, I think that that's actually really interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting startup ideas that are being formed there. We are starting one or two that we think can help empower people in that area, for example. So that would be one example of an area that- Are you going to do anything in the wealth advisor space? We are kind of tangentially doing things there. I think that there's probably a lot more to do there.
- You know, wealth advisory is a compounded issue where even the wealthy, when they have access to wealth advisory, it's not great. It's not great. Have you heard of Adpar, Sean? No. So I bet you have, Jack, right? Adpar? Yeah. Adpar, sorry. And so Adpar was started by Joe Lansdale, I think, right? I only know, like, you know, the Wikipedia version, but basically it's kind of like mint.com, but for...
- really wealthy people, but like billionaire wealthy people. I actually don't know what features necessarily it has that something a little bit, what Jack, what's it have that's more robust, you know? It basically has tracking of like everything, every fund everywhere in the world, every wealth manager, all of your assets, but they tend to work more with wealth managers instead of individuals. But Joe and that company has like a big vision for where that can go. And you might be able to work with it.
- as an individual now, but that's kind of along the lines. So I could disrupt that. So I work with some of these folks and they send me like the jankiest stuff ever and they're a login. So like Morgan Stanley, the login to like look at your investments, it's horrible. And I was like, you guys, this is just absolutely awful. Like I'm just using spreadsheet on my own. This is really bad. You know, I've heard of this at-apart thing and they're like, well, you know, you can't use that unless you're worth $500 million or like a billion dollars. It's really, really expensive. Like it's crazy high. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Just like give me a mint.com login or something. And you guys like become the admin and just like let's share this. You can just tell me because this is dog shit.
- And so I think that I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that space, but to go back to your point about distribution, I think selling to those people can be quite challenging because they're very old school and they're very conservative. But I was bringing this up to ask you if that's a space that has been interesting to you lately because I know you're being a little cryptic because you like to be stealth until you go live. So I was trying to get something out of you. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting space. I would encourage people to look into it. I think that there is a lot that can be done.
- done there. I think there's dissatisfaction amongst everyone, basically in that space. It's pretty universal. A lot of room for improvement. Cool. So that's one pattern for great ideas. So what are the wealthy companies that people have that can be democratized? And if a few people have that desire and they've pushed out to that limit, other people would want it if you can make it accessible, cheaper, and more available to them. That's an amazing one. I think there's tons of great ideas there.
- What's another framework or sort of pattern you've seen for great ideas? Yeah, so one that I think is pretty interesting, that's also I would put in like the tried and true bucket, is if you take something that people consistently do and they have to do and they feel like they have to do it, but it takes a lot of steps and or time and you dramatically simplify it and you make it a lot faster to accomplish the same thing that they feel like.
- like they have to do. So some good examples of this would be, for example, booking online travel. You know, it used to be so hard to do. You'd have to go to so many different sites. The kayak founders had the vision of let's just pull it all into kayak.com. You go to one site, you see it all in one place, they made it really easy. In the case of 10 this once, which was, anytime there's somebody has 14 tabs open to do this, to do one task, that's a business opportunity, is that right? That's a business opportunity. I mean, just watch for that. If you ever see that, people are doing a lot of research. They're.
- Yeah, tons of tabs open. It's really arduous. That's an opportunity. Another example of that that we kind of found with him and hers and other telemedicine companies that we've started is going to the doctor's office. You know, people need to go to the doctor's office. Think of that process. You're calling the doctor's office. You're scheduling an appointment. You're whipping out your calendar. You're putting it on your calendar. You're going to the waiting room. You're sitting there. You're getting prescribed something. You're going to Walgreens. You're waiting in mind for half an hour going around.
- around the store going home, you know, this is a big process. And as a result, the next generation kind of doesn't even really engage with the healthcare system. You know, close to nine out of 10 of them don't even know who their doctor is or they haven't even gone. So, you know, telemedicine takes that process and makes it a five minute process where you can do it on your phone and go through and get treated for whatever condition that you have. I think another interesting example of that is selling your house. People need to sell their house, right?
- And it's a really hard, long, arduous process fraught with a lot of anxiety and things like that. Open Door came along and said, hey, come to this website, tell us what your house is, and we'll make you an offer to buy it. And you can sell it right now. And not everyone has to do that, and not everyone does do that, but enough people do it that it created a really, really big company that's doing really well. So those are some interesting... And you guys are doing that now with Open Store, right?
- which I gotta say is a truly great idea. I remember when I first started it, I texted my friend, and I said, I didn't even say how great this idea is. I just only said, why are we not doing this? Because I was like, this is that good of an idea. Selling your company, selling your e-commerce store in this case takes so much effort, so much work, and the data is all there, right? Like I'm assuming, I don't actually know how it works. I'm assuming it's sort of like Clear Bank or whatever where you can plug into their Shopify, you can plug into their Facebook ad account, you can plug into their bank or whatever. And, and...
- With those three sources of data you can get a basically like a health score and a value of this of this Of the shop and make him an offer and they don't have to go most of them don't even know like at least with a house It's painful, but you kind of know what you're supposed to do to do it Yeah, nine out of ten friends I talked to you have a e-commerce store don't even know what you would do if you wanted to sell it even know what who's door do I knock on what do I need to have ready and So therefore I just I'm just not gonna do it and and it's like the open door thing We're not everybody's gonna do this, but
- but sure, if open door captures, I don't know what they modeled out, but you know, 1%, 3%, 5% of all house sales, like multi-billion dollar company. Same thing for open source. So I'm super, super bullish to the point where I was like, why the, what am I doing with my life that I'm not doing this idea? This makes total sense. Oh man, well, thanks for saying that. I don't worry if I can copy you, but. Keith and I are having a ton of fun, ton of fun building out that company here in Miami. That's been a blast building a great team, a huge team. Yeah, it's off this pain point in a market where it's really hard to sell your company.
- And all you need to do is come to a website. We give you a price and you can sell your company. And it's really interesting. We have an amazing data science team. We're hiring really aggressively. If anyone wants to join, anyone who joins that team, it's such an unbelievable team. I think it's going to create this almost Miami mafia, so to speak, around here of amazing people. I think it's an exceptional opportunity and scaling really quickly. So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for saying that. In another pod, you said something like, you have this list of ideas, but every once in a while, you'll meet someone who's so amazing that you say to them, well, what's your idea? And how can we just tell me what your idea is and we'll partner with you.
- Or you said something like that. I don't know if it was exactly that. What attributes would a person have to have in order for you to say that to them? Yeah, so we're open. The ideas don't necessarily have to come from us. We're totally open if people want to bring their ideas and co-phone companies with us. We just kind of ask that they be baked off in a process and that the data wins. We're just such big believers in this distribution over ideas thing that as long as we.
- If we test our idea and the distribution is great, fantastic. Let's go. Let's do it together. That sounds great. Otherwise, we just ask that we do that kind of testing process that we like to do. But some of the attributes that we look for, we really like people that are just tenacious. They just wake up in the morning. They want to play offense. They have three things they want to get done by the end of the day, and they get them done, and they knock down walls, and they're creative. They have a lot of raw intelligence. They inspire other people.
- they can hire their charismatic. It depends on the idea, right? Like some ideas that are more technically oriented. Obviously, you're looking for a slightly different profile versus ideas that are maybe more sales or product oriented. So we are a little bit founder idea or product fit as well. We do consider that, but yeah, those are some of the attributes that we look for in people. But sometimes you meet someone and there's just a really strong connection.
- you have these high bandwidth conversations, you're feeling great about everything and we'll just say, we just want to work with you. We're totally agnostic to the idea and come in and join us. Let's look at 10, 12, 15 ideas over the next three to nine months. If we find something we love, great. Let's start a company. If we don't find anything, no harm, no foul. Hopefully, met some cool people and we've had fun along the way and you're on to your next thing and we'd love to be as supportive as we can.
- One of the biggest differences between Sean and I, although we're very similar in a lot of ways, he tends to do many different things and he likes doing many things at one time. I am always teasing him and I'm jokingly criticizing him. I'm like only do one thing. If you only do one thing, you're gonna be, you're gonna succeed more and he's like, well, no, but I like this and it's working and he's right. It is working for him. You have both started one company or you know, Milo was like your baby or I imagine when you're running that, that was like your only father.
- focus. Now your focus is on launching 10 companies a year. Although, you know, you hire people to help you make it happen. So I guess your baby is kind of atomic. But do you think that starting multiple companies is going to be a bigger wealth creator for you than if had you just done kind of one major thing and you only focus on one, let's say a software company or something like that? That's an interesting question. So before I answer that, just one comment on that, I have noticed the pattern, which is that
- The smartest people I've met in the world fall into one of those two camps. They either want to be like singularly focused on one thing, almost to a fault, where they are so focused on it and they just absolutely have to crush it. And that's one archetype of success and it works really well. And some people are super successful that are that way. There are other people and I put myself more in the camp of like, I just get energy from working on a lot of things with a lot of different people. It's how my brain works. I have to work across a lot of different things.
- And that's also part of it is what you enjoy and what makes you happy. And that's kind of what I enjoy and what makes me happy. It's inventing, it's the early stages, it's what could come next. So when I thought about doing Atomic, it actually wasn't, believe it or not, a wealth building exercise. It was really, one, is it possible to build a company that builds companies? Nobody's really figured out how to do that at scale before. Two, how could you do that? Three, is that the most interesting and
- impactful problem in the world to work on. I believe that it was at that time. And, you know, would it be fun? And would I get to work with really great people on really great problems? And I thought the answer to those questions was yes. So I decided to do it. It can be very lucrative. I do think probably you can do better by just focusing on one. Like if you had one thing that was going to go to the moon, you can probably do financially better just going all in on that thing, at least in the short time.
- I don't know in the long term because in the long term if you build a company that builds companies What's the value of that? I don't know. It's like asking a genie for unlimited wishes So that's not really you know what drove the decision making or kind of how I think about it Well, you said it's not been done before I mean maybe I don't know where they were at the time You know rocket internet for those listeners. There's a company called rocket internet based in Germany started by these three crazy crazy brothers and their whole shtick was basically copy silicon valley companies But do it in Africa Asia and other places where that thing didn't
- Airbnb in Europe or Amazon and Thailand or whatever it is, Zappos in Nigeria. They created a few companies that were fucking huge. But the whole thing was copying to the point of they would have this chief scientist who would basically study, let's say they're copying Pinterest, he would send out an email to the Pinterest of Africa and the Pinterest of Germany and be like, Pinterest changed their button size on the top right from this to this. Do it.
- Do you have you ever thought? What do you think about those guys? And have you ever thought of doing that strategy where instead of invention, let's copy? Yeah. So it's just not our style. It's a very different style. First of all, I think the kind of talent you can work with that you can motivate to just copy other people's ideas, I think is very different than the kinds of people we're able to attract at atomic and work on our companies. It's more of a mercenary, probably than a mission-driven approach.
- which we pride ourselves in everything that we've done has been innovative. It's been original. We haven't been copying other people's ideas. It's not in our ethos to do that. And the processes and how it operates is very different. And the culture is very different fundamentally as a result. So I do think you need to pick one of those two things. Would it be easier to build something that just copies other people's ideas? Yeah, it would be easier, but it probably wouldn't work as well because I don't think just copying other people's ideas.
- people's ideas is as valuable. And I don't think that it would work as well anyway. But it's also just far less interesting to me. It seems like the ideas that worked well for them were the ones where there was like a local network effect in the US that hadn't gone to Europe yet. And they did it in Europe before the US company could go to Europe. But there were a lot of companies that they copied that they had a hard time because they kind of installed someone who... Yeah, they're just hired guns. They were just hired bankers and say, just spend more money than this other company.
- Exactly. And missionaries often outlast mercenaries and you have to, longevity is one of the key factors you need to win. Right. Let's talk about it worked. To some extent, though. It's just different. Let's do a couple of minutes real quick on crypto. So on a scale of one to chugging the Kool-Aid, where are you at with crypto? Just kind of personally investing in it? And then what do you think is exciting or completely overrated? I don't know what your take is. It's pretty polarizing. So people are usually very into it.
- or think it's toxic and a Ponzi scheme. So like where do you stand? Yeah, good question. I mean, I think crypto is real and it's here to stay. I think the question is, what are the fundamental like real innovations in crypto? The things that are gonna be around and what are the things that are, there's a lot of manipulation. There's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes people don't know about on these chat groups and apps like forums.
- like pump and dump things. Really bad. You know, this is stuff that people like in a normal market would probably go to jail for like seriously. This is happening somewhat regularly in this market. So it's a little concerning to like the average person to know what is and what isn't real. And that's my big concern with it is, you know, there's a lot of people rushing into it. There's a lot of enthusiasm. It is real, but knowing what is real and what isn't real, I think is really difficult.
- So what's real to you? What do you think is real? So to me, I think one indicator to look for is where are developers signing up? This is also true with companies, by the way. Whenever there's platforms that are built, and this is true for enterprise companies or like app stores, where do the developers go? Where the developers go usually works and is a good place to invest. And I think that's true of crypto as well. So on that thesis, I think
- Ethereum is a great place to go. Solana seems to have a lot of developer interests. I think there's a lot of other places. One that I was early involved in and helped get off the ground was one called Terra and Luna that just launched a new main net that had 50 to 100 apps just launched that are super interesting. They're very interesting to me because they're solving a different problem than a lot of other people in crypto are solving fundamentally. What does that mean? Sorry, go ahead.
- So a lot of, you know, if you were to kind of knock crypto, we were like a macro economist and we were like, wow, what does the world look like 10 or 20 years from now if this really catches on? The big critique would be, well, if this is digital gold, imagine what would have happened to the world if everyone just held gold and nobody put money into a bank. There'd be no jobs, there'd be no economy because people put money into the bank, the bank lends out money to companies and to people, that money gets spent, it creates jobs, those people spend the money and it goes through the economy and it's not just the economy, it's not the economy.
- And it just has this domino effect that's really important for the whole system to work. In crypto, someone puts it in crypto and it stops. And it doesn't keep traveling through the economy. It's not a productive asset. So you basically take a productive asset and you make it unproductive. And I feel like for like decentralized crypto to work and scale in the world, that's got to be fixed somehow. And the Terra and Luna people are very, very attuned to this problem. So instead of just focusing on purely technical things.
- like NFTs or new apps they can build or APIs or smart contracts or things like that. They're actually thinking about, how can you lend crypto? How can you borrow against crypto? How can you invest in stocks? You can invest in stocks directly with their stable coins. You can earn 20% interest with anchor. You can borrow against that. And then there's a way to earn 30% interest. And there's this whole ecosystem of basically ways to make crypto productive in a.
- decentralized way within the crypto ecosystem that I think is really interesting and I don't know they're a really really good really smart team. I don't know of too many other people that are working on that. And then the other one that I would call out that I wasn't early investor and as a project that hasn't launched yet but if there's anyone out there who knows how to mine, I would say mine cryptocurrency it's called ironfish and it's basically this genius I can vouch for
- She's a genius and she basically created what I think is the first true cash on the internet. So the whole idea of crypto was it's going to be cash on the internet. It's untraceable. I give this to you. Nobody knows just like with cash. In reality, what happens with Bitcoin, we make a transaction and it's public forever. Literally this record is going to be public and replicated across the internet forever and everybody's going to know about it.
- Now people realize that and it's an issue. So you had coins like Zcash and Monero that were created, but it turns out those actually can be decrypted. And you can figure out where, well, if that went. So she's the first person that really figured out how to make truly anonymized crypto. And it's called Ironfish. I think it's a really exciting project. I don't think it's tradable on exchanges, but I think it's mineable and it'll probably be tradable at some point. So those are some early ones that I think are exciting, worth.
- worth kind of looking into. Love it. And do you use DeFi? Are you like an actual participant or user of DeFi? I don't use DeFi too much per se. I'm more, I do actually a little bit, but I'm more of kind of like a set of and forget it by and hold long-term and patient type of a person. So I'm not actively doing, I know there's a lot of stuff out there going on like yield farming and things like that.
- that I'm not as attuned to. But if I had more time, I'd be interested in learning more about it. Yeah, that's what I wanted to leave it with, which was, if you weren't doing all the shit you're doing now, and I took away the reputation of the network, so you're still you. You're still sharp. You're 21, 22, 23 years old. Where do you think you would go work? What would you work on? Hmm. That's an interesting question. Hmm. I might consider.
- working on, you know, web three and crypto specifically figuring out how to use crypto to build new networks that can be built that are totally decentralized. Like social networks or other types of networks. They could be marketplaces. They could be social networks. But I think what the internet taught us as networks are what's valuable at the core. And I don't think web three is, I think it's still early. There's like 10 million.
- million sort of users out there of this stuff. There's, you know, four and a half billion people on the internet. So it still has a long ways to grow. If you can build some of these early networks with network effects, you can probably build things that are really valuable. And I know there are some people that are working on it, but they're probably still some really interesting opportunities out there. Well this is awesome, man. I mean, I could talk to you for another few hours. I've got so many more questions. Hopefully you can come back and do this again. Of course, we'd love to. Thanks for having me. This is badass. I pay attention to everything you guys do. Well, on a time like I'm always looking at your job page to see like, who are they hiring for now? What are they going to launch now and trying to figure out if I could kind of like reverse engineer and see everything. And you have good taste, dude.
- You invested in our co-incubated company with my cousin. I don't know if you know that. Rohen, which one? Rohen Puri. He started to stay in the long run. That's my cousin. It's great. Rohen's awesome. We love Rohen. Yeah, he's super smart. Yeah, he's great. Well, thank you for doing this. This is badass. This is awesome. Of course, thanks for having me. We're excited to publish this. We're excited to make this happen. It was awesome talking to you. If people want to get more, where do they follow you? Finds you, subscribe to your newsletter, buy your only fans. What do you want them to do?
- Not on only fans, but you can follow me on Twitter. I'm just at Jack Dabraham or you can find me on LinkedIn and or, you know, we're just at atomic.vc is our website. You can actually apply on our website for a program we have called the Future Founders Program where we'd love to co-found companies with people. We love co-founding companies with diverse people of all sorts of backgrounds. We're agnostic to location.
- can be from anywhere. And we want to start a lot of great companies, and it'd be an honor to start, you know, maybe we can start a company with someone listening to this. That would be great. Well, this is awesome. Thank you very much. We'll be sharing a bunch of links. I'm so excited that you came on here.

3 Profitable Business Ideas From A Private Equity Guy ｜ Sahil Bloom (#384) [c7nWti4MiHQ].txt

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- mobile podcast and video studio. Buy a few vans, kit them out with a pretty fire setup. Just in the back of a normal size van, doesn't even have to be an RV for two to three people could fit. Deck it out with a few good DSLR cameras. They can do the recording, dual camera setups that you have a few mics hanging off the sides. And basically go and post it up in a couple of major cities, like one van in each major city, and rent it out for 500 bucks for two hours to do podcast recordings, or a couple hundred bucks to do people going in and filming Instagram shorts, TikToks, shit like that. If you put one in LA and you put one in New York City, I bet you could kill it.
- What's going on? Who's the guest, Sean? We got Sino here. The man who answers the question, what would happen if Sean was better looking smarter, harder working? So, I hope Bloom is here. Definitely not smarter. Yeah, but don't dispute those other two. I'm just screwing with you. So, what's up, guys? Happy to be here. How often do you get your haircut? Let's start with the most important question. You know, like every other week at this point, now my wife is making fun of me for this, because it used to be that I'd go once a month, wasn't a big deal, and now I'm going like every other week, because I like to keep it tight, and she keeps giving me shit, because we have a little newborn at home, and I'm like, oh, I gotta go, gotta go. So, yeah, it's becoming an issue. If you don't call it a hair appointment, that's the only thing you can't do. If you say I got a hair appointment, then you're out as a guy. The place just can't be called a salon. That's always been my rule. It's a barber shop. You seem like a salon guy, though. The person you're wearing, like, you got like a Werther sweater on. You look like you're getting ready for Christmas. It's like, it's 85 degrees in Austin, Texas today. Yeah. Are we at your, like, book reading for your book right now, Sam? What are you doing? It actually does look like you should have a fireplace in the background, and you're gonna be like reading us nice stories and a soothing voice. I'm definitely drinking tea right now. So, basically, like, your bio is pretty easy. You were a nobody private equity guy, the pandemic hit, the pandemic hit, and you're like, I'm gonna be somebody. And in a matter of two years, you got famous on Twitter. What do we have? Nine or 800,000 followers? So, you got famous on Twitter and basically transformed your life all because of Twitter and COVID.
- Is that right? I mean, nobody private equity guy designation is not unreasonable. I mean, that's like, I think that's totally fair. I mean, there's a lot of nobody like finance guys that are making bank out there though, right? That would have stung, but now you're like famous and stuff. So now it's okay to laugh at it. I mean, I don't know. Like, do you think it's things like the, if you're making pretty good money doing something like that? I mean, VPs in private equity at this point, if you're doing well, like you're making seven figures as a VP in private equity. I mean, you're making four of them.
- Yeah. What about dude? I hung out with some PE guys the other day and I didn't know them well enough but obviously I just in the back of my head is how rich are you and that's like just what I wanted to keep asking are if you own a PE shop is it safe to assume that you're just wealthy and how much do they actually earn? Yeah, I mean if you are if you are a GP so like one of the principal owners of a private equity fund and you've been doing it like across multiple funds that have performed well over a period of time it's pretty safe to assume that you've got a net worth north of 50 million dollars
- Because, I mean, you just like simple math on it, right? Most of those funds are taking like one and a half to 2% management fees on, you know, if you're running a big fund, 500 million plus, a billion plus if it's like a real substantial fund. So there's, you know, 20 million plus coming in a year on a billion dollar fund. And realistically, most of them don't have that many employees. So they're not having to actually pay out a ton of that in terms of like, you know, operating costs. And then you have Kerry and they're taking, you know, 15, 20, 25% of profits above their hurdle rate, whatever that is, 8%. So you're like, you know, you're talking about if they double the funds, there's $200 million plus of Kerry to go around. And so the principal owners of those are taking the lion's share of that, you know, how much.
- I mean if there's 200 million in their principal own or owns 20 30% of that it's a shit ton of money and The I think that I've always I can't decide if it's jealousy because I'm like you guys are making a lot of money for what feels Like not a lot of work or if it's actually I dislike them because I feel as So they're just like excel sheet monkeys and they're like not actually creating value. What where's the reality? No, I mean they work crazy hard man. I don't I don't know anyone that is a long time GP You
- in private equity that doesn't work, you know, 70 plus hours a week of like stressful work. I mean, it's the type of thing Sean would absolutely hate. Like you think about like people that care about leverage on their time. It's like pretty piss poor leverage and it's high stress work because you're putting a bunch of debt on these companies typically. And you know, during a downturn like right now, right? It's hugely stressful because you're constantly dealing with like breaking covenants on the debt and having to restructure and you know, like basically what ends up happening is you spend 80% of your time on the like couple of losers in the portfolio. And the winners, you just like kind of get to set and forget it because they're growing. They're, you know, you're getting like a levered upside on them because you put, you know, 70% leverage to buy the company, 60% leverage to buy the company. And you're just like eating off those couple of winners, but you're dealing constantly with the ones that are losers. So Sean and I have our hand in this world where like, we've definitely sell and have sold courses and information stuff. We also have a podcast. And so that's like this like personality world. But then we also have built nice sized companies and we will continue to build.
- very likely much bigger companies. And so we have a foot in that world. For you, you have your foot in like the PE world, as well as the thing that we're in, this information thing. Where do you think, do you think that one, do you think that the information world or whatever we call this thing is actually a, is it an equal revenue or net worth driver as like some of the traditional company building or PE stuff? Yeah, I mean like, I think you have to think about it in terms of like your profit potential multiplied by like the freedom and time freedom that comes with it, right, to like get to like kind of an adjusted profit that you can generate from something.
- doing it in PE and making $50 million in PE from a time adjusted standpoint is a pretty grindy way to go do it. It's like high certainty if you're just on it, if you're at a good fund and you're rolling with a good fund and you're going to be a partner there and you're going to get more and more carry across bigger and bigger funds, it's a pretty low beta way to go and generate that type of net worth. But you're going to be working your ass off until you're like 60 years old doing it versus you going to the information side. Into the information economy and you're like doing newsletter, doing podcast courses, stuff that you guys are doing where you're like, you know, Sean might do his course and in a week make 300k and then be able to chill for two, three months if he wants to because who cares, right? It's like, it's just a totally different time leverage.
- So I don't know, it sort of depends on like what you want to do in that regard. Dude, what's your job now? I mean, I kind of do like 10 different things. I've got the fund, you know, like, so I ended up raising the fund and do the rolling fund at Sean, but I've got a $10 million venture fund that I raised from a handful of institutions and then a bunch of like the GPs at big funds invested in it and basically like kind of share deal flow. I've got the newsletter, which monetizes like we can talk about it, but like, you know, with newsletter sponsors now, it's 125 ish thousand subs and you know, it makes anywhere from like three and a half to $6,000 per send right now and I send it, you know, eight to 10 times a month. So, you know, pretty nice, just like business that scales to your point on like time leverage. I write the same two newsletters a week and it's a pretty nice business. And then I had this agency business that frankly like
- started just because it was like something that I saw, you know, as an arbitrage opportunity early in like 2021. And it ended up scaling into like, you know, order magnitude, probably like close to six figures a month, gross revenue business with super high margins. And so I kind of just like kept doing it and kept walking into different areas with it. And I don't know if you guys talked about this already, but you had come to us or you were kind of talking in our group chat about like the fork in the road moment you had you were, like we said before, no name private equity guy, making good money. And you had started tweeting out stuff like pretty regularly, I would say, I don't know, six months or a year before that. And you it was clear you had momentum was clear. You were good at that. You were getting followers, maybe had 100,000 or 200,000 followers, maybe at that time, I'm just rounding around. And but it wasn't you didn't have all these other things like this clear, like I have a fund, I have a newsletter that makes money, I have an agency that makes money. So you didn't know exactly what was on the other side of that hill. And you were debating what should I do? Should I, you know, the fork and there are a lot of people have should I stay in my job? That's a good cushy job? Or should I take this leap of faith into the unknown, give us like the two minutes story of like, you know, how did you think about that? And how did you decide?
- Was that the right way to think about it? Yeah, I mean, I, like a lot of people had the like COVID moment of what the fuck am I doing with my life? And, you know, am I happy doing it? Like, you know, all of a sudden for the first time in my life, after I guess it had been six years working in private equity, which at the time, you know, there's like 80 to 100 hour weeks, right? So you don't really have time to look up. You don't think about shit, because you're just working and you're, you know, you're making more and more money. And so you're like patting yourself on the back, things are good. You're, you know, you're, you're Andy and Sean, like, Andy and mother thinks it sounds impressive. You know, things are good. You probably want you to go get an MD, but it sounds pretty good. Is that what you wanted to do, Sean?
- My mom, yeah, she was, yeah, yeah, all those things. She definitely was like, don't leave a good paying job. That was just like a general rule, or general rule of thumb. I mean, my mom to this day still asks me why I didn't go to medical school, or why I didn't get a PhD in all seriousness. Like the Indian mother thing is sort of a meme, but it's also very real. The like, you know, you should go work for McKinsey if you're gonna work in professional services. That's the only place that is, that's respectable. But yeah, man, I mean, I was doing that. COVID hit, all of a sudden I was like, ah, what am I doing with my life? Had time on my hands to actually like think about other stuff for the first time in my professional life. And so I started, I mean, the Twitter thing, I just like, I started writing. And I didn't ever think of it as a potential way to like go make money, or get another job, or do something else. But as it started to grow, and as it started to spiral, you know, we were in this like group chat together, right? And I started seeing friends from the tech world, how they were leveraging, you know, platforms, Twitter, et cetera, to make money. I was like, huh, I wonder whether there's a way that I can actually, you know, build like a little side hustle with this. You know, like, whether it was courses, or whether it was an agency business, or like, whatever it was, I never really thought about the fund or investing side at the time. And then candidly, like, I had a conversation with you, Sean, that I remember being really impactful, where I was like, at a real crossroads, and I thought I was gonna,
- I thought I was going to kind of just like go join another type of investing firm and we were going to move back to the East Coast to be close to family. I was going to do that. And I remember you saying to me, like it sounds like you're just going to go do the thing that kind of sounds like it sucks. Instead of doing the thing that you actually get a lot of energy from, which is all this new stuff and that feels scalable and that you're, you know, you're fired up about. So why are you making that decision? And until someone just reframed it for me like that, I had never thought about it. I was just going to like continue down the path that felt safe. And so it was like a stupid conversation, frankly, but had a pretty big impact. You had described it. You were like, I'm thinking about path A or path B, but the way you described it, like, Path A sounded like shit. Like sounded super hard and not that much fun. And Path B sounded like a lot of fun, just like, you know, some unknowns, but like definitely good was going to come up. And I was like, how is this even a decision? Like it sounds like you're saying I'm choosing between a bad option and a good option. Go with the good one. Funny story about Path A. So at the time, that Path A, this is real was to join like a crossover hedge fund, like a hedge fund that also does investments in private tech companies. And my final interview, my final interview, I had to pitch a stock and the stock they gave me to pitch was stitch fix.
- And I had to decide, like I had a week and I had to decide whether it was a buy, you know, or a short, like if it was a long or a short. And I did like a week of research, like made this long deck, like did all this work. I mean it was miserable. Did all this thing. It was trading at the time at like $46. And it had come off, you know, it had gone up to like a hundred in the whole like, archagos, you know, Bill Huang was like pumping up stocks by doing like buying the swaps, pumped all the way up and then it came down to 46. And I pitched it as a buy, got rejected because my pitch was shitty. And now that stock is trading at $3.56. So I would have taken Path A and I would have gotten fired within six months for sure. Dude, so something that's interesting is like I get, and I know Shonda's too, I get asked maybe five times a week if someone can like write tweets for me or like cut videos for me and all this stuff. And it's pretty crazy. I don't know if it only happens like what the popularity level is where you have to, where you start getting those inbounds. But I get it's so often that I get this and you like, oh, there's like this weird, I get people asking me all the time to go, are you in Sahel or are you in this person or are you in that person to Sahel friends with this person? Because there's this like weird circle jerk of a Twitter world. And it feels, it feels though that like you are connected to like many, many, many tens of millions of followers and reach. And like there's this like weird behind the scenes thing going on with your agency. It's the dark underground cabal that runs Twitter. No. No, I mean, Sean, you actually remember this, right? Didn't like some kid hit you up and say that he ghost wrote tweets for me. And then you just texted me and were like, does this dude ghost write for you? And I was like, no, I've never heard of this kid in my life. He was just lying. And then I hit him up saying like, yo, why are you lying to this person? And he completely panicked. But yeah, man, I mean, the like the world of ghost writing tweets has now become again, like it's become a meme because what was it like business inside a rodent article about VCs getting getting ghost writers to write tweets for them. That wasn't at all how my agency thing started. It started in like late 2020 because I had started to figure out that threads were the way that people were growing on Twitter. And keep in mind, like, you know, Sean, you were around the group chat at the time, but that was like before threads had become the like thread boy meme that they are today. And so there was like legitimate arbitrage in writing quality threads. And I had all these startups that I had invested in the founders of which were like, wow, we see a ton of value and having a platform in a brand. Can you help us think through how to do this? Because you've done it. Like I had at that point gotten to $75,000 or so. And so I was like, yeah, let me, you know, I basically like started an LLC like an advisory business, basically. And I started giving like strategic support to these startups on how to think about content. And then how much would you charge them?
- I was charging five grand a month to a startup for basically like, you know, it was like texting and then maybe like one call every other week. And it was like so low because it was so low on time from what they needed for me because it was mostly like the founders didn't want to actually spend a ton of time on it. They just wanted to be able to like kind of understand it and then they would have people on their end that just like went off and did things with it. What was the high level like one, two, three bullet points that you would tell these founders so that they could just be better at this? It was basically like you need your two or three pillars of content that you're going to be able to talk about consistently that are like valuable for you as a startup or as a founder. So if you're a founder, I mean, at the time it was like, if you're a founder, talk about, you know, building companies and things you're learning along the way, which now is like ultra saturated on Twitter, right? There's like a million people that aren't necessarily credible writing about that. At the time, there weren't that many founders doing it. Like I don't know if you guys have seen the like copy AI founder. I forget his name, Paul. You might be an investor, Shawn. You know that business. Sam is not me. Okay. Yeah. And he was like the first one sort of that was like really building in public quote unquote and like sharing about their journey and the things they were learning. So I was basically telling founders, you have to establish like what are your two or three pillars that you're going to be writing about? Maybe it's, you know, building in public. Maybe it's the industry you're in. You know, maybe it's like sharing elves along the way and like vulnerability because people find that endearing. It's like, it's called the Pratt fall effect. Have you ever heard of that? It's like when, when people who you perceive to be perfect show like chinks in their armor, we find it as humans very endearing and we actually mix this like them more. And so you're like, you know, playing on that. You're like sharing your elves along the way. But I was basically telling them, you know, versions of that on a regular basis and like helping, you know, kind of craft and advise them on the content they were putting out. And it was like, five grand a month.
- Probably had like five or so clients. I think they were all like startups, either like the founders I knew or I had invested in the companies and so I was kind of around and it was, you know, beneficial to me to like see them continue to grow and do that. So you like invest in the companies and they give you that money right back? I like that. Yeah, it was a good way to hedge the, I mean, this was personal investments at the time. So this was like, you know, I might invest like 25 K in a company. And if I was making that back in five months, that was a pretty good cash on cash return on the original investment.
- But then like, after the ghostwriting thing was interesting, because basically like early mid 2021, I had a few of those clients come and say, ah, the biggest struggle for us is that we don't have people that can write this content. We don't want to build out a content team when we're focused on product and engineering and all that stuff. Like, do you have people that can write? And right at that time, I had done the course with Julian Shapiro, our friend. We did a maven course on like how to build your audience. And it was mainly how to build your audience on Twitter. And so half that course was about like how to write good threads and how to write for Twitter. And so I had this pool of like 400 students who had gone through the course, learned the principles of it, knew how to do it, that then I was just able to sort of be a connector between like freelance, you know, writing talent to then support these startups and, you know, the kind of fundamental, any agency business for anyone that's starting one is effectively that you're like creating price arbitrage where you're like charging a client 10 grand for some or five grand for something that maybe costs you two. And like, you know, the reality for most of these people is you can pay 1000 to 2500 bucks a month, maybe depending on the output. And you can easily charge, you know, a startup or a brand five for that, where you can charge like a
- You know a founder and entrepreneur who's doing really well and just made a bunch of money five for just like the fact that you're the connector between the two points So that was when it like I would say like really started to scale But it was never for VCs for me like I've never I mean I've never had a client that was a VC It's it's all been founders and it's all been like Half like half tech founders and half just like nuts and bolts like meat and potato type founders like Sam's guys Wait, if I have meat in potato guy, right? No, you're a mean potato guy Sean's my tech guy you're my meat and potatoes like you know if something's like cool or Interesting that it's kind of more my thing and if something's like really boring and like you know generally correlated with like obesity It's your thing So I want to ask you a bunch about like kind of your your big vision because you're gonna be president I don't know if people know this is a future president sitting with us, but before we do that People always tell us they're like yo, you got to do ideas with the guests meaning they want to hear okay You're so you see a bunch of different things you see a bunch of different worlds What opportunities do you see that you think some people somebody should be doing or a cool startup idea cool business idea? Niche opportunity something maybe you're not doing or whatever. Do you have any kind of ideas on your cheat sheet? Yeah, I've got three for you guys. Okay, let's go through them So first on the agency side just because I think there are two really obvious ones that like honestly anyone that's listening could probably go action on this if they wanted one is Like LinkedIn growth agency stuff Massive opportunity here I mean like you guys know a couple of our friends me and a couple of friends are starting like a spin-off agency That's just gonna focus on LinkedIn because it's a massive arbitrage opportunity right now an audience growth Twitter has become a lot more saturated because of the like thread boy thing and how many people are going and doing it LinkedIn like you I mean you can go post a few things and immediately be like getting the 10k plus and for founders and like business builders There's so much business on those platforms. It's huge for recruiting. So basically if you were to go start this the way I would do it
- I would go like go to someone who has a Twitter presence and you can go create like tweet pick P.I.K. is the like web service that I use for it. And you can basically just turn tweets that are like proven with social proof into these like carousels on LinkedIn that are the big growth hack on LinkedIn. And if you go do that for them and just say like, look, I'll take over your entire LinkedIn presence. You never have to open LinkedIn because people hate opening LinkedIn. And you just go and create carousels for them off of proven tweets and then go post it for them like two, three times a week off their tweets. Yeah, off their tweets, off their tweets or off of like other writing that exists that they've put out like say they've written blogs like I don't know. I mean, if you went and found, you know, say it's like Ryan holiday and he's written a ton of blogs that are all over the place but doesn't have a massive LinkedIn presence, you can go like turn his blogs into just shorter form writing that you put into posts on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I'll post for you three times a week. You never have to log in. Don't even worry about it. And we'll grow you to like 50K by the end of this year. Either pay as like, you know, charge us like a success fee. Like if you get to this level, you pay me this or you just say like, pay me five grand a month and I'll do this for you two and a half grand a month and I'll do this for you. And the amount of time it would take you is literally like, I mean, you could probably
- Do like an hour a week to cover a single person to like you know call it four hours a month and make five grand It's like an awesome awesome arbitrage opportunity. So that's one like any thoughts on that Sam. I Think it's awesome. Yeah, I'm doing a similar thing so I hired this guy as a content remixer for me and basically it was take content from the pod or or Twitter and Remakes it into content on other platforms that I focused on link I focused him on LinkedIn because I thought thought the thing you just said I had kind of a hypothesis that that's true and I'm now at 38,000 followers on LinkedIn and I haven't opened LinkedIn once so if you see something on LinkedIn
- It's not me writing it. It's me. I mean the same thing happened to me, but it's not me writing that but hold on Sean So you got 38,000 let's say that you post a product. This is like in two months or something like that Let's say you post a product that cost or your power writing thing Let's say it's a thousand dollars and you sell a thousand dollar thing to your 38,000 followers How much revenue will you make from that? I don't know have in test today? So you might know better, but I also haven't been doing it for long enough I wouldn't expect to be able to get value because I don't think I've given enough yet like but Twitter same thing You know like people see oh, man, you guys just you can sell a course You can just like say you're doing this new thing you get a bunch of signups It's like yeah, but but doing this podcast for three years do 300 episodes You know that hundreds of hours of content that somebody's listened to so yeah They trust you and they know they've come to a decision whether you're smart and interesting or whether you're full of shit And they've you they've done they've done they've done all that work and I've done all that work beforehand So then would you bake an offer? It's just a simple yes or no It doesn't fit their life. Does this do they think it'll drive value? They already trust that you could do it on LinkedIn I wouldn't bet that that would happen yet because it's just been so recent
- Yeah, I think you have to get. I mean, there's like a, there's like a lobe. There's a bar that I think you have to get over from a follower account standpoint. If you use that as a proxy before you can like conceivably harvest value, you got to like, you know, plant enough seeds over a period of time to Sean's point. I think like 100 K is probably the point at which you can start harvesting value from LinkedIn. Justin Welsh is this guy that you might have seen on Twitter or LinkedIn. He was like kind of like Godfather LinkedIn influencer. I think that dude now is making like 100 K plus on not even cohort based courses, just like auto courses that he generally just promotes through LinkedIn. He like, he has a newsletter now that he's built through LinkedIn, like built on the back of LinkedIn. And now he's bigger on Twitter because he's managed to like cross across all of those. But he's doing over 100 K a month in in sales revenue on his, on his courses, which are just like, you know, they're just they're not cohort based. So he's like putting in no, no time now. Dude, but got them stood up. This is interesting. Sean, have you seen what Saheel's been doing on Instagram?
- on Instagram now. I'm basically, you're always blowing up. So listen to this. So around the same time. Is it just dad content? No, listen, it was just hair. It's just mostly hair and shirtless pics and abs. There's traps. But around the same time, so Sahul and I, both around the same time, we're like, all right, let's take Instagram seriously. So I started doing it and I was beating him nicely, adding a thousand people today. I think I started with 5,000 people and I got to like 48 or 50,000 in a very short amount of time. And he was doing his thing. I was like, you need to post twice a day, I think. And he starts doing that. And then he just kind of like has rocketed past me. Now he's got the 62,000 followers in a very short amount of time, adding one or 2,000 people a day. And he's doing this exact same thing where he's taking his tweets that do well and just posting them on his Instagram. And like, so two points here. One.
- There's a world where this is just total vanity nonsense and a complete distraction from people who have their main thing. On the other hand, what I'm curious about is how much revenue can this drive to people? If their goal is not to be a famous tourist person, their goal is just to sell more shit of whatever they own already. And so I'm curious, Sahil, is a view, does this actually drive revenue for things other than you right now? Yeah, I mean right now, it's generating about a, so Instagram this past month, I think generated a thousand newsletter subs for me just through the link in my bio. And that's like, on average, I probably had 35,000 followers during the month and it generated that many. So conceivably as it continues to scale, it'll drive well north of that as it moves. And if you think a newsletter subscriber form is worth,
- You know just off of my sponsor revenue probably like three to four dollars per sub And then if you take into account my book that's gonna come where it's like extremely valuable to me if they buy a book I mean, it's a bunch of money a month. That's coming off this that scales over time, right? And that's just Instagram and you think about LinkedIn. That's another big driver You know all of these platforms so I'm like they're I mean they're ghost writing agencies They're people selling products mostly on Instagram without ever posting like their face These guys are literally like making carousels of images and stuff and they're doing 50 to 100k of revenue through it
- What's an example of that? There's this guy, Dakota Robertson, like wrongs to right, I think it says like Twitter handle and maybe that's his Instagram handle too. And he's got like, I don't know, 250,000 followers now on Instagram and like blew up real fast there just from posting his viral tweets over to Instagram. Like almost never shows his face. And dude has a thriving ghost writing business through this. Gotcha. I'm torn because on one hand, you are like perfect execution.
- of a strategy that I now hate. And so I'm like, respect to you. But I'm like, I don't even wanna talk about this because I know what's gonna happen is there's now gonna be 9,000 new people who go, this podcast is gonna breed 9,000 new people that are gonna go be like, this is my thing, I'm gonna do this. He said I could make X amount of money per month and their execution is gonna be nowhere near yours. And in general, this is like a, it's like a pathway that definitely works, but it's like, like,
- The whole sucking this whole sucking it's like it's closing and it provides Well, I think the wind is closing that's an important point Yeah, I do think like look I mean when I started writing the threats I mean Sean you were the same way right like any thread you wrote would blow the hell up early on because there just weren't that many of Them and so it was like it's like a market. It wasn't saturated now It's pretty hard to get a thread to like really take off unless you're doing the like 10 YouTube channels that will change your life For free. Yeah, but that's a point which is the things that it's like getting fit through power walking is power walking gonna burn calories Yeah, yeah for sure. Are you probably not gonna get injuries? Yeah, but like you have to look like a doofus doing it The process everyone in the neighborhood is gonna know you is that weirdo power walking like I you know I mean and I'm guilty of this too, right? Like I did this strategy as well of being like oh, I'm gonna create content for for yeah For fun initially this podcast Twitter that sort of thing and then oh shit Okay, if I kind of sell five percent of my soul or ten percent of my soul to the algorithm I think I can get this bigger. Okay, I started doing that and then it's like oh I can make good money doing this And I you know make some money doing that and that feels fun, but like
- I just want to say as a public service announcement, there's some people who are going to do this, but let's say you're somebody who's awesome I'm just gonna say this down This was awesome to do when it wasn't figured out now that it's figured out This is a certified official small boy stuff, and I do not recommend this to anybody else And I myself have stopped doing this too. I've imposed a thread and Interested in this lame-ass shit size Perfect execute a difference though anything like I I'm sitting in this house because of it. I House I go I go I write no I mean look you you you have to figure out what the What the area is where you're gonna do it? That's not crazy saturated and cringe and and to your point like you got to figure out what percent cringe are you willing to be like If writing a thread is 10% cringe like what level above that just natural base Are you gonna figure that out are you talking me? What Except that Already like 10% of people just immediately see it or like oh this is super cringe And then you just have to decide like what level you willing to go above that if a hundred percent is like 10 Chrome extensions that'll change your life and 50% is like You know here like the TED talks that changed my life What's like 20% is it some of the stuff I post probably and like if that helps a few people out there and like a bunch of people Get pissed and think that it's not for them. I don't really give a shit personally like if I help one person and you know someone hits me up and says like hey that changed my perspective on X Y RZ that's what Gary Vee's been doing for decades man that guy's a legend of putting out content That's like listicles and you know like motivational stuff Tony Robbins like Grant Cardone these guys like they get hate Because it freaking works and it helps people right so I don't know the thing I would say like have you ever been to a Tony Robbins event?
- Yeah, and I'm sure if you went to like you went to what like an at least the power within or something. Yeah, great I went to loved it thought it was amazing. I don't know if you liked it You could give me a quick reaction, but I have a different point. Yeah, I love it I mean, I love Tony Robin stuff me too and he gets on stage and he's doing all the things that you could criticize somebody for He's he's clapping. He's saying get up and jump. He's saying what I say You know, he's gonna ask a very basic question and the only answer is yes But the whole crowd says yes like a cult and you're like, oh, he's doing all the things But he's doing it at like an a plus plus plus level. He is probably in my opinion the best public speaker. I've ever seen
- and I've seen a lot of people. Next to like Obama. Yeah, yeah, he is, I think he's even more powerful than Obama, because Obama is smooth, but Obama doesn't get people, Tony Robbins, it gets you to walk across Coles and like shout your greatest fear out loud. I've never seen Obama control the crowd for 12 straight hours, like Tony Robbins would do it in an event. But here's what happens, you look around in the crowd and you're like, there's a whole spectrum of people. At the one I was in, it was like, there were celebrities there. You know, the guy from 300, what's the name, Gerald Butler, he was there, he was like, two rows down from me. I was like, wow, this is interesting. There's some interesting people here. And then in the hallways, I would meet a bunch of people that thought they were the next Tony Robbins. And they were life coaches and motivational speakers and they were, you know, change consultants and every cringe name you could think of. And then you go look at their stuff and it's the same concept, but not executed at that level. Because they didn't have the hard one life experiences that that guy had to actually like create this content. They didn't have 40 years of sharpening their craft and becoming the best. They didn't have the natural talents and charisma and you know, larger than life presence. And so you can, you can look at the best. You can look at the Gary V's and the Tony Robbins. You can look at you on Twitter and say, that's dope, you know, I could do that. And some people, a very small amount of people can do that but for most people, they will fall into the pit of cringe because they're not going to execute it at that same level. They didn't have those hard one lessons of actually knowing what they're talking about. And they're going to end up in this like weird middle ground. And I think that's the scary part. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sinks spreadsheets or doing databases. HubSpot grow better. I mean, that's kind of like, that's like any market though, right? Like, you know, someone starts a company and it's the A plus version of some, like a restaurant chain. Someone starts a restaurant chain. That's like the A plus of that thing. And then a bunch of people come in to try to mimic it. And it's like the B plus version and, you know, like whatever. Like say in and out is the A plus burger version. And then someone tries to come in and start the like five guys or whatever next. I'm probably going to get hate for saying in and out it's better than five guys. But, you know, whatever, like you kind of have the diluted versions. And the question is like, hey, do you care that you're the diluted version of Tony Robbins if you're making money doing it and taking care of your family? Because like, I know a lot of people that are just like, I don't give a shit. Like, you know, I grew my audience, super cringe stuff. And I'm making 25 grand a month. I was making five doing my prior job or 10 doing my prior job. I'm making this sitting at home and I get spent time with my kids. What do I give a shit if a bunch of tech people think that I'm cringe? Like I'm making money. It is what it is. And so I kind of, I appreciate that too. The other thing I would say is like, what game are you playing? Like what is the long term game you're playing? And for me, I was always thinking about like, what is the thing I'm trying to build long term? Like I wasn't trying to be, you know, a Twitter thread, like a thread guy. Like that's not my long term vision of what it was. It vaulted me from being a nobody private equity guys, you said, to like, I signed a book deal last month, like a big book deal last month. You know, like I raised a fund. I never would have been able to raise a fund as like this nobody VP in private equity. And so to me, it's like, what are you actually parlaying that shit into as you continue to go? If you're able to find the thing that you think you're a plus at, even if it's for a short period of time, like, how are you using that to vault yourself into that next level where you're like, I'm not even in the same class as these other guys that are doing the thing I was doing previously because I moved into whatever that next, you know, that like upper echelon is. Do you know, you're worried about Elon screwing it up for you?
- Not really. You know what's funny? Well, did he see what he really quick? He like said something and then Steph, my old coworker said, like, does this mean that like the thread boys are going to go away and actually forget his reply? What did he say? But it sounded like he was saying yes. I mean, he did like a crying emoji. I mean, yeah, like I think it was something about, he said, you know, you could basically like put a long form text onto a tweet. So you don't have to like people were used to take a screenshot of like their notes app on their phone to post a long form thing. I think all that stuff is good. I mean, like, look, I've already benefited from being early to a market. Like I grew to a big level. I built a brand that now extended into things that I own, like the newsletter, you know, that's gotten quite large and is growing faster, like the fun or like the book, whatever it is, I would be more worried if I was like, just starting out in any one of these things and like,
- like had dedicated all this time. You know, if you've rewound me a year and I was like just starting to get all these things going, I'd probably be a little more worried. But the reality is it's like, eat or be eaten, man. If you're not like figuring out the new way to, you know, be on the front of something and be building in these other areas, you're in for a tough time no matter what. Let's talk about this newsletter thing. So this is a second idea. Biggest issue I have with my newsletter is, I wanna write it. Like I love writing. That's my number one thing that gives me a lot of energy. I freaking hate thinking about and dealing with any of the like business or growth side of the newsletter. The business side is very easy to outsource. There's like, I mean, you know, there's ad agencies now, ConvertKit has an ad network where they'll manage the whole backend of your newsletter. They'll bring in sponsors for it. They'll send you the money. It's like super, super easy. It's amazing. Nathan crushed it, getting that thing out there.
- But the like growth side of newsletters is Completely untouched there's no one out there that I've been able to find that is like a full sweet growth service for your newsletter And when I say growth sweet I literally mean like I want someone thinking about my landing pages and Optimizing that I want someone thinking about referral networks newsletter swaps. I want someone thinking about paid ads You know SEO for my website to drive subs how to optimize it across my different social channels Literally just someone that's sitting around thinking about growth for the newsletter So that I can just focus on writing and I'd literally be willing to pay I mean my willingness to pay at the size of newsletter that I'm at now and given what newsletter subs are worth to me Is very high like I would easily pay ten grand a month to someone that could figure that out and do it in one place On top of whatever I would spend on paid ads. Do you think that that thing work week is gonna do that? No, dude, I mean like I Don't know how much you guys know about where I don't know a whole ton about work week but from what I can tell it's mostly the like back end Services of newsletters and there's another one called smooth ops that I think spun out from morning grew didn't work We'd spun out of the hustle didn't it not spun out they they worked for the guy was there. Yes, same thing with the morning Roo smooth ops like my understanding of all those is that they're much more focused on like helping you monetize and You know managing your like business that you can focus on writing I literally just want someone that just all they think about all day like a an absolute killer That just all they think about his growth. I mean Sean. Did you have someone? I mean or was Ben like that at milk road my guy was right Sean no
- Ben was the guy who woke up every day and just said, how do we get more subscribers? And like, that was his mission and that's what he did. So that's the, but we needed, it's like, if you don't have a bet, that was like more of a company. Whereas like, most people's personal things are not, like you're at a size where there's just not that many newsletters that are at your size that can afford to pay for something like that. How many people, how many people could afford to pay 10K per month to try to drive growth? So I think a lot. So my hypothesis is, so I tweeted this and a bunch of people were like, replying, saying they would pay for it in different ways. My hypothesis is that there's a ton of like successful founders and entrepreneurs that want to build a newsletter and owned list or like an essay type thing, like what Sam Waltman or Paul Graham have, where they have SEO and newsletter, you know, like emails that are coming to them. And they're willing to pay a lot because they actually have been successful and just have a bunch of money. They don't need it to be revenue generating out at the outset. And I think you, I mean, I bet if you developed some sort of core competency and basically like partnered, say someone partnered with me and proved it out over like two, three months, had drove this. And then we're able to use me as a case study. Maybe I own a percentage of it, you know, on the upside. And so I'm incented to like bring them new referrals. I bet you could grow a pretty big business there quickly. Yeah, you only need like 20 clients basically to make this like, you know, worth your while. Yeah, I mean, if it's a personal business, you don't even need 20 clients. I mean, you get 10 at five a month or 10 at 10 a month. And you have like, you know, it's 80, 80 plus percent margin, probably business if you're running it simple. But are you having the headache of having a service business? Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's definitely not productizing. Like I've thought about starting an agency like maybe 20 times in my life. And then literally five minutes later, every single time, I'm like,
- Don't go in the service business. Don't go in the service business. Now, we have several friends that have done it, right? Like Andrew Wilkerson did it with Metalab, our buddy Greg is doing a great job with it, with late checkout. You're doing it now with your thing. So maybe I have the wrong bias here. What do you think? I mean, what you have to do is hire a great operator. If you want to be the owner of some percentage of it and not have the headaches, you got to just recruit a killer operator who's going to run all of it. I mean, that's what we're doing with the spin out agency that we're doing now around LinkedIn stuff is like just going to hire someone exceptional and give them like 15% of the ops and just say like you're a hustler, you're a killer, you can get a whole ton of that. That was awesome. That's my finance team, man. Never heard that. That was awesome. Really? That's the, that's the no name PE guy coming out of me right there. Yeah, I thought a peer guy was a guy who likes to leave a dodge ball and recess. Like that's a PE is to me. Earlier he was talking about beta and I was like, you're talking about nerds? I don't understand what the hell is beta. It is a good thing. Hold on. You're talking about beta is like a good thing. I was like, I don't understand what that means. You're kind of a low beta guy actually, Sam. But think about it. You're kind of like even keel. Like I feel like I know within a band what I'm going to get out of you any given day. I think you're complimenting me, but I don't. Yeah, you like you show up. You tweeted about that recently. You hate when people say they're going to do something and then not do it. Like you see, you take pride in being low beta. Like people know what they can expect from you on a given day. What a stupid thing to tweet. Yeah, like I like long walks in the beach in movies. Like who likes somebody who says they're going to do something and doesn't do it. What an obvious tweet. Yeah, first of all, give me the clout that I deserve. Like don't hate. What did Saha say? Don't hate. Number two, I'm not saying it's like people who say they're afraid of heights. Like yeah, everyone's afraid of heights, but like you just like some people that just like, you know, it's like what's high on your list. I don't think that. I don't know. Like, like there's a lot of things that annoy you, Sean, that don't annoy me and vice versa. Like what's one thing that annoys you, Sean, that you don't think of noise, Sam. I don't think anything annoys him. Nothing annoys me. I that's the beauty of it. Wait, really? You don't think anything bothers you? No, I think. Yeah. Now I want to dig into this. What bothers you? I I guess what bothers me is only usually things with myself. So like if I find myself in a bad mood or like getting annoyed with something or getting bothered by something or getting impatient with something, that's actually the thing that bothers me. I'm like, oh man, I let this get to me. Like for like that second, that's the thing that gets to me. Right. So usually it's not something that frustrates me or annoys me. It's usually either impatience or boredom or feeling cranky or tires. I'm like that, you know, like, and I'm like, oh, no, I don't want to be that way. That that bothers me.
- So for years, I used to say that Sean, I was like, I think I'm gonna have a pretty steady path to wealth creation and Sean, you either gonna, like it's not gonna be as extreme. I think we joked around with Mr. B's where like, you know, six out of 10 times, if you were reborn, you would be a degenerate, like gambler or drug addict and like four out of 10 times, you'd be successful. With Sean, it's not that bad, but it's like, you're the type of guy who can roll the dice and like you might actually hit it big. There's a good chance or you might like just be only okay for a long time. And now, so I was basically saying, yeah, your likelihood I think of being a billionaire is actually higher than mine, but your likelihood of being like a degenerate is probably also higher. Yeah, high beta. Yeah, but here's the problem with Sean. I've just realized over the past handful of months, he is too emotionally healthy to probably be incredibly successful. He has this problem that few people have, which is he's just happy.
- You know what I mean? He's got this it's just it depends on your definition of success, man I would argue that Sean is the most successful then man if he's like super happy Yeah, if you define sex by success by these superficial things like happiness and well-being and all that bullshit stupid stuff Yeah, I do I will say that Sean has had more Like high highs and low lows this year at least for my like perceived view of And like and he's totally unfazed like Sean. I mean Flashback to like, you know, like crypto crash, right? I'm like, you know, Sean's down bad I'm texting Sam. I'm like is Sean okay? Like Sean's texting the group chat totally fine I'm like, you know, Sean broke like is Sean being margin called right now? Like I have no idea what's going on and then Sean's like, you know, I sold all my stock And I was like, holy shit Sean sold the bottom Sean sold the bottom like markets roaring in June And then the market crashes again and Sean's a genius trader that like Sold the top of the market or something dude is just like does that stuff bother you at all Sean like first of all what Prior to selling a business recently, but what was your network down just a significant amount. Yeah, probably
- I mean, it's hard to calculate that sort of thing. So, but let's say liquid of the liquid stuff. So not counting equity in companies, you know, probably down 50% or something like that. I mean, most of the investments I, I didn't keep much cash. This was my investment strategy pre 2022, right? So my investment strategy pre-22 was cash is trash and you know, fist bumps all around to my boys who thought the cash was trash. Then, oh, dude, is there a safer investment than Amazon? This blue chipper, right? Like, that's my version of safety is, yeah, I'm gonna put in some boring tech companies, you know, the Amazon's, Google's, Facebook's of the world. What could go wrong? And then lastly, you know, then, yeah, huge amount of startups that were, that were, you know, getting marked up like crazy, fist bumps all around, getting my ups, getting my ups was going ups. And then the last thing was crypto. And I was like, oh, well, see, your boys are genius and moved a huge percentage of net worth into Bitcoin and Ethereum. And oh, and then this Luna shit that's popping, I'm doing great. So, you know, that was me before. So basically every single thing I had invested in has gone, you know, what's my, you know, that was that thing, like my terrible horrible, no good, very bad day. Like, I was basically having that for this year in terms of investments, but.
- You know, whatever. Did it bother you? Well, I didn't like losing money, but like, you know, did I let it bother me? No, like, you know, I basically took steps. No, I took steps. I was like, okay, well, what matters here? Like, okay, let me just first get perspective. You know, am I in any kind of hardship is my family doing porn? No, they're good, they're fine. Right. Secondly, what should I actually do? Do I need to make some adjustments? Was I wrong about certain things? Or should I do some things to give myself more comfort? So why did I sell? I sold, I basically margin called myself. I was like, you know what? These things are going to go lower. And I don't want to sweat this all the time. So I'm going to sell this amount here so that I don't have to worry about anything. I'm going to move more into cash. And I'm going to book this loss because I think that'll offset it against some gains that I have this year. And, you know, then I won't have to think about this stuff for a little while. I'll focus on these other things that I want to be focusing on. Because I'm not a trader. I'm not a like investment genius. So that's not going to be my goal. And then, yeah, I don't know. I never got my happiness from when it was going up. So why would I get my sadness when it's going down? It didn't make sense to me. You must have felt good when Luna, like I think you originally plugged Luna in Milk Road at like 40. And I like, I bought some. I was like, you know, Sean's pretty smart. He knows this crypto shit. Hands down. And so I like, I bought a bag. Like, you know, I'm not like it. I'm not really a degenerate crypto guy, but I like bought a bag of Luna. And that shit went up to like 118. And I was like, you know, Sean is my God. Like, Sean, what other ideas do you have? And then we were supposed to interview on our old pod. We were supposed to interview Dokkwan. Like I'd hit him up on Twitter. He's supposed to come on the pod on like a Thursday. And on that Sunday, like Luna had been wavering like it had come down to like 80 or something. And I get an email from his assistant that just says, unfortunately, Doh will have to reschedule the interview for this Thursday. And I'm sitting in bed and I'm like, I got a little bit of the heebie GVs. Like, I don't know what this is. So I go downstairs and I sell my entire bag at like, I don't know, a small game, like not, not good. I sell the whole thing. Next morning, I wake up and that shit's at like five. Like the whole thing unraveled overnight. And then I get an email from his assistant saying, like he's going to have to cancel the interview. And I'm like, yeah, well, this dude has a red notice out for him. No shit, he's not coming on our podcast at this point. Yeah, that was, that was a bad day. I was on vacation. I was in Hawaii with my family and I'm watching my time. And I'm like, I don't even have, I'm not even at my computer. Like I can't even get to my crypto. Like it's not like on my laptop or whatever. So I'm like, well, couldn't, couldn't make a move if I wanted to. So I guess I'll just like, you know, lose all this money here. And you know, just enjoy this vacation. There's nothing else I could do at this point. You were remarkably cool about it. I remember texting with you that day. The framework you've talked about in the past that I love around this stuff is your local versus tourist thing. I think that's so good of like, you know, tourists like freak out when the seasons change and just bounce. Yeah. And locals are aware that there are seasons and that, you know, it comes in swings and they're aware of the environment. So they can stick it out and be fine through it. I've always just thought there's a third one, which is the like stubborn local, like the dude that lives in the coastal village and is like, Oh, global warming is not real. And then he's fucking underwater and like drowning. And he's like, global warming is not real as he drowns. And so I'm always just like, how do you make sure that you don't go from being the like the local and you're proud of being a local to the stubborn local that just sits there until you die? Yeah, that's the hardest thing. And I remember with startups, this was always the question because you'll hear a story like Pinterest had no traction for over a year. And then finally started to work because he walked into an Apple store and like started putting Pinterest as a default homepage on these, you know, he hustle, he was determined and it's like, Oh, okay, got it. So determination, just keep going. Even when all the data is telling you that this ain't working.
- And then there's like the exact other advice, which is like, yo, you gotta be super data driven, feedback oriented, you gotta listen to the market, all that matters is are you making something people want. And if you have no users, you gotta make adjustments, you gotta pivot. And so the hardest question as a founder is to know, am I being the right kind of stubborn, right? So am I being stubborn because I'm right and I need to just tweak, just make small adjustments and just stay at it, be determined, be persistent? Or am I banging my head against the wall and I need to listen to the signals and I need to be changing my mind. And nobody can give the generic advice about when to do what? It's super, it's like super context dependent, super circumstance dependent. Same thing with investing, right? Like, you know, am I...
- Should I still believe in something? Do I believe in Facebook stock now that it's getting crushed? For me, I went and bought more recently because I was like, what do I believe about this company? And has that changed? So the tourist versus local, right? Is you gotta ask yourself, does the thing I believed about this has that changed? Do I have new information that makes me update my thinking here? Am I holding onto this position just so that I don't feel like I'm wrong? Am I willing to accept being wrong? You gotta ask yourself all these questions and be able to be honest with yourself. Has that changed with crypto? Has what, sorry? Has your opinion of crypto changed and your conviction? No, my opinions of my conviction has stayed the same but that's about crypto as a whole, right? Then on each specific maybe project or coin you might have like a slightly different opinion. It definitely was. What's one thing that you think is bullshit now that you didn't think was bullshit a year and a half ago? So I'll give you an example where that's not true so then I'll give you an example where that's true. So the not true one is like, let's take Luda for example.
- The bet on Luna was always knowing that there's this. The way it was architected was this thing is gonna rock it up because the sort of what they call the Ponsonomics, right? Like the game theory incentive. Yeah, but people don't understand. Like basically it's this like a series of economic incentives. And so the incentives were aligned such that this thing should go up during the, during, you know, when certain participants behave a certain way. And from the beginning, there was always these blog posts out there about what does the death cycle look like? So what if this reversed course, would this not, because Luna's the collateral, would it not cause it to, you know, collapse really fast? And the question was like, will that happen? Won't that happen? So even when you invest in at the beginning, we wrote our little investment memo to ourselves about like, here's our one pager. Why we think this is a good idea and why we think this could go horribly wrong? When it crashed, it wasn't like something we never had never thought of. It was, oh yeah, that downside scenario we talked about, that's exactly what happened, right? Like basically there was a giant, you know, cell pressure that car caused that cascading down cycle. Yep, that we always thought that could happen. We had hoped it wouldn't happen. We had thought that maybe there was a, you know, there would be a way to put by pressure back against it. But nope, it wasn't going to work.
- And so this is a very fast example of basically just because it turned out bad doesn't mean that the Doesn't mean I changed my position because actually at the beginning we said well Here's why I'm not putting my entire net worth into this right? I put 250k into it. That's not like a massive Bet for me. It's a solid size bet right so it's like you know I put a appropriately sized bet because I thought I had upside and I thought there was some some key risks with it The thing that I would say I've changed my opinion most on is I thought Man if people start to worry about inflation
- And they look at, man, I have the same 100K in my bank, but it just doesn't buy me the same amount it used to, right? They'll realize, like, people will become more aware that the money they have is diminishing the cash they have, the US dollars they have is diminishing in value, that they will probably look to go to a monetary system that doesn't have that problem. And so the idea that Bitcoin will do well if people start to, if inflation becomes something that people are more and more worried about with the US dollar. And that hasn't happened. Inflation got as bad as it's ever been.
- But people's response was more conservative than aggressive. People did not make a change to the Bitcoin monetary system, which would not have that problem. They sort of stuck with it and actually the US dollars gained strength because other currencies got crushed even worse. And so the dollars gained strength. So that was one that I had thought that this was, this is what would happen and it makes me reassess. Was my logic incorrect or something else? What did I get wrong about this idea that in a high inflation environment Bitcoin should be something that people start moving more into.
- I mean, the Bitcoin one is actually pretty interesting, Sean, because I've thought about that a lot too, of is there something just like in the segmentation of how the price went up that is impacting that? Because I still think basically my assumption of why that didn't happen, like why that, you know, scenario of high inflation and people flood into this, is that most of the price increase was actually just driven by this, like, number go up, you know, crazy, you know, loose monetary policy, people just pump into speculative, you know, high risk assets, and that it wasn't really driven by like believers like you who underlying were like, oh, there's really good fundamentals, the technology really makes sense driving it up. It was mostly just like my random friends who were like, ha, ha, Bitcoin number go up, this is great. And then they freaked out when it went the other direction and pulled out, you know, interest rates rise and you pull out. I wonder whether like, if you segmented it somehow of like the true underlying technology believers, my guess would be that the picture would look different. Like people that really are like thinking about the technology and thinking about the underlying, you know, kind of like monetary policy that exists on the network. My guess would be those people think that this is a great time to be accumulating and buying. Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right. But basically it's just in my mind, it was like a very simple picture. It was like.
- You're playing one game and the rules of this game are that the bank gives you some money It's my game on monopoly where the bank gives you some money, but every year your money becomes worth a little bit less by design They're trying to make it two or three percent worse per year But sometimes I think it's ten percent worse per year right or nine percent worse per year Right? That's the the game is is set up that way and hey Oh, you know There's this other new edition of monopoly that came out or that doesn't happen to your money by assumption was like Oh, people will just start to move to the new edition because they're not gonna like when their money becomes less valuable over time But I don't think that's the message that's gone across It was basically Bitcoin's how you get rich or Bitcoin's how you lose your money And that's the narrative that actually like played out because it was more it was more aggressive Bitcoin will make you rich was an easier sell To people yeah, and it was also the reason why they'll start to sell their Bitcoin when they really when they feel like oh Bitcoin's crashing
- By the way, I've got one more non-agency business idea for you guys non-services, but maybe it's slightly so not that much services more product mobile Podcast and video studio. Yeah, man, dude. It's such a pain in the butt dude huge pain in the ass by like a few vans Get them out with like a pretty fire setup Just in the back of like a normal size van doesn't even have to be an RV for like two to three people could fit Deck it out with like a few good DSLR cameras that can do the recording like dual camera setups So you have like a few mics hanging off the sides and basically go and post it up in a couple of major cities Like one van in each major city has like dope backgrounds cool lighting like you know Whatever do the neon signs and shit in there and rent it out for like 500 bucks for two hours to do podcast recordings or like You know a couple hundred bucks to do like people going in and filming Instagram shorts tick-tocks shit like that Like if you put one in LA and you put one in New York City I bet you could kill it on a cash on cash return on one of those I just joined this gym called the collective in Austin and it's like this like fancy Whatever like and everyone there looks like an Instagram model and they have Like co-working there as well, but they also have three studios for podcast and picture-taking Like they just they just really don't know their audience and I went there and everyone looks like they're the type of person Who is like if you follow a shirtless rip guy on? Instagram and they live in Austin. They're probably a member here and if you catch them on bad lighting They don't even look that good, but I was like somehow in that lighting you'd look unreal
- I think you're making fun of me. I don't know. No, you would. The lighting makes a huge difference with these Instagram models, right? So you just get good lighting on one of those things. I bet you could kill it. I do think these mobile studio though, you could crush it. Let me ask you a question. I'm looking at these U-hole box trucks. So how much do these costs to buy? So it looks like you could buy a used one of these for like 25 grand, right? So 25 grand and let's say... And you only have to put five down. Yeah, you put five down. You're probably gonna need to put another five into the kit, like to make the thing work. And you probably need to do operating the thing. But maybe you could get rid of that, probably not. You probably have to have an operator on site. So I think that's the tricky part where you gotta sell it as a membership basically. It's gotta be a gym membership. So it's like, you can use the studio. You can just book it when it's free, but you gotta be like a monthly member. If you're doing $500 a month or whatever, and you have a studio on demand. That's a genius idea to do it as a membership actually. Because the thing that made me think of this is like in New York now, there's these couple of studios where people are doing all like in-person podcasts. Like there's this like, what the fuck media is one of them. Yeah, I go to the stream. And they're like, they're solid, they're not great, but they're having to pay New York City rent to like to do this. And so I can't imagine the economics are that great. And if you got a truck and you just bought it, you could go post this thing up in a parking lot. And every two hours just move to a different parking lot. And like, you never have to pay rent. You're paying like carrying cost of the truck and you're paying the whatever 5 to 10 grand it takes you to actually get the truck out. We're gonna call it Mudio, the mobile studio, Mudio, the Mudio Boys. That's why we might get a branding agency to work on the name, but yeah. Wait, let me ask you something about branding. Defining silence as feedback on your name. But in Sahel, let me ask you a question. So Sean and I are trying to get popular on YouTube right now with this thing. And one thing that's kind of the elephant in the room when everyone talks to you. I mean, I know Sean talks about this constantly.
- is that you are just ridiculously good looking. Do you think that this stick of yours of having good hair and being good looking is that image working for you? And what aesthetic stick should Sean and I have? First off, calling it a stick is pretty hilarious to me. You know, this stick you have, it's like all on a stick. It's like, yeah. Yeah, this whole look is like, whatever you got in between your ears, like that stick, like let's talk about it. The platforms that are visual, it obviously helps to like when people are scrolling through things for like people to stop and say, oh, the person is like attractive, right? Like it just, when you're scrolling through TikTok and you see attractive girls saying you're hot. You get helps. I was, I was, you agreed. Was that a Mean Girls reference? Do you just have a Mean Girls reference? Dude, I have a millennial through it through. The fact that I knew that it was a Mean Girls reference is just as telling me. The actual Mean Girls. No, look, I mean, for you guys, you're both good looking dudes. Am I gonna sell you short? Sam, you've got like a little look with the like fake glasses. I don't think those have a prescription on them. So it's like a little bit of work. That is a really big straight fake. They're definitely fake, dude. And then Sean, Sean's got the like, you know, my favorite line that Sean ever had is, you know, if you're not gonna be good looking, be interesting looking. And I tell that to like everyone that I give advice to. But Sean's not interesting looking right now. I mean, look at this beard. Dude, he's wearing a duke hoodie. Like he looks like literally every single person who shops at like a generic grocery store in the suburbs. What's wrong with that? That's a vibe a little bit like a tech role. That's a little bit of a vibe. But that's not interesting. I don't know, man. I mean, I think you guys can play up the whole like your stick of these two guys that look completely different that are like somehow friends. Like you guys are like cat dog, man. You remember that show back in the day? We're going for it. We're going for like.
- Why are these guys famous? That's what we need to do if we just get over the hump so accessible like this These guys that there's nothing special about them, but that's our thing though that there's nothing special I don't think you have to be that good looking on YouTube by the way like you guys don't need to be like models on YouTube You like look at the people that have crushed on YouTube. It's not like hot dudes and hot chicks on YouTube necessary Not that you guys aren't hot. I don't want you to come away I don't want Sam big text me later being like hey man what you said that Because I know I'm gonna get that text later tonight from Sam But you're wrong like I don't I don't I don't have dudes do better on YouTube. I don't think they do better I don't think that's right. I mean I'm not on YouTube yet. I'm gonna get on YouTube here soon And I'll let you know whether we think that's true So you're saying you think you're hot You got this real burden you're carrying my friend Well like Alex or Moses got the thing where he wears like those stupid cutoff jeans now And these just like you docked that nose nose strip and like the nose Level of being being muscular. That's perfect example of you don't have to be great look You got to be interesting looking
- Yeah, dude. He's peacock and hardcore and it's a look. It's a look man. And like each of you guys has a look and if you can just stick to a consistent It's like Chris soccer with his cowboy shirts. Like you need your thing. I've been actually I've been thinking about this for a long time I've been needing a uniform. I tweeted this out ago. I'm looking for a uniform I want to look the same every time I'm on this podcast. So I need something that from here up like a robe is is gotta be maybe a robe. It's gotta be signature and And I'm in the market. So I'm taking suggest I'm gonna put a bounty on this actually I'm gonna give a thousand dollar bounty to anybody who can help me develop my
- The the chest up look That's what I'm looking for. I Kind of want to see you do like traditional Indian attire for it Like it could be kind of fire if you're wearing like a dope like Corta We're like, you know some sort of like Indian, you know up top I think that'd be kind of fire Sean Puri. It could be part of your whole like angle with the name and stuff. That's true You're eligible for the bounty I might I might throw into it. I also might match it just because I think it's gonna be funny to see Okay, you heard a good first thing is so I'll throw in a thousand I'll throw in a thousand on top of it. It is before he's on the hook for a thousand Yeah, no, I don't I don't give it a peer pressure This is the stupidest thing ever I'm not gonna give someone a thousand dollars like it's up tell Sean what t-shirt to wear You have a signature look already so it's easier for you to say yeah No, you've got like the one like the pretty boy thing going with the like non-prescribing Grandfather who's sweater not a grandfather type of thing. Yeah, it's good Yeah, you are gonna be like you're gonna be a quintessential father. You're gonna have a lot of stern talks with your child I already know it's coming. I don't know what to say to this. I'll thank you
- Yeah, yeah, I want to hear this before you go. What is the grand plan? What is the grand vision for yourself? So you went from no name PE guy that as we established to legendary thread boy to now CNBC contributor book deal guy author I think you're gonna be president is that I joke about that a lot But I genuinely believe you could become the president someday if you wanted to do you have a grand plan for yourself I could see that being in the cards long-term running for public office I don't know if president is crazy roll that you necessarily want I think it's like probably one of the hardest and worst jobs in the world don't go in like Obama went in looking young and then he you know leaves all gray like looking you know looking rough It's like the highest stress job in the world running for governor would be I don't know That could be pretty fun to be a governor of a state. Do you know anything about politics? I've never known you to be a public policy. I did I did my masters in public policy, dude Oh, yeah, so that was always like what I wanted to do I mean I took a class on basket weaving like that doesn't like what like you know Do you think the people that are serving in public office today know a lot about politics? It's like what is it's sort of like the nevall thing of like you don't read a business book to no business Like there's no such thing as politics It's like you know are you a reasonable thinker do you have the ability to change your mind which right now politicians do not and Can you inspire people do you would you be people to move on things? Which party would you be? I don't even know I'm an independent man So I mean I've voted Democrat I voted Republican and prior election so I actually I actually don't know what party I'm hoping that a third party rises over the next 20 years before I actually go do this because I hate the direction that You know like polar politics has gone You know, it's just like the loudest minority on each side I could see you be a good politician because you pretty much never take a stain on anything kind of what you just did You're like I always call it. I'm like your PC like the rock man You never say anything inappropriate like you you you you are like the rock
- Well, yes, but Sahil, he never takes a stain on anything. He's always, he hedges everything. He says, you could be beautiful for a politician. All right, well, I'm counting on your fundraising for sports now. I'll even introduce you as my hot friend Sam when you come up to the speech at my future. Look, you already do it for me then? You're already lying. You're already lying. You're a good politician. Well, thanks for coming on. Where, what do you want to do? Want to promote something? Is that a thing? Do you have something to promote? I don't know, man. People kind of know where to find it. I'm at Sahil Bloom on everything. And my newsletter is at my website, sahilbloom.com. Well, I'm happy we finally got you on. We'll have to do it again. We're going to get another, I'm going to ask Austin Reif to come on. That'll be another group chat guy. We've asked Nikita to come on a few times, but he's weird. Nikita's busy right now. Yeah, right. Nikita's busy like basking in the glory of his gas app fan. No, he's just, it thinks it's cool to tell me no, I think. The coming Nikita, Nikita right now, like Nikita's been that guy that's like, oh my god, guys, I hate running this app. This is so tough. And then like, you'll see like on his Instagram, him like having a photo shoot is his house like posing out, like looking like this. It is girlfriend behind the seat says, oh my god, this looks like an album cover. Nikita's living his best life, man. More props to him because that dude had called his shot and has actually gotten and done it. So we'll get him on it. We'll get Austin on it. We've got to get a few more. We've had Huber on, but dude, thanks for coming and doing this. We appreciate it. Thank you guys, man.

3 Profitable Business Ideas You Should Start in 2022 [F2tljx5A98Q].txt

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- Okay, first thing, super quick. So have you guys heard of this Twitter account? It's called New York Times First Said. You heard of it? No. Okay, so it's kind of just like this fun little Twitter account where they track all of the articles being published by the New York Times and then they find words that are published for the first time. And it's just kind of like a fun thing because I'll send you guys this.
- I'll post it in the doc. This is a link to a couple of the ones that they published. So like deadass for example was a word like first found in the New York Times March 2019. Doom scrolling May 2020. Tech Bro apparently it was January 2022. Like that surprises me. So this is just kind of like a fun thing, but I was thinking that this should exist for jobs. So on Indeed or Glassdoor or something, there's a really really quick transition period these days between like just completely new jobs coming to market. And I think there should be an account that tracks these like, oh, this is the first time I've seen like, I don't know where I saw this, but there's like professional falconer like what? Who does that? How much does it get paid? I don't know, but I'm surprised to know it exists. And I'm sure there's many more practical jobs out there that are coming to market that people should know about. And so someone should just create.
- the equivalent of this, instead of the New York Times, it should be for Indeed. How do they do this? How do they track this? How do they track every word and check if it's ever been said before? I think it's just a scraper. I mean, I don't know exactly how they set it up, but I don't think it would actually be that way. This has 200,000 followers. So for that person out there has just been grinding, trying to put out great content, and has like 3000 followers. Just know, you could have been tweeting out like single word things from the New York Times and gotten 200,000 followers. I actually think that's a great idea. Have you guys seen the, remember how we talked about this kid that was tracking Elon Musk's private jet on Twitter? Now he's tracking all the private jets and private yachts of all the Russian oligarchs. Great pivot. Shout out to you, kid. Great pivot, Brad.
- I was like, Elon offered him $5,000 and he turned it down. He's like, no, I'm going to keep doing my thing. But both of his accounts have a lot of followers. He offered a five grand for what? Elon Jet. Stop tracking him. Yeah. Yeah, because Elon was like, I don't want people to know where I am. What a stupid thing. If you're going to come and offer someone money, do it right. $5,000. I feel like the best not miss Elon. That's how you should have replied. Five grand. I think this is cool stuff. I actually think this is a wonderful idea.
- I also think that companies would pay for this, right, as in like companies that have competitors want to know what their competitors are doing. And so like we're launching something at HubSpot soon and I've already gotten an email from someone who works at TechCrunch who's like, hey, saw this on your site or like they basically dug something up that we publish. And they're like, what's going on here? And imagine you're at the same thing where you're like, oh, I saw like sales forces, you know, hiring for these roles or I didn't know that was a role at Netflix. I think companies would pay for that intel. That's actually a crazy fascinating. If you could aggregate.
- Like let's say that you're in the me when I was at the hustle I cared about what like there's like 30 companies that I cared about what they were doing It would be kind of interesting to act if I would have paid a monthly fee and I would have gotten a daily email with like the movement and People's job just job listings. Yeah, that's that's what I was gonna say I don't think it's so interesting like the the falconer or whatever I say go whatever someone made up a random job but oh Like we see this a lot where it's like oh Netflix is hiring a web 3 engineer That means they're probably trying to explore something in that space and so you can kind of get a sense of
- What direction somebody's going? Oh, they're hiring enterprise sales. Okay. They're trying to go up market, right? So there's a competitive intelligence that comes from these, but I think that I do think that exists. I've seen People tracking these. I don't know if they're just doing it for their own fun or if there's like a service that tracks that But it is kind of interesting. I like that. All right. What else you got Steph? Oh, by the way, I should say one more thing I love our thing about this a hilarious story. I went into work one day and my buddy Neil who's like a programmer at our company He was sitting at the coffee machine making a coffee. It was like 10 a.m.
- And I hadn't even said anything to him yet. We were just standing next to each other and he just goes These are my first words He's like he didn't he realized he hadn't spoke that day yet To the coffee machine Started programming like his commute. He didn't talk to anybody is at his desk He didn't talk to me. He's just started with these are my first words and I thought that shit was so funny and And actually this is great when he said that I realized how funny Neil is and so we've replaced our marketing person with Neil He's not our iPhone iPhone program and he wrote all of the release
- notes for our apps, because he was just hilarious. And he was like, low key hilarious, but these are my first words. I'll never forget that. How does that relate to them? Because it's like a word tracker. First time the New York Times said this word. So that's how I thought of that. First time Neil's about. Yeah, so it's interesting to think about what are your first words every day. I like, what's coming out your mouth for the first time? Every day. Mine's usually like a grump. It's like a fuck when I say it up. You know what I mean? No, Sam, yours is always just sup to everyone. Just sup. I always say sup. Yeah, or I just like.
- I'm sore from exercise or something and I'm like, oh fuck, seriously my first word. Well that explains a lot. All right and then I forgot to tell you this, but this is the most important thing. I can't believe we didn't talk about this earlier to be honest with you because if you're listening to this and you like what you're hearing right now and you haven't gone and subscribed to the My First Million Podcast wherever you get your podcast, then that's the thing you've gotta do. There's nothing more important than doing that right now and don't do it because I said to do it. Do it because you wanna do it. Do it because that's who you are.
- All right, what else you guys there? I guess related to companies hiring, so you guys know Mischief, right? It's this like company that does these crazy stunts. They're on I think stunt number 70 and I, they're latest stunt. I thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring. So if you scroll down, tell me about what Mischief is. I don't entirely get it because they raised funding. But when you explain what they are, I'm like, who, what grown adult would trust this child with money? It's like South Fargo Saturday Night Live. It's a weekly show. It's like a weekly sketch.
- But it's just down through code. They make a website instead of like a video making a joke. They make a website that's a joke. Yeah. But is it exactly? Does it make money? I think it does. I don't know how much they've made. They've raised $3.5 million. So I don't know, like you're saying, I don't know who those investors are, what they're looking from mischief. But just to give like two examples. So one of them recently was, I think it's like called Tuntine. I don't know why it's called that. But basically, it's called The Game of Death Online, which you sign up, you get an account, and you pay $10 to join the game. And all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive. And the last person who.
- stays alive gets all the money. So it's just kind of like these silly quirky games, but the last one they did was They also do like commentary through their game. So it was a commentary on in this case the M set So they got people to pay fifty dollars to take the M-SOT and the highest score when it's basically like a a their version of the SATs and The person who got the highest score won the entire pot. So they didn't actually have that many people did it They had 500 people who did it, but it reminded me of something you guys talk about on the pot or have talked about on the pod Which is you know the power of like crowdsourcing things like SpaceX if they want to develop some new technology They put out some competition and that tends to attract more interesting people Then you know if they hire a bunch of recruiters to go, you know find the people in theory They're looking for the example the example I think you're thinking about is
- They were trying to figure out some like, were they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this AIDS medication and they like turned it into a video game and they'd spent 10 years trying to solve it and then like a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks. Yeah. Well there's the SpaceX, what's the SpaceX challenge? The one that everyone knows. Which is about X-PRISE? It's just like they're, that's not from SpaceX. Yeah, but there's also. Yeah, that's like a version of that where they basically just put out the bounty and then let people let anybody sort of enter.
- to try to win. OK, I feel like there's another one that SpaceX does. But in any case, what I'm getting at is all of, I mean, we work for HubSpot. There's all these companies that are trying to attract quote unquote top talent. And they're doing it in a way that, in most cases, true top talent, are you going to want to be DM'd on LinkedIn and go through a traditional interview process? In most cases, no. And so my question is, why isn't there a,
- really like mischief style recruiting agency that puts out these challenges that the smartest people on the internet are like stoked to solve just out of the cheer pride that They then can funnel potentially into these companies Maybe it's the case that these people just like would never want to work for these larger companies But I just wonder why there isn't a more creative route. I have something recruiting I have something for you. So this is one of the very first articles the hustle ever wrote I don't even know if you can Google it anymore It was literally like we wrote it like two weeks after starting and it was about my friend named Max And if you google Ben the hustle Google interview or the hustle secret Google interview So my friend Max was teaching himself some time I gotta remember all the details of this was like six years ago. He was
- learning some type of coding, some type of language. It was, and it was like a rare language. And he was typing in all these things on Google, like what does blank mean? How do you do blank? And after a while, his chrome browser like went, like looked like the matrix and it said, you look like you might belong to one of us. And it says, we've noticed that you've been Googling a lot about this type of language and we are hiring for that. Would you be interested in applying here? That's amazing. Very few people ever saw this, but we wrote an article about this. This article got seen by millions of people. What's it say Ben? What was the language?
- Google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job. That's that line. And he ended up working there and it worked. It worked and it was wild. That's dope. And you don't only Google to do that because they own the browser and the search engine, but, but what if you were just like, what if there was just like a app that just sat on your computer that basically just tracked everything you did. I know sounds great, but like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your computer. Right? Like if it knows that Steph is in all these different like subreddits and it's like, and she's like looking at Google Trends and all this stuff, that's like a signal for what type of person you are. Like it's actually like a much higher quality signal in theory than any job interview you could do where you're just trying to like present yourself as a certain way.
- versus what you actually do on the internet, right? Like, oh, you spend a lot of time in Excel or what you actually do in your computer. It's like, you spend a lot of time in Excel, you know? So we've seen what your capabilities are. Okay, if you're doing macros in Excel, you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs. And so I wonder if there's like a thing you could do like for college students. It's like, hey, put this on your computer and like, do you want your first job out of college? Like, well, we'll help figure out what that job should be. We'll help get you like a job opportunity just by putting this like tracker on your computer.
- Quick interruption, do me a favor, scroll down and you're going to see a link to the hustle. So if you want to stay up to date on the tech and business news you need to know, check out the hustle. It's a daily email. I used to help write it. I love it. So check it out. Scroll down below. Sounds very naughty. Yeah, I mean, though. Yeah, I mean, I know it's always like a, Oh, tracking everything on your computer thing, but the reason I thought of this is because I watched the QAnon documentary and in it, they have, if you guys heard of like, Cicada 3301. No, no, no, it's, they covered it in the documentary, but basically it was like the epitome of these like crazy online puzzles. I think there's been three of them. The first two were solved. The third one still has not been solved. And they are like, you know, there's, there's like a picture online and there's like a message and encrypted in that message. There's a bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and put it in. The point is, there's a bunch of numbers.
- A lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like either the NSA or the CIA And so I was like man, there should be something maybe not that crazy But something like that online for companies. I never do one of those I did this in college. We found this website and It was like, you know, it said some like vague thing. It was like the game has only begun But have you realized that it's begun? Yeah, and it's like you have to like right click view source any of the source code There's a URL you go to that URL and then it downloads an audio file you listen to the audio file It sounds like nothing you listen to it backwards all of a sudden it gives you coordinates you go to those coordinates on a map The map the L
- 50 part game, like Mr. Game, and me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this. We spent like hours and hours and hours and hours of colleagues. I don't remember what the name is. This is a second college. This is like 15 years ago, but like the I remember at the end the last puzzle we could never solve. And I think the guy just made an unsolvable puzzle. Like I just think there was no solution. His name was Mr. Wiggles or Mr. Squiggles or some shit like that. And he had this puzzle that was like the unsolvable thing at the end. But it was so much fun. And actually, now that I think about it, that is actually a great like filter and barometer for who might be good at certain times.
- of what types of work like the person that would do that for fun and solve that problem. I would love to hire that person, right? Because I know what could you could you be like there's this like if you're that game maker, Mr. Wiggles or whatever, like could you like do that as a service for a variety of companies and like make these games like hey we're gonna try and find you but I bet it's like hey I bet we're gonna do this thing this thing this thing and I bet you we're gonna get you 20 new applicants every month. Yeah totally. These silly games but they're gonna be high high quality stuff what's uh what's newly.
- So, newly, have either of you guys heard of newly N-U-U-L-Y? I think this is just a quick one, but basically, so it's this company that is part of the Urban Outfitters subsidiary, so Urban Owns, Urban Outfitters, Anthropology, Free People, and newly. And newly is a different take, so all those other businesses sell clothes in a very traditional way. What newly is is a rental business, so every month they send you six items. You choose those six items on your own. They send them to you, you get to rent them for a month, and then at the end of the month, you have the option to keep the money.
- them at honestly a pretty discounted rate somewhere between like 15 to sometimes up to 60 percent. And they have a ton of brands in there including their own brands. And the reason I thought this was interesting is, you know, there's other rental clothing services out there, but this is tacked on to existing businesses that weren't renting clothes. And it spoke to me because it was kind of similar to what Amazon's done turning a cost center into something that maybe in this case isn't a profit center, but is way more profitable, I think than the traditional clothing that
- business that they have. So if you guys remember, I think was it Mark Lore or one of your guests talked about just how many returns there are for clothing. Let me just pull up the stat right here. It's like 20% right? Yeah exactly and a return with clothing can cost up to 66% of the cost of an item. So actually a lot of these closing stores were just saying like, look you can you can just keep the stuff. You don't even have to send back the item. In this case, newly not only it doesn't have to you like.
- send items to people and not have them return, because it's so expensive, I'm paying newly to rent these clothes. So they're not losing money on the rental, they're now making money on the rental, and they've structured it in a way where it's actually really compelling. And so I think, I don't know the exact size of it now, but at least where I live, I've run into, at my coworking space, all of the girls there are wearing newly, and I just like, I wonder how this can be applied to other businesses. So what are those cost centers that could actually be turned into a profit center? Sean, what's the return rate on the things that you're involved in through investments or whatever? This is way lower.
- way lower than the 20%. So like, you know, more like, and I don't know if that's, I don't know if that number is, like what percent of your orders get returned or what percent of your revenue, what percent of revenue is your cost of returns? So I'm not sure exactly what that, what that's meant to quote. But you know, of course, any return is like a drain on the business. And so you know, any way that you could turn returns into either a neutral or profitable thing would be, would be kind of amazing. What do brands do with return to clothing or returned items? They kind of like, so typically you sort of like, there's like a, it's like an ER, right? So the patient comes in.
- And it's like, OK, it's it's it's it's a lost cause you just got to dump it. All right, right. Or it's like, oh, this could be patched up. OK, so you just need to like retag it. It's in good condition, retag it, put it back in a back and packaging. It's all good to go. Sometimes you have to like clean it, steam it, whatever, like. And in fact, there's a guy sunny who follows us on Twitter and lists us to the pod. And he has this thing called rock returns. So I think he had an e-commerce brand. He had like a suit brand, like a nice men's suit brand and returns were kind of like killing them because it's like a very kind of like heavy thing to ship.
- And it's an expensive product. And he's like, well, what am I supposed to do with this? And his 3PL or his warehouse was not like, they weren't willing to reprocess the suit. And he couldn't send out a questionable suit. So he had to know that this is like, if it is gonna be sent back out, it's in good condition. And so he actually created his own returns warehouse. And he's doing it for himself and now a bunch of other brands, right? Same as the AWS model. So he turned his cost center into a profit center. And I think this business is better than his e-commerce business.
- overall and he's just becoming an expert of like oh yeah like here's the efficient way to handle returns and now he's doing it for himself and a whole bunch of other e-commerce brands and and he's like nerding out about it hardcore he's like dude I found this new way of like steaming the thing that like makes it you know where we get extra 10% of them back into circulation because they're you know they're better now or like we could turn it around at this cost and they just charge like a cost per return processed basically for for for the brands damn that's because usually what makes you good at processing returns is not the same thing as well
- gets you good at like warehouse, a general warehouse with a bunch of pallets and boxes and shipping orders out. It's like, takes like a different skill set in a way. Can we talk about one other idea? Yeah. So what you talked about Sean reminded me of, so there's all this real estate and I'm sure this is like a overdone idea, but there's all this real estate that people have access to and not everyone knows what it can be used for. So maybe it could be used for a fulfillment center, maybe your garage could be rented out. There were a couple examples that I came upon that I thought were interesting and I wonder if someone could aggregate all of these different ways that real estate or parts of real estate.
- can be used to gain some income. So let me give you a couple of examples. A lot of people have heard of solar panels. So companies will pay you so that you can install solar panels on your roof. You'll get into a licensing agreement and they'll make money off of that. That's why they'll often install it for free. Another example is churches. So apparently, due to the height of churches, and specifically the steeples on churches, different telecom companies will pay these churches for access to their steeples. So an example is the National Cathedral in Washington is paid.
- guess how much actually guess how much they're paid by Motorola every single year. I would have thought like a thousand a month. So hundred thousand a year just for access to their 234 foot tower and some churches are even building steeples. They don't even have a steeple but they're like look I heard this other church is getting a hundred K a year we want that so that's another example. One final example I'll share is surf line. My partner he surfs all the time. He uses the surf camp so check you know how the waves are every day. Well where are these surf camps apparently they're actually in people's backyards. So if you have a backyard that is in a strategic area to see the surf.
- You can either sign up yourself or you can recommend or refer people to be like a surf cam house They'll come they'll install it and then I believe you get I'm not actually sure in this case how much but you get paid a certain Amount to have that surf cam in your backyard. So those are three examples I'm sure there's many more But I feel like there should be a site that says like oh you've got a house in this area You have a roof that gets this much sunlight or it's this tall or it's this much square footage Would you go as far as to put this into cars to one time years ago? Sean and I listened to this pitch of this guy who created a you know how cab cabbies have like advertising on top of their car he was doing that for uber drivers and I don't actually know I see him everywhere, but I don't know how the business what happened with the business Would you use valuation so?
- So they definitely got some traction. I think it's like a multi-hundred million dollar company now. It's called Firefly. What? Wow. Yeah, and there's another one that has like the screen. Have you guys been in Uber as where it's like a screen? And it's just playing ads. Those ones are, I feel like the execution on that has been terrible. But like that's another example where it's like, Oh, you actually have valuable real estate, which is the back of this car seat. Cause you have people's attention. So I have an idea for you. New side project for you. It's called the side hustle generator. And we'll put it on my first million podcast website.
- And it's a side hustle generator. It's just a giant quiz that leads you into a list of potential side hustles you could be ethical for. So you're like, you know, in your thing, it's like, do you own a church? You know, do you live by the surf? Do you have a car that you don't use all the time? Right? Like there's all these different ways. Cause I think, you know, people, people don't realize the number of opportunities that are like literally at their fingertips. It's like, do you own a phone? Do you know, you can get paid to test websites for companies? All you gotta do is just go to the website and just talk out loud as you try to use the website. Usertesting.com, right? Like my mom didn't know that and then she knows that. And that like kind of like changed her life a little bit. Right? She like all of a sudden had this thing she could do every day that kept her busy, that made her some money and she enjoyed it.
- Then you know Airbnb I remember telling my parents about Airbnb. It's like You know took some you know somebody had to educate them about it But now they make six figures a year Airbnb in their home and so there's like how many of these your parents do yeah Where do they go? There's go like you know to a hotel they'll go vacation. They'll just leave the city They'll come to my house. They'll go anywhere like that They don't care because because they can get like you know 700 $800 a night for their home and they'll go rent a hotel You know if 40 minutes away or in our way I'll go to wine country or whatever and rent a hotel for $200 and they you know the pocket the difference Did you guys remember the company I bet stuff you do the penny hoarder? Yeah, so the penny hoarder started as a blog it started by this guy named Kyle He spoke at one of our events. He's a cool dude and then his
- business partner is a friend of mine. And anyway, he started it in 2012, and he started it where he would just talk about all the side hustles he was doing. So for example, he would go on TaskRabbit and like get people's groceries. And he would talk about how much money he was making. He would become an Instacart driver. He would talk about how much money he's making. He would do an Uber driver and how much money he was making. And he got really good at getting traffic. And eventually he goes, Uber goes, hey, for every new driver you refer to us, we'll give you $2,000. Instacart did the same thing. TaskRabbit did the same thing. User testing did the same thing. And then like a person who like you need to answer surveys. And so that's what he did. And he built this business, this digital ad business.
- When he came to the event, he brought his dog and I was like, oh, how'd you get your dog on the plane? He goes, oh, I fly private. And I was like, what? Are you crushing it that hard? He goes, yeah, we bootstrapped it and we'll do about 70 million in revenue this year. And he owned 100% of the company and he recently sold it for, I forget the exact number, but it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the whole premise was just on talking about ways that you can make, it was mostly lowering-income people. Like maybe a mom who's just trying to make ends meet with just like 10 hours that she has available instead of taking care of her kids. And he killed it. This business crushed it.
- You never heard of the penny holder, Sean? I've heard it from you, but I never went to it. So I never like, used it. It's just a WordPress blog. That's all it is. Sorry, I was looking at stuff stock and realizing how many interesting ideas there are in here, Steph, we have to do a two-parter. So let's- Well, let her bang out a couple more. Let's give us one more. I'll come back any time. By the way, the top of the list was the worst ideas and the middle of the list was the best ideas. So that's why I feed back to you. Well, why don't you tell me what's an interesting one that you have your eye on? I'm looking at some of these trends success.
- stories. I think those are pretty interesting. That's when I was kind of looking at just at the moment. Which one of those is your favorite? Well, I feel like, okay, so let's call out a couple of them real quick. So last time I was on, I talked about like this idea of like, your listicle is my opportunities. Couple people have actually taken action on that. They've created these sites that identify the healthiest versions of not very healthy things. So one guy started a TikTok. It got hundreds of thousands of views in the first few days. And then someone else tweeted about this actually just last night.
- Let me see what they did. They're called fast food cravings where basically the headline says, eat what you want, not what you can. And it lets you put in a specific restaurant and find the healthiest version of the food at that restaurant. We talked about insider trading on one of the very first episodes I was on. And this guy after that episode, I think this actually existed before the episode, but Connor DM'd me and he was like, so there are these sites that track insider trades. But there are specific types of insider trades.
- that are more interesting than others. And specifically, it's stock grants to executives. It's not obviously a sure thing, but he said he was like, typically what that signals is the company trying to, you know, invest in a particular thing. If the executives hit certain targets, it's generally a good sign. Obviously not investment advice, but he created this community called spring loading. And what he does is he started a scraper that looks for all the insider trades, but then specifically vets them for this particular aspect. Like, is the company granting a buttload of stock to
- a group of executives. And he basically shares these. And then I shared an example in the chat, but he basically sends the financial report, he sends the grant details, then he summarizes it, he says, look, these people are getting this grant, this is what I have, what additional information I have, and then he gives a conviction rating. So some of his conviction ratings are like, one, guys, this is probably nothing, maybe something, if you wanna take a bet, go for it. Some of them, he's like, this is a five, so I shared one, again, not investment advice, but he shared one, for example, for CloudFlare a little bit ago. Obviously, CloudFlare with all the other tech companies has tanked recently, but he was like, this is one of the biggest performance grants I've ever seen with pretty massive price targets. I don't think there's any news in the near future, but I do believe that CloudFlare has massive potential and the stock has down 35% over the last month, and then he shares, again, the exact grant values, what targets they need to hit. So for example, these execs have different price targets, similar to, you guys discuss like Elon Musk's like crazy price targets. If they hit, I think CloudFlare today is at $95 or something like that, their first price target is $156, and it goes all the way up to $979. So this is what these execs internally are tracking towards.
- So I don't know. I thought that was like another interesting example. I think he's I think this community is pretty successful He's charging people monthly free by this idea. Did you bet on this? I? Haven't Cal my partner. He's been in the community He did actually I mean again not financial advice But he bet on one and I can't remember what company it was but it did one one day like go up But this was also in the don't even tell me more actually just Don't even I don't I don't need anything else Well, I was gonna say I definitely like don't want people's be go going gambling their money on that one anecdote But it is interesting to even just like be in there and and what I found because I'll just like dabble in the community I haven't placed any bets, but to see What like I'm learning about a bunch of different companies that I've never heard of I'm seeing like how these different companies are structuring stock grants
- and like why and someone commenting on it. And then of course there's just like a bunch of, a bunch of people commenting like, are you betting like, oh shit, like I'm 50% down. Like how are you doing? And so it's kind of like a fun community as well. Do you guys have a, this is awesome. Do you guys have a like a, like a degenerate budget or like a learner budget where it's like, okay, this is my fuck around with money that I can, I can try different things or do you guys not do that? Same with your shaking head, no. I don't, but do you? It sounds like you do. I do, yeah. How much?
- Well, let's talk about like in percentage terms. So it's like, you know, what would that be? It's like. No, don't do percentage terms. Like literally how much? Like like $50,000? No, more than that. Wow. Yeah, for sure. And so what will you do with that? What's an example of your, of a dumb, of a risky thing that you've done? Like, I think I've told this story before, but I remember watching. So the idea with these is, I'll just tell the story first. I watch the YouTube video.
- of this guy, no idea who this guy is. Some Wall Street, some hedge fund guy, basically he's a prolific short trader. This is kind of like the vibe I got from this video. Couldn't tell you. Couldn't tell you his name. Couldn't tell you what he was. Like I was reasonable enough. And he basically was like, he's like, yeah, I'm a, he's like, my short pick of the year is Tootsie Roll. And I was like, well, I was listening, I was like, what Tootsie Roll? I didn't even realize it's a public stock. He's like, Tootsie Roll? He's like, first of all, who the hell eats Tootsie Roll? He's like, do you think Tootsie Roll is growing? He's like, no, people eat Tootsie Roll's are like, you know, 50 and up, they're dying market. Kids don't want Tootsie Roll nowadays. They want like all these other candies.
- He's like, Tootsie Roll has zero innovation. They refuse to change their product. And they don't come out with anything new. And then it's also poorly run and not gonna be sold. It was owned by some woman who was like. I think it's owned by like a 92 year old lady. Yeah, she passed away now, but at the time, this was like five years ago or something like that. Like that, that this happened. I don't know where this was. This is a while back. And I remember watching that video and I was like, oh, this guy's totally right. Tootsie Roll's fucking dead. I went back to, I met against Tootsie Roll. I made a bunch of money. Just like zero thought process, zero diligence. Like just like take a punt and do something on a whim.
- And so that was the first time I realized like actually I want a Designated budget and with crypto this has become like you know kind of a necessity with crypto you basically have like You have so many new things that are all interesting and you can't get to hike in fiction because they're new is rapidly evolving like Opportunities in front of you today. And so you don't have timed diligence all these you don't have time to get to hike in fiction but you do know like Where you know you can sort of sense certain signals like if a bunch of smart people are looking at it If you see you know developer activity in that space if the premise is like you know interesting it might hit might not hit Whatever you can basically take punts on things in crypto and you get paid off
- Unlike the stock market, right? I think on the Tootsie Roll thing, I made like, I don't know, 20, 35%, something like that. In crypto, you can make like 20 X when you're right on these things. And so with crypto, the odds just shifted your favor where yeah, it's super fast moving and things can go to zero, but the upside when you hit is so high, it pays for all of your other bad bets. And so I basically created a budget because I was like, I can't, I can't overthink this. I need to, I need to intentionally underthink this. So what does that mean? It's like there's been...
- is the last five years, there's been so many examples of things that I've come across my radar in crypto that I don't take action on because I feel like I don't have enough information to make an educated decision. And actually, if I had just made uneducated decisions, I would have done far better than my like educated decisions turned out to be because the space is just where there's a lot of progress being made and you can't keep up with all the different projects, all the different tokens. So I basically set out a budget where I said, if somebody tells me something that's interesting, I have money that I could just like dump into that. It's a small amount of money. I don't care if that money that money goes to zero.
- And I'm not putting it all into one. So I'm taking like a portfolio of these and let's just see what the happens and in doing so, I get to actually learn how these things work. And so, you know, like I did one the other day and I put it in the milk road, explaining literally step by step, what this project was, and why I'm going into it and how I have no idea if this is like a great idea about it. I didn't audit the security of the project. Like I don't have time for all that. I'm just like trying to learn how these things work and I'm putting small bets in a bunch of different areas with money that I can afford to lose.
- Do you do that stuff? So I don't. Cal does. I think it's smart though because like Sean's saying, these are the type of investments where like, if you don't have money sequestered for this, it's gonna capture your psychology. That's actually why I don't dabble in these things. But he's done that a lot for NFTs, right? So at first he was like, Steph, I'm just gonna buy one. Obviously he's bought more since then, but he has a certain amount and like, that's all he's willing to invest. If it goes to zero, he's happy with it. But he's also probably sold a lot too early because he has a concentrated amount. So he's like, oh, I gotta sell this to buy another thing. Sean, did you get into proof? I feel like that was a big one. I didn't do proof. That's a great example of one where I'm like, oh, interesting, Kevin Rose is doing this NFT.
- thing, I should, I should, you know, I should just take a plot, right? Like, I'm seeing this before most people, I should go in and like, again, like, with these things, it's not gonna, it's not like gonna go to zero quote unquote, it's like, you know, so I can trade out of the thing if I want to, and you know, three months from now, but like, to weigh each, I don't want every decision to be heavy. And, and I, you guys seen this meme? That's like the, it's like the curve, I think it's called like the midwit meme. It's basically like, there's an idiot on one side, there's a genius like a, so the on one side is the idiot, he looks like a troll, looks like, you know, like, whatever, Trek. And on the other side, there's like a Jedi master.
- And then the middle, which is like the top of the curve, is like the average person. And it's like, you know, like for example, like, oh, like the idiot would be like, oh, that monkey looks like, that's a cool looking monkey, I'll buy, all right? The genius is like, oh, this has a chance to be an iconic, you know, like whatever, iconic NFT, buy. Like didn't think about it more than that. And then they're like, middle guy is like, you know, but why would anybody buy this picture of a monkey and like, how do the tokenomics work? And they like try to like analyze the whole fucking thing. And they're, hey, they're just paralyzed. There's some sort of analysis paralysis where they don't take action on anything. And then they overthink things so they miss the like.
- the big, simple opportunities that are in front of them a lot of times. And I heard the guy from YC, who Michael Sible talking about this, he goes, this is often the case with startup ideas. He goes, a beginner, like you know, you out of college, when you don't know anything about anything, you just think it's all like, you don't know how hard it's gonna be, you don't know how to vet opportunities, you just be like, oh, that sounds cool, like, let me try that. And then same thing with the Jedi Master, the Jedi Master's like, oh, like, you know, would it be cool if we could take a rocket to Mars? Let's try that, you know, like, that's also the like, you don't need to analyze it beyond that at the beginning. It's like the fundamental decision is very simple.
- And then like the person he's like, the person I hate talking to is like the second time founder who's trying to like over optimize their cap table and like try to get like really complicated about the like the valuation and this and then that and then they're trying to do like this lean start validation about every single thing. And it's like, that's the hardest person to deal with because they're they know too much, but not enough to know how to keep it simple. And he was talking about like the best ideas, the best startup ideas. They go to that that that idiot genius category where it's like, you know, like
- Should make cars that are electric, you know, like we should we should sell books online. Yeah, it's like yeah What if you buy a book online? That's it right you don't need to go too much further than that. What's that what's that video call? It's a it's one of the white commentator. It's it's Michael Sible and this guy Dalton Caldwell They do like a split screen side by side They just talk about something for 30 minutes and this is one of them. I don't remember the name of the video Do you know the name of the title? I want to find it real quick. Well, you guys talking, but I don't know By the way, it's like this idea of the sort of like idiot genius
- like don't overthink it thing? Well, I just did the ideate, we'll go ahead, step, I'll let you go first. Well, I was just gonna say it quickly, like yes, I believe in it, and yes, I think it applies to like different things. So I would say I'm the like, would you call it like mid-twit or something? Mid-wit. Somewhere in the middle for like mid-wit in finance. That's why I don't dabble. Cause I'm like, I overanalyze things, I hear one piece of news, I'm out kind of deal, but I think it applies to like with startups, I think I'm maybe not that with other things, I certainly am like just.
- Just terrible and so I think it I think our friend Jack was a great example of this right like he saw NFTs I was like, oh that looks cool like I'm gonna buy one. I'm gonna make one. What should I make it of? I don't know like this one of those diagram. I already have The simplest shit and the guys did billions of dollars this year Made off those How much you think he's made on it see do you think he's like wildly wealthy from those? I don't know, you know, he's done well for sure. I think you know, he bought apes He bought a pot. Okay. I think he's bought some of the like the projects that went up from like for sure You know and plural like you said like apes not not like one ape. He's bought multiple of all of us We're like priced at like, you know, what a thousand dollars like, you know 18 months ago And now each one is worth like, you know 250 $500,000 so
- I don't know if he held I don't know what what it was but even just the stuff he made right like I know a lot of people They're like oh web 3 the metaverse. I need to create an empty project He needs to have this and that in utility blah blah he's like hey I minted a picture of like a you know a thing that says not like right click save as you know It's kind of like just making fun of the space sold it for like $50,000 I like did that in an afternoon and that's like the mid You know instead of being the midwood over analyzer logical, you know processor of all All things you know he went to the kind of the genius zone and
- just took a punt and because he's in the idiot genius zone, it's not heavy. It doesn't take a lot of time or energy or money to like try it. And so I specifically carved out a portion of my investing budget to say, look, this is my, my gamble, like, you know, I'll get rid of my gambling energy. I'll learn by doing this because I'll get, do things that I wouldn't otherwise do. And I'll have skin in the game. So I'll actually pay attention to it. Um, and like who knows, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll have some, have some hits out of this. And I bet I honestly think that that part of my portfolio is going to do better than the, the.
- the well thought through quote unquote, part of my portfolio. By the way, Sam, I think you do this really well when people, like I've seen people come to you and they're like, Sam, I'm thinking of like, starting this business and like, I wanna cover this topic and I wanna blog and all this stuff and you're like, all right, like what's your first step? Or like you'll be like, just right. Or something like that, which just like simplifies to the like idiot Jedi, like just do the thing, not like over analyzing the like 50 startup articles for some time. It's when Sam says dog. You just needed this. He goes Randy Jackson on him. Well, I just get frustrated. I think because I think that like, I think that it's good. So if like building a business is step zero to 10 and 10 is like, you're this billionaire or like your vision has been achieved, you know, you own all this property, whatever that is. It's good to have number 10. And then a lot of people are like, all right, that's step number 10. And then like steps three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, I gotta figure those out. In my mind, I'm like, no, but it's only thing that's important is 10 and one. And one, after you get done with one, you'll figure out number two. Just but until you get to number two, don't even think about worrying about number three. It's not important. Dude, I have the same exact thing. I call it A, B, Z. It literally like word for word your thing. And I went on Jack's to Jack's community. He asked me to give a talk and to his like a visualized value community. And I, this was the one thing I told him. I go,
- You have you're at A. That's where you are Z is the vision. It's the dream. It's good to have that. It's good to know what that is, right? That's like the north star and like without that, you know, you don't really have the motivation or really understand like what the hell You're trying to do But wherever it gets paralyzed is they think they need to know a step B C D F G H I J and it's like and then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step D when they haven't even done You know a to be yet and so I go ABC. It's all you ever need It's like where you are you got to know that accurately the next thing you need to do You need to know that and then you need to know the end vision and everything else is irrelevant Like just do that and so you just literally said the same thing with your own like with numbers basically instead. It's all
- Awesome. Great. Great minds think alike. I mean, that's exactly how I feel. Because every time I've ever had any bit of success or even when I've done something and it didn't work out, I just think that if you just start and you're going to see so many things that you didn't even expect or realize were an opportunity or that weren't an opportunity. You're like, oh, I thought this, it's actually way different, but that's cool or that's not cool. We got to quit. You know what I mean? And you just have to do something. I get really frustrated with inaction. I've been saying this lately.
- I love thin books and quick silence and so what does that mean like I? Love a thin did you make that up? I love a thin book because a thin book is like a simple idea Presented without the fluff and that's it. That's the value. You know don't don't try to you don't need a thick book For everything so I'm a big fan of thin books now And the other one is a quick silence which is I call my buddy Sulea about every business question I have basically It's like oh, we're starting the milk road. Hey, what do you think about this and then? There's a quick silence like he says his thing
- It's obvious that's the answer and I was like building up in my head. I need to like, oh, I really want to sit down with him and talk. It's like within three minutes. We've reached a good pause where it's like, well, I guess nothing else really matters till we go do that, right? Yep. All right. Well, I guess I'll just. Probably do that obviously. Yeah. Check it later. Like it's a quick silence to me is like, now what I want, whereas I used to want to fill that silence with more detail, more analysis, more planning, more nuance, more like if then statements and like.
- You don't really need any of that like we talk by the end of my sentence. He says his sentence Sorry, I guess I didn't really need a call. I guess could have just done a text and you know like I guess I kind of knew this to be Good with like who maybe I didn't need to call you right, but that quick silence is really Showing me like that's when I'm on the right track is when I get it either a thin book or a quick silence Is like when I'm on the right track and when I need more answers typically? I'm just I'm actually going in the wrong direction all together Dude, that's yeah, that reminds me from coding if you if you run into an error and you're on like
- stack overflow or something and you're just like, you can't find your answer. It's probably cause you're googling the wrong thing. Like you've completely messed it up, you're in the complete wrong direction. And I feel like that applies in most cases. If you find yourself asking like 10 questions, it's like, hold up. Like you're just like going in the complete opposite direction that you should be like, pull back and revisit. How many people reach out to you after each one of these episodes goes live stuff and said that, they like wanna pitch you on something or they wanna recruit you to come join something.
- Well, it grows. And some of your buddies reach out, which is always fun, but I feel like. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? What are you talking about? I don't want to drop any of these. Realize. Ugh. Tell me. That sounds like a story. What's in what's behind that? No, no, I just mean like it's cool because, well, also, I should say like some people that I've really looked up to, I don't want to call out their names because obviously these are like private messages. But people that I've looked up to that I was like, oh, I used to read your stuff. Or like, I've literally read your book. Or like, I- Or we're from the same country. Andrew, what are you going to say? You know, it's a great story. I'm not naming any names, but it's been cool. And it's grown obviously because you guys have grown the pod a lot. So yeah.
- Well, there's few people I'll get a fist fight over. You are one of them stuff. So let me know who you have. You haven't broken your contract, Sam. So you're good. You're good. Well, good. I'm happy you came. You have so much more to cover. I think we should wrap up here, though. Yeah, sorry. I had to apologize to everybody who listened to this because Steph had a bunch of gold. And I feel like I took it in these really random directions. So to make up for it, we're going to do a second part of our stuff if you'll come back and we'll do more of these ideas rapid-fire. Yeah. And I'll shut up.

3 Ways To Validate You Have A $1,000,000 Business Ideas (#353) [PQFuKZBZJYo].txt

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- Hey, MFM. This is Bernard from Bernard in Germany. My question is about testing your business ideas. So I've heard a bunch of people on your podcast talk about this already and how it's part of what made them successful. Now, I don't really understand what this means testing your business ideas. The only thing I can think of is maybe running multiple ads and comparing the performance.
- But beyond that, I really don't know what to do. So could you first of all tell me how you have seen this done successfully in the past and second of all, I can become better at it. Thank you. All right, the guy asked Sean, he said, I hear you talk about testing ideas. What does that mean? Does that mean just like running ads to like a page and getting sales? And the answer is yes, that is our way. But he wants to know about testing ideas and how do you do that? All right, so we can share a couple of things that, I think you talked about this in the last one question Friday, but the first is
- customer conversations and the mom test. So there's a book called the mom test, worth reading if you wanna get better at this stuff. But here's the premise, which is talk to customers and the rule is don't make the mistake everybody does. Don't pitch your product and just wait for them to politely be like, yeah, sounds really interesting, let me know because that's like a false positive. You're only allowed to talk to them about their problem. So you do what's called a problem interview. You just talk to them about their life, what they're in their business, whatever your area your products in. You ask them questions, you try to see, A, is this a real problem for them? B, how big of a problem is it like, dude, this is the biggest issue in my life right now or it's nice to have. And you can suss that out by trying to figure out, okay, so what have you done to try to solve this? And if they don't really say anything, well then it's probably not actually that big of a problem. They haven't been trying to solve it. If they've tried like eight solutions and none of it's working and they're just banging their head against the wall, you know it's a real problem. And so you try to figure out the problem, you try to figure out how big of a problem and you try to figure out the words they use to describe it as a problem. Cause that's what you're gonna use to create your solution. And then separately you could say, well, I'm working on a way to solve that. It'll be a XYZ, are you interested in trying it? And then they say, yes, he said, great.
- And then you make them pay some price, whether it's literally paid money or give your information or connect your account so I can have your data or whatever, make them do something that has some friction so you can gauge if they're really interested or not. That's one way you could test an idea. And that's exactly what you did this weekend. We just talked about the basketball camp thing that Sean did. You told me what the idea was and he goes, if this interests you, Venmo me $1,800 right now. And we all did. And there was no website, there was nothing. It was just a phone call, text, Twitter thing. And that's the way I typically do things. Oftentimes it'll take.
- maybe 20 or 30 calls and I can probably get one person to show interest, but that's where a lot of people fail is they actually don't talk to enough people. So for my latest thing, I've actually talked to like 300 people and you have to talk to a lot of people. I invested in this one company and they were trying to get customers and I'm like, well, how many talked to you? Like, well, we talked to like one person last week and then a person the week before and like, oh, dude, it's got to be from like 8 a.m. to like 7 p.m. and you're on calls all day. And that's that way I think typically works, but most people don't have enough intensity around it.
- There's another way which is you take a pre validated idea. So you take an idea that's already working and you just put, you change it in some way. So, oh, it's working in the US, but there's no version of this in Europe. It's pretty good bet that the behaviors in the US are going to translate to, let's say, Europe or wherever. And so you can skip the validation idea, the validation point that way. I actually think validating an idea is really, really hard. I actually don't think you're ever going to get this clear signal that like, yep, check. I know that people want this. It's just like a spectrum. You're just increasing your confidence level that there's a real there there, but you're never at 100%. And I tell you, you know, many, many months in too far in the second thing is another way to skip the line is just work on something where you know you're the customer.
- Because if you're the customer for it, I guarantee you, on an internet scale, that there are at least another 100,000 people that are just like you that have the same problem as you that feel the same way you do. You may not be able to find them, you may not be able to market to them, but they definitely exist. And so one way to validate your idea is to just build something that solves a problem for you. Very rarely will that be too small where it's only you or only you and 10 other people that have that problem. Almost always, there's a huge group. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot?
- HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a test from three days ago I totally missed. HubSpot, grow better. There's sometimes, or a lot of times, like HubSpot or sometimes software, like Riverside, what we're using now where it's like, it's a little bit challenging to get customers before the thing is actually built. That definitely exists and there's this company that I talked to called Zupr, Z-U-P-E-R.co. Their headline is power, your field service, and deliver a better customer service. Basically, it's an app where if you're an electrician, all your electricians who work for you, they go out and it's like timetables and all this stuff. He was like, I was like, how did you do this? He said, well, I just spent all my nights and weekends talking to these business owners, and I basically interned for them, and I got to know them really well, and I honed in on the problem very specifically. I got pre-commitments, they didn't pay me, but they told me if I can do X, Y, and Z, they'll be my customer. And so I didn't validate it in the sense of I collected money, but I knew with a high degree of certainty what the problem was, because I spent a year working with these people and talking to them, and then when I built it, it took about six months to get my first customer, and I know another guy who did that, Al from Next Health, it's like a billion dollar company now, and he did the same thing. He built software for doctors, and he goes, I quit my job, and I became a secretary at a doctor's office for six months to learn exactly how they do things, so I knew very specifically the software that I was building how it was gonna solve a problem. And so I didn't validate it in the sense of I collected money, but I validated it in my mind of I had a higher degree of certainty.
- So to summarize three ways that you can validate your ideas, the worst way or the least fidelity way, go talk to as many customers as you can, go nine to five, go shadow them, try to talk to them about their problems, figure out how big of a problem it is, and what they do to solve it today. The second, a higher fidelity way, you actually have an offer, it's a landing page, it's an ad, it's a flyer, it's an email, and you try to get people to pre-commit to a solution. That will also validate that there's demand to this. And then the best way of all the ways is, you know there's demand because you have the problem. And if you have the problem, you know it well, you know what solution would work, you have a place to test it, you can be patient zero and you can test it on yourself. And if you do all that, you're not guessing, is this problem real or not? Cause you know it's real.
- And all of these take a lot of courage. A lot of people don't do them because they're afraid. Everyone's afraid. You just gotta do it. And you can get done. You can get a lot done by just having some courage and actually following these steps. So that's one question Friday.

4 A.I. Business Ideas To Start Using Dall-E, GPT3 _ Deepfake Technology [D2oYyNtfUm8].txt

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- I think this is one of the multi-billion dollar trends that like you could be on right now. And I don't say that for hyperbole. Like literally this is the window. The tech is just now finally good enough. It's not quite there, but you need to start now and you could disrupt all of these marketplaces. All right. I went out with Hassan last night for dinner. Can I tell you about it really quick? Do it. It was awesome. So he like admires you a lot. Do you know that?
- I admire him a lot. So you pronounce his name Minhaj or Minhaj, right? I think his name is actually pronounced Husson Minhaj. And everybody calls him Hassan Minhaj because it sounds awesome. And it's like Nicki Minhaj. Nicki Minhaj. And so, you know, whatever. I don't know how strict he is on that. Well, so basically the story of this is Sean interviewed him last year. I thought I saw him on the street and I ran up and went and said, Hey, and it actually wasn't him. And I looked like an idiot and I tweeted about it and he text me. I guess he got my number from you and he text me and we went and hung out. So this guy is like this, you know, pretty big deal comedian. He is so smart. He's so much smarter than I am. And that's what I learned that. And number two, I was so.
- intimidated to be around him because I didn't know if like if I was like can I make him laugh if I can make him laugh I'm like this is a way and I really didn't I didn't make him laugh I failed I did not I cannot make him laugh and he like showed me these books that he's reading and I wanted to Google like I wanted to tweet this out but I was too embarrassed so maybe you could tell me but I like like Googled like books on how to be funny because after I hung out after I hung out with him I was like dude this guy's got me in a trance he could tell me about anything he's so funny and good at storytelling like I'm so into it and I was like I want to figure out how to be funny and I went on Amazon and I Googled like how to be funny or like how to be clever and do you remember years ago when I wrote that article about this guy who games the Amazon Kindle system to rank really high and it's like shit books but you like buys reviews
- Dude, it's like six of the top 10 on page one. We're all him. It's all this guy. I know the author. I know the guy's name. So it's all bullshit. What is there? Are there good books that I can read you think on how to be funny or how to be clever? Like I felt like such a nerd like I was going to tweet this out, but I mean, look like the biggest virgin on earth. Just like, how do I like be clever in a conversation? Yeah, I don't know. I feel like this is a, it's like a, it's like a skill that's only passed down like by hand and you can, it's only like trial by fire. Like you have to like learn this when you're 12 and get good at like busting people's balls and like saying the funny thing in class. Like the, the, the, the, like hilarious. I know you like the, he has this hilarious story. He tells, he goes.
- Dude, I was in my like freshman. I remember the first time I realized I was funny as a community. He's like, I was my freshman year at college and I was going to school in Louisiana or whatever. He's like, and my professor said to our class, he was like, you know, look to your left, look to your right, you know, statistics will say that, you know, one of the one of the three of you, one out of every three people are going to end up being like a child, whatever molester or something like that. He goes, and I stood up and I just go, not it. He's like, that was the moment. And first of all, this is the hilarious story. And secondly, I think there's some truth to like, you have these little moments where you get rewarded for being funny early on in life and you're like, ooh, more of that. All right. How do I get more that last? No, I want more of that. And then you just keep doing it. And I think it's a, I think just like anything, like, you know, some people will never be a little dunk, but you definitely can improve. You can learn how to dribble better than before. For sure. Like there's got to be a skill. There's definitely a skill here. You know, I think like the best are definitely just born better, but I can be good. I can be good. There's a YouTube video that you should watch.
- So I've gone down this rabbit hole probably also after I met And I was like shit. He would tell me a story on the pod where he'd be talking and I'm so Into the story. I'm like, you know Now the palm of his hand and then he would ask me a question mid story And I just I'm like nodding like I'm still listening like it's a TV show And then I didn't realize that he said something to me like he said he was selling some stories like everybody's got that kid Growing up like you had that kid who who was it for you? And I was so in like enthralled by the story that I was just like yes
- And I realized that I was like, oh, he asked me for a name. And then I thought about who that would be because I said, now it's said, yes, that there is a kid and he's like, who was it? And I was like, I can't remember any names growing up. I'm so into you that I've like forgotten who I am and my entire past. And so, you know, that was what was happening when he was telling stories. But I asked him afterwards and I think he gave me a YouTube video that was fun that he was like, this is kind of interesting. So it's called Mark Norman. How to write a joke. And I think it's like an hour long podcast. So the thing is called writing a joke with Mark Norman.
- And Martin Norman is a good joke writer. He's a funny comedian. Yeah, he's great. And this one hour thing, he like kind of breaks down some of the like mechanics of what makes something funny. And it's not like follow these three easy stops and you too can be funny, but it is like, oh, okay, I can see how this like, if I consistently practice these mechanics, I can take something that's like not so funny and make it funnier repeatedly. And then like from there, there's more, there's storytelling and there's setups and there's like tagging jokes and there's other like things that you gotta learn, obviously, if you wanna do this well, but I think that video is pretty good.
- I'll watch that. There's these guys who have this YouTube channel called Charisma on Command and it's a beautiful name. They've been doing it forever. Have you seen these guys? Yeah, I remember for like maybe five, seven years ago, I was watching those videos. Yeah, and they're cool. It could be a little lame because it's a little bit more on like nerdy guys, how to meet women, which is cool and fine, whatever. But like, you know, I was not trying to, I was dating my wife at the time. So I was like, well, I just want to learn how to be like more charismatic. And I remember their name and they like taught a course on it and like they had all this stuff. It's like, that's a beautiful name. Charisma on Command. I'll watch that Mark Norman joke. But anyway, hung out with this dude last night.
- It was dope. He paid for dinner. So good first date It was awesome Did you try to pay? Did you do the thing? No, no for sure a lot me But I you know it's funny It's when I go to he like like this we went to grammar C Tavern He and he likes that place which is I guess is like a fancy or kind of fancy place and I was like dude you come here Lot he goes. Yeah, I love it. I go. I'm not even gonna look at a menu whatever you want to order for me Just you just do it all and that's that's how I love I love going to restaurants like that I do that all the time. I'm like I don't care. I eat meat and vegetables get whatever
- So I was, no, the best is then after they order, then you complain. You got to know that's the, the true D bag move. By the way, you know, one thing people liked from the last pod or maybe a couple of pods ago, I got a bunch of DMS about this. They were like, dude, I love the homey move that you said. I was like, I don't even remember what he's talking about. He's like, he's like, remember the homey move. That's like one of the top 10 things you've shared on the pod, which was you were like, dude, guess how many blah, blah, blah. And like, when you say that, obviously it's something impressive, but I kind of guessed low so that you can have your, your punchline where you're like, a hundred million. And I'm like, oh, I only said 10 because I kind of knew it's more than 10. But let me give you this moment. People love that. Uh, that's hilarious.
- Yeah, I saw the comments people did dig that on YouTube So I made a little vow to myself to bring more Specific ideas and stories to the pod because I personally love the free-flowing just like whatever wherever our consultation goes it goes but I want to make sure that You know we have the entree not just Top us it's not just the appetizers. I want to have the entree So let's jump into a couple ideas. I got a few too, or I got one big one
- I'm gonna go one and then you go one. All right, so we've talked about this a little bit in the past. Dolly and like how much AI is advancing. And I don't know if it's just like my TikTok feed keeps feeding me these, but every day I see a new, incredible thing that AI can do. That hell is blown me away. What's that? You have to explain what Dolly is. Dolly is a program. It's a artificial intelligence program. Dolly too, I think is the current name of it. That basically you just type in any word and it generates.
- images on that. So you could be like, Sampar, you know, fishing, and it will just generate images that like look like they're either hand drawn or like a stock photo that are Sampar fishing. Even though no such image exists, let's say it will create the image. So it like flips the whole idea of like creating art or taking photos or painting something. And it kind of like flips it on sets like no, computers and robots can now do that almost as good if not in some cases better than what would be, you know, the real thing or human, human stuff. And so you see that, you see deep fakes, like there's videos where you'll see the Mona Lisa and then they're like, watch this. And they push a button. And also the Mona Lisa starts turning her head and she starts wrapping like, you know, notorious B.I.G. And it looks like the mouth is like in sync with the lyrics and the thing looks real. It's like, yeah, they just took it, they can take an image and they could turn it into a video.
- Using AI like AI can basically say oh if I have this image I know where the eyes and those lips are I have been trained on what talking looks like what singing looks like What looking around and acting natural looks like and I can turn any image into that and it's really good It's really good They could take Barack Obama and they can make him like this happen now with the Ukraine thing They took the Russian president like and the way that people can Photoshop an image to make it look real You could take Barack Obama and you can make it sound and look like he is saying something Completely racist or whatever so yeah, I think that's it. I can't trust videos Well, I heard a podcast about that particular one I think someone made one of these things to show how amazing it is and then they also shows but here's a downfall And they made Obama I think he said the N word or something like crazy like not cool and they're like he said that and that amazing Obviously he didn't but like it seems exactly like he said it. This is where it's gonna get it's gonna get dangerous
- Totally. And let me, so, so, just keep going to some random examples. So there's another one where you, you can draw like a very basic smiley face on, on your iPad on this app called procreate. And then you can, it's basically just like eyes, nose, mouth, and you're just like pencil drawing it. Then you change the brush to the AI paintbrush and you just kind of like shade in like, you know, like in a kid with like a shape. And it like, colors in as if you like painted this in fine detail with the shadows and the colors that, and all you're doing is literally just moving your hand like a fool. And it's like, it knows already what like high quality art looks like. And it just turns your crappy art into high quality art. It's amazing. And so every day there's all these little amazing magic tricks and they're not like fool proof yet, but the demo is getting ridiculously impressive. And so I used to come up with a logo for a business. I'm thinking about starting. I use it to come up with a logo and it was awesome.
- Oh, I do that all the time. Yeah, if you just Google AI logo generator or brand generator, there's like four websites that you can use and you just say like, uh, I, you know, it's a legal, legal startup. The mood is serious, but still sophisticated. Go. And it'll spit out like an infinite number of logo variations that you could then and they could be like, cool, print this on business cards. That's like how they make money is like, print this on a business card or like give me the high quality photo. You actually use it. I used it. I used it. Yeah. Normally what I do is I go to 99 designs and I have like you 99 designs is amazing because you can get like 30 graphic designers to like make up a landing page and you can be like, I like details from number one, number eight, number 14. And then someone combines all of them and they give me the one that I want. Whereas when you work with just one designer, you got to like a kind of be nice to them and be like, no, this, this is.
- you know, this is okay, but can you kind of change it like this? Instead, I could be like, no, this sucks, do this, but also be you can see all different combinations. And with Dolly, I'm excited to use it in that way. And so let me give you like a couple ideas that I've had based off of what I've seen. So here's what I think these can be very big ideas. Now, the problem with these, also the problem also, is that I think it's so easy to do that you're gonna have a bunch of competition. So you have to find a way to be defensive. But here we go. Four ideas that you can do with AI, like right now. Okay, so number one.
- is, which one I want to start with. Okay, so number one is gonna be fake speech. So I'm investing in this company called Unreal Speech. I don't know if you've heard this, but check this out. This guy sends me deep fake audio of somebody of Gary V. and Jordan Peterson reading the milk road. So I'm gonna just play one of these. I think you can hear it. Let me just. This is the milk road. The newsletter that brings you so much entertainment, news and laughs it should be.
- legal. Yeah, no, hypothetically speaking, of course. Here's what's happening around crypto. Dude, it sounds like Jordan Peterson. This is just like Jordan Peterson. Here's Gary Vee. The news letter that brings you so much entertainment, news and laughs. It should be illegal. Yeah, no, hypothetically speaking, of course, you can see a message up sometimes happening around crypto. The new stable coin on the block. So so you can see that's amazing. That is so good. This is off like that. Very little. This very little training data. And literally just like takes my thing. And you can see the place where my my written stuff is like kind of like casual. I'm like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't do that part very well. But the other parts, it does like pretty dang well for a very small amount of training. Unreal speech. Is it available to everyone?
- Yeah, so well, it's like brand new. So he was like, hey, yeah, Sean, you want to never do an ad read again? He's like, you know, you have hundreds of hours of audio of you and Sam's voice that's on the podcast. Like all you need to do is just say the word and I can make it so that you'll never have to do an ad read again. Did you do it? I can make it so that the milk road, it'll auto add a companion audio. Like if somebody wants to listen to the news that are on the go, like it'll do it in your voice. Like I can just do that now. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. He's like, yeah, in the way we're doing it is cheaper, faster and like more accurate than like the kind of the other models that are out there on like Amazon or whatever. So it's like, you know, dramatically cheaper to do because this is a little bit expensive whenever you do this because it's like machine learning, but the cost just keeps falling every year. And then there's techniques to make it even smaller. And so think about this, like language translation. So for example, there's a world where we do this podcast and unreal speech could translate this into another language in our voices with our tones, but just speaking another language. And so now all of a sudden our podcast is in, you know, is being, you know, done in Spanish and in French and all these other languages. And so we could grow without having to actually do extra work ourselves. Damn, dude. That's crazy.
- I'll add read stuff like that. So I think that's a great business. There's also, yeah, there's other kind of like use cases for it, but I'll leave it at that. Okay, here's another one, student essays. So I told you about that guy who made a thing called writelikeshan.com and it like, I mentioned it in my email and it like blew up and it like caused him to have like $1,000 bill in his servers and he was like, you know, oh shit. Like, you know, the side project now is like a financial burden for me. But basically this guy trained AI to write like I do.
- And it was pretty damn good. And I shared an example last time. But this is not like, has other to do with me, it's just you could take any corpus of text data. In this case, he just used my Twitter feed as like the corpus of text. It could train it to write like that. Well, there's one of the big things that, you know, I don't remember growing up, but like you get assigned, you have to write an essay in school and, you know, some people would pay other people to do it for them. Some people would go find one online and try to plagiarize it. Well, this is gonna basically screw that whole thing up because I'm gonna be able to go on there and say, hey,
- write an essay about World War II and Germany's role in it in the sophistication of a 10th grader. And it's just going to spit out a full essay or like a thousand versions of an essay and I could just pick the one I like and I could just edit it in like maybe five minutes to like get rid of any like crappy computer mess ups. Dude, this is wild. You remember Turnitin.com? Did you have Turnitin.com? Like it would help you like if you submitted to submit an essay in high school, it happened. So I used to like, I had this website that like would give you free essays and I would use them all the time, you know? And like most, well, I don't know, most people do it but you know, a lot of people do it. Some people out there will think this is okay. I'll person. And I'll person did it and it was awesome. And I like to rewrite it a little bit but then they came up with Turnitin.com which ended up becoming like a huge company and sold for billions of dollars I believe where you would turn in your paper essay but then you also had to submit an electronic copy and it did a pretty good job of finding out if it was plagiarized. Frankly, I have no idea how it did it and I don't actually think it's that sophisticated of technology but they just sold to schools and they like trusted that it was legitimate because like if you just Google a phrase in quotations you could see like where, you know what I mean? It's like not like that sophisticated of a thing but like it would alert teachers like, okay, like 98% of this is copied from somewhere else. Bye.
- But yeah, the teacher doesn't want to like Google. The teacher doesn't want to Google everybody's thing. So yeah, that makes total sense. And that's exactly the case. I think you're going to have the creation of stuff, of content, on the AI auto-generated content. And then you're going to have the fact checking side, the detection businesses also. Both are going to boom. You're going to have things that take a video and say, is this a deep fake or is this a real video? You're going to have another one that's like, is this an auto-generated content or did a human write this? Like, it's like the opposite of capturing. You know, when you go to a website and it says, prove that you're a human, it's going to basically be like, prove this isn't a robot. It's basically what you're going to have to do in order to trust that this person actually did the work that's required for this.
- So I think that that's gonna be like on both sides. There's gonna be businesses. I'll give you another area that's gonna get totally disrupted. Print and patterns. So people talk about like using AI for stock photos, using AI for like be like auto-generated music. That's all gonna happen too. But here's what I think is like more low key. Like when Patrick came on, he was talking about quilt businesses. So there's a huge market of just pattern making. So this is for all like clothing, blankets.
- you know, curtains, whatever. Basically, patterns and prints are everywhere, you know, in apparel and fashion. And so if you wanna go and actually like make clothing, you will often use like websites that have large libraries of patterns and prints. What happens is today somebody hand draws each one of those like, oh, this floral pattern or this, you know, repeating pattern of, you know, whatever, it could be like fire trucks for like, you know, some kid thing or whatever. And.
- Then that person gets paid when you go buy that by that pattern you buy it for one of our hundred dollars And now they get that as they're like royalty stream Well, this is all gonna go AI in my opinion somebody can compete with these because the sites that do this They're worth hundreds of millions of dollars these marketplaces that have the creators and they have the sir Yeah, we talked about one of them. I forget what it was called. I Think I had gotten acquired by like 400 million. Yeah flower something. Yes, some flower flower or something basically They What that's gonna turn into is I'm gonna go on there. I'm gonna be like cool. I'm making a You know galaxy the I want a galaxy themed repeating pattern So I'm just gonna write galaxy themed repeating pattern and it's going to generate
- Galaxy theme patterns and then they will be able to charge one tenth of what the other sites do because there's no human involved and they'll just keep all of that revenue for themselves. So they will become the supply side of the market. So this is like you can build a billion dollar marketplace because you now don't have to worry about supply. It's what Uber's trying to do with self-driving cars, right? It's like, hey, we can make these rides way cheaper and we can like, you know, make this whole system more efficient. You just got to get to self-driving and Tesla's trying to do the same with the Robotaxi. It's like the big idea in transportation is getting rid of the driver. The same thing is going to be the case with artists. It's like, we're going to get rid of the artists. We're going to not need somebody to do the photography, the videography, the music, the pattern making, you know, the voiceover work. That's what Unreal speeches, right? It's voiceover work. The essay writing, the 99 designs, every single one of those, they're either going to have to release this and kill their own supply side or someone is going to come and do it and eat their lunch. I think this is one of the multi-billion dollar trends that like you could be on right now. And I don't say that for hyperbole. Like literally this is the window. The tech is just now finally good enough. It's not quite there, but you need to start now and you could disrupt all of these market places.
- Do you ever recognize stock image models on different websites? Yeah, there's this guy who's in the bachelor who's a stock image. And he's like in like a bunch of like funny, like whatever random like kids Halloween costumes. It's like, there's that guy. And then you see him begin on this like hot sauce commercial, like there's that guy. And he's just like this generic smiling black guy. And it's like they just reuse him everywhere. I saw like the lady that was on the Google Analytics page. It was two ladies and I saw one of them in public and I went up and got a picture with her. And like I saw her and I recognized her. And then there's this other lady that was on the Google Analytics page. She's it's like it's all it's like a lot of times the same person. It's like a racially ambiguous woman with like curly hair. It's like, you know, she could be Italian. She could be black. She could be Jewish. Why? Who knows? Like it just represents everyone. And I see this woman everywhere on all different websites. I used her a couple of times. I love this lady and I get sick of using the same pictures all the time. So for some of my projects, I've been using if you you can use Dolly and you can use a couple of other services and they'll give you fake people. So I have a couple of websites that have like testimonials and they're real testimonials, but I don't want to use the people's face because I didn't exactly ask them for it was like a email that they like wrote me. You know what I mean? I didn't want to use like their face because they didn't give me permission, but like it's who cares. Just a sentence. I can use that and I'll use I Google AI sample faces and you can get all types of faces and you can say like make this person this race, make. This person happy, make them serious. You can change it and you can make them all types of stuff. And I've been using that for sample images because when we were running the hustle, everyone's around, we would like do it the right way where we would like use an image that was for commercial use. But sometimes it would get categorized wrong and we would get like a what do they call it? Like a I forget what it was. I noticed. Yeah, that's right. And they say like, you know, you have to in multiple times, we've had to pay five grand. You know, you just like, oh, fuck these guys like they're going to cause a issue. We just got paying $5,000 and they're going to go away. But this is we just we're going to get, you know, we're getting screwed here, but whatever we got to do it. So I've been using them for stock images. So I don't have to worry about getting sued or get one of these cease and desist letters.
- Totally. It's going to be the case with stock images. You know, designers always use these libraries of icons and illustrations and there's websites like the Noun Project and other things like that. So what Dolly did was basically they just read all of the text on the internet. And then they used it to create new stuff. And some people are like, dude, that's messed up. Like GitHub is doing this too. GitHub basically read all of the code that was on GitHub. They had a crawler basically index all of that. They fed all of that user data and they fed it into machine learning. And now they have this thing called GitHub co-pilot, which is I think like...
- I don't know how much it is, like $100 a month or something like that. But it basically is like, if you're a programmer, we will, this GitHub co-pilot can basically help you write your code. You're like typing your code and it'll just auto-fill, like auto-complete the line of code. That's what it is. So it's like, oh dude, that makes this $250,000 a year software developer more efficient and more effective and less bugs and less mistakes and less thinking. It lets a less talented person sort of create these functions and write code. And it's like a no-brainer. Like GitHub co-pilot is gonna generate like hundreds of millions of dollars for GitHub. That's crazy. Create this product flip to switch. It's gonna be a multi-billion dollar product line just because it's generating so much revenue. And some people are mad about it because they're like, dude.
- You read my code, you use my code as the training data and I get nothing from this, like that's crazy. You're gonna basically put me out of a job by using my own data as the training data for this. And that's the same thing that's gonna happen with these like these websites. By the way, Ben found Spoonflower, what's the name of the pattern? Spoonflower. So all you have to do if you're doing this is like, you're gonna go and you're gonna scrape and crawl Spoonflower, you're gonna ingest all of the patterns with all of the tags and then you're gonna basically train a dataset so that it says, okay cool. This is what a pattern with X, Y, and Z keyword looks like. Great, now you give me that keyword again, I can generate 500 new patterns from scratch.
- And Spoonflower is basically going to create its destroyer in that sense. Like it is gonna, the data from these, from stuff that's already on the internet is what's gonna destroy those services. And I say it kind of like, you know, in a violent way, like destroy and all that stuff. But it is true. Like these are gonna be very competitive very quickly. And it's gonna be like the same way that the chess programs like got really good, really fast. And all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, the human cannot beat it or chess. Or the gang is kind of graphic design. Exactly. Like do you go into like enslave and pillage? You know, it's gonna go to your village. It's gonna kill the men. It's gonna marry all the women and it's gonna put the children to work. Like that's what's gonna happen with these AI marketplaces. That's my prediction. So Ben, go to this website. I sent you the chat. Can you share this? Sam, I think you've used this before too, but it's a cool one for people who don't know. It's this person does not exist. Yes, that's what I used.
- And so like look at this. That looks like you bed cut up. It just looks like a basic white dude. This guy has a much shot on day line. It takes a quick picture of you from your webcam and it just makes someone like you. This is a dude that this person does not exist. That's an AI composite of a face. So you can use this face anywhere on your website, copyright free because nobody's going to be like, hey dude, that's me. This is like such a useful, funny website. And it shows you in the bottom right, it'll tell you exactly how the image was created. It was imagined by a GAN, which is a type of machine learning thing or whatever. Here's how it works. You can use it yourself, blah, blah, blah, and watch this. You can use it for cats and horses and chemicals. It's like this cat does not exist. And you can click a cat and it'll like AI generate a cat. Yeah, this is amazing. I usually just take screenshots of those and I use those on like different websites.
- And so, yeah, those are three ideas, I think I said. Student essay generation, unreal voices for voiceovers and never, you know, never having to, basically turning your voice into a programmable asset and then patterns and prints. And that's just like, that's not even saying some of the obvious ones that I met, the other ones I mentioned, like stock. This is great. Million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? A billion dollars.
- All right, I have something for you. Have you heard of John Steinberg? Is he the guy who did cheddar? Yeah, so listen to this story. And there's a reason why I'm telling you, but let me tell you the story. So basically, John Steinberg was the COO of Buzzfeed for a long time. I think when he joined Buzzfeed, it was like 20 people. So he wasn't quite the co-founder, but he worked his way up to be COO. And he was like the ad sales guy, he became COO. And he kind of was pushing it hard. And it was almost like a co-founder of Buzzfeed.
- And he's incredibly aggressive, very aggressive. And he started this thing years ago, like eight years ago, or maybe six years ago, called Cheddar. And the whole shtick was that it was gonna be a live TV station for Facebook Live. And when he launched it, we were just getting started and he like messaged me and he goes, have we met yet? Which is just an alpha, like, there's such an alpha way to like. Hey, I forgot your name. It's like, please, please, please. You just messaged me. Yeah, he was like, hey, Dave, I was like, dude, it says, Sam, we're on Facebook. I know he's nevermind. And he's sorry, really bad with names and faces. Yeah. What? He goes, have we met yet? We should meet. That's what he said. And they go, okay, cool. He goes, I'm in San Francisco. What's your office? I'll come tomorrow. That's what he said. And I was like, all right, cool. Clear calendar. Yeah, so I hang out with him. Nice, nice guy, incredibly aggressive. Basically told me that like Buzzfeed was great, but he wanted to sell or something. Or I don't know if he said this, or I read about it, but like he wanted an exit and it didn't happen. So like he was like, I'm just going to build this thing and I'm going to have an exit. And he's told me he goes, what's going to happen is I'm going to raise a little bit of money, like $30 million. It's going to do pretty good. And then a big cable company is going to buy us because it's just going to be cheaper for them to buy us and to go make one of these cable, like a 24 hour news network on their own. And there's going to buy us for like $200 or $300 million. And at the time, and even at the time they got bought, no one watched this thing. You'd go into the Facebook Live and like there'd be like 20 people watching it and give them point. It was all on Facebook and like no one watched it.
- And I remember thinking like this guy's crazy. This is not going to work. No one want this is this is nonsense This is a bad business is a bad company and two years in he told me he goes in year two or three We're gonna get acquired for a couple hundred million bucks in year three I think he sold the business for two hundred fifty million dollars 100% Called his shot if you Google cheddar a company also to a cable company to like an Australian cable company that I never heard of I think they're popular in New York I think they have like a thing in New York too, and he sold it and he totally pulled it off and he completely disappeared He fell off the map before he was like speaking at all these conferences But he called his shot and he nailed it and I remember talking to other guys who worked in the media industry and they're like Yeah, he told me the exact same thing and he absolutely called this shot and this guy is so aggressive man He's a shark not in a bad way, but like he just bulldozed through this It just put so much intensity and energy and he pulled it off But the reason I'm bringing this up
- He did it and another woman who were friends with Rebecca did I asked her how she got popular on YouTube? She's like well I just quit my job and I like worked 50 hours a week and I had like I got up at nine and I like worked till seven and Like I studied the data and I just treated it like a business and it like became popular now I make you know Seven or eight figures whatever she makes a year and I'm rich and famous and whatever it worked because I was talented And I worked hard and I treated like a job what I think is gonna happen and And we this is a little circle jerky because both you and I like Twitter I think that very few people take Twitter seriously enough to do that you know like five or eight years ago We'd be like mr. B's you're gonna like dedicate your life to YouTube. That's the stupidest thing ever that won't work Like what are you doing? This is just a hobby. This is a joke now. It's not it's not funny Like we all know that like that's real you can become a youtuber and you know You can be like mr. B's and make hundreds of millions of dollars a year You become a tiktokker and become like some of these other famous people and do all this crazy stuff No one takes that seriously about Twitter where they think like well You know if you just like quit and like take this seriously and like build a following and like write interesting stuff And I think in the next two or three years We might see like a few empires be built on top of Twitter And it sounds kind of silly now because like oh it's just these like stupid like you know Twitter threads of guys talking about x y and z and summarizing Wikipedia and they're kind of right But I think that there's gonna be someone on Twitter that treats it kind of like cheddar did It's kind of like mr. B's and they take it really seriously And I think there's actually a huge opening and a huge gap in the market right now We're very few people are taking it seriously and it's incredibly easy to capitalize on this second right now
- This is one of the more interesting things I feel like you said. This is, I actually, I don't even think you normally think like this. I feel like this is like a, this is not your, you say a lot of interesting stuff, but it's, you're, you usually fall into, I found this really interesting diamond in the rough. You're amazing at that. Another is, I see what these people are doing and let me break it down in simple terms like all they're doing is X. And sometimes you're like, you know, this is a trend or an industry I see.
- This is different. This is like this is something something different. I like that you're bringing this up Let's break this down. So every with me at First when you I think you tweeted this out and I was like, I don't really understand what he's taught I didn't really understand it Then you just explained it and it's I'm starting to come around on it. I'm like wait He's kind of right every big social media platform has like native stars. So yes, if you're You know, whatever you're
- The president and you go on Twitter, you're going to get a bunch of followers. That's one thing But basically if you take every medium so podcasting you have Joe Rogan You have like then the people like Joe Rogan You have the color daddies and you have like other tip fairish you have other people who like they become stars on that platform And they use that to build a Pretty big empire, you know tens of millions if not hundreds of millions that they can make off it YouTube obviously there's youtubers TikTok has TikTok stars people who were not famous on YouTube But got famous on TikTok
- Instagram also, right? There's Instagram models and Instagram influencers that they were nobody and they became big on Instagram. Multi-billion dollar companies. We're talking, you know, Kardashians, Rihanna, like these like huge things. Well, I think they were Rihanna, Kardashians, they were big off of Instagram. They were big without it. Like Instagram also and Instagram had turbocharged to them. But like there are other people that are, you know, just Instagram, like Instagram made them famous. Like Dan Bilzerian is a good example. Like he's not famous without Instagram then with Instagram, he becomes famous and then now he does multiple platforms, right? By the end, everybody does multiple platforms, but you're really good at the medium. So like for example, Dan Bilzerian takes photos of himself blowing up cars with hot girls, like in bikinis. Guess what? Instagram is a visual, like, you know, put one killer image on there and they're amazing at it. And so that worked really well there.
- You're kind of right. Who is that on Twitter? Who is who is a Twitter native? Star I don't even know what that would be like is there so There's a few like I would say like and I'm on Twitter ten times a day like how do I not know this like you and I are like very Miniature versions, but we haven't really like I'm taught in like saw Hills a bigger version So our friend saw Hill bloom Trung who used to work for me He is kind of like that, but you know, we're still talking like 500,000 followers No one has really pushed it towards like how do I get 10 or 20 million? You know, how do I become like how do I build a proper empire as opposed to a niche now the differences? Basically between everything you mentioned and Twitter is Twitter is copy base text base whereas the other ones are visual base So I think there's one of two routes that's gonna happen you figure out how to add visuals to your thing and
- videos don't usually do that while on Twitter, but pictures do. Or you just get really good at writing. And I was like, well, writing's not that important. But I'm like, wait, no, I'm an idiot. Like, you know who Danielle Steele or James Patterson is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course not. These people have sold literally, like I believe Danielle Steele has sold like a hundred million plus books. I don't know if you know this, but in San Francisco, she's got like the biggest mansion in San Francisco. The big billionaire's row, her house is like the big fortress. Yeah. And then you got James Patterson. I bet you he's a billionaire too. James Patterson basically writes like 50 bucks a year. I don't even know if he writes a lot of them if he just maxes logo on it. But like, you know, I was thinking it was like, well, I'm here, that sounds.
- outrageous, but okay. I forget, but it's maybe one a month. It'll say like, what he does is like, it'll be like written by James Patterson and Bill Clinton. And then it says like, and also this other name. And it's like a duo about them. It's like a story written about like the White House or something like that. And he like partners. It's like this weird thing that he does. He writes a ton. He's prolific and a lot of like, like real quote authors, like these like artists folks are like, oh, that's just garbage. But he's like, dude, I don't care. I'm pumping the shit out. Anyway.
- Authors definitely crush it still, and the power of the written word is powerful enough to get these people to buy all these books, and I still think that's possible. But I do think that we're going to see an empire built on top of Twitter. Arguably, you and I have easily created seven figures of personal income through Twitter. Maybe you could say even, I would have to add it up, maybe eight figures, but a lot. I think though that there's going to be literally billionaires created on Twitter.
- And it hasn't happened yet though. Wow. Yeah, we can't call our empires. Like what's a very, very small, like a Lego- Like a convenience store. Yeah, like we play like a quickie mark. Yeah, we own like four Burger Kings. You know what I mean? And you're right, that's Sahil and Trung are good examples of like, they actually try. So like they like religiously write content, they schedule it, they research it, they like publish, they like try to amplify it, they have calls to action at the bottom. And it works. And I've seen them crawl from zero to Sahil's at like half a million, maybe more, I don't know. Dude, a lot of people don't even know that Trung, so Trung worked at the hustle. He wrote the daily email. We found him when he was working at like a, as a financial analyst, not like it was all internal reports. We like, he signed up for Twitter while he worked at my company. And we all like shared each other in this like silly circle jerk circle. And now he's got 600,000 followers and he's like a personality. And like people know him. Like they talk about him and how he's funny and all this stuff. And I think it's going to happen. And like when I tweeted out that event thing, a thousand people signed up and I'm like,
- Oh my god like why aren't you actually see Instagram like you'll see like the Logan the Jake Paul's and the Logan Paul They'll like say like I'm gonna be when they're starting on YouTube They're like we're gonna be at this location come and they film all these crazy videos of all these people around us No one's doing that shit for Twitter And I think that someone needs to just take the youtuber playbook and just deploy it here and take it full-time And seriously and they could create tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth And so what would you do because like I think well the guys we talked about they you know Sahil basically does like kind of like mental model intellectual like stuff or it's like oh, you know either like kind of What I'll call like the generic life advice generic business advice or like You know, hey, let me tell you about this phenomenon in psychology about cognitive biases And here's 30 cognitive biases you want to be aware of and like I don't know why these do so well They do incredibly well. That's not my cup of tea, but it's definitely other people's cup of tea
- for that kind of thing. Here's what they need to do. Here's how you cross the chasm. Here's how you cross this threshold. So basically these guys are popular on this Twitter medium and Twitter is a, it feels like a one to one a little bit or maybe like a one to 10. It's like me and my 10 friends consume this and we'll joke about it. But I'm not talking to a guy on the train or I'm not like telling a family member like, hey, you know, did you guys see X, Y, and Z? Like we're not talking about that. So what they need to do is two things. Number one, they need to meet up with like mainstream celebrity people or like mainstream people and take pictures with them and show it. And it's like, oh man, this guy's like bigger than just my little audience. Look at this, like these people like Arnold Schwarzenegger likes this person and took a photo with them. That's amazing. The second thing that they need to do is they need to get off a Twitter and into real life. So for example, in the early 2010s, when the castvers of the world were coming out,
- Subways in Manhattan were underpriced for the billboards. And a couple of these companies like Subway, Oscar, they go, let's advertise on these billboards down in the subway, and then we'll actually buy real billboards, and people are like, why would you do that? We could track all this on the internet. And they're like, well, because if we get it off of the internet, it's gonna see more than just an online thing, and it's gonna feel more like a real tangible thing. You're gonna see this ad next to a Ford ad, and next to this thing, it's gonna feel like this is actually a little bit more legitimate. And so what they need to figure out is how to do that. So you do that by having real life events. You do that by getting a book that you publish. You get that by getting a cameo on a TV show, and you get everyone in on the joke, it's like, hey, everyone, check this out. They asked me to be a background on friends. You could see my head in that hilarious. You do these things like that where it's real life and bigger than just this one to 10 thing, and then people start taking you seriously and realize that it creates FOMO, and it creates social proof, and you start becoming actually culturally relevant. You know what I mean? And that's how you should do it. So you just take pictures with you in celebrities, and then try to get in more in-person stuff, so you're off of the internet. And I think that would work.
- Yeah, I think that's good advice. Like people will believe about you, what you believe about yourself. And also people will believe about you, what they think others believe about you. So if I see you hanging out, if I see this why YouTube works, right? Like people on YouTube will have like, you know, or Instagram, they'll have like, they're taking a picture, but it's actually the background, that's the picture. It's like, I'm just trying to show you that I'm sitting in this car or at this place or with these people. And there's like...
- Everything that's said is actually in the background. The foreground is just kind of like you're just used to say it. Or when Casey Neistat's like walking through New York and he has kids coming up to him and goes, hey, what's up, kid? Say hi to the, you're on the vlog. Like, you know what I mean? It's like, oh, wow, like in New York, Casey gets recognized everywhere. He's more than just what I see on my screen. And like celebrities do this. They like, when they like tip off, you know, the paparazzi to come like, take pictures of them. And they like, for a time like they're trying to not be seen but then like, they actually, it's like a deal. Like, hey, dude, I'm gonna be here. Come up, come show up and take my photo. And then we're gonna use that photo for this. Or they'll like, you know, do stuff like that. So I think that's a thing. Like I had a buddy who created a, he's got like an online e-commerce brand. They opened up their first store. The store's not gonna do that many sales, but just showing that, hey, we opened our first store in New York. It's like kind of like, you know, wherever in New York, some like small place. And it's like, just that makes it feel like this brand is more trustworthy, it's more established, it's more legit. And then they had a bunch of friends, like 15 friends show up and they were like doing a ribbon cutting ceremony and the friends are all like, hey, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, question for you, like, you know, like trying to pretend like they're the media and...
- And like if you zoomed out, it's like 10 people standing in a small cluster. But like from the right angle, it looked like a mob was at the store. And again, it's like this perception creates some version of reality. So I definitely think that helps. I don't think that's enough to build the empire. I think you got to do two things. One, being it for like the next seven years. Like Mr. Beast and all these guys, they didn't start with like, you know, as big as they are. It takes like five to seven years to build something like really truly massive. The second is I would stop trying to jump off Twitter and go to other places and be like, this is where the good shit is. I'm going to master this medium and this meat. Totally. I'm going to make it work here.
- The third is I would do some of the stuff that just helps build fame in the first place. So I Think having your lane or your niche helps because it will attract people who are interested in that second Controversy or collabing with others. I think it's gonna work You know and people don't do controversial stuff really on Twitter right now But it should be like oh my god I called in to like this show and I got you know how people used to call into Howard Stern and like get him to like say this crazy Like check this out. Got him. You know what I mean? Well, some people do it that And it works like there's a guy who's doing this with Zach Weinberg or something like that Yeah, I love that guy built and sold like I don't know a two billion dollar company in like the biotech space or some shit like that
- But why does everybody know him because he's the guy who just will consistently shit on crypto He just is challenging people to fight about crypto and he's trying to debate them in public and embarrass them That is his whole stick and he's getting so much fame for dunking on people in crypto and Because there's a set of audience that likes to a watch a fight and be that likes to that is anti-crypto Has some anti-crypto feelings and they're like he is their champion you go debate people because I don't know if I would be able to and so That's a pretty fun thing like Shapiro got famous too by the way
- And on top of that, then you have like Keith's, or boy, or whatever, people who are just like a dick to other people, like he'll just like respond to somebody be like wrong. And they're like, well explain, like, you know, I'd love to hear your perspective. And he's like, I don't share my perspective with fucking losers. I know what I'm like. He's like, he'll like, he'll sit on you once. And then even if you try in good faith to come back, he'll be like, the data is out there. Go read a book. And like, the best thing goes, I've forgotten more about startups than you'll ever even know. Yeah, exactly. Or he'll be like, call me after your sixth unicorn because that's what I am. Or whatever, you know, like he's like, you know, obnoxiously just like sitting on people. And it's hilarious. And because of that, like the controversy spread. Some people hate him, some people love him. And he kind of uses that to grow. So anyways, I think controversy is also another underrated thing. There's a bunch of things that people need to do, but I would say the main one is like, find your angle, your hook, your niche. Like for case, nice that it's the daily vlog. For other people, it's the explainer videos. It's like whatever. You gotta find that for you on Twitter. And then like do it for five to seven years. And have faith that like, just like it wasn't obvious that being a YouTuber was just such a big deal back then, I think it's not that obvious.
- To your point that you can do this on Twitter too. Yeah, so that's my pitch. I think it could be cool. All right, can I tell you about something that I kind of knew about but has recently blown my mind? It's the Teal Fellowship. So you know- Yeah, it's amazing. What the Teal Fellowship is. Ben, I'm curious, do you know what the Teal Fellowship has come up for me for a bit? Because I think Sam already knows, I want to talk to somebody who's maybe more worthy audiences which may, you know, aware but not familiar.
- Yeah, so I know the field fellowship is I'll tell you just my impression of someone who doesn't know a ton about it is just that it's for such high schoolers who are super geniuses and Peter Thiel is going to give you a bunch of money in order to not go to college and do something cool instead. Kind of your in it's actually I think it's actually four people in college to leave college for a year. So 100k to basically leave college for a year and work on something interesting. And Ben if I asked you like hey is it like successful or successful do you have any idea?
- No, except for that I know what's his name did it. The guy who did Ethereum. Vitalik. Yeah, exactly. Vitalik. Yeah, yeah. So, which by the way, I still haven't told my Vitalik story on air, which is I was an Amsterdam, and I saw him, and I couldn't think what to say, and he's walking right past me, and I just turned and went, you're Vitalik. And he didn't, like, look or say anything. He just kept walking, but it was him. I really have security with him. No, he was walking all alone on the streets of Amsterdam at 8 a.m. in the morning.
- is just us. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most TRMs are a cobble together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new VRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot grow better. Yeah, we need to protect this man. He never has security with him. And he just like wanders around to random cafes and goes to events and stuff like this. So yeah, I really hope he's got such good security that you just can't see them. That's what I'll tell myself.
- So this teal fellowship thing is amazing. The teal fellowship was exactly what you said. Peter Teal comes out, Peter Teal is the kind of a original founder of PayPal. He was the first investor in Facebook, put 500K into Facebook early on, which became hundreds of millions of dollars, not billions of dollars. And also a prolific investor and a bunch of other things, including SpaceX and other businesses. So Peter Teal comes out and he basically says, college education is a bubble. He says college education is sort of a joke. He's like, you know, it hides under this banner, like it's teaching you something, like you're getting information, but really what you're getting is some version of like an insurance policy, like I got this degree, so I'm not gonna fall through the cracks of society. And you're getting like, you know, some status symbol, like I got this stamp on my thing. So it's like a luxury product, like wearing a nice bag. Your Harvard degree is like your Louis Vuitton bag. And so he talks about college and he's like, it's costs just keep going up and up and up, but the value and the salaries that you make don't go up. And so it's like overpriced bubble, just like the housing bubble. He says, and he says, I'm going to offer
- I'm going to offer something called the Teal Fellowship, which is $100,000. If you drop out of college and go work on something interesting and a bunch of people criticize them. They say, dude, how dare you? You're telling kids, like the normal phrases, kids stay in school. You're like, we get it. You're contrarian. You're saying kids don't stay in school and you're like trying to get people to drop out like what kind of like you're worse than a vape. And so, you know, people didn't like what he was doing. And other people were just like, oh, it's cool. But like, you know, who knows if this is going to work or not? Like, all right, you're going to pay this kid $100,000 to, you know, do a summer project. Great.
- This thing is amazing. It has produced some. Yeah, it worked out really well, didn't it? And nobody talks about it. So let me tell you some of the things that have come out of this. You have, like you said, Ethereum, which is like a $170 billion market cap thing that came from Vitalik. Probably like this generation's version of Facebook is like, you know, is Ethereum. So that comes out of this, where Vitalik does the TF fellowship and continues working on Ethereum during that time. And he launches. That's one super, super, super successful thing.
- Also Figma, which is like a, somewhere between five and $10 billion. It's a close to 10. A company that takes on Adobe in the design space. And Dylan, who is the founder of Figma, was in the Teal Fellowship. Another one, Oyo Rooms. So this is in India, it's like a, kind of like an Airbnb-ish sort of thing. It's like a hospitality website. Oyo Rooms, multi-billion dollar company. And it's a billion, I think. Luminar Technologies.
- Most people don't know this. It's a like Lidar company that basically the technology you need for self-driving cars. And this thing I think went public in a SPAC. This guy's like, I don't know, 21, 22 years old, 23 years old, something like that. And he's worth like a billion dollars. It's like one of the world's youngest billionaires, if not the youngest billionaire off of this thing. That is just alone is crazy. Also, Polkadot, another crypto protocol valued at, you know, seven billion dollars. Like I just told you basically 200 billion dollars worth of business value that has come from this program. And it's super small. But then there's way more. There's actually like dozens that are in like the hundred million dollar range. I invested in a company that recently raised another round. I think it was Owner.com, the guy Adam. He was a teal fellow and I believe, I mean that potentially could be a unicorn, but it's hundreds of millions for sure. And there's like dozens more like that. The reason I got reminded of this was because I invested in italic. And Jeremy Kai is the founder of italic. And he was like, oh yeah, I was a teal fellow. That's how I was like, how do we meet eventually? He's like, oh yeah, I was a teal fellow. We came to your office and you gave a talk. And I thought it was awesome. And so that's why we kept in touch. And I was like, dude, was a Vitalik in the room? He's like, I don't think he's like, I don't think he was at that event. But he's like, dude, he used to like crash on our couch. Like, you know, he was part of the program and.
- He's like he's I was like, what was he like? He's like he's genuinely the weirdest person ever like the weirdest person I've ever met and like he's like Yeah in a good way in a bad way nothing like he's just nothing like nothing like I've ever seen just different different sort of cat and Like this is this is too good. I think I think you should keep you the word cat by the way You like how I did that? I have been yeah, I'm a work shopping right now. Yeah, it looks good on you Yeah, I take it out first and I take it out of the garage You know, you know twice a week and I just see do people kind of like flinch when I say that you know It was a bit of flinch Try it with lit and that was I had to put that one back in storage now you're coming back out I put that one on eBay actually got rid of it
- Yeah, no, you're you're you're you're too much of a grey bush for that one, but cat yeah, the cat was cool I would stick with cat, but it is crazy man. This the Peter Taylor I thought at first it was real it was kind of stupid. I'm like dude. This is weird Like what are these like little 18 year old nerds like they're not gonna do anything interesting obviously I was wrong I like I it when I when I was like rethinking my opinion. I was like wow. I guess just like High IQ matters like it these guys they're just they have more power than I do I always say they're just they're higher you're higher functioning than me You know that's just the only way I can describe it. You have more horsepower your oven burns hotter and it actually It truly matters and it makes a difference
- You're oven burns on it. It's okay. I Love that. I mean they just got that they got that that heater furnace that's how I felt When I was at twitch I was like I was like okay Let's see what are the like you know I had kind of had opinions from the outside like okay at these big tech companies What are the people like what are the exacts like what are the average people like you know? How hard do they work how smart are they like you know? You know do they have like all these processes that are way better than the messy stuff? I was doing at my startup
- And like, you know, for the most part, I would say it's kind of like, you know, I walked out a little cockier than I came in and I came in pretty cocky. And that's what I was, you know, just sort of like, oh, okay, like, you know, they don't have some magic, you know, processes or the people aren't that much better. Except like two or three people at the company, one of which was the founder. You know, we would sit down and there would be like, you know, data science will be presenting some report on like, you know, some trends and I'm just sitting there trying to like, it's a six page memo. I'm trying to like stop yawning because it's like, I'm just like, why do I keep yawning? I'm having this like, you know, reflex. And I'm reading this thing. I'm just trying to understand these charts. And like, you just hear this little click and it's like someone's pen is down.
- And it's like, you know, if you're taking a mat that's like, who's done with the test already? And it would be, he'd be like, pens down, he'd be playing Hearthstone on his phone. And you're like, no, he like, he must have already read this or like, he must have skimmed. And then they're like, all right. Yeah, we're ready to start the discussion. And he would be like, so on page three, you know, this chart, actually I noticed that the axes a little wrong because, you know, if this was true, then this other chart on page seven would show this. I'm like, what the, you know, what is happening? How is your brain processing this most information this quickly and somehow always getting to like,
- Like the heart of the issue. It's like we all spent our time and energy like trying to parse out what's important Like he immediately got to what was important and had the conclusion and had like the follow-up question and also identified Why this paper wasn't very good in the first place and once I saw the brain doing that I was like, okay There's just some cars You know have more horsepower like or as you said the oven burns a little hotter and like His oven burns way hotter than mine and I was like, oh, that's good to know like because I have this thing I always say I like to see what level 12 looks like like What is oh that speaker system is a little too loud for me
- But like I want to know what volume on 12 even is I want to feel you know my own chest leader like vibrating with the bass And it's like okay. I don't want to be somebody who never sees it. I want to see it What was he like in like real life like outside of work because have you ever seen some of these people interact in like normal? Like life like they like I told you about one friend that's like Intense and he literally only owns a T two T shirts one pair of underwear one pair of socks and his laptop That's like the only thing he owns these worth hundreds of millions of dollars And then like I know a bunch of these guys that are like this and like for hobbies They're just all in and like so if they're into like You know like fucking their body or something They've got like every gadget you could ever imagine and they're they could tell you all about it and or if they're into dieting They've got like they're paying like my friend Jack. He's in a supplement. See and he's got literally $30,000 worth of supplements in a closet and they'd be like what's this do? What's this do? And he just like tests everything What was he like in like like was he like if he's in the cars could he like tell you every single thing about like a Porsche And what year it was from and why it was special
- Yeah, yes, but before I tell you about him, I just read this thing that was like about Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google, and it's like, oh, what is Sergei, like, you know, because he's in the news because of his wife and Elon, all that stuff. And some people are like, what is Sergei doing nowadays? Because he's not, I don't think he's at Google anymore. And it said over the last year or two, he's become very into personal fitness. In fact, he has been trying to master several Olympic sports. I was like, what? Dude, I don't know, man. I looked at this guy. He went like what Olympics for it, pig pong. I don't know. Like sea shooting. Yeah. Curling. Yeah. The other one is that he's currently writing a physics textbook. And I'll say,
- I was like, of course he's writing a physics textbook. Like, come on. That's more like, yeah. So anyways, yeah, these guys are wired like that where like when they go in, they go in like very deep. And honestly, I don't know him super well because I interacted with him mostly at work. And anytime it was outside of work, it was really cool, but it was like, you know, limited. It wasn't like I hung out with him like a hundred times. It would maybe be more like five times, you know, something like that over the couple of years that I was there. What I would say is like a couple of little things that stood out. One.
- He's like us. He's an idea machine. In fact, I need to get him on the podcast because you've been saying that for three years now I know I know and when I was there I didn't ask him cuz I was like, you know already, you know me doing this podcast is not Yeah, you're like you want to bail at noon and go and record It's not everyone's favorite thing I do you know But but I think now I could do it But he would like he told me this idea. He's like I tell you about his gym idea No, he's like he's like Jim's he's like Jim's need to be made like video games if I was gonna leave twitch I might start this a gym that's structured like a video game So he's like this is how it works you show up and you're like at the beginning character of a game Like you show up and we give you kind of like your basic uniform And we have a little little wrist strap that like tracks your level of like fitness and intensity as you work out And you let basically level up and so like every time you come to the gym You're earning points and like as you earn points like we give you like better gear Like we'll give you the like the the more fitted You know clothes that look cooler and so you can like visibly see people's different levels as they go to the gym You would be able to like go into certain sections of the gym that were previously locked to you You would be able to get like protein shakes and stuff for free He's like I think if you gamified a gym people would come more and like actually this is kind of played out with Peloton Peloton is very much organized like this with leaderboards and stuff like that gamification But I was like this is a crazy idea It'd be like the world of Warcraft of gyms like people would grind Like years of their life to level up their character to 60 and they would like work to do it He's like I think you could do that with with a gym I was like wow yeah, I mean people do that with like karate and and jiu-jitsu You know black belt brown belt blue belt exactly and they stick with it and they keep showing up because I'm 10 plus years And he's like but you know You don't want the increments to be like a year before you see some progress like every time you come you need to be earning a little bit more And getting a little bit more unlocked, you know and see that the next milestone is just within reach So I thought that was interesting the second one he was like
- He was like trying to plug in the computer to like screen share one time with me. Like normally these meetings are like set up by somebody else, but like if it's just you to like, you got to do it, plug it in. And he's like, he's fucking cables. He's like, you know, honestly, I think I could create like the Apple for like accessories for computer accessories. He's like just like the best connecting cables, the best cable management, the best plugs. He's like, he's like, nobody's like, look at this. It's like every office in the world has these. And look at how bad they look, how ugly they are, how poorly they function, how confusing they are. He's like, I think you could just build like a really nicely designed cables and connectors and accessories company for every office in the country. And like, you know, people would people would pay for it.
- And I was like, huh, like, why do you think of these things? This is weird. And so people say about you, he had a dozen ideas that were like this when I was there. All right, that's one thing that I noticed. We'll wrap this up real quick, but I, there's this famous story. So this guy named Chris Saka was a popular investor and invested in Instagram and a bunch of other stuff in Uber. And he's supposed to be one of the best angel investors of all time. He told this story somewhere where he is in Tahoe or Truckee where he has a home and he's with his dad in Travis Kalanick, right? When he was about to start Uber, came over to just spend the weekend, you know, family vacation. And Travis and Chris Saka's dad, Mr. Saka, they start playing Wii Tennis. And Travis is playing and the dad's playing. And they just like are being casual. And Travis was like, all right, you want to step it up? So he steps it up and he just crushes them. And he just beats this guy like so bad. And Mr. Saka was like, what the hell, man? And Travis goes, I've got a surprise to show you. And he puts the Wii from his left hand into his right hand. He goes, I was playing left hand at the whole time. I'm actually right handed. Let's really play. And he goes, Travis goes, all right, but I do have to tell you something. And they go to the ratings board. And he's number two in the whole world at Wii Tennis. And Chris Saka was like, right then and there, I realized I never want to compete against this guy because his drive and his hobby is winning. And he just proved that like in his free time of starting this company, he's just going to be number one in the world at Wii Tennis just because he has to. And he just hustled my dad thinking that he was left handed and it worked perfectly. This guy is a winner. And that's why Chris Saka said he invested in. It was like, I just see his intensity and just walking around.
- Dude, 100% agree. Peter Thiel is the same way he's like a master or grandmaster at chess. And like in the PayPal mafia, which is now like the most successful entrepreneur group ever, I think several of them were like very, very high level chess players that have gone through that, you know, that like we're in that thing. There's like something to the oven burns hotter. That's like true for some of these people. It's a combination of intensity and capability. That is definitely true. Another kind of like emmett observation that I was like, huh, that's weird. That doesn't seem.
- normal. So I guess two little ones. One was, I was like, what do you do for fun? Like, what do you, when you hang out? Like, what are you doing? He's like, Oh, like, I love board games. He's like, you should come over for like a board game night. And I was like, okay, like, what, like, what are we playing? Like, you know, monopoly, like twister, what do we got going here? And he's like, this is like, I'd be like, we only pay like deep strategy games. And it was like, we only like cotan on like hard mode or like even cotan is like the beginner one, like name to other games I don't even know about that. Like, you know, are like this, they're like the board games that are like actually, you know, like multi level, multi hour strategy games. And basically it was him and the brothers from Stripe and like the founder of Reddit, and they would just get together and play these games on the weekend. That's what they did. That's exactly how I want them to spend their time. Exactly. So I thought that was kind of funny. And then the other one was like, we were in a meeting and we were talking about like, I don't know, like some policy like, Oh, these, you know, whatever.
- Yes, some girls streaming on Twitch and like our nipples showing like is that okay? But it's like, you know, she lives in Denmark. You know, what? what are the rules around this should we ban her or like what and And so there was always these policy questions coming up over and over again And it felt like you can't win because whatever twitch did it was like oh dude They're trying to control us censor us like they're inconsistent They should have also changed it over here like it was a no win policy and then you know like he would he would have these like He would have these hobbies which is like reading like old books that nobody would read like no normal person's reading these books And then he'd be able to connect the dots on to like completely unrelated things It's sort of like Ben's podcast stuff where it's like oh actually like you know the Rothschilds Similarly set this up in a you know set up their will in a weird way because of this maybe you should do this like dude How do you know all this like really specific stuff from history? He would be like?
- Do you know how the potato farmers governed their farms in the Netherlands during the potato drought? And then like the head of policy at which is like, no, just tell me what he's like, actually they created this governing council That was blah blah blah and like the cool thing about this rule of law was blah blah Maybe we should you know, you should read that like tell me what you think about it And they're like all right like where do I find this like out of print book that you read like randomly and you remember What the potato farmers did and so he would always bring these like really? unrelated examples in
- That was one thing and the other one was, he would debate you over semantics, like to death. So you would be like, you know, like it'd be like an exec offsite. He'd be like, you know, I just feel like we don't have enough like trust on the team and everyone's like nodding like, yeah, you know, like, you know, he's a collaboration is a problem, whatever, and he'd be like, well, is it trust or collaboration? Cause trust means this and collaboration means this. Like, well, you know, just like the general, like trust, collaboration, just like working together better. He's like, but again, define for me what you mean when you say trust. I just want to make sure I have it right. And he's not trying to like, it's not a gotcha. He wants, he's like a hyper literal person. So he's like, when you say,
- It's failing. I take that to mean it's failing. Is it failing or is it this other thing and people are like just getting lost in the sauce of this like Semanticl debate But like he really wanted to be hyper literal about it And I've never seen anybody do this in it, you know There were upside that became a bad example here But like I think you understand the general premise which is that he really cared about words What they mean and why we're using them and if we're using them correctly to describe what's going on and And everybody else was kind of hand-wavy about stuff Especially like the higher you go up in an organization You sort of get paid for being sort of high-hand wavy like a politician and he was the opposite of that So these were some of the things I noticed that now when I invest in founders, I'm like
- I can best this guy who created something called Skio. He's like, yeah I'm this like I was like what'd you do before this? He's like oh it's a professional called duty player like before that I was you know I was like grinding in world of Warcraft like it was a waste of time but like yeah But you know top three in the world or whatever. It's like what oh you were like a top three star craft player Like you know in this on the on the east coast server like okay You're a winner and you're obsessive and you are like you find the rules of the game And then you like optimize to win it and sure enough now like with his thing He's this like a wrecking ball with like acquiring customers because he just fine This is the new game and he's like finding rules and he's like maximizing his edge and everything that he can do to the point Where he's kind of like a nut job dude, but like you know it works
- At the end of episodes like this, I'm exhausted. I feel like I just exerted so much energy both listening and Speaking do you have to take a nap at the end of this because you just spoke like with incredibly high energy for? We've done this for we're an hour and 17 minutes in do you get exhausted? I take naps after No, not at all. I I leave these on a high So do I but then I need to go to always You well yeah, you never have water. I usually drink three drinks while I'm doing these but like I'm exhausted I get exhausted just listening
- Well, that's probably my fault. So I'm sorry. I know. No, no, it's a good exhausted. I'm like, God, I just learned so much and I need to get so much better at this, this and this by hearing this story. And I was just so intensely listening and enthralled by this conversation that I need a nap. I've got to go lay down. That's how I feel. I got to go rest. Volo G went on Tim Ferriss' podcast and do like a three hour podcast and I listened to it last night. And like literally while it was happening, I could feel my brain fatiguing just trying to like digest what this man was saying. He's so, by the way, you also hear Tim Ferriss sound. I loved him first. Tim Ferriss sounds like an absolutely defeated man on these podcasts with Volo G because Volo G would be like, um, an archa, you know, on one hand, you have the woke capitalist on the other hand, you have the anarcho, uh, anarcho, anarcho capitalist. Do you know what I mean when I say that? And Tim was like,
- No, tell me and like that happens 40 times in the episode. He's like Are you familiar with the concept of the you know the Schr�dinger window it seems like No, but I assume you can tell me and he's like Dude what's up? He was like he was like he's like you know Bitcoin is kind of like battle the Bulge and you remember how the Germans were doing like dude I don't I needed an analogy for your analogy like you don't please don't reference battle of the bulge We tried to explain a complicated topic like right now I was like you know bitcoins kind of like like neuroscience like you know how like the chemicals of like this this and this interact this way Think about the big one is the amygdala of the crypto you can see the big one dude. I don't know
- Yeah, that's what that's what was happening. And I guess I did that to you in this case, but no, you're you're you're what you're way dumber. I can totally keep up with that. It just was a good story. You just talk more. No, I thought it was good. That was a compliment. I get exhausted because I'm like so into it. Like I like I love hearing these stories so much. We used to do these mastermind like dinners or hangouts where it'd be me, Sam and like three other guys and we'd meet up every two weeks or three weeks, something like that. And it would always be like, you know, each person gets 20 minutes and you'd sort of say, what's going on in your business, what's working and what you want help, what you want the other guys to like, you know, basically help you think through and then.
- And those things last basically, if you just do the math, it's like six people, 20 minutes each, but everybody runs 10 minutes over and like, you know, we start 10 minutes late. It's like, this thing is three hours long and we would always started afterwards. We'd started at like seven. It would finish at 10, 10, 30. We skipped dinner, nobody's like gone to the bathroom and basically there was two reactions. Some people were like fucking exhausted by the end of this and they're like, oh, this was great, but like, man, next time let's try to be a little shorter. And like, I get that logically. My reaction, and we used to do some of these at your office, I remember, at the hustles office.
- I don't know if you notice, I would leave your office at 10, 10, 30, and I would go straight to my office, and I would just work four or five straight hours, because I was- Dude, I can't do that. I was so inspired. I was like a combination of inspired by the, like, your guys' awesomeness, panicked that, like, oh my God, I have so much I need to do that I now realize, and like, oh, fuck, I need to do all of this, and I'm just going to try to do as much as I can tonight. And like, I was- is a combination of, like, enthusiasm and, like, feeling overwhelmed by, like, the amount of potential and ideas and, like, stuff I could be doing to make our stuff grow more- No, I gotta go, like-
- Drink Gatorade and take a power nap. Like, you know what I like to like. Yeah, you'll up. I'm gonna go eat a cliff bar. I get what's for now. I'm like, my blood sugar is low. I could feel it. I guess that's the episode right then.

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- Let's say everybody's selling banana. You can't say I'm a 5X better banana. Instead, you should come out and say, I'm an apple. And not everybody's gonna want your apple, but 100% of the people who prefer apples are gonna want what you have. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like a day's on. On a road, let's travel never looking back. All right. Yeah, Sean, I was playing this Palm Podcast. Pretty good.
- How do you feel? It was good. It was like we showed up no no context like what are we gonna talk about? Do I need to talk about Bitcoin? Do I need to have something smart to say about Bitcoin because I kind of just you know I believe I buy I hold right I'm like a monkey in this space I'm not like you know one of these experts, but um, but we talked about solo big a solo capitalist that solo pernour and Some of the different kind of like things around that so I thought I thought it was actually pretty good conversation Ben was there And he goes like I liked this one because I feel like everything you said in this was something new that I had never heard You say before he's like whereas, you know once you listen to somebody for like hundreds of hours
- You kind of hear the same, greatest hits over and over again. He's like, this felt like new stuff. Speaking of listening to us for hundreds of hours or listening to you at least, we had a good episode. We just interviewed this guy named Mike Maples. Mike was pretty cool. So Mike is a little under the radar, but he started this thing called Floodgate, which is a really big venture capital firm, but really fascinating guy. What all have they done? They've done Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, Cruz, Octa, which is like a.
- giant enterprise company that's public. So yeah, bunch of bunch of big winners that he was an investor in pretty early considered one of the best venture capital firms there is so real insightful guy. He kind of had a hint of biology a little bit. I mean, he was like real high IQ. I've been using the word high functioning. He's like a real high functioning high functioning Southerner. He had this disarming way of talking because he's got this, you know, kind of like, it was a southern or Midwestern accent. Yeah. And, you know, very, very relatable, likable guy. But then the things he was saying
- each one was like a sort of a bullet into an idea of an insight. And he definitely had a few refined ideas of where he thinks the puck is going. And I appreciate that. I like that. He gave us basically these four waves. He's like, I believe these four inflections are happening right now, and that's going to create a bunch of opportunity. And that's what I look for is like, how is the world changing? And then what's going to be new because of these inflection points? Yeah, I was taking notes. The four things are blockchain, cloud office, AmericanX, the cloud culture for consumers. So those are like the four things. And we went into like, we didn't actually go into each one entirely, but he talked a little bit about each one. And we dealt, we went deep into cloud office. And he talked about the
- the opportunities there. I thought it was great. What do you think? I loved it. I love the way he had some phrases for things. I thought at the beginning, he was like a little bit too intellectual for me. I was like, okay, wait, where do I go with this? But it was interesting, but I didn't know how to attach it to like a concrete idea. And then I thought about, you know, that was maybe the first 25%. And then the next 75%, I thought were fantastic where Yeah, came down to earth and also he has these. This is kind of amazing way of talking. I'm kind of jealous. Did you, you are like that.
- I know, but I, because I, because I try to be like that, when I see somebody who's really good at it, I'm like, oh shit, you're good at this thing. Most people don't even care about this thing. He had these little phrases coined terms for either himself or his fund or his philosophy or his mental models. And he'd be like, you know, startup is like a jazz band, not a marching band. And then he was explaining the analogy. And then he was like, he was like, I want people to choose, not compare, which is hard to understand, but once he explains it, then it's like, oh, that's actually a wonderful mental framework. It's like that Kanye song where it's like, what does it mean? It's like, I don't know what it means, but it sounds provocative. And that's how I felt with a lot of his things was like, I was like, immediately interested, I leaned in when he would say one of those phrases, even though my brain hadn't figured out exactly what it means yet. And then he would explain it. So anyways, I thought it was really good and super nice, dude.
- like, you know, it's so humble and very likable. So I don't know, great episode. I liked him a lot. I agree. And he offered to come back. I couldn't tell if like when guys are being nice, I'm like, well, if you have time, let's just keep going. But I could tell if he was being kind, we'll have to have him back on. He was awesome. Right. How did you feel about when you hit him up for some intros there? Was that smooth? I thought it was pretty smooth. Yeah, you gave him the opportunity to be a hero. And if not, it was totally OK. Yeah, I asked him. I'm going to start asking every guest that the question I'm going to start asking is.
- Who do you think would be an awesome guess like who would be good for those podcasts and then uh? What do you think's the best way to get in touch with them? Right and then they have that opportunity to be like yeah, just reach out. He's a nice guy or Yeah, let me just shoot a note right now. I'll tell them I'll intrigue you guys right? I thought that was a great angle I know I wanted to call it up because people listening they get this sort of behind the seeds of As I heard you say it I was like oh Smoothcase Sam We didn't get the kill on this time
- but I feel as though we've built enough rapport with him. I can email Mike and maybe he'll hook it up, but he did a good job. There we go. So Mike, do you, I was connected to you because my friend, my good friend Noah Kagan was like, you gotta holler at this guy. He's pretty interesting. And I had known about you as well because Tim Ferris lived near me and was a friend of mine. And he told me that he's like, there's like two people or three people who's advice I listened to when it comes to investing. One is Nval, the founder of Angelus.
- Two is Scott Belsky, who started The Hands and is now probably going to be the CEO of Adobe. And three was you. And I was like, that's kind of interesting. I have not really heard of Mike too much. You kind of keep a low profile. And I looked it up. So you started Floodgate, which eventually you guys have messaged in Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, all types of amazing stuff. So we have this podcast showing that it's pretty popular. Millions of people listen. And all we do is just brainstorm interesting ideas. And so we thought, we got to get you on to come and talk about some stuff. And so here we are. Let's give it a shot. Why not? Thanks for having me. And by the way, I've listened to your podcast.
- A bunch of times I remember the episode with Kevin Sistram from Instagram is one of my favorite ones. So, I forget what's the exact same starting greatness or staring greatness? Starting greatness, yeah. Starting greatness. It's kind of a labor of love. You know, some of the people that work at floodgate, occasionally we'd have some hallway conversation or in a meeting, they're like, dude, I wish we could have recorded that. Right. So in many ways, the guests not only help with the content, but we're trying to help some of the key ideas of starting greatness come alive through the voices of the guests.
- because I think there are some counterintuitive lessons of starting a right startup that are not obvious to people. Right, and you have a good voice and then B, your intros are great on the pod. You, it always has like, I don't know how much time you spend on that, but the intros are great. Compared to us, we put, we're sort of famous for we barely do an intro, like you'll be 10 minutes in and be like, who the hell is this guest? And then, you know, sometimes at the end, we do the sort of Irish goodbye where we're like, okay, that's it. We end it, we go about our day. And so people have like started making fun of us, making shirts about the Irish goodbye. Cause they're like, dude, I also hate saying goodbyes. It's,
- It's, you know, the hate, the unwind of a conversation. I like how you guys just leave. And so that's, that's kind of our thing. But what we want, I guess we want to start with, we could talk about kind of like all the great stuff you've invested in. But I guess I'm more curious about what's got you excited now. What spaces, what trends are you seeing where you're like, huh, I don't fully, I don't fully know what's there, but there's enough there for me to be interested. Yeah, and it might be kind of a good segue into how I think about what the next big thing will be. Because there's this, there's this thing that I say to founders, which is very, it's very counterintuitive. I say,
- If you want to start a great startup, don't try to think of a startup. And the reason for that is that great startup founders are like time travelers. And they get out of the present and they visualize different futures that are a breakthrough, that break free from the present. And when you try to think of a startup right now, you tend to orient yourself in the world of the present. And so you tend to come up with incremental conventional ideas rather than
- breakthrough ideas that sort of change the arc of the present to a different future. And so, and that gets to the areas that I'm interested in. So what I encourage founders to think about are what are the inflections? What are the waves of change? They're going to be so massive that it's going to allow an entrepreneur to change the subject about the future. Because on some level, these waves are the gathering power. It's like all the power of the ocean when you surf. You got to catch the right wave to have a chance to do great things.
- And it's these waves or these inflections. They allow the entrepreneur to wage asymmetric warfare on present. Only with big inflections does an entrepreneur go from being disadvantaged to incumbents to having a fundamental advantage, vis-a-vis incumbents. And so then in terms of the areas that I'm interested in, I tend to go with the inflections. And so one inflection I'm interested in obviously is the blockchains.
- with crypto, I think that if I was starting a startup today, that's probably where I would spend most of my time. Another area of interest for me is the transition from what I like to call office culture to cloud culture. And so in the past, the cloud was sort of more of a delivery mechanism and a business model for application software. But now what we see happening is that, the Microsoft Office literally,
- is a metaphor of the office and its files and memos and file drawers and that's what our desktop looks like but now people you know it's it's not the editor that matters as much anymore as the comment system and the versioning it's kind of more like github meets knowledge work and so you know when you when you have cloud culture rather than office culture you can take advantage of a lot of arbitrage time arbitrage talent arbitrage geography arbitrage you know that very tim veris you know we talked about him a little bit earlier
- And then the other thing that I'm interested in is what I loosely refer to as America next. And so on some level, I think that 2020 was the first real year of the 20th century or 21st century. And why is that? I think that there were a lot of issues that people were paying lip service to, a lot of stagnation that people were paying lip service to. And I think that 2020 helped people understand our military needs to be
- become more agile and more tech-forward, that are researching drugs and drug discovery, that our ability to get life-saving remedies to market faster, we need to take seriously. There's just China as a geopolitical challenger. As a result, I think that now people talk about Build Back Better, but I just believe fundamentally the United States, the Western world are going to decide they need to invest for real in tech-forward infrastructure.
- And then on the flip side of that, they're going to realize our infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber hackers and ransomware and things like that, whether it's organized by rogue gangs or nation states. So those are, I'd say those three areas plus also, I'd say cloud culture applied to consumer, which some call the metaverse. But those are the main things that I'm chasing right now. And obviously I have a lot of colleagues as well at floodgates. So we go after cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure and other things. But the areas that I describe are the ones that I'm.
- most actively going after. For that cloud office one, what products are you looking at that excite you? Yeah, so I'll kind of give you an example. So one company I'm involved with is called Almanac. And it allows teams of people to create documents. But like if you think about it, this has already happened in code and in design. So in code you had GitHub. And in the past, you just had code snippets that you shipped around and had some version control.
- but GitHub made code social and you could branch and fork and collaborate as a team at the center rather than as an afterthought. And then Figma did the same thing with design, right? So Figma, and so what we believe is that in a world where talent can live anywhere in the world, it's going to matter more that you write things down and get consensus. And part of how you get consensus is you have a paradigm that's not office centric in documentation, but it's cloud centric. And so, you know, why shouldn't you just like GitHub be able to
- branch and merge and fork documents and be able to within that one document know every version of that document that every ever existed and everybody's and you know if somebody forks it and uses it Let's say it's an employee handbook if somebody uses it for their next company Why not want to know that as well and so? But that's just one of many examples of where I believe that in the future you're gonna have all these different products that Pre-suppose that people will collaborate, you know, what else do I think will happen? I think people will say
- If it can go in the cloud it should if it can be a synchronous It should because if I put things in the cloud and make a a synchronous I can take advantage of all those different forms of arbitrage to run my company better Whereas if I'm a meeting centric culture I have to be in the room where it happened when a decision got made and I just think that that's an outmoded way of Thinking about things in today's world What so Sean and I are a similar or almost the same age we are the same age we Like when we started work, I mean
- We use Google Docs right away. But you're a little bit older than us. And that was a, you probably didn't, I mean, that was kind of interesting to you, right? When that first came around. So when you say like, what needs to be in the cloud, in my head, I'm like, wait, are you kidding me? Isn't everything already like that? What specific leader are you? For example, there's startups that are doing like virtual office. So they're like, great, everybody's remote. You have all these advantages of remote. What do you miss out on? You miss out on being able to socialize and get to know each other and build trust.
- outside of the water cooler. The conversations that used to happen in the break room. So there's crazy startups that are saying basically like online town and stuff like that that are like, here's a virtual office. You can literally walk around. You can bump into people. I don't know if any of these work, right? But they're like taking stabs at trying to move the like physical office into the cloud too, Sam. So it's not just docs are in the cloud, but hanging out is in the cloud, right? But we're going to be coworkers in the hallways in the cloud. Yeah, and the problem with most cloud offerings today is that they're basically rehosted office.
- culture. Right. So like Zoom, Zoom is a meeting, but it's a meeting online. It's not like it's a synchronous in any way. It's not, you're just rehosting the meeting rather than redefining how work happens. Now with Zoom, you can take advantage of geography arbitrage, I suppose. So that is a good thing, but you're not able to take advantage of time and talent arbitrage as easily. But like, like, what I, what I believe ends up happening at the limit is in office culture, everybody has a job description. And what I think in
- in cloud culture, people have already talked about this, but this idea of jobs to be done theory. And so, like, when you think about it, all of us don't just have one job. All of us do a whole bunch of jobs. Like if you take even a very simple example, let's say that I work at a flower shop. I might type things into the computer to manage customer records. I might take reservations and orders. I might, some parts of the day, arrange the flowers. Well, when you really think about it, the principle of comparative advantage would suggest...
- that any parts of that, any of those jobs to be done that could be done asynchronously or in the cloud, you should try to do that if you can. Because then you could take advantage of labor arbitrage, time arbitrage, and geography arbitrage. And then if I'm a great flower arranger, that's what I should be spending my time on is the thing that I'm really good at. And so what I think cloud culture lets people do at the limit is broadcast their comparative advantage to the world. And it was,
- get paid by the network for giving the network what it wants. So I think that the reason I call it cloud culture as well is who says everybody has to work at a company, right? Like people said that robots are gonna eat the jobs, but I think that's precisely the opposite of what's true. I think that software is gonna reduce the need for people to think they need to work at companies because it's gonna, all the things I would have had to possess to have a job, I'm not gonna need those things anymore by working at a company.
- I'm going to be able to have all those things in software on my own. And so I think more and more people are going to realize that really there is a aggregate of jobs that people do and all of them could be thought of as almost like a derivative that could be assembled in different ways and then move to the cloud or let you specialize. And I think that that'll over time change the fundamental culture of how teams work. Tell me if I'm misunderstanding this, but I think one thing that you just said in there is.
- that this idea that one person belongs to one firm is potentially now outdated and suboptimal idea that instead you said like a user basically contributes to the network and gets paid for that contribution to the network and so one person might belong to multiple firms and firm might change. So what does that look like? You're the time traveler. Let's say we fast forward 10 years. Smart guy like me, how does my, like today, my company got acquired by Twitch. I got a day job at Twitch. You know, great. That's, you know, something I do. And I, you know, before COVID. Thanks for your efforts there, by the way. I mean, we monetize that a little while ago, but thanks for your efforts. Of course. Anything.
- By the way, a VCSA we monetized that is a wonder, that's a really cool flex. I'm gonna feel that less. So okay, so then what, 10 years from now, so like maybe I should start from the beginning there. So what do I think is really happening, right, that underlies all my investing? I basically believe that starting around 1850, we had centralized means of production, mass distribution, mass production, and what that allowed us to do is to create the modern corporation.
- But in 1870, there was no accounting, there were no org charts. None of the stuff that we take for granted as a company really existed. But mass production and mass distribution had a tendency to centralize things. Because you got supply side economies of scale and mass distribution allows you to get things out to people. I think what started to happen probably in the late 70s, early 80s with the microprocessor is now the economy is animated by mass computation and mass connectivity. And those two attributes
- tend to decentralize the means of production. And so, I think we've moved from river Rouge plant for Ford Model T's to personal 3D printers in the future. And I think we've moved from peak centralization of three TV networks in the late 50s, early 60s to now anybody can be their own publisher or media company that goes direct. And so there's a lot of very basic assumptions we have about companies that are just 150-year artifacts of time. Like somebody in 1820 wouldn't recognize a normal company of today. There weren't any companies more than 20 people.
- in the US in 1820 hardly, maybe a few spinning looms of the hundred people. But so what I believe is now the idea is the social contract between a person and a big company, people assume that it's gonna persist. And I think it's gonna be radically different. So in the 1900s, you had people wanting to be at a company for a very long time and you had large country companies because the coordination advantages.
- of having a large organization at scale with supply side economics was valid and created abundance, then the same happened with the military, then the same thing happened with the government, media, all of our major institutions. But now I think the pendulum is swinging in the other direction towards a worldwide network where everybody on the network, every individual is a node on that network and every individual has a node on that network, has a comparative advantage. And they get paid by the network when they give the network what it wants.
- And that's true for money, it's true for jobs, it's true for everything in my view. Are there examples of startups now that are executing this? Yeah, so in the early days, our investments were in these pure play networks, Twitter, Twitch, companies like that. What does that mean? Pure play. A pure play network would be you're not really reimagining a part of the economy. So like Twitch was a whole new thing that you could argue that Twitter has had a big impact on the media, but that wasn't the thesis.
- when we invested. But then we started to get interested in this idea of, well, perhaps every sector of the economy is going to be reimagined around sort of the micro means of production. And so rather than economies of scale, it's going to be local economies of algorithmic computation and networks that span the globe. And so why did we invest in Lyft? Lyft was a more modern way to think about getting a ride than taxis. Taxis are a centralized.
- command and control tops down dispatch driven technology. Lyft says, hey, riders and drivers can advertise their presence in real time on a network and algorithms will form an ad hot connection. So it's kind of like this return of the invisible hand. And now all of a sudden the invisible hand is done by algorithms rather than kind of in the good old days of people trading fur or musket or something like that. But like, that's what we see happening time and again, you know, own connect is another board I'm on.
- They're trying to create incentives for people to use less electricity, but they're basically applying the ideas of software-defined networks to subtracting energy that homes use during certain times of the day. So I believe that every, what is Tesla really? Tesla is a car company that's animated by network capitalism, not industrial capitalism. It's a software-defined car that's updated over the air. It leverages machine learning. It leverages network effects with all the sensors in the network to help it self-drive better.
- Apple was a network capitalist centric phone compared to like Nokia, which thought we need to sell the best widget. And so in sector after sector of our economy, the companies that are software defined at their core, I believe software defined network centric companies at their core are going to keep winning. And they're going to keep displacing the companies that think of computers as the thing that you did to make your industrial thing go faster. So, you know, Burger King isn't a software defined network, even though it has computers.
- It uses computers to say how many hamburgers did I sell today? But it doesn't use computers to reinvent food in any fundamental way and the companies that we're investing in are companies that leverage network capitalism to reimagine and reinvent markets from beginning. Damn. Big idea. Maybe a little bit out there, but that's kind of... It's such a big idea that it's hard to... How can I make this more practical for myself and the listeners of someone interested in this field? You
- Yeah, and so the way I would say to make it more practical if you're a listener is the tendency is to say What's my career? Path going to be but through the lens of the 20th century, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna make a progressive set of steps And I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna get rewarded as I Do the things that I seem to need to do in society But I would argue that it's more important in today's world to figure out a what am I awesome at or or Maybe not even one of my the best in the world
- that. But what am I best at? Among all other things I'm good at, what am I best at? And then what does the world value? And then what am I passionate about? And it's like the intersection of that set of things is where you want to develop your talents. Because over time, that's where your comparative advantage will be the highest. And that is where the network will pay you the most for contributing to the network. But I think sometimes it's useful to not think of not just what company do I want to join or what set of companies should I join my career. Instead, you should say, the entire world is a network. Everybody is a node in that network. How can I be the best version of myself?
- note on that network. How can I create the most possible value for that network so that I'll get recognized by it and paid for the value that I deliver? So how do you do that? So let's say, let's take you for example. So let's say you look at the world this way as it's a giant network and you're trying to have your comparative comparative advantage. So what's your comparative advantage? Yeah, I would say that my job is to be the very best partner for a super ambitious founder in the zero to one phase. So right, like if you look at my podcast, people say, hey, why don't you have this guest? Why don't you have that guest?
- But starting greatness is all about zero to one awesome startup super ambitious. What was it like before they succeeded and There's power. There's addition and subtraction, you know, like sometimes by saying what you're not for but like niching down You're very powerful to the people who care about your niche because people say where have you been all my life? And so what you're trying to do is find that set of like-minded co-conspirators For the niche that you've really chosen to be great at
- and not get preoccupied with the fact that you can't do it all. Right? You're way better off understanding what you can just stick the landing at and develop your talent so you can do it even better and better through time. And today, floodgate is more like a traditional firm, right? It's like a company, kind of like, let's say, current world slash old world, right? You have a brand, you have multiple employees, you have a central fund, you have your LP base, it's sort of static, and then you're investing in a specific lesson.
- set a criteria of companies. Whereas the way you're describing things, it sort of feel like, correct me if I'm wrong, it sort of sounded like in the future, what you 20 years from now, what you might have done, instead of set up floodgates, you would have set up, I don't know, a one person investing fund yourself or like a Dow or something like that, basically a trust that's gonna invest in a whole bunch of things on the network. And you wouldn't need the structure of a fund with employees and with all of that.
- these different things. So would you, if you didn't have this already set up and you're setting it up for the next 20 years, would you have set up your investing differently than you did with a kind of traditional VC fund? Well, I like the way we're set up because I think that when you're investing in these crazy risky startups too early, way too early, or legally and vigorously too early, it's good to have friends and it's good to have people to run ideas by. But we have a very, I'm not sure our point of view works for everybody. So I don't even think a startup is a company. So I think a startup is...
- the capabilities and talents of the founders and their insight about the future. And what you're betting is on two things. One is that their insight's right and two is they're good enough to navigate the idea to a great product someday. But like Lyft started as Zimride and Twitter, they couldn't decide whether to call it voicemail 2.0 or TWTTR, Twitch started as Justin.TV, Octa started as Sasher. And so like what do you do with the fact that 90% of your profits come from things that started out different.
- And so my theory on that is the way to succeed is to realize that a startup isn't a company at all. And that it's the insights and the founders and you make fun of your ability to predict what they're going to come up with. That is false precision to even try. But instead where you should be precise is can these people do the job and is this powerful enough breakthrough insight? You, I believe it's your partner. I looked up who the top.
- venture capitalists were I think it was your partner. What's your name? and Mirroco, yeah, yes, and is I looked at like CB insights 2020 2019 2018 2017. I think she was in the top 10 sometimes number two or three and many many many of the years Consistent you just showed me a sign or a thing of dollar bills with Steve Blank You know who's like godfather of Silky Valley saying everything Mike does turns into money You I wish what what makes you guys great. What makes you able to spot these things?
- interesting opportunities. I think that, you know, it's funny, if you had say Warren Buffett on your show, or you know, you've had Stan Druckenmiller before on your show, right? And when they talk about investments, you'll probably notice they talk about a few things. What's the operating history of the organization? What is their competitive moat? You know, they have a set of factors, you know, that cause them to think that a company is a good investment or not.
- What's interesting is in our world, none of those mental models apply. And so because the startup's not a company, there is no operating history. There's no moat, they don't even have a product yet, they got no customers. And so what I think we're better at than most is, A, understanding that's true, and B, then asking, okay, so what should the mental models be? Right, if Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have 90 mental models and they don't apply to startup investing, well, what are the mental models?
- for startup investing then. And so we've spent years right just being students of that question, and we probably got about 30 or so that we've developed, but we try to evaluate the startup through the lens of those mental models, rather than making the mistake of thinking that a startup is a rehosted company. It's not. It's one or two of those mental models that we wouldn't expect, right? Like, I might expect somebody to say, we wanna be in a big market with customers that really love your products. Like, okay, yeah, great.
- We want to be growing extremely fast, exponential growth. Well, yeah, it's obvious at that point. I also enjoy checkmate. And so what's a mental model that's not so obvious where a hundred people in a room would nod their heads and immediately say, I already do that. I already think that way when it comes to investing for me. Yeah, so I'll just give a few examples. So I'd say at a meta level, we have a set of mental models about founding teams. And then we have a set of mental models about insights. And founding team, a good example would be
- the jazz band and not a marching band. So in companies, you have org charge, you have people who want cheap music and dance steps. And if you don't give that to them, the organization's gonna be a chaotic mess and all sprued up and discombobulated. In a startup, it's more like when you go to the French quarter and you watch a jazz band there, the lead goes on a riff and everybody else just goes with it. And you'll never hear that tune the same way ever again, but everybody knows that that's what they're in it for. Nobody's saying, hey, that's not on my sheet music. You didn't say that was gonna happen. That's the way they like to...
- offer their art to the world. And so I like to say when a startup starts, it goes through this breakthrough sequence. It has to have a great insight, which is something about the future that's not obvious that most people don't know. And then after that, they have to create a product breakthrough where they get product market fit and zero to one. And then they have to have a growth breakthrough where they get escape velocity. And then only then do they earn the right to someday be in the pantheon of companies. But it's wrong-headed to give startup founders big company advice at any of those stations.
- In fact, all of those stages are different. It would be bad to give growth advice to an insight developer, for example, because it would be precisely wrong. So that would be an example on the team side. To me, on the insight perspective, it would be don't be market first because there is no market yet. And so rather than trying to think of a startup market, we want to arrive at startup markets by following inflections. We want to say, okay.
- Cost of an AI prediction is going down exponentially. How is power gonna shift in the industry because of that? And like what new markets might arise that had never existed before? These inflections, they power your why now. So like with Lyft, GPS has got included for free and smartphones. And we believe that everybody's gonna have smartphones someday, even though in 2010, only 10% did. So you could say, wow, now I can see a world in the future where...
- drivers and riders will be able to locate each other on a network and there'll be a network effect because there'll be all these people have these phones. You could have been right about that before then, but you would have still failed because you wouldn't have had enough people with the phones and they wouldn't have been able to find each other. And so, I'd say that's the other counterintuitive thing is that you can't look at the company's tangible operating history because there is none. What you have to do instead is imagine a world where their inflections.
- change the future in a dramatic way. And that, you know, change the rules and like all the stuff that people think is gonna happen, something very radically different is gonna happen. And why do I believe this entrepreneur? What is it that they've discovered about the world that could cause me to take that bet? What you're describing is awesome. And it's like, but it's a narrow, it's a narrow but wonderful outlook. So what you're describing about inflections and looking at the world in 20 years is definitely about disruption. And these are things that are...
- This is what allows an uber or an airy B&B to go from not even an idea to a small idea to a 50 to a hundred billion dollar company. These are like truly disruptive and trans transformative things But then on the other side there's like on the podcast actually air today Shawna interviewed this guy named Brian who owns 100% of 1 800 got junk the revenue might be Four or five hundred million dollars and he owns all of it So he who knows he's probably worth two or three billion dollars and has probably a pretty calm life And he's not doing anything probably probably innovative at all. I mean, maybe there's like micro innovation
- like, you know, our supply chain is a little bit interesting or the way that we dispatch people is a little bit interesting or, or it could just be operational excellence, meaning our website ranks number one or, uh, we know how to gain the name. Right. One of the other guy. I was a, was it a fellow name? Yeah. A cute brand. How do you, um, so like, you're all, you're, what we just discussed was far on one end. Do you ever look at the other side or, or, for your job, you only care about one side and maybe you just like the, for shoot the shit or talking to your friends who want to get wealthy, do you say like, yeah, but this side's actually.
- kind of interesting too. Yeah, and it's funny because we alluded to this earlier. I don't try to be for everybody. I try to be the very best at the thing I try to be good at. And so my view is that I want to go very focused on breakthrough startups and in that zero to one phase and how they... So I like to say I'm a rocket fuel salesman. And I go to founders and I say, don't take my fuel if you don't want to achieve escape velocity with that rocket that's on the launch pad. Because if you're not sure it's a rocket, this fuel isn't going to be good for your vehicle. Right? Don't put this in your scooter. Right? And so I probably don't deserve too much credit when it does escape. But I probably don't deserve too much of the blame when it doesn't. Right? I'm just like, just be clear about what I'm selling here.
- And people say, well, it's not realistic that everybody should build one of the $20 billion plus exit startups of the year. And I'm like, you're correct about that. I'm not saying that my advice or my approach is mainstream or even normal. In fact, I would say it's hyper not normal. But in that area of, I sell rocket fuel to people who want to blast their rockets into outer space and get escape velocity. I try to be the very best period.
- And so like that's what I'm in it for. So a lot of your listeners might be like, well, that's interesting and kind of intellectually interesting, but I'm not one of those. But that's okay. There's lots of ways to get rich in this world. And there's lots of ways to succeed in business. Every comes back to everybody should know what's my comparative advantage. And not be preoccupied by all the things you can't be the best at. So you're not even close to the guy who sees like, oh, wow, there's a ton of really poorly run laundry store or laundry mats. We should buy all of them and put it back in software. I mean, that doesn't even kind of closely, or that doesn't even get you excited.
- Well, not only that, like if somebody said, hey, can you give me some advice on how to grow this? I would say you should not listen to me. I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't know how to do laundromats at scale. Like it's not even a question of whether I'm interested. It's a question of whether I'm competent. And I'm not. I'm like I'm not and I don't try to be and I let go of the idea that I need to be. I love your answer by the way. I have something to say about that too. But I would say like, you know, you've made me realize that I think one of the things that we're trying to build our comparative advantages is like we could on this. We get on this podcast twice a week and we shoot the.
- either just me and Sam or we're gonna great guests like you on. And we talk about everything from, I think, one of the most popular episodes was, you know, Bology talking about like the future startups, our cities. And it's like, what? And you know, Bology will bend your brain with a blockchain. And then the next episode, so he's probably the most listened to. And the second most listened to is this side hustle, this entrepreneur has where he's, we break down his business of vending machines. He's got 27 vending machines, is making six figures of profit. And, you know, he got started with very little capital and it doesn't take rocket science or rocket fuel to do it. And our listeners like the,
- the breadth of that, of how we can hop from blue collar. We have a segment called the Hillbilly Side Hustle, which is like, you know, just a blue collar, kind of like a simple thing you can do, all the way to, okay, what is, you know, some disruptive idea, you know, how does AI impact this space? And is it okay if we talk about biology for a minute? Because I think he's like amazing. It's amazing. So like, you know, earlier I mentioned this idea of cloud culture. I think biology probably has the best handle on this of anybody I talk to. So like, and, you know, I've listened to much of what he said, but like, what I think happens at the limit is that all of these different cloud cultures are like their own society.
- And so right now the main organizing principle of society is the nation state, which is also an economies of scale centric model, right? But if you think about it, what is Bitcoin really? Bitcoin is a society of people who care about sound money and the protocol is what enables governance and so these cloud Societies at the limit I think look more and more like the future version of countries But you know what is a country really? It's a bunch of people who decide what their boundaries are who decide who gets in the club and they have a Constitution where they decide how to separate powers and how to protect the rights of individuals
- against the mob and the tyrant. That's exactly what Bitcoin does with its protocol. And just to use some other examples, so Bitcoin is the people who have this cult-like belief, religious belief around sound money. Ethereum is people who believe in programmable money. And then you have Wall Street Bets, which is like, hey, let's just middle finger to the large, to the incumbents. So how does David beat Goliath? And we're basically going to screw around with them and make profits while we do it. That's what we're here for. And we will assign ourselves names. They call themselves retards and things like that because in their culture, that's okay, right? Burning Man is a pop-up culture that happens for a week in the desert where all these people will go behave totally differently than they will the other 51 weeks out of the year. And so there's a whole bunch of these.
- either pop-up cultures, cloud cultures that all have different, different virtues, different admissions criteria and all the different pieces you just described. Yeah. And it's so interesting because there's historical parallels, right? Like in the Reformation, the Pope used to declare all the answers and then all of a sudden the printing press comes out and double entry counting. And now Martin Luther can distribute the Bible to lots of people in a permissionless way, ironically. And then not only that, the merchants of Venice can trade with each other without a central authority because they can have double entry records and
- keep track of IOUs. And so to me, like the internet and blockchain are just so amazingly parallel to that. And I think society ebbs and flows. It's like when you're too decentralized for too long, gets chaotic. And so then you have innovations that centralize the means of production, but then it gets too centralized. And so what we're seeing now, I believe, is Wall Street Beth's perfect example. The people at the edge are saying the network should decide not the center. And if you read books like Revolt to the Republic and things like that, you see a world where the people at the edge are starting to say about the people.
- at the center, you're illegitimate, just like people at the edge back in the Reformation started to say that about the pope and some of the things that were happening with exclusionary, you know, sort of inside our only activities. And so, and in the last two years, you know, social media went from, you know, the edge to call it pointing at mainstream media. Mainstream media now is like synonymous with the fake news, right? That wasn't even a thing five years ago, right? American media is now used as a derogatory description of something.
- which is kind of crazy, right? That's a big change. And the important thing is, like I try not to be too judgmental about it. So I don't sit there and say, oh, those mainstream media people are no good. I'm just like, it's inevitable that media is gonna decentralize. It's inevitable that money will. It's inevitable that politics will. It's inevitable that a lot of these things will. And it's like arguing for it or against it's kind of like arguing against the direction of the wind. It's just, it's fruit. But then back to your listeners.
- To me, what that means writ large is if the 20th century was about being the quote unquote organization man and following the rules and progressing up the hierarchy, it doesn't exist anymore. Now you have to be, you have to take agency for your own life and own your comparative advantage and understand that that is your responsibility as a free person in this world. And if you do that, you're going to be incredibly rewarded in the 21st century. But if you wish that it's like the 20th, I got bad news for you.
- floodgate invested into Refinery29, right? Yeah. For those, we have unfortunately, or I mean, it is what it is. A lot of our listeners are men, so they don't know. Refinery29 is a huge media company geared for women. Refinery29.com. They were pretty big, right? They were like maybe $200 million or $150 million in revenue, and then they sold or merged or something like that with Vice, right? Yes. And Vice is like probably a billion dollar a year entity at the moment.
- point with everything they have going on. Do you think that media companies like that, given what you're saying about, I mean, because BICE is at this point, even though they weren't new, BICE and Refinery29 are probably almost like old school at this point. Do you think that those style of media companies are still going to be great companies, given what you've just said? Well, I think that there's going to be a very rich ecosystem of all types of media companies. But to me, the defining new characteristic will be that media is no longer a function of
- the credential elites telling you what to think and That that was the real problem that we started to get in the media in my opinion is that you had a set of credential elites running these media companies of which there weren't very many and These institutions are all inherited now rather than founded and so the people running these institutions didn't really understand What made them great in the old days? And so they they started to get Worse over time in their effectiveness
- and legitimacy. And so to me, the real question about media is not so much, is there one way it's going to happen versus not? I think that the winners will be those that niche down, have a comparative advantage in the type of content that they cover and attract the attention of the people who care about that type of content. And the credentials won't define it because the old media companies had credentialed elites running them, but they also had a monopoly on distribution.
- with the newspaper and how they got print magazines out and things like that. So I think that all of that's going to change. Is there any media companies or opportunities that you're looking at and you're like, oh, that's kind of interesting for us? I would say that my colleague and me or co is probably smarter about that than I am. You know, and it's funny, even within floodgate, I tend to stick to my areas that I'm excited about and I am. So there's a lot of exciting things that all that I'll miss probably.
- I'm going to ask you a question. Yeah. I'm going to ask you a question that might be hard to answer, because it's one of those things like, oh, how are you? You. But you've said a couple things that caught my attention. You have these nice phrases. So one is, I didn't realize that I see this on your bio. I didn't realize you coined the term thunderlizards. I've heard many investors talk about thunderlizards as something they want to invest in, which is sort of like the gods and all the type companies that emerge every decade or so. And that's what you've really chased.
- because those are where all the returns are, and those are what changed the world. But you also said the kind of the rocket, I'm a rocket fuel salesman. You are catchier than your average VC. You are more, I don't know, you have a little sort of gift there of coining these little mind viruses, these little little phrases that stick with people rather than just saying a bunch of jargon. Is that a skill you learned consciously? Or is that just, you know, growing up, your parents talk like that, where did that come from?
- I don't know, but I guess the way I look at things in this world is you want to force a choice and not a comparison. And so what do I mean by that? You did it again. Exactly. Right? So if I say, hey, we're investing in particularly disruptive types of companies, that's not the same as saying thunderlissards. And so why is it so important? Well, if you're trying to create a breakthrough, by definition it breaks free from the present. So by definition, it can't be compared to something in the present.
- because if it's comparable to what's in the present, it's too incremental, it's too conventional. And so like when I say force a choice in not comparison, I say to founders, let's say everybody's selling banana, you can't say I'm a 5X better banana. Instead, you should come out and say I'm an apple. And not everybody's gonna want your apple, but 100% of the people who prefer apples are gonna want what you have. And like forget the guy who wants the best banana, there's a thousand of those people, you need to waste not an arc of energy on them, you need to spend your time on the people who potentially value your advantage and start a movement around that. Earlier we talked about markets.
- Companies have markets that could be segmented, sub-segmented, and classified. Startups don't. Startups, they create movements. They have a secret about the future. They get early believers who co-conspire with them to create a different future. And the market emerges as a consequence of the movement succeeding. But in the early days, we just have to get people moving. We have to get people moving to somewhere different, not better. And so as a result, we must force a choice and not a comparison. And as a seed investor, I have to do the same thing because there's 2,000 seed funds now.
- And so it was innovative when they and I helped invent seed investing in 2006 but like now there's 2000 firms and so we have to come up with some way for people to say okay I can't reconcile the choice of working with floodgate versus Brandecks And I think I'm right and writing checks with writing checks on the spot. That's how we differentiate I don't know but I think there's a lot to be it relates to niching down I think a lot of people would benefit from the idea of How can I force a choice and not a comparison? It takes more courage and it forces you to say no to more than you say yes to
- But if you do it the right way, the stuff you say yes to, I like to say it's less but better is the way to think about it. You've had some amazing people in your podcast. You've invested in a ton of amazing companies. And I bet you know just about everyone in this world of all these people that you've invested in or did business with. If you guys were put on a stranded island, who do you think would come out on top? Who's the most formidable person that you've worked with? Oh, there there've been so many great people.
- I think a lot of it would be a function of just who had the right idea at the right time. You know, so much of this is just, I call it a founder future fit. It's just like, you know, like when, when Andreessen did Mozilla, it was just, he was the perfect person in the world at the perfect time to do that idea. And so, you know, it's not just how formidable is the person, but it's also just, was it was the timing right and were they just the right person the right time? I'm obsessed with, I'm obsessed with stories and I love interesting personality types. Is there anyone that fits that bill of?
- of being incredibly formidable, like to the point of like, you think how can you be more like that person? Or I wish everyone thought a little bit more like this person. Yeah, so I try to learn from everybody, but I never try to imitate or be like somebody else. Because then that defeats the purpose. Now I'm comparing myself to somebody else. And so I never do that. I don't believe that people should compare themselves with anybody. I think they should learn from people, but I don't think they should compare themselves to others and I don't think they should have heroes. And I think that, yeah. You mentioned a couple of people that you've learned from.
- you know, biology being one, you know, Tim Ferriss that he learned from you, who are some other names, you know, if people listen to this and they're like, you know, or me, right? I really enjoyed hearing you talk during this hour. I think you got a bunch of smart ideas. I want to know, you know, what's he eating? Basically, what's your information diet? What are your sort of some of your favorite people to follow and learn from that you're getting a bunch of interesting information that's not just like the rest? Yeah, so, well, I like the the foreign street blog a lot with Shane Parrish and
- And by the way, just because I don't invest like Buffett and Munger doesn't mean I don't study him like crazy, right? Because I think that when I read how they look at the world, I'll understand what's different about how they look at the world, but I'll also connect dots that will make the difference of my world more clear. I read a ton, I probably read about one or two books a week just in general. What are some of the ones that I've read recently that I liked? One I liked a lot is called The Courage to Be Dislighted.
- by a couple of Japanese authors. I think it's amazing. And so then I went down this rabbit hole of the psychiatrist Alfred Adler, who kind of came of age at the same time as Freud and Young, but wasn't as famous. But I think he's, I think that Alfred Adler's ideas about individual agency are perfectly time for the 21st century. So I've been liking everything that I can get my hands on about him. And it's weird because although I read a lot of books,
- There's always a subset that I come back to over and over again where I try to take notes and because I try to make sure I really understand it so that I could explain it to somebody else in a really clear way. I liked the courage to be disliked quite a bit. I've been reading a lot of stuff on stoicism lately, which I find to be very misunderstood. But you know- What's the misunderstanding? I think that most people think of Stoics as emotionless, turn the other cheek when things go bad.
- And I actually find that when you read about the Stoics and that there are actual philosophies in this world, they're actually quite optimistic and quite inspiring. And I find that it's helpful for me to internalize. So like things like some of the lessons of Stoicism and some of the lessons of Alfred Adler, I'll find myself reading those books over and over again and trying to make the list of things to learn and ask myself every day am I exercising those muscles. And then there'll be other things where I'm like a friend of mine will say this is a really good book. I'm like, oh, I should just read that.
- So right, you know, that's just fun. It's great. All right. We're coming up on the hour so we can we can wrap it Mike, thanks for joining. This is great Where do people find you if they want to get more so obviously the podcast so starting greatness? Where else should they follow to get more? Yeah, I'm on Twitter at m2 jr Let's see where that's probably the best place. Yeah or floodgate calm. You're your tweet machine I've been following you since I talked to him years ago about you Okay, yeah, and if you guys want to cover any other topics happy to I know that we kind of bounced around so I American next I feel like that would have been an interesting one that I think we should we
- If you're up for it, we could do around two around American experts. I think there's a bunch that's there that people are talking about. Yeah, in all of these themes, right? I think that the idea also of blockchains and thinking about the future of money and how we're going to a currency governed by commons rather than fiat government is interesting. I think that the evolution of, I like to say that computing phases, you had mainframes and you had PCs and you had internet and they always start with an enabling technology and they commoditize the prior.
- So, mainframes, computers are expensive, and then PCs, computers were basically free, proprietary software becomes valuable. Okay, next thing, the internet software becomes open source, amassing lots of proprietary data becomes valuable. And so, one way I look at blockchains are they're the next wave of computing, and that they're going to probably democratize data and control of things back to networks, and then what becomes a valuable thing. My instinct is it's about governance.
- And so there's like a lot of conversation we could have about that that might be interesting and then I totally agree, American next, all the stuff that I think is going to have to happen and for the military to be more agile and for us to kind of upgrade our thinking about stuff. You know, when you're talking, I'm like, this is what I could be like. If I could just focus on three things that I really believed in and I just stopped thinking about other shit for like two years, I could have this level of clarity and insight and you're making me want to focus.
- which Sam and many others in my life have ever tried to get me to focus before and this may be the most effective way. Well, there's no one way, right? Like I like to be a compiler, right? It's like you want to be a mile wide and inch deep so that you just can appropriate creative ideas from the world. But then I think you want to be a mile deep somewhere. So it's like a tea, right? And it's like that's why you read several books at a time, but then you also go deep on a small number. They're truly great. Do you, um, who?
- Who should we invite next on this podcast? Who do you think are some of the best storytellers and prolific idea folks? You had Reid Hoffman, we're trying to get in touch with him. Is there anyone else that you think is, we should invite him? Reid Hoffman, Nval Ravekant. Chris Saka is always a good storyteller. I can think about that. The Instagrammers are fun. Andy Radcliffe, probably not as famous as some of your guests and stuff, but boy, is he a clear thing.
- a great communicator. What's the best way to get in touch with Reed just to call the movie you think? Probably. Let's see. Or you just say that I've mentioned you guys and that it was a good show and then I enjoyed it. The people that you just mentioned. I'll email the people you just mentioned. And also Mike said you're the. Mike said you're the guy. So, you know, I haven't seen as much of Chris Saka lately, so I don't know if that would be as effective with him. But I think that some of the other guys would.
- would recognize me pretty well. I showed up for Chris one morning, he texted me, and he said, hey, I gotta film a Shark Tank intro, we need some bodies in the background for my intro, and I left my job, I went to where he was at, nine in the morning, and I filmed a, I was a body double, I was an extra in the background for his Shark Tank intro, so I'll pull that favorite card and be like, hey, Chris, now's the time to pay it back. Yeah, if you haven't had Mark Cuban, I think he's really good. And by the way, on this, so it's funny, because you guys are using Zencaster.
- So does Shane Harris. So I was on his, sorry, Shane Parrish. And on his, after he listened to the talk, he's like, there's so many upfront questions I wish I'd asked you, can we do this again? And so I was like, sure. So we ended up having a lot of content that he kind of cut down. But like if you find yourself in that position here, let me know, I'm happy to help you make it is less but better, right? So if we can, we're gonna ship a product and I just will be fucking awesome, right?
- So I love you. Where are you from? I was born in Oklahoma, but moved all around because my dad was an IBMer. Yeah, and then worked at Microsoft. Yeah. I feel like how old are you? Early, 53. So you're, I'm 31. So you would have had to have me when you were quite young. But I feel like you could, you could, you could, you could be my uncle, I think. That's what the founders call me. Their nickname for me is the crazy uncle.
- So, yeah, I think we kind of looked the same. I can tell you, I thought you would have been from the Midwest or maybe the South. I'm from Missouri. Can I see? Show me state. Yeah, and my cousins live in Oklahoma, in Owens, Oklahoma, where they buck bulls. I have a feeling you and I, we could be distant cousins, so we don't even know it. Yeah, yeah, you never know. Coming from Missouri in Oklahoma, you never know. Yeah, well, I appreciate this, man. This is awesome, shiny. Anything to say? No, my camera died. I'm at the, yeah, over.
- for heating Mark, but Mike, this is great. Thank you for coming on. I enjoyed that. That was good. And you're in Austin. Now I live in Marin County. So I'm in Northern California. Oh, I thought you live in Austin for some reason. No, I helped him though find his place. So when he decided to move, I used to live in Austin about up until about 15 years ago and my family's from there, all my relatives and stuff. And so, you know, I've stayed. You just got them instead of what everyone else did. It seems so. And everybody keeps asking me when we were going to move back to Austin. I don't know. I'm pretty happy with where we live, but.

4 Dumb Businesses Valued At Over $100,000,000 (#357) [hbUZcRWaBHA].txt

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- So in like 2012, 2013, 2014, he started a vitamin brand and it only did okay. And then he started also tinkering with a skincare brand, which it actually did much better. It got to like 10 million or so in revenue. He hired a CEO, the CEO kind of like drove it into the ground and didn't really do that well. And so he started focusing again to his vitamin brand and he's like, look, it's doing okay. But who's the best customer of a vitamin company? Dogs. Because this is it, I'm not disparaging him, but like, do they work?
- Yeah, why not like fuck Aussie you know like forget yeah, I got welcome to for gazii ink yeah, they're supplements for dogs don't ever tell you if it works or doesn't work What up what up are we supposed to like start with like a catchphrase now Hey boys and girls welcome to the business show where you learn how to make so much money that you'll get taxed out the ass
- That's what we're talking about taxes if you don't care about taxes yet. You ain't rich. Do you care about taxes? Yeah, I like I don't I'm not gonna live my life according to like where the low taxes are but like It's like the number two or number three thing that I'm thinking about so I'm thinking about this whole New York Texas thing and I like do the math and I'm like damn like imagine I got a rent a place for let's just say like 20 grand a Month like that's how much taxes I'm paying by moving here versus staying or you know, whatever it is like a lot of money a month Well, you have a good thing you could do the like Texas is your main residence and spend four or five months out of the year in New York So that's not so bad that's not so bad
- But I need to do it with New York and Florida because Texas winter is not like winter-led winter that's desirable enough that you want to winter there. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Have you heard about this like the Teddy Bear law? The Teddy Bear rule? What's that? So I was asking my tax now. Oh, well, you keep your like possessions? Yeah, basically I was like, so what's the rule? Is it six months out of the year? What does it take to have residency in some place? And he was like, well, there's a bunch of little factors. He's like, but one, there was a famous case with Derek Jeter, the New York Yankees shortstop there.
- Jeter wanted Jeter played for the Yankees in New York, but he didn't want to pay New York taxes He wanted to pay Florida taxes because he's like look this is my home. This is where I live Well, I think but you also have an apartment in New York and you play in New York You so you work there your home is there and your kids go to school there I think and there and so they ended up it got ruled in in court and they call it I think the the name they call it is the I haven't looked this up It's like the teddy bear law and it's basically like where would you keep your teddy bear? So the place you would call home so like factors like where your kids go to school Where are the possessions that you love it all goes into this like umbrella to be like where do we actually think your home is?
- And actually, when I first heard this, I was like, wow, that's really subjective for a ruling or a law. And actually, it's one of the laws I kind of agree with. I actually think that that is more like how it should be done, which is like, dude, what's the spirit of this? Do you actually live here? Or do you just stay here for exactly six months and one day every year? And I have to, I don't actually know where you are at any given time. But if you're working at a place, your kids go to school there, all your possessions are there, all your friends are there, family is there, like that's where you live. As an avid listener of Dateline, one of the easiest ways to catch the husband who kills the wife is like three weeks before, he either bought like, you know, a trash bag and like a shovel or he googled like, how to dispose of a body. And last night I found myself googling and I was still embarrassed to do this. So I went to an incognito window. I was like, I can't Google this.
- They're gonna know that I killed her. Yeah, and it was like, how does the state that you're visiting know, like if I'm renting, and I didn't even know what to Google, by the way, I was trying to figure out how to phrase this, but if I live in Texas, how does New York even know that I'm there if I'm just renting a place? Dude, that's so funny you said that I did the same thing and like my queries sound exactly like, does the Irish really know? Somehow that's how it's like formatted in my search. Like I would Google what like, I don't know. Dude, Google needs to understand I italicized. Really? Like the asterisk and everything. It's like there's one browser that's just like, Hmm, this guy's only ever incognito. And he's either looking at porn or taxes. Like, what's this guy's life like, right? Cause like, basically it's like, you know, I'm trying to Google like,
- When you get, you know, if the IRS does this to you, is that like jail or just a fight? Yeah. Yeah. Are we bringing a rule or law? Right. Is this, are taxes or recommendation or a requirement? Well, when I learned googling this, googling this was the IRS and I, like, it makes sense, but I didn't even understand it. IRS is for federal. So like, uh, but I pay my federal taxes no matter what, but I'm like, okay, so then how does the state of New York actually know that I was ever here? And I'm trying to like figure, I want to, I'm googling that to follow the rule.
- but I am curious and I was like- To be clear, in case they also listen to podcasts, I'm googling this A for a friend and B to enforce the law on my friend. Because I'm not here for anything else. And I was just curious. I'm just curious. I'm like, literally, how does the state of New York even know that I exist? I'm the same way. I have the same way we're all go down this rabbit hole. Then I'm like 30 minutes in. I'm like, why am I even looking for this? This is not applicable at all to me. But I'm like, I just want to know how it works. Like, I'll be like, when you keep the receipt, does anybody ever go read the receipts? Like, you know what? What actually happened? Or like, you know, there's this Twitter account. I love called How Stuff Works or something like that. I love it. And today they posted a thing. It was like-
- How luggage gets loaded into an airplane? So there's a guy in the back of the airplane and then there's like a conveyor belt shooting suitcases at him and he's stacking it like a perfect Tetris grid and I'm just like I do I love this account because it's always these these things where I'm like dude How does the world actually work like you know? I know I give them my suitcase But what happens after that and it's like sort of the same thing with like either taxes or like Like I'll Google just like you know Rich people don't pay taxes But how like you know these I hear about other are there really these loopholes like are like you know universities have this endowment?
- What the hell are they doing with that? And I'm just like always trying to get to the bottom of like, I wanna have like an actual understanding of what's going on. And I feel like I have so little understanding about so many things on Earth. But it's so funny that you brought that book. I actually, I'm like doing the thing with Maven again, the Ideation Bootcamp course. And I started talking about the book that I had as a kid called How Stuff Works. And then there's another one where they just like split like a power tool into two and you just see like a picture of like how school bus operates or whatever. And I'm like the reason why researching, which is what you and I do for this podcast is cool, is because whether you like it or not, America and the rest of the world is guided by capitalism and commerce. And so like if you understand how like a business works, just like these books show you how like the luggage guy works, then you kind of understand like what's possible and what's not possible, why laws are the way they are, why art is the way it is. Like you can, it's not just money making, but it's just like the Earth, like just how the world and society. And so I actually was just writing that yesterday and I totally agree. And I think that's why like studying businesses is cool.
- And by the way, like I think most people do this for science. They're like, you know, why is the sky blue? And like there is an element of that. I'm talking about just like here's a perfect example We use the luggage one for example. It's like question What happens if you just never pick up your suitcase or like what happens if you just simply like I see those bags over there They say that they're waiting for someone to come get them. What happens if they don't like is this do you pile up forever? You want to know what happens? I'm a doctor Mario and then yeah, I do know I was yeah, I'll tee it up for you Then there is an answer and it's actually kind of fascinating for somebody who goes and digs in and says like okay But then what right or like they you know like a kid like well Why do they do that and why do they do that and then you get to what's it called unclaimed? baggage or whatever it's called like that what's that the name is a company so basically the hustle wrote about it So if you do like the hustle unclaimed baggage or the company and like rural, Alabama I think it's Alabama or Arkansas called unclaimed baggage and they sell three hundred million dollars a year worth of unclaimed bags and they it's like a huge thrift store, you know right gender and same thing with like the
- Like, you know, the shampoo at a hotel, like, you know, I use this thing once. What do they do with it? Do they just refill it and give it to the next person? I'm curious. What do they do? It's like, oh, actually, there's the whole company that recycles these. They take the half used champions from hotels and they say, they tell the hotel, hey, we'll pay you nothing for it, but we'll come collect it for you. We'll take it off your hands because you can't give that to the next guest. And then they take that and then they have like a basically a way to repackage and resell those and their brand is around lessening waste on earth. And they, that company does extremely well. And so you actually find companies at the end of all these because again,
- This is like a giant little business ecosystem, just in the same way that like, you know, there's plankton that eats stuff off the whales head or whatever, it's like, you know, basically there's a little business that's going to solve every one of these edge cases all around the world, right? There's a person whose job it is to do that thing. And if you keep going far enough, you'll like find those little nicks and crannies. Well, which is a perfect segment for what I wanna talk about today, because here's what I wanna, I'm gonna give you a bunch of example of things I'm calling frame breaking businesses. So like things that I've discovered that have changed how I thought about stuff. And there's a story. And by the way, today I was thinking, I was like, today's my leg day, because I'm putting you on my back and I'm carrying us for this episode. I've got like a side note, by the way, my mom yesterday, well, I work out with my mom sometimes and she was like,
- Sam pars legs. She'll just go to Sam par full name. I love it. I don't know if she knows that's like to your person last much Sam pars legs man. He's got strong legs and I was like yeah He's great. It's just like I was just looking at his legs in the last video the Mr Peace video cuz you were wearing like shorts on the couch or whatever. I was just looking at his legs I didn't hear anything Hey, it's Shawn's mom text me. I'll send you some more pics I'll set these pictures of my legs. I got you It's genetics people people comment on my legs. It's just it was it was I was born that way So thank you. I appreciate the love though Alright, so basically the reason I thought about this was because
- dig. So there's this website called dig. It's actually not that popular anymore. But if you're above 30, you probably know it dig and Reddit or competitors. And for a long time, dig was kind of beating Reddit. But they're both like the whole like front page of the Internet type of businesses that had like tens of millions of monthly and Kevin Rose, the founder of dig was on the cover of time as like meat, Silicon Valley's new wonderkin, the guy who is 20 years old and worth a billion dollars or whatever. He was like the Mark Zuckerberg, like the next Zuckerberg and dig ended up not actually winning this battle. And they're currently for sale. And I linked to their financials. Someone just sent this to me on Twitter. So it's not like I got this through like I didn't like sign up for a service where I had to agree to confidentiality. But someone just sent this to me. Right. You signed the FDA, a full disclosure agreement, where you're like, I will put this on blast if you send this random shit to me. That's exactly what happened. So I would just send it to me. I didn't ask questions and I just looked at it. But I'll give you like the overview. The overview is that over the last year, they had 27 million users. So what's that 2 million a month? So which is not a lot. The hustle gets more than 2 million a month just on our website. We don't even try to get traffic on our website. So 2 million a month. They're revenue slam slam on dig. Nice. Keep going. Oh, God. Okay. So.
- Their revenue for the year was something like a million or like 1.3 or like it was like 1.2 1.3 nothing shit Dig which was supposed to be like, you know a great website only like 80 70 91 thousand 44 thousand a month in revenue horrible crazy certified small boy shit Yeah, yeah, and but here's the thing is that this rep this this discrepancy We're gonna call it the gap the gap between how much we talked about them and their prestige and like, you know The accolades that they get as but from
- But the gap between where they actually are in reality, that gap is huge. So instead, I'm gonna swap it and we're gonna have some frame-breaking companies that we're gonna talk about the actual good type of gap. And I wanna show you a few businesses that people don't talk about that are actually phenomenal and really interesting. So I'm gonna give you the first one. The first one, we maybe talked about before, but I was looking at Michael Bizbing, Michael Bizbing's a YouTuber for MMA, and a VPN company sponsored him. And I thought, that's kind of strange. So I just Googled like, what's a good VPN? And maybe I'll start buying a VPN. Basically a VPN, if you're in America and you wanna like tell the internet that you're in Europe, you use a VPN. Or if you're in like North Korea or one of the Koreas, whichever one.
- With this would apply to and you want to act like you're in America you use a VPN That's and that's a that's a or if you just want to like just search the web anonymously and you want to Google stuff about taxes And that's what the VPN just wore and so I Googled best VPN and I came across this website called compared tech that was kind of intriguing So I linked to it. Do you see compare tech comm slash VPN? So I started reading it and I was like this is kind of an interesting site And I looked him up on similar web and they get millions of views and I scroll all the way to the bottom And I notice that they're based in England
- And the thing about England and the UK is that if you are a UK company, name all the things you love about England. Maybe the tea, maybe you like the queen, and you like the fact that all companies' numbers are publicly available. Yes, a lot of people don't know this, but if you are a company in the UK, I don't know what the threshold is. It could be as low as five. It could be as high as 10 million. And you do over 10 million in revenue. There's a thing called company's house, which is a very British name. I don't know if it's like...
- IRS or something like that where you can go and log in and see all these financials From privately held companies and I was curious about this little website called compare tech So I went and looked it up on their on companies house Can you see what their financials are do you have it up? I don't have it open. No, okay? So I'm gonna pull it up and I linked to it down there. It said financials Basically, oh fuck it the link broke on me, but basically their revenue for the trailing 12 months which 12 million
- And their profit was 10 million. And this little old website that just reviews VPNs, I'm sure it's more sophisticated than what it looks like, but it's not good looking. It's not like, doesn't have the best design. And I believe this website ended up selling for like $200 million. And I think it only gets like a million visits a month. It sold last year or six or 10, six or 12 months ago. Interesting site, right?
- That's crazy. It was also only started in 2015. So sometimes I see these sites that I'm like, oh wow, this thing gets so much traffic and they just send clicks out to whatever. Basically their business model is, they write about what VPN to use, and then they link you to the VPN and they get a kickback from any, whichever link you click of the 10, they'll get a kickback from all 10 for some dollar value. If the VPN says, cool, every customer's worth $300 to us, we'll pay $100 to anybody that refers to the customer. And so these guys will do some numbers like that.
- Normally, when I see those really high-trafficed sites that just look very basic, it's like, you know, this was started in 2004. I'm like, well, okay, props to you. You had the foresight to know that very early on in the internet days or Google's days, somebody was like, I'm going to start reviewing credit cards. I'm going to start reviewing VPN providers. I'm going to start reviewing what email software is best. And they made what email software is best.com. They rake in $6 million a year, you know, 90% profit margins, something silly like that. And like, you know, the person has spent the last 15 years trying to figure out, you know, the meaning of life because they won the business game already. And so that's normally what you see, but 2015 is like pretty new for a site like this. It's pretty new. And here's their financials. I went and found them on company's house. In 2021, they did 15 million in revenue and 13.2 million in profit. The year before that, 10 million in revenue, 9.5 million in profit.
- That's crazy. This is crazy, right? Right. Yeah, I'm a big fan of these now. By the way, do you ever, do you play with SEO a lot? Because growth tactics are like martial arts. It's like you could be a black belt in Jiu Jitsu and know nothing about karate, right? Or you know karate and you're nothing about Taekwondo or Judo. You don't know how to do any grappling and any throws. And that's how I feel about growth channels. Like I've spent a lot of my career figuring out virality. I've spent a lot of my career figuring out paid marketing now with e-commerce, things like that. The thing I've never touched is SEO. Dude, I know I'm like an absolute novice on it. Absolutely. I know SEO like an Ivy League architect knows about construction. Like maybe I can have a conversation with the construction worker who's going to build my project and like kind of know, but like I'm not going to be able to reference like which rivet to use. And you could kind of lie to me sometimes and I wouldn't exactly know if you were. Right. Right. You put me on the job site and I'm going to ask for some gloves because I don't want to have my hands. Yeah. Everything's going to be called a monkey wrench. So like I don't entirely understand SEO, but I do believe it's the maybe the best one.
- Like it's like like if you nail it, I think it's the best thing to nail or one like that That's the seat in the office when Dwight's like, you know trying to ignore Jim and then Jim's like Dwight I do they're doing I can't wait yeah, which bear is best Stupid question there's a he's like you know basically school Basically school two schools of thoughts here wrong. Yeah That's how I feel about like you is this your best like I don't know is a brown bear best or is a black bear Best like every every one of these girls channels is like has something awesome and then something terrible and the one you're in You know it too. Well usually and you're like this thing is awful I wish I could just go on Facebook and spend money and get to spend a dollar get to a back and the Facebook guys like oh My god, you can get free traffic on Google and the Google guys like holy shit this thing grows virally Wow, what is that you know and so I think there's no there's no best
- Yeah, I would agree. And by the way, this site compared tech, it was sold for over $100 million. I believe this year in 2022 for like one. Give me another frame breaker. That's a great first one. All right. Another one. A company called. Can I give a PS here just in case something good happens? A PS is with a milk road today, we run like a business model is newsletter ads. And I had asked Ben, I was like, Ben, if we were going to sell a product, our own product instead of advertised other people's products, what would be what product would work best? What bear is best, Ben? And he was like VPN, dude. He's like, he's like, we should just launch our own VPN, fits the audience. You gotta come up with a better name though. We just have to buy an existing VPN and plug in our distribution. And so if anyone is a VPN, they want to sell me. I'm happy to either buy one or build our own. Yeah, you gotta come up with like some cute branding, like VP Nope, you know what I mean? Like you can't track me, you know, like you gotta come up with something cute just like you do it milk road and sell. I think we got to just get rid of VP and that's just to whatever it needs to be like, you know, whatever, Mysterio or like, you know, some like, you know, so
- It's secret juice and it's like, oh, I use the juice. I'm on board with that. Don't tell, don't tell, you know. Yeah, just call it don't tell mom. All right, the next one. Quinn Street. Have you heard of Quinn Street? Mmm, no. All right, Google Quinn Street and go to their website for me. All right, I'm going. And tell me like what the. My guess is I thought this was a fashion brand. If you'd told me nothing else, but okay, I'm guessing it's not. All right, Quinn Street, I just see a guy and it says, we're performance drives digital. And then there's like another stock photo. And this guy is high intent prospects. This guy is a horrible stock. Mott, like these guys on here aren't ugly enough to be like a stock model. They're not good looking enough to be like, they look like they're like out of like a like Spanish or like geometry. Telemundo. Yeah, like they just look like just normal. You know, it's like it's they're so normal that they don't even look. Why does your skin have like, you know, normal people wrinkles and blemishes? That's not right. Stock photo, you need to be perfectly airbrushed. Right. Is this the founder? It looks like the founder. I don't know. I don't know who the founder is, but it's like a simple ass website that's not good looking. All right, this. Dude, I'm going through the slideshow. This is hilarious, dude. This looks like, you know, Meredith from the office. This is like. That's what I'm saying. They're like so normal. That they're not that it looks silly. So this, this company, I'm going to explain what they do. I'm going to tell you how big they are. So what this company does is they used to own and I don't know if they still own these sites, but I'll tell you what they what they still own now, but they used to own websites like directory of schools.com or campus corner.com or learning and life.com or find the right school.com just like these, like boring websites. They don't look that cool. And when you Google Ohio insurance.
- Ohio auto insurance. They come up number one. You enter an information and they sell that information to the highest bidder for insurance people. This website, it's like ugly looking, it's simple looking and you like a lot of people disrespect it. They made about 600 million in revenue last year. It's publicly traded. It's publicly traded. That's crazy, right? This is another frame-breaking company. If you click their about page on Quinn Street, or one of their forms, it doesn't work. It goes to a 401. They don't have it set up.
- dude, okay, you know when you meet someone and you're like, I can't tell if this person is absolutely a genius or if they're completely idiotic or if you're in San Francisco, you see somebody walking to a fancy restaurant with like a hoodie and like, you know, they're like, one, one all bird and one crock and you're like, all right, this person's either homeless or a billionaire, right? Like, that's like a pretty common situation in San Francisco. That's how I feel when I go to websites like this. I'm like, these are either the biggest dummies on earth and don't because I can't, I can't understand what they do, right? Their website is full of pages. It just says like performance are our product or something like that. Yeah, it's like going into a video game and like you taught, you bump into one of the stock characters that just like, oh, hey, I didn't see you there. Hello. And this is, I keep repeating some on loop, some random shit that doesn't make any sense. That's their website. So these websites, they're either like absolute money printers.
- Or it's like, you know, someone's aunt who's got some dream of like, you know, being successful and they're never gonna make it Because this makes no sense. I can't tell and now when I get to finally then I see the the key money tab Investor relations if you got an investor relations tab on your on your website like it's working right like, you know Put in the Bill Clinton clip where he's like I did not have relations with that woman That's how that's how I feel when I see the investor relations tab. I know some shit's going down That's hilarious Our software is the worst have you heard of HubSpot see most TRMs are cobbled together mess But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new VRM our software is the best HubSpot grow better It's kind of this whole website in this whole brand It reminds me of like a fourth grade classroom with like the like, you know Like teamwork and like each letter like it spells a certain word. Do you know what I mean or like? teamwork T is for teamwork is That's what the this whole website looks like but it makes 500 600 ish million in revenue market cap isn't very great because it's a Lee Jen company those typically just don't have good market caps, but it's just crazy They just ignored all the unimportant stuff like how good does their website they're like Public-facing brand website look and they only focus on just the results I guess and they own all these other websites that don't look so bad and they clearly get results But it's like a really interesting company and it's another frame-breaking business where they just don't give a shit about the things that most people care about and It works. It's effective
- So I recently met two guys who run a business like this and they've run three other businesses like this and exited them I'm gonna share I can't share the story now, but I'm hoping one month from today I Could share a kind of crazy story about them. So I'm just gonna put that there Create a teaser for a future one month from today. You know, there will be a crazy story about these two guys I might even have them on the podcast. I don't know yet, but But this is this is insane. This is a San Parse special. How did you find Quinn Street? Where where were you?
- What was in the what VPN and private browser did you have open when you were searching for this two ways one a guy named Jackie Chu who I like just like tweeted at this tweeted me this a while ago and I just saved it and then number two Joe Spicer my partner in a bunch of stuff. He told me he used to work with them He owned an ad network and he was like in the early 2000s like I worked with them They basically right now they do car insurance and things like that But they used to do University of Phoenix So University of Phoenix you they would you know they owned all these school websites You would Google like what's a good online degree? They figured out that and this what what the these guys look unsophisticated. They are not they're very sophisticated They like know how to get traffic to websites. They know how to do SEO like they look like a fat guy who like it trains Jiu Jitsu just like just like you talked about like oh this guy He's good and but then he like you know can like put you in a headlock but in three seconds That's what these guys yeah And so anyway, I found it just by goofing around and talking to people
- This is crazy. So they own insurance.com, insure.com, car insurance.com, card ratings.com, money rates, bank tracker, M1 and modernize home services. And then they partner with way more. By the way, that's a really great source for info is talk to people at ad networks. Yeah, they know everything. People who like work at Google Cloud or AWS, they know everything. They see everything. They know who's making money and who's not. They know who's getting traffic and who's not. And like if you ever wanted to go figure out your next gig.
- Go be like yeah, I'll be janitor at this like mobile ad network. I'm gonna go be janitor at AWS My payment all I need is like login credentials into the dashboard I like to I'll be a account rep for high value clients And therefore I need that list of the high value accounts that we have and you basically just mind that and you're like alright Which one of the you know who am I gonna copy Do there's a website going to a barbershop and you see like I'll take the number 12 the fuckboy fade please Do you guys do eyebrow lightning bolts? No, okay, fine. I'll take the number 12
- That's funny. Dude, alright, the next one is in your world. Not just because he's an Indian guy, but because he's an e-cut guy. Come up with some reason that it's not just that. I don't know, man. Indian entrepreneurs, you guys are taking over the world. You guys all are part of the same tribe. You know one another kind of. There's only a billion of you. So this guy, alright, so I was looking at the Inc. 5000 list. Of all the list, that's the only one that kind of matters. It still, you get so gay, man. Dude, I see this all the time. I see the random ass.
- Some digital agency that I've worked with that does not like nothing special They're like we're a three-time ink 5000 winner. I'm like well You could still it's supposed to be based on revenue and they're supposed so I don't trust ink anymore But I used to and when I did like okay, let's I click the lake for 2022 black fight is number one black Five basically just went out of business I Already written the story though greatest active athletes bill Russell They like created the list and someone who works here like hey, we got to remove block five from number one and they're like Seems like a lot of work. They're like look I Don't make up the rules here. I just think them up and write them down according to us is 245,000 percent this year You forgot the negatives
- so far away the computer. I don't know where my charger is. That's what 8,000 is. You go to the office. No one knows what the charger is. We can order one, but we would need our computer to do that. I guess I could speak by best behind my way home. But they're like, oh, it's happy hour. Jackers have given bid at a, have you ever been at like a company happy hour? And like you'll hear news that something's really, really bad has happened. And had you heard about that during the day, you'd be like, live it and like a kill. Yeah, I'm gonna fucking kill some boy. Like this is live it. And then you hear about it like when you're laughing at happy hour, you're like,
- Yeah, like that's what happened. You know, I'm talking about you're a bit like a company happy or do you like hear bad news and you're like 100% we used to do ours on Friday. It was called the Friday Wine Down and it was like wine and cheese and like whatever. You know that often you guys wash. So it's like a bunch of wine and cheese types of guy though. I know but the office before I joined the office was pretty, you know, adult and mature and like sophisticated people and then I joined I started hiring people that would sleep at the office. And so like it became this crazy culture clash. We ended up ending it but it was so funny because it would be like Friday you look at the numbers like well.
- Still don't have part of our kid fit. I guess. All right. Let's just head over to the office at large. Just drink for a bit and like servers down. It's like how much traffic you think we get on the weekends anyways? Yeah. One guy would go back to his desk to like fix the thing or like check the check. They'd check their email like, Oh, we got to go fix this. And then everybody else would be like, sort of watch them walk away. Like, all right, if he looks like he's having trouble, I'll go to. Yeah. You're like, no, don't.
- that's how you talk it's just the voice of like well let me know if you need anything. I was looking at this eight five thousand which apparently just bullshit black by I didn't realize I saw black by was number one I didn't realize that that was the company that like went out of business with so yeah the list is kind of no at this point it doesn't really matter but I saw someone who's number six or number seven it's called high key it's like a
- Keto cookie business type of thing and the guy's last name I don't know if it says it on this list but this other list I was looking at it was Patel and they use his real name But I was like wait, I think that sounds like AJ Patel So who I recognize and high key was like six or five. Do you see what it is on the list? Yeah, it's number five or six. Yeah, and they grew by forty 1000 percent. I think that just means 41 X, right? So like if it was a million there do 42 million now or 41 million. Yeah, again these numbers Do you ever heard this word? Yeah, it just means like fake, right? Yeah, but I'm all about the word for Gazy. I feel like I can own this corner I don't know anyone who says it and absolute pleasure absolute treat say the same way Yeah, it's like well, it's like the most popular line in Wolf of Wall Street Who gave you for Gazi. Yeah, it was a tall game. You know just carry the 12, you know, like I just can't do this So this guy AJ Patel he started this thing called high key which I would imagine is in the 30 or 40 million range But listen to this guy. So he's probably in his
- later 30s, probably 35 or 36. So in like 2012, 2013, 2014, he started a vitamin brand and it only did okay. And then he started also tinkering with a skincare brand, which it actually did much better. It got to like 10 million or so in revenue. He hired a CEO, the CEO kind of like drove it into the ground and didn't really do that well. And so he started focusing again to his vitamin brand and he's like, look, it's doing okay. But who's the best customer of a vitamin company? Dogs. Because this is it, I'm not disparaging him, but like, do they work?
- Yeah, why not like fuck Aussie you know like Welcome to for gazii ink. Yeah, they accept limits for dogs. They'll never tell you if it works or doesn't work Yeah, you know what to be that's like it's like what's that memory loss game where it's like brain teasers You know brain dacity or brain acid. Yeah, it's like it's like neurosity. No, no. Yeah It's like having like like a like an ad campaign towards those with amnesia like does or or with like Alzheimer's Like does it work at yeah, maybe So that's like what like these vitamins for dogs are like who knows if it actually works and He starts growing this company and he pivots from like, you know normal vitamins to dog vitamins And he starts growing this thing and it takes off after a while and he in it and he kills it He gets a 25 million in revenue and then he sells part of it Uh to a PE company and he took 60 million dollars off the table Then he grew up for another three years and sold it for like 650 million dollars And he still owned like half of it
- So collectively he made 300, 400 million dollars at the age of 32 and this guy isn't in Silicon Valley He's not in New York. He's not in Brooklyn. He's in Orlando, Florida capital of George George City, USA You know George City white new balance town 22 listeners in Orlando. They all just collectively looked out at their lap and came back and nodded like facts of fact, maybe Yeah, yeah, yeah, like Like you know the England or Illinois is the land of Lincoln, Florida is like land of dogs the bounty hunter You know like and that's where this this he's born in India Indian immigrant came over decided for some reason the Florida's the place and Knocked it out the park and
- not really well known and I was just like researching him and high key is now Number six on this list they grew 41 percent 41,000 percent so 41 X So if they were doing a million in revenue or 500,000 in revenue They're doing 20 to 40 million in revenue now So it's another nine figure and value brand and this guy is just quietly crushing it and I love it and I watched a talk with him There's this thing. There's this website called capitalism calm Dude, I'm reading the transcript of that talk right now as you speak
- It's pretty crazy. So let me just recap. This guy is known mostly for, he sold Zesty Paul's that company for 600 million, I think, right? So the, it was over in the, in the, in the transcript. He says, yeah, the public number is 600, but it actually got raised a little bit higher. Wow. And he, he also has high key snacks. In this thing, it says his first business. I was like his first kind of side hustle was he was selling, he's like, I played the single poker and I got to, by the way, I did this exact same thing. That's why this stood out to me. I told you, you guys are brothers, man. You guys are now I know the connection. So he got to a million chips. He sold it for 37 bucks. I, I did this on poker stars. I grinded my way. I accumulated a million. That was my actual first million.
- It was a million fake poker chips on poker stars. And I sold it for $13. And I tell you what, I've never felt like more of a prostitute in my life. I was like, wow, I just worked so hard for like three months to get the, like just grinding the free money game. And I got to a million chips and I sold it for $13 via PayPal. And then I proceeded to lose the $13 immediately on the real money tables. And I was like, I had never felt like, you know. So I was like, take a shower. I feel dirty. Yeah, I googled like, can I declare bankruptcy just out of embarrassment? And I was like, is there some like version of that? Is I was so embarrassed at like the terrible trade I had done. He said he did that same thing. And he started doing that as a like, as a market, basically on eBay. And I think he made like a hundred or 200 grand.
- just doing the fake poker chips, like buying and selling basically. Which is, it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like a kid being good at chess when they're six. Like if you're doing that on eBay, it's like, yeah, you're gonna. Yeah, well, just here's all my money. Just hopefully you'll figure it out one day. Just get me back when you can. Like that's what you do when you, when you meet people doing things like that. That's like it just tell. We need this guy on. And I'll give you two. I'm talking to him. I've been talking to him on Facebook. I got him. He's, he clearly has, you know, he comes from, where he's cut from the same cloth. I know what kind of cloth that is, but it's definitely all cloth. Whatever the. Yeah, we'll assume it's silk. But dude, this guy, he, I started becoming friends with him on Facebook. Never talked to him in my life. There's a software that I needed to use. I don't want to out him, but there's a software I needed to use. And it's like 10 grand a year. And I mentioned to him that I use it. He goes, oh, here, I have an annual subscription. Here's my password. And he's been letting me use this free like $10,000 a year subscription. So this guy, this guy is my guy. My man. Yeah. And so what's the second reason why we need him on here? Because I just Googled his name, AJ Patel.
- Now here's a guy sold a company for over 600 million sold another company got heicky snacks He's sitting on store shelves everywhere in the cross the country Guess what Google puts up in the the like Google thinks I'm talking about Patel AJ MD the doctor in San Francisco Dude no matter what an Indian guy does in business the doctor is still number one He's still at the top of the ranks and so he needs to come on this pod So we can we can get this guy's SEO One what's Jessica Alba's company honest the guy started that his name's Brian Lee He started like that shoe dazzle and like legal zoom if you Google Brian Lee like he ain't coming up
- Oh dude, it's a wrestler. It's a guy who looks like Undertaker or like Big Show or something. Yeah, like Brian Lee, like it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or not. You know, you cannot, which by the way, fame is always way better than money. So wrestling beats being a billionaire. But this guy in his talk, he said something amazing. So like he hired the CEO to run his skincare brand and he says, yeah, like it's stunk. This guy, like I gave him the reins and I told him to do it. And he totally talks like to me and I thought he knew what he was doing. And he, and it didn't work. And the guy goes, um,
- The interviewer goes well was it a sad day when you fired him like it must have been hard right and AJ goes No, it was awesome firing him was so easy because he was so bad And I felt so great like getting rid of all the dead weight and I look at business as a living organ organism And like I have zero emotional attachment if someone doesn't serve the business And I'm willing to fire myself or anyone else and I have zero sadness about it And I saw that and I was like hell yeah, I call that you know what I call that I call that Korean Convenient store owner energy remember you remember here's why you remember um
- Remember like the Rodney King riots like in the 90s. Remember like these pictures of like the Korean store business owners with like shotguns standing on top of their like, they're like, no, like, yeah, like, let's go. I was talking to like some people I invested in the other day and they were telling me about their business and like how they're like, things aren't going that well. I'm like, well, can you do me a favor? Like do a screen share. Let me see your calendar. And like it was totally open and like they hadn't booked a lot. Like I'm like, what I'm like, every building meditation afternoon walk. Yeah, like dude from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It's got to you have to have sales calls set up with perspective customers and like, don't give me this nonsense of like, oh, well, you know, it went out of business, but we learned a lot. Or like, you know, like we just couldn't.
- Or the things that you're suggesting Sam, they don't scale. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no dude right now You need to have that Korean store owner energy where it's just like if you don't make this work You don't feed your family and maybe you're gonna get deported like you need to have that like That that energy of starvation with a side of deportation is yeah Disturved dude you have to have that energy sometimes like of course like once things going well Yeah, you got to get like beyond like scale and all that stuff but like early on and call yourself a startup call yourself It doesn't matter what you call yourself. You're just a convenient store owner and like some convenient stores You go there and they have every type of kind bar you could ever imagine That's where I'm going other type of convenience stores like you know They don't have what I want I ain't ever going there again You got to be that convenience store that has every kind bar every cliff bar has a stick and just grinding and knows your name They are willing to call me like you know like what do you want the usual that type of that's what like A lot of startup Founders need and so this guy AJ Patel. He's got that Korean store business owner energy. You know that like immigrant hustle. I love it
- Yeah, he's great and that's great and I feel like we know so many people That it's like I meet with them and I hear them talking and it's like oh Let's just fast forward to the part where you write a medium article called my next chapter or our next our next adventure And then you're gonna sign off saying onwards Yeah, you're a fucking captain of a ship in the 1700s like a hoy, matey your business is failing wake up Do something don't just sit there and lose and then go work at Facebook and write my next chapter I'm so excited to lead, you know, you know digital digital ad products at Facebook now for the next two years of my life Before I go out and do the same stupid thing again. It's like wake up go figure this out right figure out something that's gonna work I don't care what you do. I don't even care if it's bad But like I need to see some like some serious action being taken You know and like realize your shit is not working
- And like I invest in startups and I know that the name of the game is you're gonna lose most of your money and only a few are gonna like Return all the money, but when I hear like their updates, I'm like alright. I I'm okay with swinging and missing. I'm not actually okay with it But I know that's part of the game and it's just a numbers game But for those not swinging it doesn't matter if I only invested five thousand dollars I reply and I'm like oh you're losing and you suck for these reasons and you need to improve because I give you my hard-earned money So you can have a good shot at trying something and you are not trying or taking a good shot And that's pissing me off and I told some of my other angel investor friends And I'm like well I kind of feel that way, but I never say that like what do you like what what why not?
- Why wouldn't you say this it doesn't matter how little or how much you invested you gave your hard-earned money to someone to like take a swing Step to the plate dog like swing but don't like give me this nonsense we We have this phrase I use in and all my companies which is that All right people are gonna make mistakes But there's two types of mistakes and you have to do you have to decide when you when you make a mistake Which one is it? Did you make an error of action or an error of inaction an Error of action is you tried something and you did it wrong or it didn't work or had a bad result But you know you were trying really hard to do something and you just messed it up. That's okay That's a fumble no problem Then there's an error of inaction which is your mistake was that you didn't do something you didn't think about something you didn't anticipate it You didn't plan, you know, you just forgot to do something you dropped the ball and that's the unforgivable run, right? So it's like I'm always like number one to be like bro. No problem. This was an error of action That's great. I love errors of action. That's how you get better and like never feel bad or sorry for an error of action
- For an era of inaction, I now have a problem. And so I feel the same way with founders that I invest in. It's like some of them, I'm like, oh man, they're just banging their head against this wall. I will only ever say something to somebody if I feel like if they're making errors of action. When they're making errors of inaction, my experience, I did it twice now. And I was just like, hey guys, your update makes it sounds like everything's okay, but read what you said, everything is not okay. And like you gotta do something. What can we do here? And I like rolled up my sleeves and I was like helping them with their strategy and their pivot and then their investor deck to raise money because they're running out of money. And same with the other one, I was like, hey guys, like this is just not working. Like you don't have product market fit. You have like two customers after two years, like what's going on? And they're like, no, we're really excited about the pipeline. We think that's not fair. And I was just like, oh my God.
- Not only were you like not aware of it, you're actually in denial of it. Wow. This is like, you know, complete waste of my time and, you know, sure enough, in both cases, they, you know, my like. Several days worth of like full time effort to try to help them, resulted in nothing. And so, you know, I know I'm picking, I'm a little bit pickier where I'll test the waters and I'll see, does this person, if given a dose of reality, do they take it and say more please or are they like, Oh, I don't want this. And it's like, Oh, if you don't want reality, then I don't want to, you know, I was just, there's a mistake on my part. I judged wrong, you know, my, my, my, my check was written to the wrong person.
- As the great Dr. Phil once said, don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain. All right, I got one last one. I have an interesting one. So it's like a billy of the week, but someone who like people never talk about or at least they don't talk about a lot. And he's got that gap. And when I say he, it's actually him and his wife and his wife is actually the more interesting person, but this guy a little bit is more front facing. His name's Stuart Resnick. Have you ever heard of Stuart Resnick? Have we talked about him?
- I don't know the name, but I just Googled it. And now I know they do the wonderful company or whatever. So give me his story. All right. So listen to this guy's name, Stuart Resnick, him and his wife. His wife's name is Linda. They're based out of California. And so in the 1970s, he started a janitor business and he just basically was a janitor at one point, I think, and then he eventually hired a few more and he got contracts with buildings. And once he was in those buildings and had the contracts, he expanded to security guards. And at one point, he had a thousand armed security guards on staff. So he like drew this janitor business into a security guard business. And it was amazing. He got some lucrative contracts to LAX and it turned out to be a great business. And he ended up selling it and he made a little bit of money. And with that money, he eventually bought the Franklin Mint, which at the time was one of the world's largest sellers of coins, collectible coins. And oddly enough, you know who owns the Franklin Mint right now?
- No, no idea. Former MFM. Tylopes. Tylopes. Does he really? Yeah. That was my, that was a joke. Yeah, basically the good job. So basically like in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even up to the 90s, like all the Maryland Monroe coins and Elvis Presley coins, the Franklin Mint, they, they're the ones who started it or who produced a lot of them. And so from there, he part laid that into a couple of things. And now at this point, his company, it's called Wonderful Bramps. They own a bunch of really interesting brands. They own landmark wines. That's not that interesting. Teleflora. Do you know what Teleflora is? It's a pretty big $350 million a year business where you call, it's like 1 800 flowers, a competitor. But here's the big ones that they own. The first is Wonderful Pistachios. You've seen those at the store, right?
- The second is palm wonderful. You know, palm wonderful. Yeah, palm juice, yeah, pomegranate. Yeah, palm juice. And so basically the wife Linda, she, she's like, you know, I love pomegranate, but there's no, this was like in the 80s. She's like, there's not really a good palm grant juice. Let's, let's do this juice. And she goes, you know what, pomegranate, it's good for your heart. It's, what else is it? And she like learns about what it's good for. And she was like, you know, it makes women have like an hour glass figure, like it like, it's like good for you and like, you know, it makes you feel good, I guess. And so they made, she made the bottle like a, you know, it's like a, if you ever seen it, it's like a signature bottle. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a signature bottle. Well, they own another company that has a wonderful signature bottle called Fiji water.
- So they also owned Fiji, which has a square bottle. And at this point, they're privately owned. They're one of the largest producers of, one of the largest farm owners in America. So they own all men in pistachio farms and they do $4 billion a year in revenue. And so- And so it says in 2018, they were the wealthiest farmers in the country. Yeah. And this guy, you know, the, I believe the wife Linda, she's Jewish, but she's got this like Southern Bell charm to her. Like she's from like Alabama or something. She reminds me like an old like, you know, Faulkner novel. Like she reminds me of like a character and forced gunp movie.
- And, and, but they're based out of California. And then he's got like a little New York vibe where he like kind of comes off as like cool and hit, but they're farmers. They own their huge farmers and they're like have the best brands out there. Fiji is a great brand. And they created these. They're not just acquiring these, right? No, they made them. Yeah. They make these brands and they own way more. Wonderful is a really good brand. I love wonderful pistachios. And so these guys just kill it. They're just quietly crushing it. And I think at this point, I think they're like 81 or 82 years old. And I still watch talks with them and they talk about how they go, well, how do you stay close to their customers? And they're like, well, I just read Twitter all day. And I like read about and like sometimes I'll like. They're just like us. Yeah, they're just like us. And so sometimes they just like look at like what customer they're like, we use Facebook and we just like skim like our page and we just see like which complaints are actually good and which are, are nonsense and we reply and then we make changes and we just run our business that way. And they're really interesting people. So that's the billies of the week. Stewart Resnick and his wife Linda. Linda.
- Wow. Yeah. She looks like the type of person that would give you a kiss on the cheek and then wipe off the lipstick. Yeah. What's that? Yeah. Yeah. I love those women. They always smell so good. Yeah. By going to the bathroom at one of the, at that of woman like that's house is just an absolute pleasure. There's so many things you know, so many sense, sense you didn't even know existed. Like you'll spend 15 minutes just trying to wash your hands to get out of there because it's like, Oh, wow, this is like a handkerchief instead of like a towel. This is amazing. Yeah. At the end of this, you're going to be an expert on butterscotch candy. Like you're going to go up like those little like red, green and yellow candies that like what the fuck.
- What are these? This is like fruit punch candies. So I love this brand. And I love this. And by the way, this teleflora 1 800 flowers thing, why doesn't somebody create like 1 800 flowers and teleflowers as just a ghost kitchen on door dash and on Uber Eats? Like why is this? Does that exist? Like what? Why can't I just order flowers? I've seen a flower thing when I go on there, but I think it's like door dash is own. I think you could create like either edible and rain or flower thing and just partner with local florists to fulfill the demand. And it's like, it's like way better than food. But I know whenever there's like a birthday or something like that, that's my go to thing now is just like, I'm going to door dash them something.
- Right because like I never play in the game. What's like a good enough? Like I'll do like like the last one I did was like, you know, like a bunch of Boba tea Like this person like really likes Boba tees so I sent them a bunch of Boba or I'll send them like, you know Pizza and wings or I'll send them a cinnabon and whatever or I'll send them, you know a bunch of ice cream or chocolate or whatever Because it's like I can procrastinate until 30 minutes before Like their birthday, you know is over and I could push this button and still be a great friend So let me do that. That's a great friend machine
- Noah Kagan for my birthday gifted me like 200 bucks worth of 16 ounce bottles of topo Chico from Costco And I like that was it was like a it was easy It was like a month and a half supply of topo Chico and it's like all I drank for two and a half months or something It was awesome. Yeah on your birthday. I tried to see like is there such a thing as gas station gift cards, but I was really tough to find anything that would work Funny I was like can I open a tab in my friend's name? You guys sell dip and like yeah, not Joe cheese What is the not to cheese? If it brings his own cup, can he just walk out with some hot cheese? That's awesome. That's the episode dude. You really did carry that episode that was amazing This is this entire episode is gonna be called the Sam Parr special and It's just Sam bringing hit after hit after hit you want to know quads to work You want to know what I'm most proud about guess I'm long that took me to prepare
- I think you would be proud if you spent a long time like 45 minutes. Oh, with the other way. It's 1 p.m. now. We started recording at noon. I block off of my schedule from 11 to noon is my research time. I did all of this in that one hour time and I even took a bathroom break and I definitely did some pull ups. So, yeah, did you like take the limitless pill? How did you do all that? I just got a good brain. I don't know. Yeah, my brain's good. I just was on fire today. I drank a bunch of coffee.

4 Robot Businesses That Will Take Over The Fast Food Industry (#359) [290S2wVSgGc].txt

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- The world has changed where there's now this like robotic arm. That's a general purpose robotic arm. So think of it like an iPhone, right? It's a piece of hardware that you could buy that you could program to do anything, right? So when Steve Jobs came out with the iPhone, they were like, this is an iPhone, it can access the internet, it has a GPS inside and it can make phone calls. Like that's what it could do. And from there, you guys figure out the rest, right? Like initially they didn't have the App Store, but then when they did have the App Store, now all of a sudden you get the flashlight app. And then the app that turns, you know, it's like a ruler. It uses the camera to like measure something. Then you get like Strava, it's like, we'll use the GPS to do this thing. So it's basically like a programmable general purpose tool. So that's what's happening with these robotic arms. So that's what's happening with these robotic arms. So that's what's happening with these robotic arms.
- Alright, we're live. Bro, what's up? Listen to this thing. I'm going to tell you something. I, you know, had been being really healthy this summer and didn't eat a lot of sugar. I didn't have no sugar other than like fruits and vegetables and like just no sugar added. Today I decided today was my planned cheat day after three months of like doing this and I ate some ice cream. I feel miserable. Yeah, the cheat day is always underwhelming. It's always like I'm looking forward to it. I'm planning for it. Then I start doing it. I feel good while I'm eating it.
- Well, it's like it's like When you drink and then the next day you're hungover and you're like, why did I do that? But then you immediately do it again like a few days later I kind of feel like that except instead of like three days. It's like it's 10 minutes So like I eat something and 10 minutes later. I'm feeling horrible. I'm like, oh fuck it. There's still some love though I should probably do it. Oh my god. I feel so sick. You have such an extreme personality You always go to these extremes You also I feel like this is also why people hate Like fit people is because they like have these types of problems and normal people are just like what are you talking about? Like what is the big deal? Why are you doing this yourself? Why you wake up in the middle of night thinking about ice cream? It's like the way that you know the way that some people get annoyed about
- like crossfitters and You know like people who love to talk about intermittent fasting I think there's people who feel that way about us with business and money, which is just like dude not everything's a business It's okay, and I would say that if we succeed We need to succeed in creating people that are as annoying as crossfitters as our fans I think that's my new goal. Yeah, you need freaks and here you got you're at a huge disadvantage You know why right is because you are what I like to call emotionally Stable you have too much emotional health good emotional health in order to you know be extreme like some people I'm reading this great book about Leaders and how the guy the author looks at a lot of like Interesting leaders who we like like so for example able link is one of the most written about I think the most written about American figure ever went to church Hill a bunch of people like that And he basically his whole theory is that during okay times A mentally stable leader is could be adequate, but during bad times mentally unstable leaders Typically are the best at leading because they understand like the ups and downs They are kind of crazy enough kind of like when an entrepreneur like invent something or start something versus the type of person Who just runs it and runs it like even keel and they're like well You kind of need some extremes or extreme times and it like analyzes history on Emotionally unstable people and looks at like oh, they're actually the best during bad times
- Well, I think people underestimate this because in theory, it sounds like you want somebody who is stable. In theory, you want, let's say you joined a startup or a small company, you want it to be like, oh, how do we make decisions? You know, we talk about it as a group, we get a bunch of different perspectives, and then we sort of all chime in with what we think and we go with, you know, maybe the majority, it's like a democracy. And actually that shit doesn't work in startups. It is not the norm, and that would be the outlier if it was to work.
- The norm is what they call the benevolent dictator. So it's basically, we agree for better or for worse, that person's the captain. They're the captain and we're going on their ship and either we're going down or we're going to the promised land and that's how the best startups work, is they pick a captain and they just go ride or die with that person and they say look, for better or for worse, we need to make decisions fast. So one person's gonna always be faster than a committee. We need to be extremely decisive. So we can't be torn constantly by warring, one group wants A, the other group wants B, we can't have that.
- three, we need it to be a little bit extreme, because look, we're trying to do an extreme thing here. So maybe we need an extreme leader. And so I think in companies, you actually want a dictatorship. And people don't like that. They're uncomfortable with that, because that's not what you want in your country maybe, or that's not what you want in your local city. But it is what you want in a company. And it is what you want on any creative project, it's kind of my view. You want kind of a crazy genius is gonna be the creative force driving the thing, and everybody else get on board or get off. And that's how you ran the hustle. That's how I run my companies. It is definitely the way when it comes to creating new stuff from scratch. Yeah, and then it actually makes sense. And let me explain how I was, and you tell me if you're the same way. But if you look at like, with a CEO, it doesn't really matter if there's a 30% not approval rating. It's just like, do the numbers, like, does it work? For a publicly traded company, it's like, unfortunately or fortunately, the way you look at it, doesn't matter if you're an asshole, did the numbers go up? And did you achieve what you said you're going to achieve? And so it doesn't matter if you're employees. I mean, it matters if it becomes a retention problem, but if you have a 10% approval rating, but your numbers are great, it's great. If you have a 10% approval rating and you're the president of America, well, you're jobless, you know what I mean? Like you're not gonna win the next election. So it's just like all about appeasing to 1%. And because of that, we get used to this idea of like democracy and like, you know, I don't want to be led. This is like, you know, don't lead me, just like get me involved. And so I remember when I started my company, I was like, yeah, that's how I'm gonna run it. Like, look, this is like a meritocracy. We are all here working together. And it is that, but it is definitely more like, hey, I'm the boss. I will take input in from everyone. I'm making the decision. And this is the way that we're gonna go. And it's my job to make sure that you feel inspired to be here and all this other stuff. And I remember feeling really self-conscious about that. And then there'd be times where I wasn't the leader. Like for example, when I joined HubSpot, or maybe when you and I work on this podcast, it's like, well, I'm not exactly the boss. And I actually felt a lot of security and comfort when I said, hey, who's the boss of this project? And you just say, is this person the boss? Great, hey boss, what, you know, make your decision please. And I felt actually good about like being a follower. And then I realized that maybe I think my employees, when I'm the boss, like you have to have a boss, I think. And when you are the boss, it is kind of cool, but also very stressful. But when you're not the boss, it's like, yeah, I'm okay taking this role. And I recognize we need a leader. Just tell me what to do.
- Right. Yeah. What do they call it? One neck to choke. It's like there needs to be one neck to choke when it comes to any situation or any problem. Like if it's like, if I don't know who's in charge, if I don't know who's who actually makes the call, then you lose one really powerful thing, which is accountability. And so I think that's that's really important. I think that you're absolutely right. I don't mind whether I'm the person or I'm not the person in charge. I just like that there is a person in charge. I want a benevolent dictatorship because that's what I've had personally seen. I remember when I was at Twitch, and we did the first executive off site. So it's like, I don't know, the sort of like 15, exactly leaders in the company go to whatever some fancy place. They have a spread of, you know, like whatever team crumpets and even your busters in Daily City. Yeah. Fridays. You got a Friday's very happy hour. Potatoes is the nuclear margarita. Yeah. Yeah. You loaded potato and you start to decide to feature the company. You got to feel like your customers. You know, you got to go to the Applebee's and you got to get the nachos.
- So the CEO and the CEO, they get up there and they say, hey, look, we read the results from the last offsite we did a last quarter. And it seemed like the big thing you guys wanted was you felt like the decision making was too top down and you didn't have a say and you feel like it felt like your ideas either weren't heard or the groups, you know, it was all just sort of mandated from above and you just had to execute. You didn't feel empowered. So this time we're doing it different. And they like spent the whole day. And it was like, what are your ideas, children? And then everybody writes down their ideas and sticking to say, awesome, let's do a color voting system. Everybody vote on your top three. And you're like, uh, and they're like, you know, uh, so you want to do a commercial with the Rolling Stones, Sean, you know, that that cost a million dollars. Well, OK, we'll take that into account.
- Yeah, who here keeps writing billboards are back from where? What is this idea about? So it's like, you basically, and then you go through this whole day process where everybody's talking about it. And you could tell that these exes in a way, they're interested, but they're also biting their tongue a bit because they're like, look, all right, we said we're not gonna just like slam in with our opinion and just overrule everything and be like, guys, it's fucking obvious. We're doing one, two, and three. What are we talking about here? And so they didn't do that. They let everybody do their things. Great, come up and we leave the offsite.
- Fast forward either the next quarter of the quarter after that. So three or six months later, we go for the next off site. It's like, oh, we're in the feedback. We feel like we just don't know how decisions are being made. We kind of wish that the leadership would just step in and give us clear direction on what we're going to do. Like, hey, we're ready. We just need some clarity from you guys. It's called the law con, man. This is the law con. And so they basically were like, here, we'll let you try this. And I was just like, am I the only one in the room that just remembers what the last feedback was, which is the exact opposite, which is like two top down. And now it's like, are the leaders going to be leaders or not? Like we need clarity. Your job is to give us these decisions. Like we feel like you're just sitting back and then now it's mayhem. And it's like, and so that was like the affirmation of something I always believed. The second part of that. There's a skit from the Chappelle show where he wants to get Oprah pregnant. So he, you know, he wants to have Oprah's baby and he gets our pregnant and goes, gotcha. And like that's how I feel. Emmett is just like saying to himself after like three months. He's like, gotcha. You guys say what does the Chappelle got to clip? No, I'm kidding.
- pregnant. Are you sure it's my? It's yours. That's your bitch. The, the second thing is wartime and peacetime. I think this also matters a lot. So you want this sort of like dictatorship when it is wartime. And for, for a startup there for a company, there's usually two war times. There's the beginning. When you're nobody, you have no customers, no product, no direction. You have no market share, no nothing.
- And then if you start to succeed, you will hopefully enter some version of peacetime where it's like the thing is working. We don't need to every day wake up and worry about dying or killing our competitors or like all the stuff. Like, maybe you're working on maintenance, fixing bugs, maybe you're working on talking to customers and making sure you're supporting things that you kind of pushed by the wayside. Now there's more time to go do those things properly. You work on security. You work on server robustness, whatever. Just the same thing, but more and better a little bit every time. Yeah, you don't need to go and conquer new lands. You're basically taking your existing land and saying, oh, yeah, we need to fix up some things around here that we ignored during the wartime rush.
- But then you enter wartime again inevitably and that's when the competitive landscape changes, new platform gets released, competitors emerge, whatever. The economy changes. And being able to shift between those two gears is pretty tough. I think very few leaders can be the best wartime CEO and the best peacetime CEO. Usually you're one or the other, you're an amazing peacetime or amazing wartime and then you sort of stay too long when the season shifts. And so I think that's the other thing to recognize because people will always say, oh, this person's good or bad. And it's like, well, actually, maybe they're just amazing at one season and the season has changed. And now a different type of person would actually be best for what's going on now. And so that's the other thing about like kind of this dictatorship stuff that you got to know is like, what season are we in? If we're in wartime, I want a wartime CEO.
- If we're in peacetime, I need a peacetime CEO and I need to know when to shift. I always hated saying this because there's so many people who died and it was so bad for so many people, but I remember thinking like, do COVID was awesome? Like, I loved, I loved being in the trenches, you know? Like, it was actually quite exciting. It's exciting now because I know how the story ends and things and well, at the time I was quite scared, but looking back, I was like, oh, I feel alive. Like this is what it is about. And honestly, I kind of hate the war metaphor because, you know,
- First of all, there's people who heard actually in war. So yeah, that's true. This is a it's a borrowed It's a borrowed term term and they didn't give us permission the second thing is You know our war is fought literally at a keyboard with clicks firing left and right and so you know There's a part of me that just feels very lame. It's like yeah I felt so alive when I was logging into Google analytics every morning and checking out, you know what was good. It's like well Do you acknowledge that you're kind of a soft bitch right like it's like okay Yeah, as long as I acknowledge that then it's okay to continue this yeah this metaphor, but let's acknowledge It is a metaphor. It is not like real in any any way But I know what you mean, which was that when these big shakeups happen or there's a downturn
- where most people's reaction is, oh shit, I'm sorry, you know, this is bad for me and they just go with the sheep of like, it's bad for me versus a lot of other people recognize, hey, this is happening whether I like it or not. And given that it's happening, the questions I need to ask are, what opportunities does this open up for me? Where does this, what am I now gonna get strong in that I was otherwise weak in? What have I been neglecting that now it's time to put my focus on, right? Like just ask yourself better questions then you start to focus on cool, I'm gonna take market share in this area. I'm gonna quickly pounce on this thing that I've otherwise been neglecting that I now matters a lot or, hey, oh, now that everybody's comfortable with remote work and stuff like what, oh, that opens up this new opportunity for us and just ask better questions and you'll get better answers.
- Dude speaking of so I've got two topics here that are like kind of related to like mad men and crazy people the first Have you ever heard of this guy named Brad Brett adcock? No, have you heard of this company called the veteran do you remember veteran? Not really okay, but no I don't I could tell you what it is so this guy named Brett adcock He I just met him recently and he joined our community and I'd be getting a noam Listen to this guy's background. So he's 36 years old. He's from central, Illinois and in around 2012 2015 He started a company called veterinary and it's nothing particularly sexy It was just basically like a job site and it was a little bit like hired calm and eventually hired calm tried to bully Veterinary hired calm was also a similar business a job board But like you know more in-depth more technology and they raised north of a hundred million dollars fast forward five or six years later Veterinary ended up buying hired calm when hired calm went bankrupt And so veterinary was basically a job website to help people recruit engineers race ten million dollars eventually was acquired for a hundred and twenty ish About a hundred hundred fifty I think so this guy Brett. He's 36 now So back then when it was acquired that was in like 2015 so he was in his 20s He made low-digit tens of millions of dollars So he didn't tell me but I would imagine in the twenty million dollar range He but here's what he did tell me listen to this he put 100% of his money Minus a little bit of cash that he put down for a down payment for a house So when I say 100% he told me he goes I didn't own any outside equities I owned nothing I had my down payment my house and 100% of the earnings that I made Which was low tens of million tens of millions put into the business bank account and then he started a company called archer So basically it they make like these car they some people call them flying cars. They're basically like helicopters
- helicopters, but they kind of look like a car body. And I was like, how did you learn about this? And he said, I learned it all on my own. I read 50 engineering books and built three generations of electric aircraft in 2018 at the University of Florida where I was doing engineering courses as an undergrad. I had to build a lab there to have facilities big enough in 2018. And so with owning zero public equities outside of Archer, the Archer stock, he makes zero outside investments. And he said because he needs extreme focus. And all this money in Archer, Archer eventually does a SPAC. I believe they did a SPAC, but they went public. So they sold like a billion dollars worth of these flying vehicles to United Airlines or something like that. Takes it public for three or four billion dollars. Now the stock is, you know, like most stocks in the growth space. Is it doing so hot? But I still think it's a billion dollar company and his net worth skyrockets to a billion. I think now it's in the three or 400 range and makes all this money from Archer.
- And now I can't talk about his new startup, but I can't soon. He's told me he took basically $200 million, and he's put all of it into his new company. And still, to this day, he goes, the only stock that I own is Archer and my house. That's like the only outside investments. And then now the new business. And so I go, you know, is your wife and family okay with this? He goes, I've been doing, I've been going all in and been doing this for 20 years. They're used to it by now. And I said, what do you think about people who say, you know, you're kind of nuts. Why don't you square away a little bit of money while you can? And he goes, I don't care what people think. I just want to build the future. And this guy, he's not like one of these Elon Musk types where he's like hard to talk to. And you like ask him a question. He's like, you know, so smart that he can't articulate it. He's like fairly,
- Normal, I guess, normal quotation marks, but he's like easy ish to talk. He's easy to talk to. He's a personal personable charismatic guy and you're like, oh, you're seeing very reasonable. And then he says he does this stuff and I'm like, you are insane. You're a mad man. And so really interesting guy totally under the radar from central Illinois. He's only 36 years old. So I got along with him because I'm from Missouri. Really fascinating dude. And I'm on his Twitter. He's talking only about this thing called poll star. Is that his new thing or that's? Poll star is a, uh, poll star is like a subsidiary or their partner with Volvo and they make really cool cars. Is that what the tweet is about? I don't know. Yeah, he's just talking about poll star cars. The whole time. Okay. Uh, wow. Amazing. So, uh, so that's incredible. So they basically is it the, are they actually planes? Are they what they call VTOL, like vertical takeoff and landing. The second one. So kind of like a helicopter ish. It looks like a helicopter. It looks like four blades, four helicopter blades attached to like, you know, uh, a Honda Civic.
- Right. And why do you need this? What does this do differently than a helicopter? I have no idea. I feel like question here's the answer. Does he ask you? It's usually name where you're from. And then instead of like, you know, what do you do? It's like, what other equities do you own? And like, how much of your personal net worth are you reloading into your next company? Wow. Okay. Let's focus on that. I don't want to know why you've created this company. I have no idea. What the actual helicopter does? That's what a website's for. I don't know. It takes cool pictures. I don't know. What are planes for? It's just like a plane. I don't know. I mean, I'm looking at the website. Oh, it's also just cool pictures of the aircraft. Yeah. I don't give a fuck what the widget is. It's a widget.
- It's just like this beautiful black woman getting into this helicopter and address and I'm like what she doing What's the purpose here? And then she and then the next photo is she's on like a sand dune and Dubai It's like oh, did she just fly fly to the desert? Yeah, she had a ghost of a date Sorry, bread adcock we did not do a justice there I'm the actual thing, but okay, so hold on there's a little question or a plot hole about the story so
- It said that he had to he was an undergrad in 2018, but you said he sold his company like in 2016 No, like he back to school. Yeah, he was in school like he went back to school to learn how to do this stuff. Oh My god even more incredible this guy's interesting. I became an undergrad Yes, and he told me he goes he goes whenever I do something I go all in he goes for example I'm I I'm going all in on my latest thing. I went all in on archer He goes when I was starting veterinary There was a time where I took a personal loan one month because I didn't have any money my personal account And we had to pay rent and he goes this is just what I do and so he said he wanted to learn about electric cars or whatever these this
- Cool shit is and he went and learned about it at University of Florida Wow Okay, that's incredible speaking of people who go all in you know My buddy Furkan and he's been on the podcast. We haven't had him on a while We should bring him back on but basically He was my co-founder at my last startup before we we it was called bebo and we sold it to twitch and then since then he left and he was I was like what are you gonna? Well, you got to say what he did before that Before he's got a kind of a crazy story before that he was a co-founder of a company called app-loven that went public and it's like I don't know
- $15, $20 billion mobile ad network, a mobile gaming company. So one of the fastest growing companies ever. Yeah, just an incredible story. They've only ever raised $4 million and they took that $4 million of external capital. So they took, I think, $4 million from the founders and $4 million from strategic investors and they turned that into basically $20 billion of equity value, which is insane capital efficiency. Three billion a year in revenue. So it's like a big business. When they rotated, they were a mobile ad network and then they went public and when they were going public, it was like a mobile ad network. Their comps were not very good because most mobile ad networks were not doing very well. And even though they were like, well, our business is actually really good, but we're just going to keep getting compared.
- to these low multiple other mobile ad networks. So they basically executed a pivot mid flight and we're like, well, on our ad network, the number one advertisers are games. That's who makes the most money on our network. That's who pays the most money on our ad network. It's mobile games. So they're like, why don't we just build mobile games and buy mobile gaming studios? And so they built up this mobile gaming arm that I think does over a billion dollars a year in revenue. I think they do two billion on just the mobile game. It's like the Amazon basic of games. Yeah, exactly. So they started buying up these little partnering, buying up studios and building their own studio in house. And then they would just use their existing reach in their ad network to grow their own games and insane. And then they got valued at Machire because they had a different story than just where a mobile ad network. And that's it. So anyways, Furcon's been doing crazy shit, but he's been going all in since he was very, very young. So when he was 15, he worked at a .com during the .com boom. Like his dad was like, hey.
- I met this guy they raised like an November dot com is like this guy raised $50 million on a PowerPoint. He needs somebody to build his website. He doesn't know how you know how to build websites like why don't you go work over there. So at 15 he's working at a dot com. Then he starts his own ecom site that's like selling like cool like mods for your computer. You know people like trick out their cars with like rims and stuff. He was doing that for like your gaming computer or something like that. You can have like a see through case with like blue liquid going through it or stuff like that. He goes to San Jose state. So not like a fancy school.
- Freshman year, he's like- And see an immigrant? Is he from? Well, yeah, his family's their Pakistani, but they've lived, he grew up at the Bay Area. So he grew up at the Bay Area. That's part of the magic. It's like his dad worked, I think, at IBM. And when he was five years old, his dad would bring home the early computer or the early printer, it'd be like, let's assemble this together. So that's how he learned how to do shit. So anyway, he's a freshman year at San Jose State. He's like, dude, I just keep leaving the classroom to take calls because we're out of inventory or whatever. And so he just quits San Jose State. He goes all in on the E-com thing. He figures out one hack with the E-com thing, which was like-
- Back then I think on Google or Yahoo or somewhere where people were searching for stuff you could just sort my cheapest So he just wrote a bot that would always price What like their their main like high selling skew one cent lower than whatever the cheapest price was and it was like his lost Leader and it would always bring somebody to the to the site And that's what he that's when he decided to quit school was he was in a class and they were Describing what a lost leader is he's like oh, that's the shit. I'm doing with my like Well, I'm like I'm like selling this stuff at a loss to get traffic. He's like I don't need to be here I'm learning this shit like in the real world So he just left and just like I dropped out and then he's like whatever goes on he spends a couple years playing poker as well Like you know a bunch of different crazy stuff comes back starts doing startups
- And now, and so after we saw an after Apple oven goes public, the guy never needs to work again. He's got all the money in the world. And I'm like, so what are you gonna do? And he's like, I wanna, like I'm gonna buy a big space. And basically it's like he's creating his heaven on earth, which did he find that space or did he rent it? It looks beautiful. He's renting that one, but he was looking at buying before. Then when COVID started happening, he's like, I'm just gonna lease these. They're all like dirt cheap leases now. And like, I don't know if you buy. It's a sick place over on the Presidio.
- Yeah, so he's in Fort Mason. He's got like, I don't know, maybe 10,000, 20,000, 25,000 square feet or something like that. It's crazy. And he basically created his heaven on earth, which I've come to realize is like, I, that's actually what I respect the most. It's like, I don't respect, because people will be like, Oh, on one hand, you guys go all in on Elon or Brett adcock. These guys will go all in. Is that what you love? But you also love this guy who's got this amazing lifestyle and works four hours a month. The same thing. The same thing. They're creating their heaven on earth. And I think that is that my best description of what I admire and what I want to do is create my own little heaven on earth, which takes too big. I don't even like that description. I say they're taking the world and they're just bending it over their leg to help the shape that they wanted to be. You know what I mean? They're just spanking their world. Yeah, they're a dominatrix and the earth is their is the recipient. No, they're just like making the world. Because that's what it feels like. It feels like they're forcing things. They're forcing it industry. And they say, Billy, go get my belt and then they bend the industry over and they spank it. Yeah, exactly. Billy, go get my belt. That's another one. So, so he's also an all in kind of guy because he basically immediately created like a lot of work for himself. He rented out this space. He puts 40. I went there to visit. There's 40 people working in there. I'm like, who are all these? This is like a bunch of young brown dudes. Like, who are all these Indian dudes everywhere? What are they? I sit in one of them because they're just part of his thing. I was like, furcon. Are these guys legit? And he like told me this huge explanation. I was like, all right. So just say yes or no. And I say less. Yeah. Yeah. I actually want to just invest in the index because actually individually, all of the ideas are a little bit crazy. They're like, one of these is going to work. I just don't trust myself to pick the right one. So I actually have talking to him about like, how do I just index into all of your crazy? Like, I would like a piece of every brown dude in this, in this under this roof here. Like, how do I do that? And I think we're going to work it out. But I don't tell you about one of the things that I saw there. So dude, the guy I invested in was a white guy.
- Shit. Oh, yeah. You're the AGM drafting Kyle Forver. Dude. You should take LeBron, I think. So one of the guys that, one of the guys I met in there, they were doing something called Orangewood Robotics. Have you ever heard of this company? No, but obviously I'm in. Yeah. Or maybe I can. Yeah, I go in and there's a reason it's called Orangewood. I'll explain it in a second. So they go in and I walk in and there's a bunch of people at their computers and then there's the big thing he wanted to do was he was like, you know, a lot of engineers.
- They want to work in a space with other smart engineers. That's cool. But one of the things that engineers struggle with He's like the first thing I bought when I got money is I bought like a 3d printer and you know Then like this robotics thing and then I brought about this drone thing He's like I just want to have a whole bunch of hardware available For free to engineers that are building stuff that requires this stuff. That's very expensive So they can come and hack on these these tools and they don't need to like go buy this You know $15,000 machine that just does this thing and so that's what he did and so when I walk in I'm like what's going on in there There's basically a room with a bunch of robotic equipment in there I walk in and there's this company called Orangewood
- And what these guys are doing is they basically are like, I was like, explain what this is. They go, oh, we have this robot that can paint stuff. And I was like, okay, why? And they're like, well, you know, like, you know, look around this room, like you see that, you see this? You know, there's this process called powder coating. You ever powder coated something? And I was like, you obviously don't know who you're talking to. Yeah, so I was like, no, I was like, is that for donuts? What is that? And he's like, no, basically it's this like process where you need to paint. I still can't expect it to be. By the way, that was a good one. Thank you. Um, you do that thing in text where you're like six out of 10, eight out of 10, not any joke. That was a good one. I like that one powder coating for donuts.
- So basically they're like, you know, it takes, you know, a specialist you have to, you know, you have to hire higher labor Labor is really hard nowadays and it's also like a chemically intensive process It's not really that good for you powder coating like I do it with motorcycles So like your motorcycle frame is just metal and they powder coat it which is it kind of looks like paint I don't actually know exactly how it works But you do it in like a room that's sealed and you do it with gloves on and it's like you're putting it looks like a powder on it And it's like a sealant slash protected thing slash paint You
- Right. So they basically train this robot to do it. And what they do, the trick is that the world has changed where there's now this like robotic arm that's a general purpose robotic arm. So think of it like an iPhone, right? It's a piece of hardware that you could buy that you could program to do anything. So when Steve Jobs came out with the iPhone, they were like, this is an iPhone, it can access the internet, it has a GPS inside and it can make phone calls. Like that's what it could do. And from there, you guys figure out the rest, right? Like initially they didn't have the App Store but then when they did have the App Store, now all of a sudden you get the flashlight app and then the app that turns, you know, it's like a ruler. It uses the camera to like measure something. Then you get like Strava, it's like, we'll use the GPS to do this thing. So it's basically like a programmable general purpose tool. So that's what's happening with these robotic arms. These guys wrote software to teach that robotic arm they bought how to powder coat things.
- And then they taught it how to paint floors and then they taught it how to weld things. So this thing can literally just weld shit together. They taught it how to, you know, pick and pack things. So it could take, it could sort, take things out of one place and put it into another place based on what it looks like. And, and the way you do it is like, you just write a program that, that does each of these functions and you need to specialize it. And then there's, there's more sophisticated ways they'll put a camera on top and they'll teach it to like recognize stuff. And then they'll be like, my cousin was doing this where he was teaching this robotic arm. Literally, I went to his office and it was straight up a robotic arm and a, like a hole. And his whole thing was, can I get the arm to go in the hole? And I was like, what's going on here guys? Like this is a little like, you know, sexual robot stuff. What is it? And he's like, no, this is basically in the future, electric cars are going to get, need to get charged. But when they're self-driving, there's no driver to get out of the car and plug it in.
- He's like, so you need the charging station to be able to automatically attach to the car. Otherwise, we're never going to have self-driving cars that work that are electric because who will fill them up? You'll need a person there always to be able to go do this and they'll need basic gas attendants at every gas station to do this. Which in my mind, I was like, that doesn't sound so bad, but like, you know, there's a reason he pivoted. But the point is they were training this arm to be able to use the camera to find the hole and exactly get in without scratching the car. And so there's like this whole industry of people that are doing this. They're just figuring out how to program these general purpose robotic arms and they're making very interesting businesses off them. So these guys are doing it with painting. I thought that was pretty cool because it's like a high value thing. Like you rent it for 500 bucks for the day and it'll paint all your shit. And it's like, that's cheaper than hiring a person to do it and more reliable maybe because they'll do it. It'll do it like perfectly even every single time. You don't have like human error.
- And so the other one that's interesting like this is Cafe X, which you've probably seen in the malls, which is basically a robotic version of Starbucks. Yeah, and like you see it and you're like, oh, what was this stupid? And then you start thinking about it and you're like, oh my God, the implications here are quite big. Yeah, no, I saw that and I was immediately like, this is one of the smartest ideas I've ever seen. So if you haven't seen Cafe X because you're not like in San Francisco, imagine Starbucks, but now shrink Starbucks down to the size of like a jumbo vending machine. And it's see through and inside is just a robotic arm and you go, you place your order. You're like, I need my cappuccino, I want it, you know, whatever, double shot. And I don't drink coffee, so.
- I don't make that, but like, you know, oat milk and two sugars. And basically the arm then starts to like move around inside and it makes your coffee that it hands it to you. And then it waves and it does a dance and at least, and you get to walk away. And basically you pay, you know, $2.50 and you're getting a robotic coffee. So the, why this is dope is it takes up like one-tenth of the real estate of Starbucks. It has no like labor costs or very, very low labor costs. It's just the person who comes and cleans the robot at the end of the day and refills the ingredients. So there's like, you know, very low labor cost. And the robot like never gets tired, never calls in sick. It just like runs all day and just makes the perfect, the exact same coffee all the time. And it could do that with like, you know, a hundred drinks or something like that. And so Cafe X hasn't quite taken off. I think there's, they did some stupid things. And I remember hearing that like at one point, like in the seed round, the founder only owned 4% of the company or something. They like effed up their cap table or something like that. Yeah, I heard that too.
- And so, you know, that particular startup, I don't think it's gonna work, but I'll be damned if this is not gonna be a thing. Like, this is gonna be a thing. It just makes too much, it has such an economic advantage and it only has technology risks. And I think people really underestimate that because most businesses have extreme market risk. We don't even know if the customers want it. And if we don't know if they're gonna adopt it, then it has, but this has like, well, if the customer wants it, it's not really a question. The customer wants a fast, delicious coffee. Yes, that's not that hard to do. And instead of making Starbucks as a place where you go sit, it's optimizing for people who wanna get in and get out, like subway stations and stuff like that, like people who are quickly on the go.
- and has such a big financial advantage if they can do it because of the real estate and the labor costs. Now the only question is, can you make the robot arm work well enough? And actually that's a problem that engineers are good at solving over like a 10 year period. So I'm trying to just do this math to make sure I'm right. Wow, okay, so check this out. So I know a few of these guys doing these startups that involve, a lot of them use the word humanoid. Have you heard that word? Yeah, don't like it. Yeah, I don't like humanoid, but basically it's robots that do jobs of humans like gas station attendant. So I was just curious and this cafe X is interesting. There's another one that's doing it for pizza. I think it's called Zoom. It's called Zoom.
- That was one of the popular ones. Soft bank put like, I don't know, $500 million into it or something ridiculous. Which sounds silly, but I only did this research while we were talking. It could be way off, but I'm looking at a government website. It seems legit. Do you know what percentage of working Americans work in fast food? Oh man, this is gonna be high, but I'm gonna give you the homey move and say, seven percent? No, that was way too much. I asked that poorly. So about three and a half million Americans work in fast food jobs. Which is like a one point.
- That's that's significant dude. That's significant 10% of those work at McDonald's. So McDonald's employees like 250 300,000 people It's kind of astonishing. I'm I'm a fairly libertarian person, but when I think of these things, I'm like What are these people gonna do for work? I mean, there's just that's only we're only talking about fast fast food You talk about all these other things. I mean potentially five or ten percent of Americans of workers It's like, you know Maybe you don't have a lot of that many skills like when these things happen. I'm like, I don't know what's gonna happen with these people It's not a good situation. It almost is more scary than it is
- Interesting. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, people always say that I don't know. I just feel like It's there's really two questions, which is like a is this new? No forever Technology has been like making things easier and getting rid of jobs like okay, you know Maybe we were you know doing stuff by hand on the fields and then we got the tractor and that like maybe reduce the number of people you needed by 10x in order to run the farm and You know with all the automation by the way the farming industry has massive stuff subsidies I mean they like there's some farmers that are so efficient and so good There's more nuance to this so someone's gonna correct me But basically some farms my parents work in the agriculture industry It's kind of how you know this some farms are so big and so good the government will pay you money Not to grow a crop because they say you're gonna screw up the whole market if you overflow us Yes, it's called the farm act. I believe or is that the farm act? There's a couple acts a couple bills In America will they will pay you money not to do anything because they say you're gonna disrupt you're gonna You're gonna make too much you we don't want to screw in this up
- Yeah, and so the farming thing is a good example and what has happened is the government is heavily involved That sounds the sounds so stupid I Really oversimplified that but it is basically the case where you get paid not to do something Because you will disrupt the market too much That's insane to me. I mean aren't there people that need food and aren't there prices high it higher than ever Like that's crazy to be that we're this not for like corn I mean corn I mean like America does like to a few things really well one we produce really good entertainment so like our biggest export you could say is like Culture you know movies and music and fashion and the second best thing is corn like our ability to create corn is like Phenomenal we treat corn so well I mean corn series and everything ethanol fuel is mad a corn everything's mad a corn we are really good at making corn So I don't know I think with corn I think we're kind of we kind of nailed that one we could like that's a home run
- Yeah, okay, I don't know enough about this to really speak on it, but I guess what my point is over time technology has just gotten more and more pervasive and it's like what's what happened to all the horse carriage drivers what happened to all the people that worked in factories what happened to all the people that did this and that. And the reality is like they shift they shift around so you know some people will become robot attendance they'll become good at like managing and cleaning the robots and many fixing them when they when they bug out. Some people will shift into a new type of labor and like whether that's they become entertainers on social media they become you know there's new jobs that will get created from every single thing that they get's done. And like you know what's the other question is like what's the alternative.
- Do you pump the brakes on making things better faster cheaper like that doesn't seem like you it's possible or real or like Yeah, I'm not gonna let I'm not gonna let like my feelings get away of like progress and technology I'm just saying like it it that doesn't mean that it's not frightening Yeah, I just think you know there's a little bit of carnage whenever any change happens whether it's you know Change for the good or it's changed for the bad right like I think in any there's there's a little bit of collateral damage along the way And the question is like, you know that also creates opportunities because if you created a business that reskills people Not only are there going to be a lot of people that need reskilling But maybe the government will pay you to help reskill workers in the economy so the free market can come up with a solution
- to how to absorb this labor, how to reskill this labor and do things like that. So I don't really worry about stuff like that, but I do think that it's very interesting to me that these are robotic, like these general purpose robot, like pieces can now be programmed to do just a variety of things that are otherwise, you know, today, human labor. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sinks, spreadsheets, or doing databases. HubSpot grow better. Have you seen this TV show called The Bear?
- I've seen a few episodes. I haven't finished it. I'm all right. So the background in the show is it's necessarily the important topic here, but it's a topic I want to ask you about, but the background is basically a restaurant in Chicago, the owner kills himself. And the brother inherits this restaurant and it's a mess and the brother is a trained chef from French laundry, which is like the best restaurant in the world. And he comes to this kind of like shit hole restaurant and he's got to turn it around. So that's the whole premise. And I'm watching this show and I used to work at a restaurant like most kids, if you know, 15, 16, 17, 18, I worked at a restaurant.
- And this show reminded me how miserable they are. And this goes on the list right below like music festivals of things and businesses that you should never start and run from no matter, almost no matter how good they are. And, or like this. Wait, why music festivals? What's wrong with music festivals? Dude, any business that you spend 18 months working on and if it rains that day, you're completely screwed. That's a one out of, you know, 365 chant. I mean, more than that, it means more than one time a year. But like the odds that like rain come and ruin your whole years of work, that's the world. Like I don't wanna join that business.
- I mean, like music festivals, they're just horrible. And they're horrible because the bigger and more people who that go and the more money that you make, the worse the experience gets. That's why I always disliked conferences. It was like, damn, the better I make this for me, the worse it is for the attendee and thus harder for them to come back over and over again. And with a restaurant, you see inside this kitchen at the bare, it's called like Chicago beef, I think. You see, behind the scenes of the restaurant, it is impossible. This is playing business on the hardest mode possible. People are angry, people are vulgar all the time. Remember when I used to work at a restaurant, like there was a huge contingency of drug addicts. You know, you get off work at 2 a.m., what are you gonna do? You're gonna immediately go to the bar and get screwed up and then come back to work and stay at 11. Lots of drug addicts, lots of people calling in to stick for work, lots of people angry, buds of vulgar hostility. This looks like a horrible business to be in. Your sushi restaurant was probably a little bit different than this, but was it at all similar to what I'm seeing in the bear?
- Well ours wasn't just because a we only ran it for three months and You know we were only open and live for three months and B We were the we were the labor for most of that We only had a couple other people the but what way I experienced this was we shit We went and worked in other restaurants to shadow to learn how do you actually run a restaurant? Right? So like we worked in other sushi restaurants My buddy Dan worked inside of a noodles and company to see like how does a fast casual like process thing work or whatever? And how does that work? With lots of salt He was just I did like because we used to eat at these places. He's like don't order the tomato bisque
- I was like the best gets a soup the soup is the good thing. He's like don't order the tomato Bisc. I was like what's wrong? He's just like Bro, you never seen salt like you see It's like somebody who was just like traumatized by what they saw and it's just like Dude those people in the back don't give a shit They're gonna put whatever they want in this it does and the things that they're supposed to put are so bad for you and This stuff just sits around and like he's like don't don't eat this stuff I was like okay. Yeah, sometimes the less you know Like I remember when we were working in the kitchen We worked out of a commissary kitchen So there's other people there the food truck people would come prep there the caterers and the worst was the guy who would sell hot dogs He had like a hot dog stand not no offense, but like he would just come in with 350 hot dogs
- He would pour them all into the sink and we're like that's the sink where we do everybody does their dishes in there It's like pouring your hot dogs in a hot tub and then he was like just started turned up the water was just washing them And then he was just like chucking them to the side after they've been like rinse for a second Yeah, I was like first of all why are you washing the hot dog? Why did this need washing? It was like if it came out of a package you washed it you washed it in the grossest sink possible And you just threw it on the side like somebody's gonna eat that like six hours I was like I will never eat a hot dog again I think forget about what even went into the hot dog which I think in itself is gross Like you watch these documentaries about like you know farming and stuff like that I was like just watching this dude watch the hot dogs before taking over to the ball game You say no offense is now gonna be my new nag So I'm gonna be like I'm gonna just gonna be talking about anything like yeah, dude I was run this guy and he smelled so bad no offense Start saying no offense And like I'll walk around the streets and they're disgusting no offense First was so annoying no offense. I mean nothing wrong with annoying people so no No offense. I'm a total fencer is there all the time That's disgusting but anyway this show what's interesting about it though And this was a lot of similarities I see in what you and I do what a lot of our friends do and a lot of listeners do is
- They are so passionate about this thing. And at first I was like, why are they so passionate about this? And I started, I was like, oh, wait, no, this is just their, this is just their stick. You know, my outlet's a little bit different, but it's like the same type of obsessed. They love it. They love it. So anyway, cool show. And I wanted to bring it up because I wouldn't show if it was similar to your restaurant experience. I think it was like we used to do the thing. You get off at 1 a.m. Are you, you know, the thing closed at midnight, you got to clean up prep for the next day. It's one before you get out of there.
- And now you're hungry and tired. You didn't want to eat your own food. So you go to another restaurant, they're getting off. They'll just cook for you for free, but then like, you know, two people are doing cocaine in the bathroom and you're like, this isn't like, you know, the most productive lifestyle. The restaurant industry, I would say the bonding is very, like the camaraderie was amazing. And I would say there's something very soulful about like feeding people that's like really great, but then the hours are brutal. It is business on hard mode. And there's a lot of like degeneracy. Same thing with like poker. I used to play poker. I love the game of poker. I hated sitting in a casino playing poker because I just felt like I was surrounded by.
- So many degenerates and I was like this is not a high quality of living like just sitting here in this kind of Artificial air with this guy who's like fell asleep next to me because he's been here for 42 hours straight Like this is not who I want to surround myself with I need to get out of this situation Let me tell you about something that is the opposite of that kind of a an inspiring work environment So I saw this tick-tock and it just that's not too tick-tock. I don't remind you I want to tell you about I'm not gonna play them here because it'll take a little too long Maybe in the YouTube video we can we could play them but I want to know if you've seen these one went viral
- So it was, did you see this viral clip of the picture on the Mets coming out to the, uh, coming out to pitch. He's like the closer. So he was coming out to do his thing and it's normally on TV. They just cut to commercial, um, in between like the chain, like the lineup change, because it's like, whatever it's going to be two minutes. The guy's got to warm up. He's got to run out from the bullpen. That takes a little while baseball slow already. He's got to warm up then, whatever. They usually come back, but this time they stuck with it. So they showed, did you see this clip or am I just, should I describe it? Can you go on and keep going? So the, the show from behind the guy like walking out from the thing, emerging basically into the stadium. So they have a dope camera shot. Oh, and they're using that UFC lens. Have you noticed all these guys are using the UFC's got this beautiful lens where it like blurs out the back and you own special. Yeah. And then they, and the guy normally comes out to this, um, song. I don't know what it's called. It's like, whatever.
- I don't know, the guy Timmy Trump, Timmy Trumpets is like the singer, you know, he's featured on it. This guy with this trumpet, but the Mets had brought the guy there live. And so he was kind of hiding. And he comes out, he's got his little trumpet, he's got a microphone on the end of the trumpet and he starts playing the song. And he's playing the song live. The guys running out into like the roaring crowd. And it's just so dope. One, two, three inning. And now Timmy Trumpet takes center stage. As it would be as gets ready to come in.
- You
- All right, business is cool, but like God, sports and music just have this special thing, this special moment, these special feelings that you can't, there's nobody is that passionate about our podcast. Nobody is that passionate about this piece of software. But when this moment hits, the guy runs out, he's the hero, the trumpet guy's there, he's playing the crowds going nuts. And it was just like this special moment and it was a lot of showmanship.
- And so I watched that and I get this feeling. I'm like, that was dope. I'm glad that they went that extra mile for that showmanship to Zat Create. I will never watch baseball, but like I'm a fan of like this guy, that's on the baseball. You don't watch baseball at all? You're right now. Way too slow for you, right? Too slow, too boring. Used to love it, but you know, when I was a kid. So now I swipe up on TikTok. The next video is this teacher. And it says, Revealing the year musical part one.
- I'm like, I don't know. I just hung around for an extra second to watch it. He goes, he goes, all right. And this year the musical is gonna be, and he like reveals the whiteboard, and there's nothing in there, and then there's like a small envelope, and everyone's like, what, what? And then he's like, he opens up the envelope, they're like, it's gonna be, hold on, this just says, turn on the computer. And then the students are like, what's going on here? And clearly the teacher had kind of set up a bit to like, just make it more fun. And like, you know, everybody loves this because it's like, here's this teacher of like a middle school or a high school or something like that. They didn't have to do this. Like, you know, most teachers are just sort of like, they wanna just roll out the TV on the black, you know, like trolley and just be like, all right guys, just watch this fucking movie for an hour and like, just leave, right? Like, being a teacher is exhausting. And like, it's easy, it would be very easy to phone it in. Most don't. And some, like this guy go the extra mile. So now he clicks his computer and it's a video, and it's him.
- And he's like hey, it's me from the future and he's just like it's a silly bit But he's talking back to it. He's like, what are you doing here? He's like, I don't know I read the envelope It said turn the computer He's like you just got to do whatever the envelope says and it's like it goes back and forth So he's like doing this skit with himself and he's like he's like and it freezes and then it freezes and it says wait Everybody look under your desk and like one kid has this special thing and then it was like this elaborate almost like an escape room leading up to this reveal and I saw that and so what was the plan? Videos viral the play was like I don't remember it was like It was like not something like that cool. It was like, you know
- Les Mis�rables, whatever. It was like some like But like by the end the students are going nuts because they're so invested at this point They sort of midway through they realized okay, this is cheesy But I'm into it. He's doing this for us and like all right. I want to know he built up tension and The reason I bring up these examples is because there is a word that my trainer uses all the time and nobody else in my life I know talks about this my trainer all the time goes yeah, you got to have a little showmanship
- And showmanship is a word that I think like for most of us doesn't even enter our brain on a day-to-day basis And my trainer will always tell me he's like, you know, he'll be at Starbucks before you know He'll go get a coffee before our session and he'll always tell me these stories He's like, you know, I decided to add a little showmanship So I told him my name was blah blah blah and they wrote it on the cup and then by the time the person was done You know, I told them like, you know, whatever You know, he'll say, you know, bond James Bond and then they'll just laugh they'll have a little chuckle and then they'll write bond Cut he's like add the comma James Bond and then they'll do it They'll laugh a little more and now he just like made their day a little more entertaining than it was then it had to be if he just said My name is John and okay cool You're just another John and so he always talks about adding showmanship
- And it's just like walking through life and just identify little moments where you could do something slightly different than the norm. And I have kids now, so I do this with my daughter all the time. We used to have such a hard time getting her to eat. And my mother-in-law came over and as a classic sort of mother-in-law thing, she's like, always being like, do this, do that. You guys are doing this wrong. It's true, she's got 30 years of parenting experience. We got two. But it's also really annoying to be told what to do, how to parent better, and how to do this to that. So normally my default was kind of annoyed.
- But one day she was like, she was like, like the milk bottle was like way less. I was like, how did you get her to drink the milk? And she's like, oh, she loves to drink out of this like little measuring cup instead of like the normal cup. And she goes, change the presentation. And I go, and I was like, and so now me and my wife will always joke because we're always like, oh God, someone always was telling us what to do. But then like, sometimes she does pull this like rabbit out of her hat and like, you know, we'll do something, my daughter doesn't want to do it. And then we just change the present, like change the presentation of how we're getting her to do it. And all of a sudden she's super locked in. Like I do this now. When I feed her, I couldn't get her to eat vegetables. So I decided to create like my own version of the show chopped. So I'm like, okay, close your eyes. I'm going to put one thing in front of you and I'm front of your brother and like, take the bite. And then you need to tell me, is it one thumbs up, two thumbs up or thumbs down? And then I do a huge reaction based on the score they give me. And she's like, I want to play the close eyes game. I want to play the close eyes game because she, and I can get her to eat a whole meal if I'm willing to basically create a television show out of it. It's really like exhausting for me. But honestly, it's like also kind of fun and it gets her to eat anything. Whereas otherwise that's actually even more exhausting to try to feed or something she doesn't want. And so this idea of showmanship keeps weaving its way into my life. And I wanted to bring this up because for somebody out there, they're going to basically use this as like your word of the day. Find a way to like weave in a little more showmanship into what you're doing, a little change of presentation as we say. Have you, do you think about this at all? I do. And so I had to go find it. But have you heard of this guy named Trend Griffin? He's like this like.
- 60s, maybe, at least 60 something years old, white dude, and this Twitter bio just says, I used to work with Bill Gates at Microsoft, so you're automatically wise and interesting. So he has a blog called 25 IQ, and I was reading it the other day, and he had this article called A Doesn't Beliefs About Business, Money and Life that Kanye West shares with other great entrepreneurs and investors. So it's like, oh, that's an interesting title. And the very first line has always stuck with me. And it's from Kanye, and it says, for me, first of all, don't miss is what I like the most.
- Dopeness people who want to make things as dope as possible and and buy default make money from it And I always think about that quote because I also get caught up and like well This does this and this does this and this is this and this is how it makes money and I'm like oh Yeah, but this is super lame and not that cool and like this sucks my soul. What am I doing? Like this isn't awesome, you know, and it's like well, what is awesome? I don't know exactly how to explain it But I do think about that all the time where I'll try to like nickel and dime things about what I'm gonna buy Or like the other day I bought some Like Air Force ones and I was like trying to like get like this cheap ones and I'm like brah
- I can get the $250 Air Force once and I don't have to justify it like if they're cool. They're cool. They're dope I'm doing it no matter what and I always have to justify like certain decisions to myself as like This is just cool do it because it's cool. I only have one life. So yeah, I think about this all the time Yeah, do it because it's cool. I think is a great like, you know For most people who listen to this podcast they're probably like High achiever types and they're probably rational and like analytical about a lot of decisions
- And so I think for that audience, actually you need to add more of this other ingredient, which is the- Yeah, for sure. Do it because it's cool, F it, don't measure it. And also, honestly, the same thing can either be done boring or dope. It's like, it's not the thing that's dope. Yeah, it's like- How you do the thing that's dope or not dope. And so, you know, the broccoli itself wasn't dope. When I turned it into this game, I made it more dope for her and therefore she has a different experience. And I have a different experience in doing it. And if I consistently do that, well, there's just more experiences throughout my day that are dope. And what's a dope life? It's a bunch of dope days. What's a bunch of dope days? It's a bunch of dope experiences throughout the day, right? You just break it down into moment. Like you could break it down into its atomic unit and realize that like the boringness or like routine of your life is like, you know, in your own hands. And if you just add a little showmanship to yourself and to the people around you, you kind of change how the experience feels. And I'm- Do you do this in many ways, but like, you know, I'm seeing how this helps me and I wanted to share this little framework. Do you remember Boosted Skateboards?
- Yeah, these are all over the place in San Francisco. People would like skateboard up the hill because it was like, you know, San Francisco is so hilly and it was like, look, like magic. How are they going up this? And now like electric scooters of the norms, like the bird scooters and all these things. So that's like considered normal now. But about eight years ago, Boosted Skateboards came out with this long board skateboard that would go 25 miles an hour. I remember I bought one and it was crazy. It was so cool. And I met the founder and I was like, tell me about your background. He's like, oh, I worked at NASA. And I was doing this other thing. And then I thought about like working in the government and like setting people to Mars. I thought that had been like interesting. But I decided to launch this skateboard company. I was like, well.
- You know, are you interested in skateboards? He's like, no, I was like, were you interested in this other thing? He's like, no, not really. I was like, well, why'd you go to skateboards? He goes, because it's fucking awesome. And I remember it'd be, I remember him saying that. And I was like, well, yeah, you got a point. Yeah, yeah, it is awesome. And when he told me that, I just, I remember a shift happened in my life. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah. That's a good addition. I got to add that to my like box of checks, checkbox, you know, of things to do. Like, you know, it makes money. It makes my mom proud. It's effing awesome. I remember him saying that. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're right.
- Right. Yeah. Tony Robbins has this thing he says, which is like, you will, uh, you will only meet the, you'll meet your standards, not your, not your desires. And basically like a standard is like more of a must, a standard is like, you know, I'm not going to eat at a restaurant. If I saw flies flying around over that's below my standard. And so an important thing to figure out is like, what are my standards for the things that I do in my life? It sounds like for this guy, one of his standards for like, what do I work on is, is this awesome or not? Whereas for a lot of people, that shit is completely optional. Nice to have for sure. I need to pay the bills. It's not part of the standard. And then you meet certain people, and this is the best thing you could do. Like why do people have that phrase of like, you are the average of the five people you spend your most, the most time with is because fundamentally you will adopt the standards of the people you're around.
- It's not because they'll teach you things. It's not because they'll give you good advice It's because fundamentally you will adopt the standards like I remember we have a couple friends who are like you Like you're one of my friends who's very fit I have other friends that are very fit or they care about being very fit and Whenever there's a question of like alright, you know, let's go grab some food. What do you guys want to eat? It's like I know that I can't suggest, you know, I can't say cheesecake factories not on the list You know like I can't I can't take these guys there That's not there their standard is that that's not what they eat and so like, you know I automatically I will start to only suggest and therefore only go to places that I know meets their standard of what they They consider like I could I I fucked with cheesecake factory hardcore get that chick banana all day
- Yeah, we have a couple friends that like is like, oh, cool. Like, you ordered the Gordita. What's good here? I've never been to this place. Dude, can I talk about something that I can't decide if actually, and we can wrap up with it, I can't decide if it's awesome and dope or not. So basically, I want to give people perspective on you and I is behind the scene. So you and I, Sean and I get DM'd or cold email all the time. And a very common thing is, hey, can I like give you content to share? And I'll do it for free or something like that. And the bad thing about free is you kind of get what you pay for. So when it's free shit, you're like, oh, this is too much work. I don't want to share your stuff on Twitter. I don't want to share your stuff on whatever. It's just, it's not good. I don't want to work on it.
- For some reason, I gave one of these kids a chance. And I say no to everyone. I gave this kid a chance, he DM'd me, and I was like, you know, I'll give you, I'm gonna give you my password to my TikTok, and I want you to impress me. I go send me a picture of your social security card, send me a picture of your boss, and send me a picture of your driver's license. And he did, and I go, all right, if you fuck, I was like, if you, what? Cause I was like, if you screw me over here, I'm gonna get you back. So like I have your information.
- Here's my password to my tiktok. I gave him the pass I go look like if you do something bad to be able to get you and so I I gave him my password to my tiktok. Give me your mother's address because I will be mailing her your index finger in an envelope Because there's like no information that I could get to like get back at this person You know what I mean? Like I'm like I need you to have something like I'm balanced You can really screw me by posting on my account. What am I gonna? I need to equally be able to screw you okay? Yeah, I can't continue yeah I gave him the password to my tiktok. It's been one week so in one week This kid has taken you and I's videos and posted it to a day on tiktok and in six days Maybe I think one week's tomorrow. He's gotten 1.5 million views And I went from basically zero to like not having an account to like eight or nine thousand followers as of now a handful of videos Have gotten one got five hundred thousand one got seven hundred thousand a bunch got fifty thousand plus
- 150 or 200,000 likes, tens of thousands of comments. And I'm like, that's kind of interesting, but I don't exactly believe that this is true. Like I don't know if this is true. And so I was like, post a video where there's a call to action. And so we did a video about my favorite book and it shot up the charts. And I'm like, all right, people are actually like, these people are somewhat engaged. They're like buying a book that I would- It shot up the charts like on Amazon, you mean? Yeah. So, and this is the second time that I did this. So one time I recommended a book and before I recommended it, I took a picture of it's rating on Amazon. And then I recommended it and the next day it was number one in the entrepreneurship category and number one in the business category. And I took screenshots of it to like prove it. And it was the book called How to Get Rich. That tweet reached two million people. This other video that I did, I talked about the same book and it shot up. I think now it's number one in entrepreneurship again. And that video has been viewed 500,000 times. Well, let's write our own book. If you got this kind of Oprah influence, I mean, why are you referencing this guy's dead? He doesn't need your help. Come on, let's write our own book. Let's see. Okay, yeah, look, How to Get Rich is now number 30 in all of Audible and Originals. It's number one in the small business category. Yeah, look up How to Get Rich. Go look at it right now. Look at the categories. Like skyrocketed after this video.
- And I can't decide if this whole TikTok game is actually- We should just do it where it's like, these are just simpler, which is just like, if you're a real person, I don't know if these TikTok views are real or not. If you're real, just put like a one in the, just type the number one- I am going to do that. Who's gonna do that? You know, because I feel the same way about these TikTok views, it's like, our favorite word, it's a little fugazi. A little fugazi. There's a fugazi, fugazi element to these TikTok views. It's like, how, you know, is this really 1.5 million people? What does this mean? Do they actually watch it? What's going on here? If so, that's amazing. But you know, some things can be too good to be true. But that's going to be- I can't believe- I've been showing up on my feed for what it's worth. But I think it's because we're, I have like two TikTok fans and you're one of them. Hey, this book video got 414,000 views. A couple of them got 70,000, 50,000. We only have 700,000, lots of 20,000s. I can't decide if this is real, and if it is real,
- I don't want to sound like Gary Vee, but I'm like, oh, everyone should do this. Like, this is easy. This is this kid of Miami is just doing this and he just spun this up and it's working wonderfully. And like you I don't I mean, I think you're actually better than me, but I'm not like that charismatic. I'm not that good. Why is this game so easy? And is this game is it real? And also honestly, is it worth it? I'm not convinced that it's worth it. Well, if you can spike a book to number one of the charts, that shows that there's some value there. There's some influence there. Like, and it's not just a number, but okay. Yeah, it's kind of lame. Like most of the most there's a lot of amazing stuff on TikTok. Basically, these 18 year old kids are like the most creative people I've ever seen. But then there's guys like you and me, these like money people and influencers and everyone's doing the same fucking circle jerk Alex or Mosey stuff. And it's really lame. And so.
- I don't know how to make it interesting. And right now what I'm doing, I think it's not interesting, but the results are incredible. Yeah, but is it Fing Awesome to go back to your standard? TBD, TBD, you know what's Fing Awesome is when you create content and then like someone like legitimately famous and cool, like Hassan, like Holler's at you. And then you're like, yeah, this is the awesome part about it. So like that, you know what I mean? Like that's worth all the lame tweets that you and I have done is getting to hang out. Like a couple of really cool people.
- You know, it's cool about selling your soul. Sometimes someone pays price for it. You know, it's cool about being a whore. It's a money. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. We're out. I know that. We're out.

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- Here's the headline. Great headline. Guy sells $1 bills for $15. Here's how, right? And so here's what he did. So he basically is 15 years old and he says he sees a dollar bill on eBay that instead of who's a little dollar bill is Washington or something like that. Instead of whoever plus fellow George Washington, it's Michael Jordan's face in the middle, right? And he orders it is he's like, Oh, love Michael Jordan or whatever. And this is funny and gets it. And it's basically it's a normal dollar bill, but then there's just like a sticker paper over the George Washington and you could just like do that. You could just go to office max and like do this. And so that's exactly what he did. He goes to office max. He's like, I need to be able to create these because.
- What better businesses there to sell dollar bills for $15. And so he goes there and then he goes, he puts them up on eBay. What's up? Let's jump in. What you got? You tell me, I think I've been driving the last handful of sessions. I'm gonna ask you to drive right now. Let's switch gears. I wanna do a topic about, I think you know Mark Jenny. You know Mark Jenny? Mark Jenny's a great friend of mine. He's an amazing, amazing, amazing entrepreneur. He's an awesome guy. We're going, I'm gonna meet him next week. We're going down to stay at one of us. He has this like luxury Airbnb portfolio. And you should follow him on Twitter. Well, you wanted to give his background? Do you know his background?
- I know a little bit of it, but go give the story. So if I remember correctly, I think he was raised, he had something was a little wonky with his childhood. I think like he didn't have a dad or a single household or something like that. So he wasn't raised in like a very privileged place. And then at one point, I think he was even homeless and he lived out of like a storage unit or something like that. He started a bunch of different companies like info marketing stuff and everything did kind of okay. Then he started RV trader. I believe. I mean, RV share, which was like Airbnb for RVs. He eventually sold a large portion of it to KKR, I think a large PE company and he probably made many, many tens of millions of dollars of lifetime of money. Now he has a new thing that he's been doing for the last maybe five or something like that years where he buys, I think he owns 20 of them now. He's got a huge portfolio of Airbnb's and these are high end luxury homes that sleep like 20 people. It's like a two acre plot with like a fancy.
- four or five, six thousand square foot home with like basketball courts, tennis courts, mini putt putt, and he's built this like really, really good business making millions and millions of dollars renting Airbnb's and he's doing it right and he's got a small team and it's a proper company, not like a side project. Yeah, I think what is it like a 50 million dollar luxury Airbnb portfolio at this point? Yeah, I mean, I'm friends with Mark. So he tells me lots of stuff. So I'm trying not to say any of the numbers because I forget what's public and what's been private. So anything that you I'll let you actually say any of the numbers because you're probably getting it. Yeah, that's just what he tweets out. So you just follow him on Twitter. He's a good follow and it's cool to see like he'll post like a before and after photo of these properties. He's like, here's what it was. And then we added a McDonald's play place in the backyard. It's like he does like dope stuff like which I like, you know, he's not just like and he's totally unheard of like he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like, he's like,
- He's got like maybe 2,000, 3,000 followers on Twitter, I think. He's not like a popular, like a big name person. So he tweeted this out the other day and I thought that this was a great, we haven't done a blue collar side hustle in a while. So I thought this is kind of a great little, almost like a blue collar side hustle that he said he had done. I don't know if you saw this. He was talked about one of his very first, like sort of side hustles that he did or early, early hustles was selling dollar bills for $15. Did you see this? Yes. Yeah, go tell the story. So he tweeted this out. You can kind of look at it, but here's the headline. Great headline. Guy sells $1 bills for $15. Here's how, right? And so here's what he did. So he basically, he's 15 years old and he says he sees a dollar bill on eBay that instead of who's on the dollar bills, Washington or something like that, instead of whoever, this fellow George Washington, it's Michael Jordan's face in the middle, right? And he orders it is he's like, oh, love Michael Jordan or whatever. This is funny and gets it. And it's a basically it's a normal dollar bill, but then there's just like a sticker paper over the George Washington. And you could just like do that. You could just go to office max and like do this. And so that's exactly what he did. He goes to office max. He's like, I need to be able to create these because.
- What better businesses there to sell dollar bills for $15. And so he goes there and then he goes, he puts them up on eBay. And he, oh, he first he looked on eBay. And at that time, eBay was showing like how many items a seller would sell. And he could just keep track of it like, OK, this week, oh, wow, they're selling like, you know, 100 of these? Like, that's amazing. So he starts doing it. He creates an eBay account. He starts selling these. And he starts averaging 100 bills sold per day for $15, which includes the shipping costs general profit. So what's that? $1,500 a day? Not 1,500 a day. He's profiting basically $1,000 a day during this. And then he ramped it up and he got it to, I think, $10,000 a day in sales. And he became the largest seller of custom novelty collectible dollar bills on eBay. But it's a real dollar. It was a real dollar bill. A real dollar. Yeah. You just add the sticker on top so you could sell it. Can you do that legally? I guess so. Why not?
- I don't know. I don't know. I just thought there'd be some weird rules around money No, I think you could do it like you know people sell these like coins and whatever it seems to seem legit So then what he would do he's like you know here So I had to start thinking of growth hacks. How do I beat these other eBay guys at doing this? So what he would do is he would do one of the auctions and then he would direct message everybody who didn't win the auction Offering him the bill at whatever their highest price was and so And so he's like you know what I ate was your top price on it. I'll do it for eight He started like just racking up as many sales as he could doing this So then he became the top ranked seller which helped him in the organic search As he was going from there and I kind of love this and I loved it for a couple reasons one It's just another example of these little nuggets. These little stories that shows you There's a trillion ways to win. There's a trillion ways to get rich right like he was doing basically $365,000 a year of sales or whatever You know he was doing really really well at that time
- You know, I'm just a little bit these a day what how old was he didn't did you say he was like his teens? He was 15 16 years old. That's amazing and And you know probably didn't last forever, but these little these little arbitrage opportunities that come up Then I started thinking okay, like what would somebody do if they're doing that now? So here's I'm gonna give you three ideas of how you could do that now First I think you could probably do the same thing. Yeah, what's old is new? Well, it's out is in and I think you probably do the same thing either on eBay or Etsy or find one of the marketplaces And you could try to win doing the same thing I went on Etsy and actually you could see that there's people doing this on Etsy right now And you can see you know how they're how they're doing so possibly you could go do the same thing and compete Especially if you could pick a different, you know celebrity face to put on the thing like
- Trump is the obvious one. But if it's not Trump, like maybe there's some other ones that you could do. But Trump dollar bills is my first idea of how I would do this. Second idea, okay, let's remix it, right? We want to keep 80% of the idea. We want to change 20%. So what's the 20% change? I would try to piggyback off of whatever's trending in movies or music or something like that. So for example, remember when Superbad came out and there was like the McLovin ID? Here's Hawaii ID, the rainbow on it. It's like the same iconic look.
- I think you could just do McLovin IDs at that time. Like if that was the movie that would come out now, I think you could take a prop from a movie or like in Pulp Fiction, they had the Bad Mother effort wallet or whatever. Like, I don't know. I had one. I don't watch a bunch of movies now, but yeah, exactly. I wanted one of those and you could just like jump on that trend and be like, cool. Like for the McLovin one, it's like upload your photo and we'll send you yourself as a McLovin ID. Maybe use a little of these like AI things to like create the avatar where it looks the same. But I think that's one that you could do, really cheap to print and laminate. And then you can send these out very cheaply because they're so thin.
- And I saw some other ones if you go on tiktok you'll see things that are like this one for example. I think the second biggest Etsy store Maybe the first actually now. I think it's second or first on the planet is this thing called Caitlin minimum minimalist I'm guessing you've never heard of this, but no what is this? I got a whole thing coming on the pot of my Etsy deep dive But but we'll I'll just give you a little sneak peek the top-selling store is Caitlin minimalist What she does was how she got her break was she was like she was Making jewelry for herself for friends like oh that's cool Then her friend has special real question goes my mom or dad passed away. I forgot which one And like the last thing they wrote me was like this note
- Is it possible to like get their signature in their handwriting as like a bracelet? And she's like yeah, you just like I could do that for you and she gave it to her for free she was like this is so meaningful to you I'll just give it to you for free and She was like overwhelmed was like this is the most meaningful thing in the world and so She's like oh wow people just want like you know Their name their parents name their kids name and ideally in their own handwriting like done in jewelry And so that's what you do that you like send her or is it all digital You like yeah, I picture or you write the name you know depends if you want to match the handwriting You got to send a picture of the of this
- of like a piece of paper with the writing on it. And there's some tech that just then like tells her like, it's like, etch is it in that look, right? Oh, so it's not like made out of metal. It's a metal plaque or it's like a dog tag. And then she like, it's like, it's cut. It's like the name is cut in, it's like out of the chain or whatever, like, so it is like, you know, whatever, somehow, somehow cut. I don't know exactly her manufacturing process, but these little like custom, custom name things, I think work. And I was on TikTok yesterday when I was thinking about this idea. I think it's it.
- Oh, it's huge. She's done like probably 80, 90 million in sales is my, my God. So she's done two million transactions. I would guess her average transactions, like, you know, something 40, 50 bucks, something like that. So, you know, that's like $80 million in sales lifetime. And she's just like this woman out of LA or whatever. And I was on TikTok and I was scrolling and I saw another one of these, which was you, it was a hoodie is like, here's a perfect gift for the holidays or for Valentine's Day, it's a hoodie and they're like, take a picture of you and your whatever, your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, whatever. And it basically takes like, let's say it's a picture of you and your wife and you're kissing. And it just like it'll etch, it'll stitch like a silhouette of that. Yeah. And it's like into the hoodie. So it's like a meaningful gift. But again, it's like this kind of what they call mass customization. Right. So if you can do mass customization, if you can figure out a manufacturing process to do this, there's a lot of opportunity to sell somebody these like kind of gimmick gifts that I think will, that can and will work. Do you remember a teespring?
- Yeah, it was like the print on demand type of. Yeah, it was a really cool t-shirt company start by this guy named Walker Williams. And they were like one of these companies that was like, Oh, this is going to be one of the fastest companies ever to get to 100 million in revenue. And the way that they got popular was it was on demand t-shirt printing. And they figured out this hack on Facebook where you could target people that have your like by last name. So it could be like the one thing we all know about Smith's is that they loved a party. Or they also did it by location. Like the one thing we know about people who are raised in Boston is that they love blank and had a t-shirt that said, I'm from Boston and I'm proud or I'm from Boston and I love blank or I'm a proud Smith or something like that.
- And the engagement on those ads was crazy. So their cack was like stupid low. And that's one of the ways that they grew. And it's just like that. It's that thing from Dale Carnegie, the most beautiful word in any language is of the person's name. And I think it's like name, location, and maybe like where you went to school and then followed by like your friend's names. And if you could figure out how to like incorporate those into ads, they clicked your rate is crazy. Your pet's face. So there's another one which is pet socks, pet's face on socks, I think. I have a pair. Jungle Creations was the name of it. So if I remember correctly, at one point they did like a million dollars in like a week selling. You'd basically go on the website, you'd upload a photo of your pet's face and they would print it on socks. And they would just drop ship that to you basically.
- And let me see if I can find, yeah, they did 2018, they did 17 million in revenue. They did 17 million in revenue doing basically pet face on socks, right? And so that's the same thing, you know, celebrity face on dollar bill, pet face on socks, right? Like we have a buddy who is doing the pet portraits, right? Like a painting of your pet that would just be like mass customized produced. There's a ton of these like little opportunities. Yeah, and the click to rates on these things are like kill it for the ads. So yeah, that's an interesting idea. Let's see if anyone actually files through with it. But Mark Jenny's amazing, man. He's awesome. All right, so let me break a boy thing up.
- Dude, this guy made fun of me the other day for having a course and it hurt my feelings. A friend or an internet stranger. A little bit of both. And it really hurt my feelings. Do you feel like, because all right, so I built a business before. I built a few businesses before. So a few that I've got the seven figures, a few that I've got eight figures, I've sold things. I should feel confident about this. And then you and I both have courses. I'm going to actually launch another course that I think can be like a.
- like a million dollar plus a year income stream for me and my family, which is awesome. It's never good when you have to save for me and my family. Like if you have to justify feeding your family, that means that's just the insecurity poking out of there. Well, it gives context. And what I mean is, is it the contact, the question that I'm gonna ask is, is it worth it? Because part of me thinks, well, if I'm such a big shot, I shouldn't talk about it. I should just have shit and not teach it. But then I'm like, but I like doing it. And it's a significant, like it pays for my whole life. So do you? Yeah, if you, again, the only person I was gonna ask, do you like it? You like doing it?
- Yeah. All right. That's enough, right? Like, but do you feel like you feel like a fraud sometimes too? Or at least you've never said that to me, but you said that when we have when we're interviewing that one person, you're like, I kind of feel like a fraud every once in a while, or I forget what you said. Not a fraud, but I do feel like I make fun of myself about the course thing, because same thing. Self-conscious. What's it be? Self-conscious is a better way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, I would say somebody who is like. Somebody who is really locked in and I use the word locked in because it's not about.
- how much money you have. But it's true, somebody who's really, really wealthy would not do a paid course, I don't think. I don't think somebody who's super wealthy probably should be or would be doing paid course. It's pretty unusual to do that. I think that's actually wrong though, because Warren Buffett had a course at Columbia. I mean, there's a lot of examples of wonderful investors who go and they act up. I don't think Warren Buffett did his course, like I don't think he was pocketing a bunch of money doing a direct sales course type of thing. Like if I went and taught a guest, if I was a guest lecturer at Stanford, right, I drove 45 minutes away, I go guest lecturer at Stanford and I'm a teacher there, I would be doing that for different reasons and it would feel totally differently than me being like, hey, I have my power writing course, go sign up and pay for it. I don't know why it is, it's just different. It's a different thing, but I would say it two things. I said locked in because also,
- If you have like a main thing that is totally An obsession for you you're loving working on it. There's so much there's more to do than you'll ever have time to do You really wouldn't take the time to stop pause and go Sell the course my opinion about myself. I should say I would not go do that So to me as long as I'm still doing courses, it's me part of my Wandering around phase trying to figure out what I really want to do when I grow up What I want to do with my life what I want to do with my time. I know that if I get locked in on oh, man I really love this project. I'm just
- building brick by brick. This is something that I'm really excited about. There's no chance in hell that I would push pause and teach course, even though my courses are like, it's two weeks out of the year. So it's not a lot of time, but even those two weeks I probably wouldn't do if I was in that position in the same way that when I was building my startup, I had no podcast, I had no angel investing, I had no courses, I didn't do, I didn't tweet, I didn't do shit when I was building my startup for like seven years, because I was fully locked in on that. It's only after we sold that I started doing a bunch of these things and that became the new business was the podcast and other things.
- I think I'm gonna keep doing it, but I think you should totally keep doing it. You said you like it so keep doing it Let me share a little thing. I do it during my course because during the course the the writing course some people will be like You know, okay, I get like this lesson was really great I feel like I now have a much better idea how I would write to like kind of grow viral or Build my brand There's a part of me that just feels like you know, they'll ask a question. That's like how much content would you say is too much? You know, it's what's what's too much to post or would you say that like, you know I should wait, you know until my product launches to start doing content or like they ask all these questions that are sort of like self-promoting and Self-conscious feelings self-conscious. There's just under this is a layer of self-consciousness around the whole thing Or like, you know, what do you what do you say if you post something and then somebody comments? Do you take it down blah blah? Do you know how do you deal with you know a negativity or blah blah?
- And I always just say the same thing. I go, like, oh, I'm gonna answer your question, but hey, what time is it? I wanna make sure we don't go over. What time is it? And then they're like, nine, 34? I'm like, no, no, it's meo clock. You forgot that it's meo clock. You know, you're thinking about what everybody else might think, what they might say, and how they might feel, and what my, bro, you forgot the main thing. It's always meo clock. You just gotta ask yourself, do I like this? Do I wanna do this? How do I feel about doing this? Remember, it is always meo clock. In fact, I wanna get watches made, or a clock on my wall that just reminds me it is meo clock. Should I wait to go do this thing? No, it's meo clock. Should I care what other people are thinking? No, it's meo clock. How do I feel? That's what I'm gonna do things based off. Dude, there's this funny picture of Fidel Castro, you know, like the, the dictator of Cuba. And he's wearing two Rolexes at the same time, both of the same wrist, just cause he's just like, he's just wants to flex that hard. But no, no, it's meo clock. You need to get two watches on each head, that's a, wait, just let me make sure this other one's not broken. Yeah, that's exactly how I feel. Dude, your question to me, I don't even need to answer, I just gotta remind you, it's meo clock. You do what the hell you want. All right, you have another thing on here that was like,
- The 10 list. Yeah, the list. I'm gonna read the title and you go from there. So it just says, a few non-popular things I've learned from this pod. Pretty good headline, eight out of 10. Thank you. We'll accept. I'm gonna say each one and I want you to give me your reaction and then I'll explain a little more context. But all right, the first one. Well, can you give context on the whole thing? Like where did this come from? Or why did you even think of this list of non-popular things you've learned from the pod? I see a lot of things online that people talking where they try to explain rules. Like you do have to work this much or you don't have to work this much. And the reality is, is that there's a million ways to get the same things done. So for every example of one person succeeding in one way, there's gonna be lots of examples of them succeeding a totally different way. So I think it's silly to have rules.
- And so I like will see these things of people posting of like, oh, you know, like they say it's a 10 year overnight success and in my head, I think. Man, I know people who have had overnight successes were like literally in three months or life has changed and I think it's silly to not acknowledge that, you know, and so that's how I kind of came up with this list. Okay, all right, hit me. I'm excited now. All right, the first one I just said, so an overnight success, which is like one or six months, it's absolutely possible and those those exist and they're real. What agree or disagree? All right, give us an example. For example, we covered this company called Broomate, B-R-U-M-A-T-E and I think in like year two, they got the 20 million in revenue and year one, they got to like 8 million. And I know a few people that have had other companies were like in the first six months, like it kind of just took off and it worked. So we interviewed, who else did we interview? Well, I would say your current.
- stealth company we haven't talked about yet. Take it off right away. Yeah, it's succeeded like pretty quickly. But you count that. Do you count that overnight success? Or do you say, I've been preparing my whole life for this, right? That's the account argument. I'll say like I built up a reputation and I'm trading off that reputation. But there are times you and I have like talked to people, for example, we had this guy on who you weren't here, but you know him, his name's Val. You know Val, V-A-L, Val. He had a company where in year one, it made like 10 million in profit and it was selling like ringtones on the internet. And like just some people just have the factor and then also like luck is real. So that's another thing. Luck is real. Sometimes you just kind of nail it and it just works. Not always and most of the time it doesn't. But every once in a while, it just happens. And so I think for people to say overnight success isn't real, I think that that's nonsense. Cause I know a handful of people who are like 19, 20 year old kids who,
- Like within a few months, I've got something making many, many tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in sales. And it just works. Yeah. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I agree. All right. Here's another one. I think at least in the beginning of your career, where you live, it actually really, really matters. It's incredibly important. And the people who don't move some places, I think they are at a disadvantage. 100% agree. I did this. I was sitting in Australia. And I wanted to do startups. And I went to a local startup event.
- And I was like, okay, I'm like looking around. Everybody's being super nice, right? It's Australia. Everybody gets along great. And I just thought in my head, I go, who's the most successful entrepreneur in this room? And it was this one old ass motherfucker who was like, you know, had built something in the 90s and he just like stuck around and then nobody else pretty much. And then I was asking some questions. I was talking and then the organizers like, dude, you should give a talk next month at the meetup. Like this is great. We would love to have you teach. And I was like, T.
- I'm 23, I've done nothing. I was like, at first I was flattered and then I caught myself two seconds later. I was like, oh wait, this just means I'm in the wrong pond. I do not want to be a smart guy in the room. They should be like, dude, you should shut up. You don't know anything about anything. That's the type of room I want to be in. And so I literally went home, I went on, I think, like T-Mobile or whatever. I activated a phone plan and I got a 650 area number, because I was like, I need to, just mentally, before I even move, I need to go to Silicon Valley now. So I changed my phone number and then I booked a ticket and my mom was like, you know, where are you gonna stay? Do you have a job? I was like, I don't know. I'm gonna figure it out, but I have a better shot of figuring it out there than I do from here. And that was my whole mindset. And Tony Robbins has a thing he says about this. He goes, proximity is power. And I am a huge believer that proximity is power. I have done pretty crazy things to just get in proximity of people that I think are awesome. Like I will take jobs that I think are like the worst job of all the job offers I have. If I know that it's gonna get me to sit side by side with somebody awesome, because I know six months next to that person is gonna do more for me than, you know, like a better, higher paying job would have done. And so proximity is power. This goes beyond business. It's beyond business. It's just anything. If you want to make it in the movie industry, you have a higher likelihood if you at least spend a handful of years early on in Hollywood. Just putting in the time matters. You know, there's like these funny stories about Bill Murray who lives in like North Carolina or something. And he's like totally out of the loop. So yeah, that definitely works. There are examples of that. But I think it helps. Increase your odds. Yeah. You want to increase your odds of success. The second one or the third one, luck is incredibly real. You know, I remember like early on in my career, I was thinking like, there is no such thing as luck. It's just hard work. I'm just going to do it.
- No, shit's real. Shit's real. I remember, I've said this story a bunch of times when we were selling our company, Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot at the time, got in a life-threatening accident, two weeks after we closed. And there's a world where two weeks before, if it happened, it could have ruined it. I think you've had a couple examples where if one or two things happened before after selling a business, like within like a month, it could have changed things. Being sick really matters, being born in a healthy place, in a healthy family, things like that. Luck is totally real and I think that we dismiss it too often.
- Yeah, I think I agree with that. I would say luck is real. I would also say a big part of luck is in your control and a small part of luck is outside of your control. So most of the luck you experience in your life, there's a whole bunch of things at the beginning being born in a certain place, healthy, your parents, whatever. Those are outside of your control. A lot of what happens after that is in your control. And we've done the there's a podcast episode called four levels of luck where we taught, on framework Friday, where we talk about actually manipulating luck to be to go towards your advantage, if that makes sense. There is a set of actions you can take that will increase the amount of luck you end up having in your life. And this is not like, you know, hold crystals or something like that. It's like more practical, tangible stuff.
- Okay, the last part of that that I'll say is I remember when I was, I had moved to San Francisco and I met Michael Birch, the guy I came to work with, because again, proximity is power. I just took the job because I was like, oh, I get to sit next to this guy. This guy's like a billionaire who's built for successful internet companies. Well, what is the thing I want to do? Build a successful internet company? I think this is the place to sit. And I was talking to him and I was trying to figure out like, did this guy just get lucky or what happened? Because a lot of people, I think would look at him and say, oh, he got lucky because the thing he sold.
- Two years later, Bibo, he sold it for $850 million, two years later, a year later, AOL wrote it off for like, you know, a giant tax write off and just like, and nobody uses Bibo now, Facebook won and Facebook beat it. And so some people say, oh, he got lucky, right? You know, he sold it for whatever. And I definitely don't think that's true, because he's built like multiple companies that have been successful. But what I figured out, the thing I ended up figuring out was, it's not lucky that he won, but it is lucky how much he won. So he was going to be successful either way. But whether that number was 20 million, 80 million, or 800 million, there was a large degree of luck and timing that was outside of his control that contributed to that. He could just easily, just as easily have been an 80 million guy versus an 800 million guy. And that I don't think was necessarily in his control. That was right place, right time, right circumstances. You know, the right person had the right drinks at the right bar next to the right person. And I think that, you know, the magnitude of success is a lot more based on luck, not the appearance of six, not the, not the existence of the success. He was going to be successful no matter what.
- All right, and I'm gonna jump around another one Ivy League-ish school So I don't know how we're gonna define that but like that a top 20 University Is totally worth it what even if that means that you have to go into a lot of debt I think it's totally worth it I think state schools where you get some type of in-state tuition and you still get a college experience Totally worth it most everything in between if you have to go into debt for it. I think it's absolutely not worth it You're like where I went school where I went I went to Belmont University I was I was fortunate I got a little bit of a scholarship and my parents paid for it for 100% not worth it. It was at the time I think 30 or 40 grand a year and it's a no-name university that It's just completely irrelevant 100% not worth it, but I know people who went to I my wife went to an Ivy League school I know people like you went to Duke and like you have a handful of connections If you go to Stanford you have all these connections that seem 100% worth it and here's another like thing if you have Stanford on your resume You're gonna at least get the interview This is true if you look at how people recruit They just got a scroll through an excel sheet and it just says where you graduated Bellarmine and Kentucky that cost $60,000 a year or whatever it is That is not the same as Stanford or Darth Darkman Like you're just automatically going to have an increased likelihood of getting that interview But even more important than that you're gonna meet people who are have been or maybe been around the world have rich parents Like that stuff actually matters and actually those connections and that that influence on your life It really actually matters and it's worth going into debt to debt. I
- kind of disagree here. So I went to Duke, which is not an, not technically an Ivy League school, but is like considered up there with Ivy League is actually like a sports thing, but like, you know, whatever, it's considered like a top school. And it wasn't worth it for me, because I was not ready to figure out how to make it worth it, right? It's, it's what you make of it. It is not going to be handed to you just by showing up. And I had the total, I had totally the wrong mindset. I thought I'm here. I got to, I don't know, do the thing I've been doing to get here, get good grades. You know, eventually graduate past the test, you know, go to med school, do whatever I'm supposed to do. It was like a track.
- And there are some people who made it worth it. The people who were like, yo, we got these resources free or I'm gonna go and meet these, these two professors or I'm gonna get exposure to these other classes that I wanna learn about or I'm gonna use my time here to socialize plus spin up some side hustles because man, there's no better time to find co-founders and build a startup than when you're in college. Like there were some people who had that right mindset. My light bulb is not on, right? Like now I got this floating ass light bulb. There was no light bulb on at that time. And so I misused it. I think the majority of people misuse it.
- I did have one phone call that was really important and I'm just gonna say it out loud here because if there's somebody who Needs to hear this, you know, I got lucky that my dad gave me this phone call Maybe your maybe your dad doesn't have the same sort of wisdom that my mind did so I'm gonna say it out loud I called my dad my second year into college and I was like hey He's like how's it going and I was like, I don't know. It's okay. He's like, what do you mean? Like how's your you know, how's school? And I was like well Grades aren't great. He's like, oh man. What would happen? I was like no, they're not terrible I'm not failing. I just like, you know, I'm a B-minus student here And like, you know, I've been getting a's in high school. So B-minus was like, no, not very good. He's like alright That's alright. He's like are you trying?
- And I was like, yeah, I'm trying, but man, like everybody here is smart. Like, you know, everybody here is just as smart as me, if not smarter. And they all work harder than me. I'm trying to figure out this whole hard work thing, but like, you know, just going to be honest with you. Like these guys just live in the library and I just don't even like, I just figured out where they go. They go to the library. They go to office hours like I was, I didn't even understand where people were going with their free time. That's what they were doing. Were your, what's your dad paying? Yeah, parents are paying for it. So this is what I told him I go, you know, you're paying a lot of money for me to go here.
- And I could go to UT, you know, state school, it'd be, I think 10 times cheaper or something like that. Like five times cheaper maybe. I was like, you know, if you want me to try, like I'm willing to transfer by the way, just because like I don't think I'm going to do that well here. And so I don't think it's worth it for you to pay this amount of money. And so I told him that and he goes, um, and, but I had been telling him, he's like, he goes, why do you say that, you know, um, you're not like good there? And I was like, well, like dude, my, my, this guy who lives next door to me. He's like a freaking genius. He's like a, you know, he just gets the physics stuff right away. And then he's also good outside of class. Like, you know, in the summers he goes in, he drives an ambulance and the Palestinian war front just for fun. And like, yeah, that's how he spends the summers. Like, you know, I'm over here picking boogers with you. Like, I don't, I don't even know what to do in the summer. These guys all got plans and internships and this and that. And like this guy's uncle works at JP Morgan. He's doing that thing. That's the point. And he goes, yeah, that's the point because that's why you're there. You're not there for the classes. You're there because when everybody around you is like that, it will just raise your standards. You won't even know what mediocre looks like. You think you're mediocre, but that's because you're hanging out with exceptional people. If I take you and put you in a state school, you're not going to have as many exceptional people around you who for them, that's normal. And he goes, so, you know, the point of being in college for you to go to that school is not so you could graduate at the top of the class and get the best. Grades and be the smartest kid in the classes. It's so that that becomes your network and that becomes your normal. And he's basically said something to that effect. And I'm improving my point, by the way. It's pretty deep. You're kind of proven my point. I know. I know. So I'm saying like that is the the saving grace of it. I don't know if the I don't know like that light bulb went off of me halfway through. Then I started to focus on, oh, yeah, then once I realized that, I started to get to know those people before that. I was like,
- Oh, these, they're just different. I'm a stay away and like, I don't know. I got to find people who are like me who are just basically bumming around here who don't know what to do. Instead, I was like, Oh, the point is to be hanging out with these people and become more like them and not feel like I'm competing with them or intimidated by them. All right. I've got a few more and I'm going to actually merge a couple of them. So, um, uh, another one, having a technical skill. If we're talking about internet companies, it, this mostly means like being able to like code or design. Um, in my case, it was writing, which actually I think counts, but it's a little bit less more important, but having a technical skill, like in training to have a skill set is a massive, massive advantage. And I think being a generalist is not, that is just a bullshit excuse, but you should actually be good at least one thing. And particularly coding or design would be better, but copywriting counts as well. And there's a few other things sales actually, I think can count, but you need to be good at something. And I think that most people don't do that. I would say great at something. You got to like train for years to acquire a skill and then go beyond that, but you need a skill. And I think it's a massive advantage. And people dismiss that as being a generalist. And that's just like self masturbation. That is a full crap excuse in reality. You should be, you should try to get great at something.
- You know, it's the funniest version of a generalist. A generalist already is like, you're teetering on the edge of just being a bullshitter. Yeah. It's people who call themselves a polymath. Have you ever heard somebody call themselves a bullshitter? Dude, yes. That's like people who call themselves a contrarian. It's like, dude, if you got a label it, you probably not it. You can't be the one who calls yourself a polymath, nor could you call yourself a contrarian. It's other people who got pointed out. That's when that label works. It's like you can't nickname yourself brain. That doesn't work that way. You know, you either you either. You either. Yeah. No, no, that's not how that worked. Other people can call you humble. You don't get to call yourself humble. Yeah. So polymath is like the you've you've fallen over the fence like hump dumpty and now you're fully in bullshit land when you call it yourself a polymath. So okay, that's my that's my rant on that. I think you're 100% right. You gotta have some skit. What do we say? You gotta have some attributes. You gotta bring some attributes, man. You're gonna have some side strike time. You're gonna have attributes. You can't just be a dope.
- I hired a guy that I thought was gonna be great because he was like, you know, saying all the right to his hustle and he was saying all the right things and within a month I realized Guys got no attributes. He's got a handsome attribute. What are you good at? What can you do? Man, I can help with anything. Okay, you can help with anything. What can you what problem can you go solve? What what are you great at if I hand you this thing? What can you just nail this part of it? I? Oh, I would also consider myself somewhat of a generalist But it's you can only really what people mean when they're actually a good version of a generalist is they're great at one thing But they decided not to just specialize is that yeah that one tool for the rest of their life and they've decided to go broader But they got that in their back pocket one or two core skills. They're amazing at paid marketing. They're amazing at copywriting They're amazing at building at you know coding. They're amazing at
- Sales and they could just do that as their job and they could be you know And the top 10% of people if they did that just as their job not the top 1% right because they're not sure Specializing and being like I'm gonna hone this craft every day for the rest of my life But they're in the top 10% already at that and then they're in the top like 30% at four or five other things That's a real generalist not somebody who's just Average at everything and like or good at nothing or good at nothing right. Yeah What did a ronda Rousey called it a DNB you remember that what's that mean she goes She was talking about this when she was on the top and the OC and she goes oh yeah girls just DNB's There's just do nothing bitches And so in my head when I hear a generalist I'm like let me make sure you're actually not just a DNB Yeah, dude a dude nothing bitch like you need to do something and or like in your case your Skill set could actually be like charisma and like attracting and recruiting people and like putting in the right direction That that's a skill set you know leadership is a skill set getting things started that that and being like the the initial Match that gets like a fire started. I think that's a skill set But I think having a skill and that actually being great at something. It's really important. All right. I'll give you a few more
- Assume that people don't change. I think that's like a safe rule. You know, we have this attitude. Maybe it's an American thing. I don't know where it's just like, you can change. And I do believe that's possible. You know, I've had demons in the past that I've overcome. I know a lot of other people who have had things that they've overcome, that shit does take place. It's fairly rare. And if you are a person that talks the talk and you don't walk the walk, you will never change. And if I meet someone like that, I just assume, oh, they're just always going to be like that. And they will not change. No amount of encouragement is going to make them change. Sometimes that happens.
- Assume it won't and that's I used to have a different attitude when I started my company I'm like, oh, I'll just get these people and I'll teach them how to be great yada yada yada As I've grown with this pod and talk to people I just the people who act a certain way have always acted that way Yeah, there's my sister says that she goes no people change for the worse They will decay more often than they're gonna be like turning it around and like you know Going from a to be and so I think you're right that is the working assumption On to you know innocent until proven guilty, you know same till proven different is how I feel with people right? Exactly you got a show that something is changing I am not gonna assume and I'm not gonna be that you know The the stereotypical like the woman who wants to fix him. It's like don't I'm not that I'm not I don't want to be that when I recruit people anymore. No, I'd rather just recruit people who are great
- And like, just let them do their thing versus somebody that I'm going to train and groom and turn around a project. It's like, why do all that effort? No bonus points for making it harder. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sink spreadsheets are doing databases. HubSpot grow better. Alright, the last two. So I actually don't think necessarily that the time and effort put into a project is going to dictate the outcome. I think to build a company, now I would have to put numbers on it. To build a company that makes you potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.
- You don't necessarily have you can achieve that by having balance. But I think to have these massive outsized world changing companies, things that create tens of billions of dollars in 10, 15 years and have a meaningful impact in the world, like a Tesla or something crazy like that or a stripe, something like that. I think that working 80 hours a week, raising lots and lots of money and having zero balance is 100% needed. That said, I think you can still achieve a huge amount of success compared to the average Joe and actually do it working 40 hours a week or in some cases after a while less. And that's like an interesting dichotomy, but I think it's true. Yeah, I'll go with that. I like that. What else you got?
- Last one. And this is like, this is one of the very few irreversible decisions. So having some type of success and taking a meaningful amount of risk before you have a family, meaning you have less time, you've got less responsibility. Unfortunately, it's an irreversible decision. But getting an early-ish win early in your career is 100% a huge advantage. And you are at a massive disadvantage by having a young family and not having achieved something and then wanting to go achieve it. It's not impossible. But taking those risks early on, people should be encouraged to do that more because it is life-changing. Yeah, I think so. Paul Graham has this essay that he wrote. I don't remember the name of it.
- He basically was like assume I forgot the exact metrics. I read this a long time ago I was in my early 20s and I like stood out to me. He was like Assume you start out with seven points as an entrepreneur and these are your set the seven points is like your capacity to like take risks and like achieve what you want and Then he's like for every one of these things like you know minus one right it's like Mortgage and whatever minus one kids minus two You know and he's basically you know you can still do it
- But you're margin of error and the difficulty that you're gonna have and the stress and the stress you're gonna have pulling this off Like assume you are sort of sapping your you know your life mono your points in terms of how much ammo you have to go attack This thing it's being sapped by each one of these these factors and I don't remember what all of them were but it's worth you know go go and find this essay because I think he's actually true It's an uncomfortable truth people don't like this because it doesn't sound politically correct because like you know the politically correct thing to say is you can do it you could do anything and And you could argue and you should by the way if you're 40 you shouldn't be listening to this part you should be saying
- Screw that. I got all the wisdom. I got my purpose. My kids. I got the experience. Oh, you know, that a 20 year old will never have. I have, and yes, you have different advantages. But objectively speaking, it is much easier to take risks. And if you were going to just play it out in an ideal scenario, you would take your risks earlier when you have less to lose. You have less pressure, less stress, less financial obligations. It's just a more like game theory, optimal way to play. You don't have to play it that way. But it is, I think, sort of objectively speaking, a preferred way to play. But, you know, if you didn't play that way, it's okay. It can still win anyways.
- So that's the list. That's my unpopular truths, my not awesome stuff to discuss, but I believe it to be true that I've learned from the pod and I'll end with all of those rules or ever I described them as can be completely broken and there's tons of examples of all of them being not true. But that's what I believe the truth. So that's my list. Okay, I like it. Let me give you another idea. All right, so I was doing, do you do like gifts, like company gifts for the holiday or something like that? Do you like send out gifts? No, no, that wasn't that wasn't a me thing. Do you do that warm tender person who might that you know give give Exhale my love language, bro. Where's the affirmation are?
- silent nods of approval. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A pound in the back is the greatest gift. The greatest gift is the lack of criticism. I provided you today. So I was thinking about it. I was like, Oh, you know, and I remember at a previous company I worked at the office manager, she was good at the stuff and she would get like everybody's address and then she would send these Harry and David gift gift baskets. Have you ever had a Harry and David gift basket? No, what's that? Oh, dude. Imagine.
- Somebody's at the door. Who could it be? You got to the door? Hey, we have this amazing huge gift basket for you. You take it into your kitchen, you're like, wow, what's what's going to be in this gift basket? Sam, take a guess. What's in this gift basket? Chocolate, I guess. Could be chocolate. Could have been chocolate. It's not chocolate, though. What else could it be? Like local foods like brixasolami and cheese. They could be sloppy cheese. There's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of chocolate. There's a little bit of cheese in there. Pairs. They had these jumbo pears, and they know because pears are the most underrated fruit. They are the official fruit of my first million as far as I'm concerned. I agree. These huge, delicious pears were in there, and I was like, what the hell is this? And I was like, what is this giant?
- Gift that I received and why does it why is it so awesome? It's all the one to Harry and David Harry and David right? So they they do gift baskets of all kinds But this one was a giant pair basket that we got and I still remember this thing and I was dude You came over to my house. I don't care if you're the the cleaner You're just a guy walk a bite I was slinging pairs to you because I had the juiciest pairs that were gonna go bad They were massive and I needed to offload these things and everybody asked. Oh wow. Where'd you get this? I said my company sent it to me because they love me and that's how I felt and so I thought I always remember this experience And so then I started digging I was like what's up with this Harry David thing by the way Oh my and they're huge Harry and David Sold to a company that you know of 1 800 flowers for a hundred and forty two million dollars back in 2014
- They have a couple main brands of this thing. I'm Harry and David, which is these gift baskets. They have Wolferman, which is Gourmet English Muffins and other foods like that. And they have Stockyards, which is prime meats, basically. And Harry and David, it's a super seasonal business. Fall and winters when they get a lot of their orders and they got 50 retail stores that like help them fill the stuff. And it got me thinking about Harry and David. It got me thinking about 1-100 flowers. That did a little deep dive. So 100 flowers starts off as a phone number 42 years ago. Literally, it was just 1-100 flowers. And it goes on to build basically like a $600 million plus business. They, you know, for a long time, it's just the phone number. Then 1985, they start e-commerce because they're like, oh, we need this. And they basically have like thousands of locations and fulfillment centers. Not all owned by them, but like fulfillment partners. Somebody who can send flowers to you.
- And basically these guys are, it's like a bundle of 14 brands and let me just give you their revenue last quarter. So last quarter, what's that publicly traded? They did 485 million in revenue last quarter. So that means they're now a, what is that 500 times? Well, and that's not even a popular quarter, probably their February revenue, like Trump's like the, I think winter's probably their biggest. Well, let's say it's probably a billion and a half a year. This is pretty safe to say. The gift baskets, which are the Harry and David section, they did 148 million last quarter. So that means that's probably like a $500 million your business florals was 300 million. And then yeah, basically they have like whatever, they have some other stuff.
- They got Cheryl's cookies. They bought her for 40 million. They got you know Personalization mail, which is something out of the buffertune of his million. They got Sherry's berries You know, there is Barry's I love Sherry's berries. Yeah, right? It's great popcorn factory He bought that for 30 million back in the day. So they own all these brands. So I'm like, okay, this is great now, I've also been doing this food gifting thing lately because I'm like you have not a big gift or trying to get better at it inspired by our buddy Ramon Who is a prolific gift her the best gift or someone said savage of a gift her
- So he got me thinking, man, he really highlighted my gifting deficiencies. So I said, I'm a star sending gift, but I'm not a big plan ahead guy. So day of where do you get a last minute gift that can get to that person's house same day, same hour? Maybe maybe it's 11 p.m. I'm trying to squeeze it in before midnight. Door dash in Uber Eats. That's what I've been doing. I will just door dash you food because food is, you know, the universal love language. Yeah. But when you get to send me a pizza at 11 a.m. That's stupid. I'll send you a pizza and wings. I'll send you.
- Four slushies. I'll send you Boba tea. I'll send you a cinnabon I'll send you bro. I got options. I got I got a whole like menu of my gifting foods that I'll go to Because I gotta know I gotta know what you like right like I know you got that sweet tooth right I might hit you with 16 pints of ice cream and you'll be like this is Sean. This is simply too much ice cream I'll be like I know because I love you that much right I'll just hit you with these kind of these kind of gifts so I Think that somebody should build a 1 800 flowers type of brand because the things I'm gifting They're not made for this that I'm made to be gifted right the cinnabon is not made to be sent to a friend for their birthday
- But I think somebody should build basically birthday eats or last minute gifts on door dash on completely agree as a cloud kitchen. I'm just getting stronger as the idea builds As a cloud kitchen nationwide it is optimized for gifts. So baskets that are nicely like put a bow on it handwritten notes that's got to be a part of it You know, so something that's gonna be able to give you a note or even a little like little trinket that shows that this is a card That this is for the occasion and then help me help you help me give to somebody else is how I feel about this now
- The cloud kitchen is already good, but if you remember back in the day, we had the idea of not just a cloud kitchen But a cloud kitchen where you partner with a celebrity. So this is where I need your help We need our celebrity partner who is gonna be the face of This last minute gifts brand this gourmet gifts brand that we're gonna create launch nationwide across Uberites It sounds like a rhetorical question. So I have a feeling you have someone in mind. No, no Honestly, only person I thought of was Ryan C. Chris and I don't even know why I might as well go with the hardest working man in Hollywood. I haven't seen his face in that app I think he would like to be in that app. So I'm thinking Ryan C. Chris is a good white will white women like you you'd be fine universally A recognizable face But who else could be who else could be the guy or the girl like you know Mariah Carey she's seasonal maybe Mariah's Maybe Mariah's is is is maybe she needs to get out of the song game and get into the gift game
- I don't know, but I do think this is actually brilliant. I've tried to order one, I'm the last minute gift guide too. And I'll try to order 1-800 flowers the morning of Valentine's Day. And oftentimes they don't let you. Yeah, and just like too late. If you really loved her, you would have done this three days ago. Yeah. And it's super annoying. So I'm totally on board. I think this is awesome. I think this is great. Can you not do that now? There aren't any good gift basket companies on the DoorDash. Like if I open DoorDash right now. So let's.
- Let's open this. I can't get an edible arrangement also a great gift man edible arrangements wonderful Yeah, those are good and I think you can get some of those, but I think we need a fresh brand so like Like you know they have like they have the flour and gift boutique on mine at least And it's flowers. You know, it's just flowers right like It's like roses for food a cookie in a bag right Yeah a bath bomb come on You think Mariah and Ryan secrets are just Extravagant
- I'm on board. I've experienced the same thing. And I've also studied 1-800-flowers. 1-800-flowers is a really interesting company because they will tell you all types of insights in their annual report and they have so much intel because they own so many brands. So I'll give you an example. In one of their reports, they said succulents are growing amongst millennials. And I remember reading about that like in 2018 and I told a couple people about it and they started succulent delivery businesses geared towards millennials and they kill it. You know, there's now the the sale There's another one called what's that other one called?
- Yeah, I was. They've raised millennial, you know, succulent. Playing businesses, yeah, I don't know. Dude, and they have so much insight. Or another insight that you can get from 100 flowers is they're like, we're trying to, what do they say? We actually don't make a lot of money from flowers, but we make a shitload of money from like, when people buy vases. So I'm like, why aren't you like, painting cool shit on this vase and getting people to like, spend more money on it? You know, like, why aren't I see like, a Frida Kahla or whoever it is like, painting on like this, like, sick vase and I'll pay you $50 for it. Dude, 1-800 flowers is actually a really, really, really good business to go and read their annual reports because they have such interesting insight and they've been doing it for.
- I don't know how old is it now? It's from the 70s, I think. And so, really interesting company of study. I love that business. I love the gifting business. But their market cap sucks. Why is their market cap so bad? Their market cap is $600 million. Is it really? Yeah, it's horrible. They just plummeted over the past. Well, I guess everything has plummeted, but it's been really bad over the past year. That's interesting. I wonder if they think they're getting, like, disrupted by something? Yes, $600 million is the market cap. That sounds. And the guy who runs it's really interesting. I think that the guy who invented it, who founded it, I think his name was Jim McCann. And his son now is the CEO. And Jim is like a really interesting guy. I've had him on the phone a couple times. Really fascinating person and his son is the CEO now. So it's almost like a really weird family business. Another one that falls in this category. Have you ever studied Omaha Steaks?
- No. So, Omaha, do you know what that is? No, but that just sounds like exactly what it is. So Omaha Steaks, it's a mail order business. They sell steaks. So if you want to buy someone like $200 of like prime rib and filet mignon and chicken and like bratwurst and shit, you order from there and they send it to you and it's an awesome gift. And I believe it's privately owned. They make many, many, many hundreds. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually north of a billion in revenue. And they were one of the very first companies to take advantage of internet marketing. And so right when the internet got popular, you would see Omaha Steaks ads everywhere. And they were very, very, very progressive with like their, they're figuring out how to market on the internet. And they're still really fascinating. And it's a really, really interesting company to study. I think it's privately owned. You've never, I'm shocked you haven't heard of Omaha Steaks, but you also didn't know who Dolly Parton was. So yeah, you're really shocking. Exactly. But anyway, look up Omaha Steaks. You know, I think they're in like the six or $700 million a year in sales range. Are they invented or founded in like 1920? They've been around forever. A really fascinating company to study.
- So they are they like in are they mostly in stores or this is like no no no no It's 100% online and you gotta you just have to call them or it was like a catalog and you like would order steaks The very first thing it says the classic gift and a $90 package of sticks That's right dude. It's a great gift Neville my you know my best friend Neville who's also my neighbor his mom always is buying him Omaha steaks And so whenever he gets an order of Omaha steaks we all go to his house and we like we grill him It's an awesome gift Omaha steaks is a wonderful gift. I'm shocked you haven't heard of it No, but I I also feel like this could be done with like the right influencer partners
- like just do a sort of, you know, a slightly different version of this. This seems like the type of thing that is, you know, it's got a pretty good moat probably because they're like, you know, they probably own the production or something like that. No, that's not what their mode is. I would think their moat is the fact that like it's been around for so long. And so like you saw your parents gift it to people and then you're like, like, oh man, what should I get this guy? Like, oh, like, I guess like some fucking Omaha stakes, you know what I mean? It's like C's candy. It's like, why does Warren Buffett like that? He's like, I don't know, just like, that's just like the default gift that men give their wives and like people have seen their parents do it for years and then they grow up doing it. I don't know. The local C's candy here near me, they opened up a nursing home in the store because everybody there is so old. It's an incredible genius idea on their part. They're like, hey, actually we're just a funeral home in the back. You know, there's like one in five days. You can drop it in the store. Dude, C's candy is pretty whack. Like I go and eat it. It's shit. But like, it does seem kind of dead at this point. But you know, I get it warm up. It's like a dating center for him. Like, I don't know what's going on. Why is everyone 90 insights? He's cander. That is that just my local one.
- No, it's always like that, but it is like fire. Like, yes, I'm like just some truffles. You ever had a good truffle or a turtle? I'm all about the turtles. Dude, the turtles. Great job. The turtle is nothing to bat an eye about. But yeah, look up Omaha stakes. Look up 1-800 flowers. These are really interesting companies to study because like they're also interesting because you think Omaha stakes and you like judge them of like. Or at least I did. I'm like, oh, you know, it's just like some Omaha company. They can't be that sophisticated. They are incredibly sophisticated, at least in terms of internet marketing. And so they're really interesting to go and study. Right.
- Okay, cool. Let's let's let's cap it here. I get by the way, there's a bunch of fun stuff coming. So I got to say I want to do the studio tour and breakdown of how we did this like studio change and what you know What we learned from it what it cost all that good stuff. I Want to do a plan for next year. We're gonna do our annual awards. We're gonna drop the new intro music we're gonna do all kinds of different stuff and We're gonna talk about where the pods going. So I want to do that soon and Yeah, I think I think in the next the next two weeks. I think we're gonna have some fire podcast

5 Business Ideas With High Demand _ Low Supply ｜ Start These In 2022 (#374) [7x5M4lxK-dw].txt

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- With the pandemic, a bunch of restaurants have gone online, quote unquote, they have the QR codes, right? And something that I think of every single time as an internet marketer is why they are not A.B. testing their menus. And so I think someone needs to go and create A.B. testing software that restaurants can ingest super easily. What's up, Steph? Steph is back back in the house. One of the most requested return guests of all time. We should have you on more. What are you doing now, by the way? You left the hustle slash HubSpot. You went to Andrison. Is that where you're at still? Or are you doing other things? Yeah, exactly. I'm at A16Z. I'm their new podcast host. So they've had a podcast for like seven or eight years. And then it went on hiatus. They looked for a new host. And that's me. We haven't gone live yet, but we will be.
- Every time you come on, you bring this document. That's basically like, it's sort of what me and Sam do, but when me and Sam do an episode, we have like two or three bullet points each, like three words, and I have two and he has two, and that's how we prepare. You send this like encyclopedia Britannica of topics, ideas, like half-baked things in your head. So like I'm looking at this, this is like seven or eight pages or something like that. Oh no, 12 pages long. So we have a lot to choose from. So where do you wanna start? I wanted to share this one idea. I think I've actually talked about it on another couple pods, but...
- With the pandemic, a bunch of restaurants have gone online, quote unquote, they have the QR codes, right? And you pull up the menu, some restaurants have reverted back to the physical menu, but tons of restaurants are still using these QR codes. And something that I think of every single time as an internet marketer is why they are not A.B. testing their menus. And so I think someone needs to go and create A.B. testing software that restaurants can ingest super easily. And the basis of this is, well, A, if you think about what has made so many internet companies successful, it is the fact that they have these alternate worlds that they can A.B. test, right? Google Home page are we using this font or this font or using this color, this color, Netflix, you know, Amazon, every, all of these large internet companies have used this. But also there's the
- restaurant equivalent. So the hustle did a story on this woman, Michelle Binesh, and you can just look up design restaurant menus, the hustle or something like that to get the article. But we wrote about this woman who her job was literally to go redesign menus, physical menus, and based on her understanding of human psychology orientation. There's like this Z or Z effect on the menu and the way people scroll. She was able to figure out how to get one restaurant, just as an example.
- to bring in $9 more per customer by redesigning their menu. Same products, but just the orientation, the order of the menu, the design of it. I was thinking, why are restaurants not using this? As in, now we have the QR code, which allows us to direct someone to any unique link. We have the digitization of this. You could hire someone like Michelle, and she could probably figure out how to do this for you, or someone should just create a software that allows restaurants to do this. They don't need to change their menu at all, but they can mess around with the menu design the same way you mess around with landing page design and get higher conversion. And of course, the average restaurant owner is not going to know how to do this, and that's why I think they're needing to.
- needs to be just some sort of software that says, hey, we can increase your conversions by 50%, we can increase your average customer value by $3, whatever it is, and I haven't seen it anywhere. This is amazing. This is great. I remember, so I started a restaurant back in the day, but my very first startup was a restaurant. And we were, but when we finally got to launch, long story short, we were like, do we wanna launch a physical restaurant? We gotta sign this 10 year lease with a personal guarantee. That sounds scary. And our mentor kind of was like, could you test your concept by doing delivery only? And basically it was like a cloud, what a cloud kitchen is today, but this was back more than 10 years ago now where there was no door dash, there was no Uber Eats at the time.
- But it was like, what if people could just order online? What if you just had a kitchen nearby downtown? There was no physical seating. There's no storefront. You just deliver. And we were like, okay, listen. And so we tried it. And when you do that, you're really conscious of, well, our home menu is online. So that means we could run a test to just see like what makes people order more or not. And so we did the most basic of AB test. The first thing we did was we were trying to lower prices and we talked to this guy Dan Ariele, who was, he wrote this book, Predictably Irrational.
- And we were like, Dan, hey, we're three dudes trying to build this sushi restaurant startup. Do you know anything about the restaurant industry? And he's like, I know a lot about the restaurant industry. He goes, I get paid by companies to come in and help them with either the menu or, like, he told us about some experiment. I think Panda Express had paid him a bunch of money to do to basically say, could we get people, we have healthy items on the menu and people tell us the reason they don't eat here is because it's unhealthy, but nobody orders the healthy items. So like, what gives? And he's like, oh, humans are predictably irrational. They'll tell you one thing and then they won't do it. And he, the one test he had made was when you walk into a Panda Express, instead of putting both items on the menu and just having you choose, it was right when you walk through the door, it was like a little angel path. It's like, if you're going to eat healthy, go this way. And there was like the devil, if you're going to eat indulgently, you know, like, if you want full flavor, go this way. And when people make that choice upon walking in and then they only see a menu of those items, they were happier with their choice and they ordered more of those items. And so he like figured out that was the only way he could design this restaurant to do that one thing.
- And so similarly he was like, oh, he goes, oh, yeah, I can help your business. Your prices are too low. And we go, what do you mean? Like everybody says sushi's too expensive. We're trying to make it more affordable. How is that a bad thing? Like, what are you talking about, man? We're trying to do the people's work here. He's like, sushi people, like, do you ever want to eat? If I told you, you can eat cheap sushi. Would you want that? And he's like, no. And he's like, you know, he's like, so just like the wine industry, people buy expensive things because it makes them feel good that they bought a higher quality thing. And so he goes, just test the price. So we did it. We basically up the price 50% on one menu versus the other. We just A.B. tested it. And we had like higher conversion rate on the higher price, which is crazy. Like not even just it netted more money. It was higher conversion rate on the higher price. So that was like the first time I saw this like menu A.B. testing. I mean, think about how big of a lift that is. Like if you can convert every customer to higher rate and a higher dollar amount, that's like, you know,
- meaningful in an industry that's like 10% margins. And so we did that, then we tested other things like, instead of just saying, you know, this is a whatever, this is like the Philadelphia role we use salmon. It's like Alaskan salmon. Hand-caught Alaskan salmon. Farm-caught hand, you know, handled Alaskan salmon or whatever. We just started adding all these extra words that were like, meant nothing, changed nothing. They were all true, but it's like, always fresh, never frozen Alaskan salmon, hand-caught by a farmer near you. And it's like, oh, people like love that. And then they would buy more. And so you can see these little menu tricks. Now, what I didn't think of, which is your genius idea, is how do you actually turn that into a business where you could become an agency that does this for companies. You could become a piece of software that does this as AV testing of QR codes. You could do this with physical menus also, by the way. Like you could just give out two different versions of the physical menu and say, and just track the tickets and be like, cool, we know what the checkout is for how much they spend on both sides. And we could just prove to you that menu design A is better than B and like.
- Your current menu was designed by your niece who knows Photoshop So like you know I think we can do better than that and if we do that if we beat your current menu Then you pay us you know $50 a month and we'll keep running tests for you. Yeah, I think this is actually a really really great idea Yeah, I think the key difference. I mean you always look for inflection points I think you guys say or changes and so before you're right you could do this with physical menus But you know the data is so much harder to get and you have to like match up the physical menu with the POS software You're using but now I don't know what the percentage is But we all know a ton of restaurants are using these QR codes And so they're already they've like taken the major step that they went before of digitizing the experience And so now what you need to do is just apply those analytics And so some company needs to just go create the software Ideally it integrates into the POS so you just literally can
- pop out a report at the end. But even if you don't have it integrating with the POS, I think you can even just look at, oh, how long does someone spend on this menu versus this menu? How are they scrolling? Yeah, what items are being sold more? Well, you would even need to, because you're basically, so basically they'll scan the QR code and it's like Google Optimize or Optimize one of those. You don't enter an AB pass. Exactly. And then you're gonna pass the final value. Here's the final cart that they're checking out with to the thing. And when it's in person, like in restaurant, they check out with everything. They don't walk away. They actually do order food, so you can kind of bet pretty heavily on that. I wonder if people would also do this with DoorDash or Uber Eats. Could I be a service that just optimizes your DoorDash listing with photos, menus, copy? And if you're a national chain that's in whatever 1,000 cities, and I can get you an extra half a point conversion or extra $2 cart size, that's pretty meaningful for these restaurants that are on these delivery platforms.
- Yeah, I was thinking about that too because Uber Eats menus are always so long and you know, there's like that, what's it called where there you have too many options? Yeah, paralysis by analysis or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. And also Uber Eats will have three or so items at the top of like our most popular items. And I don't know if Uber actually selects that for the restaurant, but if you had the option and actually if you're an engineer at Uber working on this, like create a platform where people can A.B. Right. So that they feel like that's a platform where they're making more money versus DoorDash versus their own. Like that's a value add past if someone created their own.
- online menu that people ordered from, which would make obviously more sticky for people to stay there. Well, I looked at this startup that was, I know this works because I looked at this startup that was doing exactly this. What they were doing was they would go to a local mom and pop restaurant that was like, let's say, Chinese food, and they'd say, great. You know, Mr. Hans, Chinese, you know, great. Your, your, your, everybody loves you locally. And now you're on DoorDash, but like your photos are kind of crap. Your, you know, your descriptions are all off. You're not saying what foods are vegan, even though they are vegan, you're just, you don't list them. Like you're just not optimized. So what he would do is he would partner with the restaurant and he would just create a shadow, like a, like a clone of the brand, but he would call it like,
- You know, like two Chinese, like it would be like a more like catchy name. Then all the photos are super bright. So it's like, you know, on a backdrop of like orange or red or whatever, and like really good looking photos and they would, he would trim the menu down. He'd be like, like people come in here, they want like fried chicken and they want dumplings and they want this and that. And so he would just do like, this is just these items. He wrote better copy. He took better photos. And then all it was was when an order gets placed on those restaurants, that same restaurant just gets a ticket. They don't even, it's like they don't even know it's like from this other brand basically. And then later they would send them packaging. That's like, hey, if it comes in through this register, this like ticket printer, put it in the two, two Chinese like box, don't put it in Mr. Hans, like, you know, like local box. And so they just created separate packaging. So he's like, yeah, we have 200 restaurants. We do like, you know, 17 million in GMV and we operate none of these restaurants. They were already restaurants that already existed. All we did was just rebrand them for Postmates and Uber Eats and DoorDash.
- And I was like, oh my God, like this is like a mind-blowing idea. Yeah. He's like, yeah, they love it because they get like 30% extra revenue just because we're better at marketing on those platforms than they are. And I wonder how they're going to know. I actually haven't caught up with them. I didn't end up investing because I was like, I don't know where this goes. Like this is, I feel like this could just get like banned or blocked in one second, but like it was a fascinating idea. And that guy was really talented who was doing it. Yeah. One more thing on the idea of food, have you seen that? I think it's the FDA, their food pyramid or at least in Canada, that's what we called it, the food pyramid and you have like all these grains and they're like, tell it, eat this most bread and they're rethinking that. Have you seen that? They're re- they're really saying carbs, the foundation of the diet. Like fruit was this time fruit and vegetables were this like they shared a little section. Like they had bunk beds at the top of the pyramid. It was crazy.
- Yeah, they were, you know, people got upset because I mean, a simple example is they'd be like nuts, no nuts, too much fat. And then they'd be like, but white bread. Okay, you know, foundational. And so they're coming out with a new food pyramid of sorts and that impacts, I didn't know this, but foods can apply the word healthy to their products. Like, you know, brands, you could like actually have the word healthy on your cereal box as an example based on this food pyramid or some sort of requisites. And they're changing that. And I just thought, I don't know if there's a business idea here, but I feel like there's going to be a ton of content, a ton of changes coming out because of this, because I mean, the food pyramid was pretty foundational. And so I don't know what the business idea here is, but it's just like one of those, ah, there's got to be something here.
- Well, that's a good inflection. I'll give you another inflection like that that I was thinking about over the weekend. So you know the law change that allows college athletes to monetize their brand, their face called NIL, name and likeness. And so that came into effect this year. And so now college athletes can get paid. For example, when we did our MFM camp, we paid Puff Johnson, this basketball player at North Carolina to come drop in and play pickup with us. It was just a cool moment. It's like, oh yeah, here's like this guy who's gonna be in the NBA in a couple years. Like he's just playing with us and we paid him. I don't even know what.
- like $200 or something like that to show up for an hour. And he's like, cool. Like I got nothing else going on on a Saturday. Like I'll go pick up $200. And by the way, he was an awesome guy. So that's a little like market that's gotten created. And I was like, I was asking Ben, I was like, how did you book him? Like what'd you use? And he's like, I just DMed him on Instagram. And I was like, oh, interesting. There's no, there's not really a great marketplace yet that's connecting college athletes to the like people who want to pay them for their, you know, just to do an appearance or a sponsorship, whatever. There's some people trying, but nobody's like, there's gonna be one company that just owns this.
- Here's the liquidity. It's like we got all the athletes and then like because of that, we got all the brands and we take care of all the transactions and you don't need to use Instagram DMs and like Venmo. Like it just all happens to your platform and we have all the reporting that we hand over to the universities. So I think that's like a big idea is I create AngelList for like, you know, the NIL marketplace. The second thing is just what opportunities is open up. So Dave Portnoy, who runs Barstool, they jumped on this pretty early. They're like, oh great, we'll have a Barstool athlete program where you can sign up to be a Barstool athlete, which will help you get these deals. And they came out there like we're taking 0% cut on these deals. I don't know how or why, but they just decided to say that. And he's like, we have 200,000 college athletes as part of this now, some like huge number like that.
- That seems insane. And so I was thinking, I was like, man, so many different products and brands have been built off influencer marketing. Everything from movement watches, which were like early to Instagram, like influencer marketing and built a $100 million watch brand. Sugar Bear hair, they got the Kardashians to be, take pictures with this gummy, biting this little blue gummy, and that became like this iconic look. And then that became like, again, $100 million, like, you know, supplements brand. And so now I'm thinking, while all of a sudden overnight, you now can tap into the influencer marketing of college athletes across the country.
- And probably very few brands are doing this just yet. And you could almost create a company just working backwards from, all right, if I could get every influential college athlete to post something, what product should I make that's gonna work best with their audience and like their trust and all that stuff? Because it's kind of an unsaturated marketing channel right now. And an unsaturated marketing channel right now is like worth, it can be worth like $100 million if you can be the first to figure it out, that platform. And so you could kind of think about what products would their audience buy because now I can reach them for a very low cost.
- And this literally couldn't happen before. So you had this inflection change. And so I think that's another brainstorm that somebody could do and figure out what product would fit that category and just work backwards from the distribution. What would you do? Do you have any thoughts on if you were to choose that as your channel, people talk about channel market fit, what product would you create? Well, so thinking on the e-commerce side, just for a second, so I was like, all right, you can, and I don't know if e-commerce is the best. I think probably like some credit card or debit card or something like that is probably the best. Like if you can basically go get, you know, a million people, a million college students to start using your credit card because you got, you know, 100,000 athletes to just say, like, oh, I'm using this and sign up for this bonus point program and you get a, you know, whatever, $500 credit for a spring break or whatever. You come up with some offer, but you distribute it through these athletes and you basically say, cool. If I get at age 18 to 21, somebody to pick my credit card, what's that worth to me? And I think that's probably like, you know, one of the best categories you could be in, but if it's not that, let's just take e-commerce for a second. Like, I think that you want the, you find the, you know, I would first go to the class of the best e-commerce products to like high repeat purchase rates, high like kind of lock in basically, high margin, you know, low shipping. This is why like native deodorant was such a great product.
- It weighed less than a pound. So you could ship it in a normal envelope. So shipping was low cost. It's repeat purchase because you wear a deodorant every day and you run out of it every, whatever, two, three months. And so you're gonna keep buying in. It's high margin. It only costs this much to make and they could charge whatever, 20 bucks to sell a two pack. And so it had a lot of the traits that make for a great product. And so I would try to figure out whether it's like protein powder or like athletic greens or like some sparkling water brand or like, some sell sort of like. Smelly water. But yeah, smelly water. I try to figure out some product like that that's like mass appeal, high margin, high repeat purchase rate. And then I would just like work backwards from that. And I wouldn't do.
- You know products that are like you know big one-off purchases with the low-pew EPRIS I just try to stay away from those so I would go look at the winners of like current e-commerce and then I would try to You know retrofit those and be like would that like particularly hit with a college ground? Like I think like an energy drink would be like amazing Like I think I think if you could do like you know, whatever Red Bull rock star type of thing is if you could just make like the next the next either, you know Vitamin water or or energy drink I think that's probably the
- the strongest one, but if it's not that, then some kind of like subscription product like maybe deodorant or, I don't know, something like that, this is probably where I'd go for. Deodorant would work. You could be like, don't smell on the court or some cheesy thing like that, but yeah, I think deodorant would actually be. Well, you could also like just riffing on that. You could take the deodorant brands and you could like make it specific, you could make the sense specific to the campus. So like, you know, whatever the name, like you have like Longhorn, you know, whatever for UT and then you have like the names of the sense that like kind of fit that market. It's the same scent, you're just labeling it differently depending on where it's at, but you're now pulling into that kind of like brand affinity they already have with their campus or whatever else. And it makes sense for the athlete to be promoting that because it's like, again, they're like a college athlete for that school. Maybe you could do some things like that to like juice how attractive it is.
- I kind of love that because I'm just, you know, my marketing hat is on and there's so many taglines. You could be like sniff out your competitors or like, you know, you could imagine these internet wars of like, Oh man, that like that university is sent sucks or that like high school like, have you smelled that? Like that stuff's nasty or like, you know, people actually competing on which, which college has the best set. For every, every stick that's bought here, we, you know, drop one stink bomb at your rival school like that. It's like some way to like, you know, compete with the other schools.
- Nice. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sinks, spreadsheets are doing databases. HubSpot grow better. Okay, let's do a quick one, which is I actually saw this in the trends newsletter a while ago. I didn't write this, but it was this stat, which is the average person spends one and a half thousand dollars after a breakup. I have no idea where the stat came from, but definitely got the wheel spinning and they came up with a bunch of different ideas, which I think actually are getting some traction.
- Divorce party ideas is something that gets search volume, breakup cake, people throwing their own breakup parties. And I was just like, huh, I don't know if there's specific brands that are taking this on, but I was like, huh, that's that, one and a half thousand dollars, don't know where it came from, but there's something there. That's like, if I'm F Jerry, that Instagram account and they have these, they've built a little media empire, they have a bunch of other accounts, but they also have products they make. They made that card game, I think, they make some products now. If I was one of those accounts, I would be jumping on this. I would basically say, all right, it's already viral, it's me worthy, it's remarkable, people are gonna talk about this. So how do I make the best breakup cake delivery service? Or like, the revenge body kit, and it's like, we send you this seven day detox, we send you a healing crystal, we send you a juice cleanse and whatever else to get that person out of your life, you're gonna get the bad juju away, and I'd be like, this is called bad juju or whatever. And I would just try to create like a viral product through that, because I think it's on brand, and I think it has like enough demand where there's, you could see this doing, you know, two to 10 million dollars a year, all organic, just because the product is so viral.
- You know, it's probably not gonna be enormous, but there's a there's enough of a niche there Especially if you're one of these accounts because you already got distribution or you're somebody who goes to those accounts and partners with them And says hey, I got the right product for you guys Let's do you know some kind of profit share and I'll run this business and you guys just help me promote this like, you know Whatever like the breakup vodka and it's like, you know, this is the break of vodka kit or whatever, you know, whatever the thing is Yeah, I mean I'm imagining you know all the tropes of someone gets broken up with and they become super fit and like They get a PhD and they just become like the best version of themselves after the breakup doesn't always happen But you could imagine something like that or something that's even less work It's like what's those what are those like voodoo dolls where you like poke it and you're like I'll will towards them You can just like upload a photo of your purse that we print you a doll that looks like, you know, like close enough like them And like you can do that
- That reminds me of, did you see that startup, Empty? It was fake. Did you hear about this? It's, I think it was, you know, had the silly spelling too. It was like, EMPTI or something. And it was a fake startup that people thought was real. And basically they sent people these empty boxes. And the whole idea was like, look, we send you these empty boxes. And there's some like, motivational quote from Buddha in it. And it's like, you know, rid yourself of all the things you don't need in your life. And the idea is that people are supposed to take all their junk, put it in these boxes, and send it to this company for free. But they pay this company to send them these boxes. But it was a fake startup, and all these people are writing about it, and they're like, oh, this is so smart. Like, what a cool company. And it was just it. Yeah, exactly. It was a joke.
- Yeah, actually you could do that with this too. You could send them the breakup box. It's like put all their crap in this, all their crap they've left in your house that reminds you of them. Put it in this, send it to us and we will send you a video of us like burning this box in this like epic way and like you get to have that at the end. That's, you know, those are the types of ideas you could do with this. Nice. So you were right before we started recording, you were starting to tell me you go, here's my theory of why people like this podcast. So what is your theory? Okay, so there are many reasons to love my first million. I think there's something that you guys have done, especially recently when you and Sam just go back and forth and you tell a really funny joke and then Sam just starts laughing hysterically like in a contagious way that most people would hold back maybe on a podcast, but it's literally, as people say, like you're in the room with him. And it reminded me of this subreddit I found recently called r slash contagious laughter. 4.5 million people subscribe to this. And it's one of, I think the top hundreds of Reddit's out there. And it's literally just a feed of people laughing.
- And there's dozens of posts every day. And I was just, as I went down it, I was like, there's gotta be a post of Sam and Sean who's here. Well, okay, I'll tell you a couple interesting things about this. First, I think this must, I think the subreddit must be kind of like, almost like new or growing faster recently, right? Because I hadn't heard of this subreddit before and I kind of keep an eye on the top ones. Maybe I just missed it. But I've also seen this trend on TikTok. I don't know if you've seen it. Somebody will be like, I'm a clinical psychologist and I can make you happier in the next 10 seconds.
- Repeat after me. Ha. And there's like a duet. So that guy's like, ha. She's like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, and you're just like, okay, I see what this is going. And then she just gets like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, and like by the end, both people are just cracking up, like, because it's like 10 deep, and you can't help yourself. Like the body will just start like genuinely laughing just from making the sound like it goes both ways. It's not like something funny happens. Therefore, I break out laughing. It's like, if you break out laughing intentionally, you could just like, it's like something funny just happened basically. And yeah. And so I've thought about this. I contagious laughter thing in two ways. One is.
- as a I was thinking about the podcast and I was like watching I was watching the all-in pod and I love that podcast, but they do something that really bothers me Which is one of them will crack a joke and the other guys don't what I call sell of a joke like they don't laugh And I don't know if they don't laugh because they're trying to They're a they don't think it's funny be it's not that's they're trying to keep it serious or see they might just edit it Where they just don't use the audio track from someone because it kind of makes it a little choppy because you're using one on top of the other
- But it totally changes the vibe of something when in a podcast especially when the other person actually sells your joke Like if you if you try to crack something and I go with it or and this works for for other things on my first million Two I call it the homey move or say we'll be like Do you know how many people buy this thing and I know it's probably a high number if he's telling me like that But I'll be like I don't know what like like a hundred and just to give him though like no dude a million And I give him that like assist basically and so there are several things like that where you got to kind of sell The other person's thing and it's not fake. It's just like be expressive like laugh hard react big that stuff works when it comes to content and people are very shelled up about that sort of thing I don't know if that that is in line with what you're talking about
- Totally. One of the funniest moments on My First Million was your Orlando Bloom story, which I think if I just heard you telling it by yourself, I'd be like, yeah, that's pretty funny. But Sam's laughter layered onto that where he was, you can just tell he was dying as you were telling that story. Just made it honestly, top five moments on My First Million history for me. But that's why I think this subreddit is so great, even in their rules or their like community guidelines. You know how someone posts something and there's typically a bot that says, hey, report this if X, Y, and Z on that subreddit, it's like report this if you're laughing at a joke or some sort of incident and not the laughter specifically. They're like, we only want you to be on here to hear other people laughing. So I don't know, I just thought that was like a fun, a fun thing. And reminded me of why I think some people love My First Million, it's just so authentic.
- Well, you're you're about to do podcast and do you remember what I told you my advice to you when it came to to do in a Podcast I don't know if you remember this this is a couple years ago. I actually don't you should tell me I was like Don't be too normal or I was like you're too normal. I was like you need to be yeah Like to me the ideal podcast guest is like half insane And what that means is like there's things that they're not even aware of that are in something Sam has a ton of these where he's like Dude, I was thinking that you know you think about like what happens if someone broken right behind me right now I'm trying to kill me. I'm like no, I don't think that the fact that you think I think that means you're kind of insane You're not even aware that that's a weird thing you're doing you think that other people do that too And then the second is like being willing to say something crazy stuff like that And then the third is like they don't hedge
- and try to downplay. Like most people are basically taking their own little volume knob and turning it down all the time because they wanna fit in. And so the best thing you could do if you wanna be a personality on the internet is like you can't have that, I'm trying to fit in, turn the volume down thing. You gotta like turn it up if anything. And so that was my theory on it. Now I do think I might be wrong cause like there's people like Lex Friedman or whoever who are successful with their podcast and like, you know, it's like, you know, Lex is not, his volume is like down to two basically. He's a very monotone, calm, normal person. And people do end up loving it. So I don't think my theory was entirely correct, but I do think it helps to have like, you know, bit of a screw loose and like, you know, you're a very stable, smart person. You don't have that much of a screw loose. I think you're almost playing from behind when it comes to internet content. No, I think you're right. So in preparing for every episode that I do, I go and listen to that person on other podcasts. And it's crazy how they get asked the exact same questions everywhere they go because they're just kind of a template of like, okay, so tell me about your life. Like tell me why you went this direction in your career. And I think you've even talked about this on my first million. You're like, we don't do that. We ignore all the questions that we know everyone's gonna ask. I guess maybe some people wanna hear, but we ask you like the real stuff, like how much do you make? Like what keeps you up at night? Like,
- When have you failed or like even more than that, you actually just ask the questions that people probably want to hear. Yeah, there's this great thing that happens if you always ask questions like that. It's like a get out of jail free card. It's like, well, that's just what he does versus if you just try and spring that on one person, it's a little intrusive there. But it's like, oh, that's his stick. That's the show's stick. That's what they do. Then you can get away with being a little more blunt. And so cultivating an image of being a don't-given-f slash blunt personality has all these advantages because people just create new rules for you. They're like, ah, if a normal person did this, yeah, I would feel wrong. But that's just Sean being Sean. That's just Sam being Sam. And you're like, whoa, OK. And I just get to be that. That's awesome. That is awesome. Wow. OK, this is good. Let's keep going. What else you got? Cheating scandals. Everyone's talking about it. Just poker fishing. I even saw Irish dance.
- in Unused Letter recently. So, you know, cheating's everywhere. But... Well, if people are out of the loop, frame it for them about what are the controversies? Okay, so I don't know all of them in depth, but I've been following the chess one pretty closely. Magnus Carlsen, World Chess Champion, played Hans Neiman several weeks ago. Neiman beat him, but then there was all this controversy after where Magnus was acting sketchy, and then eventually came out with this statement saying, hey, I believe Hans cheated. I can't speak to exactly why. And then there has been a history of Hans cheating.
- in the past as well. So there's all of these people on the internet who are taking sides and saying, no Hans has been really good. How could you cheat over the board? And then there's people who believe in Carlson and are like, no, he's had a history of cheating. We just don't know how. And then there's been a similar poker controversy and then a fishing one where there were stuffing fish with like lead balls. And so I think a bunch of people have just, you know, become fascinated with this idea that, oh my gosh, people are cheating, even though they have been for a long time. But I have a couple ideas around the idea of cheating, but I first wanna hear your take. Like what do you think about these cheating scandals?
- Well, there's something very seductive about them. I don't know about you, but like I don't follow chess normally. But when it came to this, I was like, God damn it, if I don't have to get to the bottom of this, like, here goes four hours of like YouTube rabbit hole in, and I don't, it's not even like, it's a better entry point for me than just this person is great, or this was a great match. It's like, here's the controversy. Oh, what is it, right? And it goes back to this thing that I remember Dana White said once, Dana White's the president of the UFC. And he goes.
- They were like, you know, UFC is kind of a fringe small thing, but you're saying it's going to be huge. Why do you believe that? He goes, I believe that because if you go to a park or a playground right now and you've got a basketball court, people are playing basketball. You got a football field, people playing football, you soccer over here, baseball over there, and then somebody screams fight and there's a fight going on. Guess where everybody's head's turning to the fight. And that was his whole thesis of like, why I think the UFC is going to be big because fighting is this universal thing that just gets you to turn your neck, whether you wanted to or not. And it's actually kind of played out. The UFC's become this global sport, you know, a $5 billion plus company and.
- And it succeeded in places where, you know, like football doesn't really translate into Europe or Asia, but fighting does fighting, you know, like there's Chinese the Chinese viewership is big in the UFC. So is Russian and so is wherever every little country. So, I think controversy is kind of the same thing where like I wasn't that into chess until I found out that there might be this like scandal. What's the scandal? I gotta know. And then you look at the evidence and you're like, well, there's two kind of like interesting components. One is like, how would somebody cheat? That's kind of interesting. It's sort of like a oceans 11. Like, how did they rob the bank type of thing? Because you know, you're sitting there at a chessboard. It's not online. So, you know, this guy had been he had been caught cheating online admitted to cheating online. And many people cheat online to basically have a program running because, you know, AI can play chess better than a human can.
- But then you have, how was he cheating over the board? And there was this, then somebody threw out this crazy theory, which was that. The anal beads. Yeah, he's got anal beads, you know, basically up his butt that vibrate, tell him, you know, what to move to make or whatever. And so, and the way that Magnus did it kind of added to it. So he first, when he got beat, it was big news because Magnus is the greatest player in the world, maybe the greatest player of all time. He then goes online and he tweets out this thing like, he tweeted out like, I don't know, like a meme or quote from a soccer coach who was like, you know, I can't, if I say what I want to say, I'll get in trouble.
- And people are like, what is he trying to say? Then he comes out with the statement saying, I think he cheated. Then he plays him again, and one move or two moves into the match, he just resigns, he basically quits and walks away. Again, sort of like saying, I'm not gonna play with this cheater. And so some people are like, is this just sour grapes? And other people are like, no, he knows something. But he's not said why he thinks he's cheating yet. And then over time, more than three. Probably because he doesn't know, right? Well, now he did come out. He thinks that Hans cheated, but he doesn't know how. And that's probably why he hasn't been descriptive about it. Because he's like, I think this guy's cheated. There's two pieces of evidence.
- One is just, he says, he didn't look like he was trying. Like the guy beat me, I'm the greatest player in the world, and I know what it looks like when people try to beat me. They're very focused and concentrated. He barely looked like he was paying attention, yet he played basically a perfect game in beat me. That was his first thing, it was just like, I didn't think they feel like he tried and he beat me. So that was the first piece of evidence. And the second was people went back and looked at all of his past games as he ranked up, because he's had this crazy rise from a normal, great player to like Grandmaster or whatever, top ranked player. And they did this thing where they basically can put your game history back in this like chess solver engine and see how close to perfect, how close to AI did you play? And like the greatest players of all time have played like at 62 or 72% of their moves matched, you know, like what the AI would do, like perfect moves. And he's had like several, many games where he's at 100%. And like the greatest players ever have, the Mets will have like no games at 100% during their like rise to the top. And so it's sort of fishy on that front like, you know,
- really this guy's making like 100% game theory optimal moves and the greatest players ever at best or like at 70% and so That those are the kind of pieces of evidence against him, but still nobody knows how he did it if he if he is indeed Yeah, exactly So I used to play chess competitively as a kid and both of those are very compelling arguments The first one especially like if you've ever played chess across the board if you're in a tough situation Certainly if you're playing the world chess champion you are concentrating so hard I think there's stats that say like, you know a full chess match can burn like a thousand calories or whatever if you're sitting at the board For several hours and so I think that's really compelling. My question is a how do you prove that someone's cheating? I don't know if you can I think you can prove someone has the intent to cheat if you catch them with like Yeah, some anal beads or something in their shoe But how do you actually prove that someone has cheated and then I'm also curious to know how these
- You know like the chess Federation etc. How are they going to change the way they operate? To catch the shooting in the future. I don't I don't know. I guess they make people walk through a metal detector, but It's a game of action right? Yeah, you can always do the next thing that's like and I'm not gonna get caught Once you know, it's just like you know in the Olympics you have you saw Or Wada who basically the agencies are supposed to catch you from doping, but what happens is? Guys go to the Olympics. They test clean. They break all the records and oh, they're a natural athlete and then six years later Wada updates their tests so they can test for new stuff That's new to them But the athlete had it all along and then they go back to Tesla samples and they're like oh turns out they were doping right And this has happened like a few times in in the Olympics and in high-level sports And so there's this problem of like it's this cat mouse game between cheaters and the and the and the sort of like the anti-cheat But anti-cheat is actually a really interesting business like category. So I didn't really know much about this Until we started building a startup that was in the gaming space
- This was the company that ended up getting acquired by Twitch, but when we were building in this space we would play games in the office just refund if they fortnight played Overwatch played a bunch of different games like that and and Then you sort of see two things one is like wow the importance of like This sort of hand-eye coordination aim basically being able to aim and shoot in these games is like critical And then there's like you'll play somebody and you're like oh my god like as soon as I peek around the corner Boom I get headshot immediately perfectly one time every time by the same guy and it's like oh, it's an aim bot It's like basically somebody's using a basically like a piece of software that will automatically just aim for your head every single Time more than a human can do and so then the games have all these anti-cheat mechanisms built in to prevent that because it's I mean ruins the game when you have When you have cheaters and so at the highest levels and these games now have like a really big competitive scene e-sports Like they have to figure out how to catch this and so you have a software game and then you have software anti-cheat Which is different than like the Olympics or this like chess metal detector thing where it's a it's an offline game Now you do all fine offline anti-cheat
- And so I think that the offline world needs to sort of learn more from the gaming world about anti-cheat because there's these companies that are quite big that are anti-cheat providers to all games. Because each game individually can't build the security system that's going to stop every potential form of cheating. And so there's just individual companies that are like, we are anti-cheat software, every game becomes our customer, and we can use them. And so I think that's what's going to have to happen, which is that you're going to have to have, like, anti-cheat companies.
- that are security systems basically for the competitive integrity of the games and I think chess and poker and You know fishing and others are gonna have to like ramp up in this area But the irony is this is the best thing that's ever happened those best things since Queen's Gambit right? attention than ever on these things Yeah, I mean there's like conspiracy theories which is like Huns and Magnus are in this together and like they're they're associated with chest Com and they're all doing this to just like hype up chest which I don't think is true But I mean it's kind of crazy when you think about fishing for example How was the fact that there was lead balls in a fish not caught earlier? I mean I think you're right that some of these in-person sports are just like way behind on the concept of cheating
- which is ancient. So I'm interested to see how that progresses, but one idea, like you said, there's gonna be this wave of measures that needs to be put in place. And I just thought of this thing that I saw, you guys have had Peter Lovels on the podcast before. And he had, so Nomadlist is one of his companies. And for ages, people kept trying to copy Nomadlist. There's all these companies were like, we're gonna hire 10 engineers and we're gonna just like smash you, right? Cause you're one engineer and we're just gonna take all your data. And he would just for fun, put in fake data. So there was this country or city that he put in called Dorobo. And he would just do that to be like, who copied my data set? Just to see, which I kind of loved. And I was trying to think through how that maybe could be applied elsewhere. I don't know if it could be applied to chess, but you could imagine like what if Stockfish just had like a couple incorrect moves?
- that would catch the cheater. It's like, oh, you played G4, you were not supposed to play G4. If you were a great player, you would know otherwise. And I just wonder what other kind of spoofs or tricks you could put in as anti-cheating measures. Well, I don't know if you saw this. I was looking at, I was on Twitter this morning and I saw that Elon had tweeted at somebody this story. And it's not as pretty interesting. So somebody tweeted at Elon, they go, hey, Elon, back in the day you had this 2008, I think there was somebody who was leaking internal company data and they kept leaking it to news outlets, it was bad for business. And then you found them. I'm curious, how did you find them when it had happened?
- And he goes, actually, it's an interesting story. Because normally Elon's tweets are just memes, but he's like, actually it's an interesting story. We sent everybody in the company the same email, but with one slightly different space somewhere in the email. So like we would, you know, between this period, we would either do two spaces or one space, but it was a long email. So we were able to create like a unique fingerprint for everybody in the company. We sent them all a slightly unique email that was like sort of like binary proof that this was your email that got out. And he's like, so we found the person that way, you know, we caught them sort of immediately. It was the fastest path to catching them versus going through all the email like servers and like patting people down as they leave the factory. Like how are we going to find this person? And that was the best way to do it, was to put out something juicy that was false, space out the thing differently. And then they caught the person immediately and he's like, you know, that we,
- we asked them to pursue a career in another company. And like, you know, we let them go. That's why you're saying it. Yeah, that's so clever. Yeah, so I'm interested to see how this progresses because I do wonder, it's like who wins? Do the cheaters win? Do the anti-cheating measures win? Historically, I mean, in gaming, what was the case? Like could the anti-cheating measures keep up with the cheaters? No, like the best cheaters always one step ahead because, you know, there's always the bigger, the more money involved, the bigger the incentive to cheat. And so you're anytime you have a big pot of money, you're going to find people are going to cheat. Well, this is why, you know, PayPal and Facebook and others, they have so much staff every day dedicated just to catching cheaters.
- because there's a huge amount of money involved in it. This is why people love Bitcoin. They're like, wow, if somebody could have hacked this or spoofed this or done a double spend, there is literally like half a trillion dollar prize for the taking. And because it hasn't, that just shows you how secure this is. So it's like the absence of a hack shows the security. And so with anywhere there's a lot of money, there's gonna be an incentive to cheat. And there's always, the hardest part is that it's usually not sophisticated. So for example, if you follow the poker one that's been going on, it's like this.
- This like high stakes game in LA that they stream the game and so they have like a twitch channel or whatever They're streaming the game. So it's like kind of like the World's Azure program Just going on all the time people are playing for like each person has like a hundred or three hundred thousand dollars on the table so you get these pots and like half a million dollar pots and This girl makes this this woman's playing this hand and she plays it in a way that kind of makes no sense She has Jack for off-seeds doesn't make any sense why you would even be in the hand the board has no jacks no floors and Flush draw has a straight draw the other guy has both
- And he bets, he bets, she calls it all in when she has nothing. And she wins the hand. And people are like, there is no way you can make that call. Like there's no, you're holding those cards. The only explanation is you looked at your cards wrong and you thought you had something else. But she kind of like, if you read the audio is there too, where she's like, no, I don't have it, right? She's basically saying I don't have a, do you have a three? She's like, no, I don't have a three. And so she's basically, she's like, oh, you know, I just did this as a bluff catcher. And literally the guys face when she calls, at first she's like, oh, you got me, I didn't have it. You caught my bluff.
- But then she turns over her cards and he's like, okay, you come my bluff, but you come a bluff with that that makes Zero sense that you would ever try to even catch a bluff with that and he's literally stone face for like a minute and a half He doesn't say anything He's just looking and his eyes are just moving between the table and her and he's like you could tell the computer in his brain is like Breaking it's like there's no way this could have happened. He is detected basically An anomaly an anomalous move that has to be something like cheating like there's no other explanation It's how about how somebody could make it a two hundred thousand dollar bet on with those cards unless you knew what my cards were and what's coming out and so
- And so they launched this investigation and I think Reddit and YouTube are great at that where they crowdsource the investigation. They're finding old clips and more than any police officer could do, put Reddit on the case. It's like when they found the Boston bomber or whatever, I don't know if that ended up being too rough, but it's the same idea. And so basically what it looks like happened was just there's a human in the production team who was probably feeding her the information and she had a vibrator device on her in her pocket or in her pants or something like that. That was like signaling her just like, if it vibrates, that means you're good. Like call the bet. If it doesn't vibrate, that means you don't have, you're not winning full. And that's what people think is the like sort of most likely explanation for this at this point, but that's hard because it's human engineering and like
- There's this conference that happens every year. I forgot the name of it, but you might know it's in Vegas. And it's like the hacker conference. I don't know if you've heard it's like DefCon or something like that. It's like, oh, that's familiar. Yeah. It's basically, it's the number one hacker convention. Like, I don't know why anybody would go to this. It's like, you know, walking into a shark den basically. But one thing that they showed, I kind of went down this rabbit hole of like, what do they talk about it this thing? And one thing they showed is just how much of like hacks is not like brilliant computer engineering. It's somebody just calling you and being like, hey, I'm just verifying some information with the bank here. Could you just tell me your mother's maiden name and your date of birth and your last warrior social? All right. Thank you. You're confirmed. Nothing else to worry about. And then they just take that and they call the bank and they say, hey, I need to change my password. Can you change it for me? I forgot what my old one is. But, you know, oh, my security questions? Yeah, my mother's maiden name is this. And here's my last four. And then they get the password change to take all your money. And they didn't hack in the system. They just literally like, they catfished you, right? They sort of like human engineering. They basically just like.
- trick you into giving up information. And that's how a lot of the big hacks happen, is they just trick a human into giving them their password. And then they don't need to break in, it's like you gave me the keys, I can just walk right in. Exactly, that's why sim swapping is like one of the, unfortunately, super common ways of hacking people, because people will just go into like an AT&T and be like, hey, I'm this person, this is my phone number, I lost my sim, could you give me a new one? And they just get that. And so yeah, it's definitely humans are the like faulty piece in the information. Great business that came out of this insight, which was, there's many of them now, but when I heard this, I remember thinking, oh my God, that is genius. It's basically a business that goes to companies and they say, hey,
- The number, you know that 90% of these hacks happen just because your, your employees gonna just type their password on the wrong page. And they're like, yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah. They go, so here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna send false phishing emails to your employees. And but don't worry, like, you know, when they type it in, we're just gonna give you a report every month because you're paying for our contract, which is just to say this employee click this link. And this would have been a breach. But thankfully we caught it. You can now educate the employees better. And you know, this is a way to like, you know, make sure that your employees are not gonna fall for this. And those companies do extremely well because it's way cheaper to like prevent the hack that way just by having somebody kind of stress test your employees in that way, try to break through the system and just say, Hey, here's where we found a vulnerability. And I thought that was just like a genius business category to be.
- Yeah, I have a coworker that fell for one of those recently and she's like, Oh man, I got to do this training. But I was like, really? That's all we have to do. We just got to do a little bit of training. Like this seems pretty faulty if all these employees are clicking on this. But I kind of love the idea of ethical hacking. Have you seen there's been someone recently, I think their code name or their hacker name is like Bjork Ska or something. And they've hacked into three of Indonesia's like large government databases. And at first people are like, Oh man, this is just Indonesia is a huge country, right? In terms of population, they're like, Oh, they've got like millions, hundreds of millions of records the first time. And then the second time they were like, Oh my gosh, this happened again. Like this person has way too much data. But by the third time, they were like, this person is just exposing how fragile all of our systems are because they haven't, you know, sent the data anywhere. They're just like, you guys, you have to fix this. And they're just like using proof to show it instead of saying, you know, going to people and tweeting like, our systems are really.
- insecure or whatever. Instead they're just like, let me just show you. And I think it's, I mean, I think, have you heard of Wiz? I think that's like some sort of enterprise security software was the fastest, or at least one of the fastest that hit 100 million ARR recently, like faster than deal, faster than a lot of the companies that we're familiar with. Yeah, just WIZ, right? I think that's the name of it. Wiz Cloud Security, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they had, they came out with some, I've never heard of this company and it's like, hey, we're the fastest growing company in the world. Exactly. And they do, is this what they do? They do the sort of like bug bounty stuff. Yeah, 100 million ARR in 18 months.
- I don't know exactly what they do, but I just know there's some sort of enterprise security software and yeah, they're like quietly the big the biggest fastest or not the biggest the fastest growing company in a while. Yeah, that's insane. All right, enough, enough hacking and cheating and stealing. Although I do, I just I love that stuff I can't get enough of a controversy I know same let's do these internet portfolios. So I think these are these are pretty cool. These are good in spell for people and you've curated a group of them. Let me kind of set it up, which is basically
- People have these kind of like personal websites, portfolios, and I think you wrote something on this doc, I want you to explain. You wrote evidence greater than, greater than, greater than confidence. So what does that mean? And then why do these interest you? Yeah, so I think in the age of social media, especially, it's like really easy for you to be seen as an expert in something. Someone who's done no marketing can look up a bunch of Wikipedia articles and start tweeting threads on it, and a bunch of people who don't know any better can just say, oh, wow, this person has a lot of confidence. And that's fine. But what I think is important, especially in this era where everyone can seem like an expert, is that, you know, you're not going to be a expert.
- evidence, so evidence over confidence. And what do I mean by evidence? It's like, don't tell me you're this business expert. Show me the businesses that you've built and how successful they are and how you built them. Or let me see how you built them instead of you telling me how you built them. And I think one version of this for individuals are these personal portfolio sites. So you can have a site, which again, it's like, I've written for fortune, and I have this many followers on Twitter or all of these things that you've made up that tell people you're confident instead of how about you just show me your skills and some of these portfolios which will.
- hopefully pull up here are just really fascinating because as soon as I go to them, I'm like, this person is a badass. I want to hire them just based on what I see here, based on the evidence that they are a killer creator. We should pull some of them up, but for example, pull up this one from Bruno Simon. Tell me what you see. Basically, it's Bruno-Simon.com. You land and it's literally a Jeep that's on the screen. You click Start and there's a Jeep that's on the screen and it says, use your keys to move around. It's just like, you can go forward and it's like drive into stuff. It's like a 3D, it's basically a game. It's like his resume almost, but...
- You can basically drive around crashing to stuff and like clearly this person is like super talented artist creative Web developer type of person. It's like all right. I'm gonna drive to the projects section And like okay, I'm in the project section and I could see they're different things if I park my car on the open On the parking spot there. It'll open that like you know That link to go see that website that they built and this is amazing like this is one of the best Portfolios I've ever seen this is like stunning. Yeah, it's pretty awesome pull up Another one, which is just another example. Click the one that says interactive resume
- from Robbie Leonardo. Robbie, okay, oh my God, it's like basically a game of Mario. So there's a character and I'm scrolling and all of a sudden I'm like, okay, level one, that's his about. Oh wow, this is cool. This is sick. It's basically like a chart of like, oh, I'm good at design, illustration, whatever. But it's like I'm running through the level and I'm like learning these different things about the person, about what they're into. Okay, NBA fan, oh my God. Now I'm under water, I'm doing the underwater level. Yeah, so this is crazy. It basically just took a resume, designed it beautifully and made it.
- Play like a Mario Mario game and at the end of the level it's like contact me here You want to work with me or whatever? You know here's my contact for me you've won you made it to the end of the level One thing I love about this is I assume these people are not applying for jobs But can you imagine if you had a job opening and you had like a hundred? Typical resumes of people being like yeah, I've worked here for three years. I've done this I have this degree and then one of them was this how could you not hire this person? How could you choose something when I applied for so when I moved to Silicon Valley? I did this so basically I Applied to two jobs when I wanted to move to Silicon Valley
- I applied to Stripe and I applied to a place called Monkey Inferno. Stripe, everybody knows, turned into like, you know, whatever, $100 billion company. I would have been like employee at like 35, 40 at the time. So it would have been great. It would have probably made like $10, $30 million, something like that, just as I can mid-level sales, biz dev type guy that I was gonna join as. Unfortunately, I crashed and burned in the interview when he was like, sell me this pen. And I was like, and I just fumbled it. But the other job I applied to is Monkey Inferno. And Monkey Inferno was a really cool company. And one thing that's interesting is the more.
- The company shows that they're unique the more you sort of get the vibe You're like, okay, I can read the room you're cool and unique and you appreciate like a you know creativity in a sense of humor So that's how I'm gonna apply so I didn't send in a resume I just made a website and I you know I can't code I'm not like you're way more technically talented let alone these people who are like, you know, freaking You know, they're creating like, you know fake Mario game as their resume But I made a basic website that was basically and I just sent an email I tried to copyright it while I was like, you know, my first line of the email was like You know, hey Michael. I'm applying for the yeah, I saw your job role for product manager And even though, you know, I have none of the qualifications you're looking for Let me explain to you why I'm the man for the job and like, you know I think that was like gonna get his attention to read the next thing just to be like is this guy? You know a complete clown or like is there something here?
- And so I wrote this email and I said, you know, rather than add a, you know, resume to the stack of resumes, like I made a website for you. And so my website wasn't about me. It was like, why I should work at Monkey Inferno. So it was like more tailored to him. And I had these same things. I had this like skills chart, but I included stuff that I wasn't good at. I was like, hard work. I was like, ah, 40%. Like, you know, that was like one of my lowest skills. I was like, yeah, I'm kind of lazy actually. You know, I'm kind of lazy. I can't force myself to do things that I don't love to do. But I gave them like things. And then in the interview, like, I remember one of the guys was like, why would you apply for a job and write your hard work is not high? And I was like, well, I'm glad you asked. I can explain. Here's what I think about that. And so I had this whole thing and I kind of wrote a resume exactly for them. I was like, you know, here's some of the my mottos. Here's like,
- I looked at your companies. Here's some of the things I think I could do for them. And so I kind of tailored it to that. And I remember he later told me, he was like, you know, if you hadn't done that website, like there's no way we would have hired you. Cause on paper you had like literally none of the qualifications we were looking for. Like the entire job description was like, just not you. But that website was really cool, it was really unique. Nobody else had done something like that. And so it just made me feel like we got to talk to this guy. And so that was like the in that got me the job in the end, in the end. Yeah, I mean, I think I've hired a decent amount now. And there's so many people who mass applied to jobs and they're like, yeah, I'm interested in this job. And I have the qualifications, but the times I've been really impressed is like, you can tell someone really wants to work there and has done their research. And you know the second they get in, you almost don't have to train them on the company. You probably have to train them on other things. But you know, they understand exactly what you're trying to do because they've been following.
- your company or your team or your people for a while. So I think that's that's spot on. Right. Let's do a couple of a couple of these other ones. So yeah, let's rapid fire through. So Neil, the Neil dot fun one I think I've talked about before on here. This one's awesome. So it's nea.fon. But I don't know if you could pull it up. But basically it's like, it's just like the headline is a tiny website on the internet and then he's basically got a bunch of little like interactive little projects that he's made that you can do. And I remember I went through the absurd trolley problems one, which is basically like.
- If you remember in school where it's like, you know, there's a train on the tracks That's gonna kill five people, but you can pull the switch and just kill this one. Would you do it? And you're like, yeah, I guess I'd rather kill one than five I think I would do it and then it basically like changes it to like but the one is a baby Would you do it? And you're like, no, I wouldn't kill the baby and then it's like It's like okay, but the other one is five cats. Would you do five cats? And it's like it just takes you through 30 like absurd Variations of that of that question and and each one when you say yes or no It says 74% of people agree with you 26% disagree There's been 2.1 million votes of this and you're like wow, that's like that school You can see where do you differ from like, you know the masses when it comes to these?
- And so that's the one I did. Are there any other cool ones that he's got here? Well, I mean, he has so many. I'll call it a couple. So it feels like he just took all of his curiosities, which are the same curiosities that many people have, and turned them into these internet games of sorts. So one of them is explore the scale of space, or see who was alive in X year. Like, I wonder who was alive in 1870. And you can kind of see what famous people or influential people were alive at the same time. Another one that's fun is the internet's greatest debates. So it's all these questions like, is it GIF or GIF? Or I can't remember what some of the other ones are, but he gets the internet to vote on them. So you actually get the answer to the internet's greatest questions. But as you can see, if people are watching on screen, there's just so many.
- that he's built. Like this one that was designed the next iPhone, it just lets you drag and drop. Like you could put a camera in the, like, I put it like off to the side, like halfway off the camera. You could put an Android logo on it. That's good. This is this guy's kid. What does this guy do for a living? Is he this is what he does? Or he's like, I don't know. Let's pull him. I'm pulling up his Twitter. His name is Neil Agarwal. I think I'm the creator. So he says creative coder. Yeah, this guy's cool. Um, yeah, I like these personal portfolio. You had a pretty good portfolio website that you had built. Did you, like, maintain it? Or what did you do with it?
- I haven't updated it in a while, but I will say the page that gets the most traffic or really gets the most people who contact me is my open page. So a lot of, well, not a lot. Some startups have an open page that is, we make this much revenue. We have this many page views and normally they don't go much past that. I created an equivalent. I haven't updated it in a while, but it was basically like, okay, this is how much I make from my personal projects, but it's also my goals. And it's like, if my goal, for example, is I exercise 50% of the days in a year, I hooked it up to my spreadsheet and it publicly tracks it daily.
- So you can see exactly how much I'm doing or it shows what books I'm reading or I don't know silly things like that. But people seem to love that for some reason. Yeah, yeah, people do love that. They wish they were like as organized and on top and clear about their goals as you. That's why they love it. But you only put your side project revenue on here, right? Yeah, I've actually, you know what? I have debated, I've been wanting to write an article which is about my like, you could say monetary assent through life as in. Wow, that's like post economic, my monetary assent. That's amazing. I'll say, so the reason it's an assent is not because I make so much now but I just made so little starting out. And so I've been wanting to write about that because it's kind of, you know, I feel like I've learned some things but also I think it'd be interesting to actually publicly say in this year I made X. And I've seen some celebrities do this but you know, 20 years later, they're like, look at my tax return.
- But I kind of want to do it now and say, look, five years ago I was making X and then I made X. And to really publicly share how much I made, how, like, what jobs they were, etc. And what I learned along the way. But I know I'm just going to get trashed. You know what I mean? Because the same you make a bunch of money now is not something people love. So I stayed away from it, but I kind of want to anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I've thought about those same things. And I'm just like, why do I want to invite this in? I don't need this. Which make a bunch of money. You're like, I don't need to kind of whore myself out there for the attention anymore. So there's this like counter-productive thing where it's like, well, the reason I would, for me, I'm very like simple, which is like, people when they do that stuff, they're like, I just want to increase transparency in the world. Or like, you know, I just want other people like me to know, you know, I think we should openly share. I think we should openly share strategies. I think we should openly share tactics. I think you should privately with a group of trusted people share your numbers itself.
- But to publicly for everybody share how much you make I think only is in is in your interest when you're not making that much But but it's growing then once you're making a bunch at that point the kind of risk reward flips I think at least and so you know I'm not that into that but but this cool. I notice there's no twenty twenty two goals What happened? We're almost at the end. I know I gotta I gotta post it, but I help will say I'm way behind on them So maybe that's why they have Are you are you like a goal hitter like do you hit like most of these goals? No, I mean, I'm one of those people who I hit some of them But that's how I think it should be right if you're hitting a hundred percent You're not setting ambitious goals if you're getting nothing then you're just lost in the world probably but I hit maybe 50% every year Yeah, I think at Amazon they had said somebody had said like 75% if you if you're hitting more than 75% of your goals Like you weren't sufficiently ambitious if you're hitting less than 75% of your goals Or like maybe maybe it was a little bit less than that I don't know, but it was like you're not executing well enough. You know, you didn't you didn't do a good enough job
- Yeah. Okay. All right. What else we got? You got a bunch of ideas on here. You want to give us some business ideas? Let's go. Some quick ones. Okay. So business ideas. I don't know if there's one, like a new business idea here, but I thought this was interesting. I'm calling it salty bowls and smelly water. And so basically there's two examples of everyone wants to eat healthier. That's, I think, a pretty universal human want at least. And two companies are doing something interesting here. So Kieran, which is K-I-R-I-N, it's a company in Japan and they partnered with a university and they found a way to make, to basically use a super weak electrical current, both in bowls and chopsticks so that when you're eating something about the ionization or the electric current, make something taste saltier. So you can imagine like when you actually eat something, your taste buds or, you know,
- Yeah, what there's some something happening chemically on your tongue and they've basically found a way to somewhat reproduce this So you can actually eat food every not everyone a lot of people including myself love salty food You're actually eating foods with less sodium, but they taste salty And then I'm just gonna quickly tack on the other one which is similar where it's I'm calling it smelling water because it's this company Called air up which basically has found a way to create a scented ring around a bottles lip So similarly they found a way to make something taste better in this case through scent instead of electrical current And they I think raised 68 million dollars and so I think it's just this like interesting phenomena of
- How do you make something and there's the train? How do you make something taste good without actually changing the caloric or the the intake of the food and hang on Your your note here says it's making a hundred million plus a year Put put be as like an estimate according to glimpse air up is this like flavored ring of the bottle So you basically you bring a bottle up to your lips The water itself is not flavored the ring is scented or flavored in some way so that when you drink the water You get that you know, whatever hint of citrus or whatever you're looking for is that it?
- Yes, and I put according to glimpse because I wasn't able to reproduce or like find that number online. I don't know where they got it. They definitely raised a bunch of money. I just don't know if that revenue number is correct. That is crazy. Wow. Have you tried either of these? No, I want to. I saw the chopstick bowl one very recently, so I kind of want to order one and then I haven't tried air up. Wow. These are, this is fascinating. I had not, I didn't know, you had said this salty bowl smelly water thing. I didn't understand what it was until you said that, but that's crazy. I mean, the sort of like salt taste without, without extra salt, that's kind of, I mean, that's, that's kind of genius if you could do that. All right. You want to close things off? Yeah, we can wrap it up. Where should people kind of find you, follow you? Where do they get your next podcast that's coming out?
- Tell the people what they want. Yeah, so you can find me at stepsmith.io or on Twitter, Stepsmith.io and then yeah, we're going to be hopefully launching the podcast soon, the A16Z podcast. You can find it anywhere that you find your podcast. Do you have a name yet or not yet? It's called the A16Z podcast. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I don't know where you were going. Yeah. All right. Thanks for coming on, Steph, and best of luck with the pod. Thanks.

5 Practical Tips To Improve Your Public Speaking Skills (#363) [4oSLJyUt2ps].txt

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- All right. It's one question Friday where we answer one question from one of the listeners. If you want to submit your question, go to mfmpod.com. Is it dot com? MFMpod.com and click the little microphone to submit your question. This one came in through text message. Somebody said, Hey, dude, I'm giving a my first talk at a conference. I got invited to speak at this conference. I'm giving my first talk. I'm excited about it, but a little bit nervous. Like, he's like, I know it's going to be fine, but I just don't want it to be lame. He's like, you and Sam are really good at doing these kind of public speaking things.
- You know, what's the trick, you know, what do I do to make this good? What do I do to make this not just the same old same old so I thought we would give maybe Our take on what we do to make public speaking fun slash interesting. What do you got? Well, I would say first public speaking is a skill So a lot of people think well I speak all the time and I speak in public therefore I'm probably gonna be decent at public speaking. They don't really work that way So public speaking some people are talented and they are just better at Gary Vaynerchuk's like that I think he's just better than everyone else But for most people it's a skill so I highly recommend like reading a book on it or like googling like how to be better at this It's a skill set and so there are tricks I don't think that this is like the best time for us just to say like all what all the tactics are but a few of them are Just like on storytelling and it's very similar to stand-up comedy Which again some people are just born better But a lot of people you just have to learn and try and so buy a book on it And I think that's actually the easiest first step
- Is there a book you'd recommend on it or just not on the top of your head? Yeah, I think what's the one that you and I were reading on storytelling by the guy who like won all the muse come story worthy? I think yeah, I think story worthy was awesome that I had a bunch of takeaways from that and then speak like a TED talk or Something like that. It's called like the TED talk or TED talk speakers guide or something like that That's quite good, but the story worthy. I actually thought was pretty phenomenal So I'm gonna tell you what I told him I said And by the way, he had also said he's like I want to bring that showmanship that you guys talked about so that you think He's picking up on what we would talk about so I said alright three things
- I said, number one, be in peak state. It's very easy when you're nervous to go kind of inward. You're kind of low energy, your mouth's a little dry, your shoulders hunched over. Like fundamentally, as soon as you walk out there, people are gonna read your body language. They're gonna read your energy and they'll start to respond to it. When somebody comes out and they're electric, you could feel that they're excited, that they got to like a bounce in their step. You're paying attention because you wanna know what they're all about. I said, so just make sure before you go out there, do some pushups, go run a wind sprint, do some jumping jacks, do whatever you gotta do physically to literally just get blood flowing and be in a like more like high performance day. I said, think about it, athlete doesn't go on the field until they are warmed up, until they're ready. A singer or a dancer or a performer, they're not gonna go on the stage until they're warmed up and they're feeling loose and warm. It's the same thing if you're gonna go talk. You wanna feel loose and warm both in your voice, but also your body. So that's the first thing, just do the physical, get the physical part right.
- The second is remember, this is the first of many. It'll do this 500 more times. So this might feel like a big deal now, but a year from now, this will be an afterthought. You'll just, you won't even really remember how it went. Just treat it as a practice rep, one of 500 times you're gonna do this. It's a chance to experiment with some things. That'll depressurize this moment for you. And it'll teach you to remember that like this is just, like you said, it's a skill, you gotta get good at it, to get good at any skill, you need practice reps. I said the last one, I said storytelling. I said have a back pocket story, right? So what's a back pocket story? It's like you started the podcast that we just recorded with the
- Dude, I gotta tell you this funny story on, you know, this something that happened to me today. Before we do this, I was walking through the park and these nannies were getting attacked with this guy and I'm in there in my fanny pack and me and the fanny and the nannies, we all fought these guys off basically as like this funny story. And it doesn't need to be a hilarious extreme story like that. It could be anything. It could be like, let's say you're at a conference. You might be like, you know, before we start, I just talked to this guy in the back and he asked me a really interesting question. I wanna ask you guys this too, because honestly, I think we might be really split on how we answer this question. Already, you really wanna know what it is. And I've taken control of the scenario and I've made it already an interesting talk before we jump in and say, hi, my name is this, I'm from this and today I've been here to talk to you about blah, blah, blah. So have a story in your back pocket. It could be fun, interesting, controversial, whatever, something that's gonna get them. And the trick is I said,
- Just, you need to be excited by it. If you're excited by it, they'll be excited by it. Remember the lesson that, what's her name? Miss Excel, that like woman who's, she basically teaches you how to use Excel better, but somehow that's like going viral on TikTok. And why is something as boring as Excel tricks, going viral on TikTok? One of the reasons is she like, comes out with this crazy energy. She seems really excited by this stuff. And it's just enjoyable to watch her do it. Even if you're not even gonna use Excel that day, it's just enjoyable to watch somebody do that. And she says this in her interview, she goes, content is the transfer of emotion.
- I gotta get myself into the emotion of being excited about something if I ever want you to be excited by it. I have to get myself to be fascinated by something if I want you to be fascinated by it. And she's like, I just get myself into that state and I run to the phone, click record and I start to do my thing. And it's like, that's actually what it is. Content is the transference of emotion. And so what most people try to do is they think about what they're gonna say, which is intellectual. That's shit's words. People don't remember the words that you said. They will remember if you had some emotion and some energy behind you.
- and they'll remember the vibes, they'll remember how you made them feel, and they'll take away just a few nuggets out of what you said. Most of what you said, 90% of what you say will go in one ear and out the other. ["The Best"] Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most TRMs are a cobble together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new VRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. And that's a thing I tell people at the time, I told you this when you're early on, when I was maybe six months ahead of you in terms of content, you're like, how do I write these articles? And I was like, it's not really about what you want to teach, it's about what you want to make someone feel. And oftentimes when people give presentations,
- They think well, I'm talking about this like I'm talking about like mosquitoes and how they like cause malaria in Africa And this is like a really serious thing It's like yeah, it could be serious But you need to weave in some stories and you need to do some crazy shit And it's no different than a comedy show or a play where you capture attention Yes, you're doing it about something important and isn't just entertainment But you have to weave that in there. One of my favorite tricks I've saw is when I they brought up malaria is when Steve Bill Gates or someone let Talked about malaria and mosquitoes and he goes I want to show you why this is an important deal And he opens up this jar and mosquitoes fly out all over the place He goes I'm gonna tell you about how many people die from malaria which comes from mosquitoes just like this and like so people like are like You know that's showmanship and so it's the same way with any talk you're doing You don't have to do something that extreme, but it starts with the story It starts with an emotion and then I would say the last thing is you have to treat people your audience regardless if they're smart You kind of got to treat them dumb meaning a lot of people what they do is they put way too much emphasis on the slides And in my opinion most talks should be able to be like at least a B level without any slide the slide Maybe makes it go from a nine to a ten, but the slides to me It's kind of like when you are when you're in a band. It's about how do I make this song great? It's not how do I make this one little guitar solo awesome? It's like no dude the guitar solo exists to make the song great the song doesn't exist to make that solo awesome It's the other way around and so it's about my my it's it's about my performance And it just so happens that this PowerPoint is just one piece of that and I should need to treat people stupid and assume That they're not gonna read this small text and it's up to me to use my words my body language in order to make them feel Something and the the the slides are just an extra added effect
- That's right. All right. I think that's great. There's a ton more. I feel like we could probably like there's probably 10 more things, but really the reality is you don't need to know all the things. If you just do the things we talked about, right, which is basically, you know, show up with energy, have some showmanship through either a little magic trick or a story or something like that and treat it like practice because you're going to need to do this a hundred times before you're, you're any good at it. If you just internalize those three, you're going to be ahead of the curve. You're going to be ahead of 80, 90% of people.

6 Hilarious Business Ideas That Could Make You $1,000,000 in 2022 (#351) [7YJ1SMw4mJs].txt

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- This business I'm calling only problems because forget about crime. The biggest battle is what's inside. So people in life have basically the same five problems, health, wealth, relationships, happiness, purpose in life. Everybody's got the same five problems, right? That's the dirty secret. I saw Tony Robbins once he goes, I've helped 4 million people in these seminars, 22 years. And guess what? People have five problems. And he goes, if you think, whoa, is me, if you think it's a big burden on you, guess what? In this room right now, there's probably 500 other people who have, you know, this can have the same problem as you, whether it's with their, their, their husband or their kids or their parents or their health, whatever.
- And so a lot of people need therapy, but guess what? A lot of people aren't going to therapy. It's too taboo, it's too expensive, too vulnerable, they don't wanna do it. People would rather sit on Netflix and just watch reality TV for distraction and entertainment. Wait a minute, is that a great idea? Is that a great idea I just heard? Yes, it is. You turn therapy into entertainment. So it's called Only Problems, it's Only Fans for Therapy. And here's how it works. You are going to, you pay a monthly subscription and you get to sit in, fly on the wall style to somebody going through an actual therapy session with the problem that you have, right? With the area of your life that you're most curious about, you can go listen to somebody vent about their relationships, about their health problems, about their career problems, whatever it is, they're getting real therapy.
- but they get it subsidized so they get cheap therapy maybe free therapy because there's twenty five people anonymous people who don't know their identity you don't know that you don't know this is identity that get to listen in. And they get to back channel talk a little shit in the chat you don't get to see that and they get to sit in on the therapy session therapist get more clients people get more help and other people get kind of secondhand smoke help by being in the crowd and getting to listen to they get the entertainment and they get help.
- All right, so we're here. We're going to do a fan favorite. The drunk ideas episode. This, this episode started when I had some business ideas that I'll admit it. I knew they were bad, but they weren't all bad. They were bad good and bad good is a separate thing altogether. Bad good. How do you explain bad good? You know what I mean when I say that, right? Yeah, it's like the lady who sells farts in a jar. Like when you're telling someone about it, you're like, that's, that's a stupid issue I've ever heard. And then she makes $500,000. Have you seen that lady? Yeah, yeah, this, this idea is like the beefy five burrito at Taco Bell is bad. And so, so, so basically these are ideas that I know are not great.
- But there's some, not yet a gold in them. There's some truth to them. And so they need to be said. And so, you know, I think being drunk is like air cover to saying some silly stupid things. Neither of us, I don't drink, Sam doesn't drink. What was the last time you drank, like 10 years ago? Eight years ago. When was that? Eight years ago. Well, I'm not like, you know, I don't have like my sobriety coin or whatever the hell. Like I just like, I just generally don't drink. It's not like a, I'm not a dork like you. I never problem. Yeah. You should lie and say you did.
- No, no, no, I didn't have to overcome this. I just kind of got older. Like. So. And the best drunk idea last time that I still think about it all the time was called the really long distance girlfriend, which was a service where you just text a lady and she just becomes her campaign companion. But you never actually see her because she's just a really long distance girlfriend. And she's the best kind of girlfriend. She's only supportive. Why? Because she's paid. That's it. She's paid to be great. And so you don't have to be great. You don't have to be a great boyfriend. She's just a great girlfriend, but at a distance. And so she's a really great girlfriend for like a lot of people. And, you know, I should set up a call center in the Ukraine because I think that idea still has legs. All right. So let's do. So this time, last time it was just me, this time we both were supposed to do this.
- How was this for you? I am good. It was hard. How are you? I've got a few, but some of them are actually look like good ideas and some of them are not even that funny, but I've got a couple. I've got a few, but I want you to start. So you see only have a few ideas like bad, bad ideas? No, I've got a couple of good ones. Most of mine are things that already kind of exist and I'm shocked that they work and I have what those are. All right. All right. So pitch. pitch each other these. I don't know what yours are. You don't know mine are.
- We're gonna pitch each other these and then Ben producer Ben young powerful producer Ben man of God Ben Ben who can still dunk and we're gonna see it this weekend Ben He's gonna be the judge at the end. You're gonna give us the the best and the worst ideas You know you can give us the winner and the honorable mention. All right I'll go first. Can I go first? Yeah, you're gonna end up going first and second and fourth and fifth probably Yeah, it's like a fantasy draft where I'm three of the teams. Yeah So all right the first idea Sam it's called hideaway
- All right, let me just, I'm gonna ask you a question. You need to think of the scariest things in the world. Maybe you're thinking about snakes, maybe with public speaking. That's right, that's, we've heard those studies, but public speaking is sort of silly. Nobody's actually afraid of public speaking. They're afraid of public humiliation. And there's no greater humiliation than digital humiliation. I'm talking about you're in a work presentation and you try to share your screen and you still got a tab open from last night. You know, that's, that's public humiliation. But the worst one.
- Is if somebody just takes your phone and opens it up and you don't know where they're gonna go with it Oh, you don't know what they're gonna open and the most I think the most and likely go to your browser in the first Letter they're gonna type in starts with a P and you're like, what's good on a bill? What's good on a bill? Please let me have a Google PBS recently. Yeah So What Haidaway does is it takes the sensitive parts of it and this is our first product Right, we're really all about preventing digital humiliation, but our first product our keynote product
- the iPhone of our mix is a private camera roll. So it's actually gonna combine two of my favorite ideas. So one, we solve the pain of somebody taking your phone or you're trying to show them a photo, but you're scrolling through your camera roll of all your photos, which is ridiculous, a ridiculous invasion of privacy. And one of my favorite ideas, I know something I've always wanted growing up was, in a movie you see those secret, rich people have a room in their house with the secret bookcase. So they pull the fourth book on the second shelf and a secret door emerges. So it's that. It's a secret bookcase, it's a Murphy door for your phone, it is hideaway. And so what is it? It's basically a camera and a camera roll that is private and kept separate from your main camera and camera roll. So you open up the app, it's disguised to look like a harmless app. It looks like an Amazon Kindle app, it's like a book shelf.
- But only when you tap the third seventh and eighth book books does it flip over and it's a camera And then that that camera roll is for your eyes only hide away. That's the idea It could be a calculator app. It could be a book book reading app It's got to be something that looks harmless that even if your parent looked over your shoulder and saw oh My son is just browsing the latest books. He's just doing some quick calculations They don't know that you're actually going to your secret camera roll. All right. What do you think? All right? Let me let me elaborate a little bit on this So do me a favor and all right you're on a computer go to search photo vault app
- Okay, Photovolt app. And you hear the is the first result, Apple? No, no, the first result I see is private Photovolt pick safe and it's literally the icon is incredible. Yeah, YouTube guy put the icon of this on the screen. It's a Manila folder, but Photoshop onto it is a giant key lock and the key is just going directly through the middle of the Manila folder, which is incredible. So this app, it's been reviewed 807,000 times.
- And it's 86 in the App Store. This app has been around for a while. And I've looked into it a fair bit. The founder of his name is William Sidwell. Sid L, he's based out of Vegas. I can't find much information about this company, but they haven't. Yeah, he, as I shouldn't, he's done a good job. But I believe he's one of the only employees because I can't find anything I linked in. And an app that's been reviewed 800,000 times, I mean, it must have been downloaded. Tens of millions of times. And they have a premium version. And the premium version, they like, it does, the premium version is like 50 bucks a year and it stores photos and stores documents and stores all this shit. But what it does is like it makes your, it makes the app look like a game and you have to do photo ID and then type in like three different passwords in order to get to just the photo vault password. It's pretty interesting. And this app, I've not seen a lot of people online talk about it, but it's kind of a juggernaut, man. It's been around forever. I have to imagine that pictures is one of the most popular category in the app store. And this has been ranked 86, or it is 86 now. And I bet you this has been ranked like that for a long, long, long time. It's crazy the amount of reviews this. This is incredible. Yeah, so you know, so if you go to the Google Play store, it'll tell you the right download range, right? Apple doesn't do that, but on Google Play, this has been downloaded at least 10 million times. It's 10 million plus. So that means it's above 10, but less than 50 million. That's that range.
- And that's just on Google Play, let alone, and we, I mean, you know how I feel about Android. So we know, you know, I'm already, I'm already thinking if Google Play, if Google Play is a 10 million, you just, you know what my boys on Apple are doing. And by the way, I don't know why I said that. There's a guy in the YouTube comments is always like, dude, Sean's always got a comment about Android. He just does a laughing emoji. So I decided to make that my thing. But I don't really have anything against it. But for the record, I do. All right, the key feature of this that I didn't have in my pitch.
- Decoy password. So sometimes a nosy person wants into your private photo. Yes. In here, that's my password that will show you just a random set of safe images and they think they got in. This guy thought of everything, bro. This is amazing. Dude, it's fascinating. So let's just if we assume that Google has 10 million, which would mean that Apple probably has five times that, right? So 50 million. So he's probably has 50 to 60 million downloads ever. If you assume, okay. Yeah. Well, if he, well, if Google is 10 million, right? You said it's at least one would Apple be 10. Why would Apple be five times more? There's more Google users.
- some more introducers. Well, then maybe my mask fogged up. So let's just say it's equal. Let's just say that it's 20 million. You don't have to believe that. He did that with two Gs, fogged up with two Gs. In fact, if your kids are in the car, turn the volume up. That was fine, what he just did. So that was good. Like, fuck this shiv. No, it's good. So like, if he has 20 or 30 million downloads, do you think it's, I don't really remember like app conversion rates. Is it crazy to think that he would have a 3% conversion? Is it crazy to think that you would have one million paying premium users?
- Not crazy. Not crazy. So it's $40, which means this guy has probably gross in the lifetime $40 million from his premium version. Let's just put it this way. At the bottom of the page, the copyright 2011 to 2020 says it's from legendary software labs, LLC. And I just got a call from the state of Delaware. And they said there's never been a better, better named company. That company name was perfectly appropriate. We've reviewed it. We triple stamped the double stamp and that was correct. This is a legendary software and my drunk idea is validated. All right, you're up. All right. I found something that it seems like it came out of a drunken like bar hangout one night. So do me a favor. Go to Santa's Club.com. Santa's Club. Oh, God.
- is this? Are we going to NF NSFW here? No, it's safe. It's that it could go either way. But no, that's actually everything safe for work now. We're working it from home, bro. Like that that thing needs to be gone. All right. That's a good point. Have you seen not not safe for life? No, I'm ready. I go to these forums and some of the stuff are tagged not safe for life. And it's hilarious. It's it's it's a pretty like it'll be like someone popping a zip and it says not not safe for life. Okay, so I'm on Santa's club.
- There we go. Thank you. So Santa's Club, it was started in 2020. This guy named Will Evelsizer started it. And each year, about 15,000 people come to his site and they spend around $75 and it only, this business only operates two months out of the year. And my God. Basically, if you go to the, if you go to the website, what you're going to see is like your typical look at Santa Claus in a studio and he, you get to spend 15 minutes and you do a virtual Santa sit on their lap, ask what you want for Christmas type of thing for only 10 or 15 minutes. And he's got like a studio probably in Nevada where instead of cam girls,
- Just fat Santas and he makes According to the I read some articles about it in the first year he had 15,000 visits and prices range from 35 to 75 dollars per visit Which means he's doing around 500,000 to a million dollars in only two months and if you go to the website now He's got like a presale. It's 100% sold out. You can't buy anymore. The guys got to go get more Santas Dude this is This is genius. This is hilarious
- This is not even a good bad idea. This is simply a good, good idea. So I like this. I think I kind of like a little bit better cameo for Santa's. So I'm going to, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you a little side dish there, which is Santa for cameos for Santa's or Sam's ever came. In fact, Steven, he came on the pot, I think. Did he come on the pot? Former dude guy built cameo. He needs to just implement this in the cameo this holiday season. Well, this is, it's very clear. Santa's club, they just got to get the knees to bunny. The tooth fairy. What are the other like characters?
- Yeah, that's great. That's what you got to do Ben do you guys got some holidays where you need a little Character of some kind yeah like a Joseph Smith like a guy in a beard with like eight wives We got pioneer day. Yeah, maybe you know a pioneer type dude That could work We're gonna call it we got the Christian holidays we got Easter Christmas. Sorry. I can't do more for you we're gonna call it fairy ink and the employees are gonna be the fairies and We're gonna have Easter Bunny Santa tooth fairy what else is there?
- I forget what I don't know what else there is Does we're gonna have any copyright issues because that's also what we call morning brew on the down This is a good business. It's pretty cool So it started off as a drunken idea, but it's actually cool I have this lady who I have no I think she's listed so the podcast and she threaded me on Facebook And she dresses like Elsa like from frozen and people pay her money to do a call like she like has you know She's like a disney like come to walk this is great It's cosplay, but like, you know a paid little cameo call or recorded video
- That makes a lot of sense to me like I know that's like, you know, obviously copyright infringement But like if it wasn't right Santa that's that that's that makes sense Easter Bunny tooth fairy Those all make sense that you should be able to do this You know and especially if you did it on demand somebody could just rip out like hundreds of these in a studio every single day Just being like oh Amanda You know, ho ho ho Merry Christmas your mom wanted me to tell you you've been doing great job with all of laws See you later next video and like each one of those is $40 a pop
- You know how like on webinars, I think you'll see, you'll see like business webinars and I'll be like Neil Patel who was on the pod and I'll be like, Hey everyone, this is Neil. Are we live? Is this thing working? Is this on? And it's like fake? Like it's a recording, but he, but he acts like it's real. And you see people in the comments like, Hey, Neil, what's up? And he'll say like, Hey, Derek from Chicago. How are you? And like, you know, it's just a, it's just a recording. It's all fake. You know, you could do this. You could obviously you could do the same thing. I hate when you're not.
- And what webinars like that. Well, I don't know if Neil does it. I think he probably does. I think I have seen him do it, but there's a lot of webinars that are like that. And it's like a recording, but what they do is they like put like replies in there and they just, it's, you know what I mean? It's all artificial. It's all fake, but they make it look real. And it's pretty good. Oh, phone it in. Okay. Amazing. Okay. So I give this a good, good idea. I think that's that's solid. Anything else on this or can I hit you with my next one? Hit me. All right.
- What's the name of a fast growing company that does billions of dollars and serves creators all around the world? It's bigger than Twitch. They provide private photos and videos to their fans. If you subscribe, you might be considered only their fan. That's right. Only fans. Now, only fans is a great business model. The owner of Only Fans, let's say, is this podcast and they crush it. They are absolutely phenomenal business.
- I got to thinking, what other space could you do this at? And so I was sitting there and I was thinking, and you told me about a app that somebody had built called Police Scanner. Police Scanner Plus, something like that. This app that does millions of dollars a year. And I just, I couldn't get that out of my head. I thought, who would do this? Why would anybody want to listen to it like a? Dude, I listen to it all the time. If I hear a gunshot or like a loud backfire of a car, I immediately open it up and I'm like, all right, let's see what's going on here. Was it real or was it not? And so there's a curiosity component. People, I think just like listening to a train wreck in a way that they like to observe from a safe distance. Do you have the app called Citizen?
- Citizen is just like this. Yeah, where it's like, you know, when I'm in Brooklyn, like I'll pull it up. It looks like my phone screen is chickenpox. Like there's red dots all over the place. I'm like, there's crime everywhere. You know what I'm saying? Like I can't be doing that anymore. So, okay. This business I'm calling only problems because forget about crime. The biggest battle is what's inside. So people in life have basically the same five problems. Health, wealth, relationships, happiness, purpose in life.
- Everybody's got the same five problems, right? That's the dirty secret. I saw Tony Robbins once he goes, I've helped 4 million people in these seminars, 22 years, and guess what, people have five problems. And he goes, if you think, whoa, is me, if you think it's a big burden on you, guess what? In this room right now, there's probably 500 other people who have, you know, this can have the same problem as you, whether it's with their, their husband, or their kids, or their parents, or their health, whatever. And so a lot of people need therapy, guess what, a lot of people aren't going to therapy. It's too taboo, it's too expensive, too vulnerable, they don't want to do it. People would rather sit on Netflix and just watch reality TV for distraction and entertainment.
- Wait a minute. Is that a great idea? Is that a great idea? I just heard? Yes, it is. You turn therapy into entertainment. So it's called only problems. It's only fans for therapy. And here's how it works. You are going to, you pay a monthly subscription and you get to sit in, fly on the wall style to somebody going through an actual therapy session with the problem that you have, right? With the area of your life that you're most curious about. You can go listen to somebody vent about their relationships, about their health problems, about their career problems, whatever it is. They're getting real therapy.
- but they get it subsidized so they get cheap therapy maybe free therapy because there's 25 people anonymous people who don't know their identity you don't know that you don't know the listeners identity that get to listen in and they get to back channel talk a little shit in the chat you don't get to see that and they get to sit in on the therapy session therapists get more clients people get more help and other people get kind of secondhand smoke help by being in the crowd and getting to listen to they get the entertainment and they get help have you ever seen a movie honestly honestly I'm gonna just say it right now
- I wrote this idea down and I got I got goosebumps under this hairy on. Yeah, yeah, little little arm mountains. Dude, have you have you seen the movie Fight Club? Of course. So there's like one of the premises of the movie is that this guy Ed Norton. I guess he's Tyler. I don't know. I forget his name Tyler Jordan. And then he meets that woman that's like the love interest and what they do is they go to terminal cancer anonymous meetings.
- And I don't know why I forget why but they like it makes them feel alive and it like makes them feel happy because they think that they're all screwed up And they're like I want to go meet with people who are actually dying and it's like oddly therapeutic for them What you're describing is kind of like that where you sit and you're like oh wow this guy really is fucked up I'm straight. I'm good. Yeah, you know, I mean gratitude as a service It ain't so bad after all we Is this a freak? Yeah, and that's the thing the crazier your problems are the more vulnerable and open you get the more people tip you little hearts in the App the bigger rev share you get as part of doing that therapy So you're incentivized to be screwed up and you can just make stuff up to be honest with you But like you're definitely it's your Springer, right? Why do we like your Springer?
- Why do you still watch your spinger reruns every morning before work because? We like to watch other people have effed up problems and then see them deal with it and we like fights also But that's the that's what I'm tapping into here. I'm but I'm doing it through an app. I'm doing it it's called only problems and Honestly, if you're gonna run with this you better hit Sean at Sean purry calm That's all I need to I need to see an email from somebody try this idea I feel I genuinely feel like this is one of those ideas. That's like no way And then it gets huge
- It reminds me of like the people who want to go watch someone do surgery. Have you ever seen like those like setups where you were first? No. So for like if you're a student like there's these medical rooms that have it's like it's like a two way mirror almost. Yeah. It's like watching an execution almost like you just like sit there and you just like watch what they're doing. That's what this reminds me of. Have you ever been to this subreddit called popping? No, but I was going to bring up the addictive way that people watch you like pop a black head or a pimple or whatever. There's a subreddit. There's a subreddit called popping. I've been on the front of it. You see I've been on the front page. You see this scar right here.
- Yes. Yeah. So I have a big scar on my because I had like a ping pong ball size thing like growing like on my brain and I had to get surgery like in 2014 to get it taken out and right before I go under I go to the surgeon I go, Hey man, do you have your iPhone on you? He goes, Yeah, I go. Can you save my number and take some pictures when I'm under so you can like get some like before after and during pics of a surgery. So I could post it on r slash popping and he did it. He texted me and I got these like beautiful photos of like this, this growth like being popped and scraped off my brain and I posted it on that subreddit and I got like 80,000 views on my photo album. And so I'm a member of r slash popping. I love it. And so you may not have a blue check mark on Twitter, but you always have this. Put this in your bio, put this on your LinkedIn, front, front page, yeah, former front page or serial front pager of r slash popping. Dude, I have it. I have to find it and send it to you.
- but you see like, you know, like, and then he also like cut some fat from my stomach and then he like putted it into the hole and like, so you like see this whole process of like there being a growth. Like when you move out of an apartment and you're coming up to the painting so you gotta fill a hole. Yeah. He took a little fat off me and he just like putted that bad boy in it. I woke up and like my stomach was hurting. I was like, dude, I thought you were gonna take it from my leg. He's like, no, your leg was pretty muscular. So we just took some off your stomach. You had a lot there. And I asked, so it just kind of like took a little. We're flexed, but okay. Well, I have muscular legs, not always a muscular stomach. And he's like, One of our feeds, who does is we don't mess with perfection. So I couldn't touch the legs. I had to do that. So anyway, on board with only problems. Good idea. Thank you. Thank you. All right. You want me to go third also. Let me let me. This is the last one I probably have. Well, I got one more, but all right.
- The biggest, this is a little bit of a stretch, but I actually don't think it is that much of a stretch. The most popular business publication in the world by digital audience. What do you think it is? Most popular, what? Most popular, right? Most popular digital business publication in the world by traffic. Um, I'm gonna go. So there's Wall Street Journal, there's, I'm gonna tell you. I'm at the pointmarketcap.com. Coinmarketcap, that's a good guess. That probably does how much? Probably 50 million a month in. It's a great one, yeah.
- So there's Wall Street Journal, there's Financial Times.com, there's CoinMarketCap, there's Business Insider, Business Insider probably gets a lot. I'd high-pot, I would say, and I'd high-pot size, the largest business publication in the world is run by basically two people. And it is called SlideShare. You ever been to SlideShare? I love SlideShare. Wow, that's... So I thought you were going to bring up Drudge Report again, by the way. No. SlideShare. So SlideShare is this site that was started by... I forget her name, but she's an interesting founder, she's pretty outspoken on Twitter, and I like her a lot. Anyway, she's... Indian woman, yeah. She started it and she sold it to LinkedIn for like $150 million. And SlideShare was a... Most Indian social network of all time.
- Just power points That's what slide sure is way to slack off but make your parents proud at the same time. Yeah Did you see our buddy Sheila? He just got engaged and he's good he always I have an aunt who doesn't speak English She only knows a few words, but the only words that she knows she texts me all the time and it says are you married yet? and you like posted screenshots of Of her asking that and in perfect English. Are you married yet? Please be married? Please be married So slide share it's just like a it's just a website where you upload shit, right? You upload decks Well LinkedIn bought it in 2012 and it just sat there and then scribe. You know scribed or is it scribbed? Scribb they bought it and I'm almost certain looking at LinkedIn and looking at the website that like one and a half Engineers are the only employees working on this
- And they were for sale for a little while, so I don't think this is entirely guessing, but basically they get between 100 to 150 million visits a month. And most of the content, or about half, but it could be at this point most, is marketing decks, pitch decks, conference decks on business strategy. And it makes virtually no revenue. If you go there, you won't see any ads. And it's just this website that does 100 to 150, maybe 200 million monthly visits. It's this juggernaut of a website with, if you look at the website, it hasn't been updated in years and years and years and years. Here's my idea.
- If I were a B2B company, if I were Salesforce or HubSpot, or if I were, I don't know, anyone selling like software or anything that sells people to shit for people who goes to like, you know, these like business conference, I would buy it and turn it in to a B2B Legion website. And I think that you can make a ton of money off this website because here's why, any website that gets a ton of traffic from user generated content, once it hits a critical mass, which SlideShare does, it's like impossible to stop. You know what I'm saying? It just keeps going and it's almost impossible to catch up with that. It's really, really, really hard. So I think that this website is just sitting there.
- floating along, not doing anything. And it could actually be a business that makes nine figures a year through ads, which is like the best revenue of all time when you don't actually have to like make anything. Yeah, you have super high value customers because it's only business people that are gonna be doing this. So who bought that? Did Link didn't buy them at some point or no? Link didn't bought them in 2012 and it just sat there and they did nothing with it. And then they sold it. It was crazy to me. Yeah. And I think they paid $150. They paid nine figures for it. And then they sold it to Scribd. And if I had a bet Scribd, like LinkedIn was like, just get this off our hands. Just don't fire anyone who works on it and like assume all the liability and like just, it's yours. Just go away. So
- Check out this tweet I just put in the chat. Okay, it says, it's from you and it says, free $500 million idea. Reinvent and relaunch slide share. All right, great, great mind thinking like, if there's a talented engineer designer who wants to do this, I'll give you money and share my one page plan on how to attack this. All right, I do, we're on the same page here I think. Do you wanna see my one page plan? Yeah. You can't, it doesn't exist. I just wrote that out and I was like, if somebody actually reaches out that's interesting for this, I will come up with a one page plan of how I would do this because to me, slide share is so ripe for the picking. It is completely neglected. It is extremely valuable as a like a potential tool. It never really got replaced properly by something else. It didn't become obsolete.
- And it's just one of those big opportunities hiding in plain sight. And I would love to basically brainstorm how I would attack this kind of slide share problem. But the opportunity was missed. LinkedIn, if one of us or someone listening had a little bit of charm and swab and was able to get connected with the LinkedIn people, they would have given it to you. It would have been free. I don't know about, because Scrib isn't a big enough company where they're like, oh yeah, here, we don't give a fuck, just take it. But when you're owned by Microsoft, they're just like, I imagine they're just like,
- We can't focus on this right now. Yeah, an undisclosed price. This would have been, I mean, I can't imagine this was that much. I could be wrong, but like- It didn't make any revenue. I feel like they probably got just like $10 million or something like that. Or less. Yeah. Wow. Or less. Mist opportunity. That is a serious, missed opportunity. That's not that drunk of an idea, but anyway, it's an idea. That's good. All right, I got another one. Let me make a little- I'm all out, by the way. I- You don't want to know how long this list is.
- And it all came to me in one giant flood. I just dumped them all out. What do you do? Do you just like come up with like names? Are you like Michael Scott where you just like has a name for something and you build a business around it? No joke. That's part of it. My thing was sort of like you have to find something relatable. Either something that really sucks or that's really awesome and then just use it in an unexpected way. Right. You're just smashing two things together. Exactly. So I saw this like the hidden bookcase thing and I was like, oh my God, I freaking always wanted one of these where I hit the three piano keys and a door opens or I pulled the bookshelf took the book out and it like opens the secret door.
- So how do I take that awesome thing and just use it in an unexpected way and that's where that idea came from Have you ever seen have you ever seen those for guns? So You know I've thought about buying one of these where you can put like a shelf like you know how you have a shelf next to your front Door that you put your keys on Yeah You can buy some of these and you click a button and it opens a little bit on the bottom and you just grab your pistol And they're pretty sick That's pretty cool. Okay. I like that Like my fanny pack in there maybe for when I leave the house like some cheese it's But would it fit a regulation size bag of corn nuts She's it your cheese at storage All right, so speaking of work baggers from a great idea. Here's the here's the name of this one
- I mean, Ben, you might want to get your pens a lot for the top winner of the episode. Instagram, a hanas. That sounds weird. So like Benny Hana's. It's Benny Hana's for photo opportunities. Okay, so here's how it works. It's a restaurant that's not about the food. It's a restaurant about the content. Like the museum of ice cream, baby. People roll in their eyes. It's like the museum ice cream, but it's seated. And it is like basically people go to restaurants, they order food, and they order like, oh, we got a fish bowl drink or we're drinking beer out of up shoe. And like, oh, we got the huge like donuts at the end and they take pictures and it becomes content. Or like they use sparklers instead of birthday candles. Now I started a restaurant. I know all the problems about restaurants.
- You got all this food waste, you got high labor costs, you got all this. You don't actually, you're not running this like a restaurant. So here's how it works. It's like Benihanas, you go, there's like, I don't know, 30 tables, you sit down, every table seats like eight people, and you go as a group, and you're going for an experience. You're not going for the food. And two things happen. So basically food is gonna come out that in each one is photo worthy food, either because it's gross, it's funny looking, it's huge, it's so indulgent. It's right, it's like, you know, a giant pile of sour gummy worms. It's, oh, it's the mega green donut. How are we ever gonna eat this? Oh, look, it's so funny to watch me try that sort of thing. Oh, this guy's gonna come out and we have to drink this giant beer can, that's like, you know, 36 ounces or whatever. I don't know, but a big beer can, 360 ounces, let's say. And so that's the idea. It's all photo worthy food. It's brought out like omakase at a sushi restaurant. We're gonna call it the food porn cafe.
- Instagram, Han is his the name, but if you'd like to launch a competitor, bring it on. There's a drone camera that just flies right above the table, and it's just recording the whole thing, and it's just going to just dumps it in a Google Drive folder, and there's a guy in India, one guy who's editing everybody's photos all night, everybody's content all night, and at the end, you're going to get the three or four best reaction shots because the food gets revealed. It's like when you get a picture on Roller Coaster. Exactly, exactly, but we're using outsourced labor, the drone is capturing everything, and it feels like a party. There's a DJ, you don't like those New York brunches for cool people. This is that for fat people.
- So instead of being cool and having to like know how to dance and stand up on the table and drink champagne at nine in the morning You sit and food comes out. That's crazy and you get to eat it And you get to make a big mess and it's gonna be your reactions on your and your attempts are all all photo and video recorded $100 a person plus tips eight people per table. I'm thinking you know 20 maybe 30 tables you know two or three turns per night and We're talking a million dollar a month easy on this food cost is way down because it's not even real food You're just doing like giant popcorn and silly stuff. You're no no proteins. You don't have to worry about that There's no food waste because it's
- You're just bringing out one thing for the table to react. It's like you're fighting each person. Your five pound burger doesn't need taste good. Exactly. It's like Benihana's. There's like a Harvard Business School case study on how amazing Benihana's is. And one of the reasons is like they because they put the, there's no kitchen space. They use the whole restaurant for like for dining because the chef is at the table. The stove is the table basically. And they have like higher labor costs because they've skilled chefs, but they have way lower like, you know, the use of real estate better and like their food waste is way down because they have a limited venue. So it's, you kind of do all that smart stuff. Have you ever seen a Hana? What do you think? I'm in. I'm into it. Have you ever heard the background of Benihana, the guy?
- Rocky, I think it's his name? Yeah, so he's basically, we wrote about it and it was one of our most trafficked articles for a long time. He's basically, you know, he's an immigrant, came here with nothing, and then, you know, who his son is, Steve Aoki, the DJ. Oh, no way, I did not know that. Yeah, and this guy Rocky, I think he, I forget the article, but it was like one of those like most interesting man alive stories where like he had been involved in like porn and then Benihana was like a big, and then went bankrupt, then he bought it back and it went big again. And then he was like this international man of mystery. Like it's a really interesting story and people love that company and it's still crushing. I went, we used to go to Team Dinner's there. I fucking love Benihana's, but dude, I'm into this. Oh, let's bring it up, dude, when we're in like a car and it's like, oh, we're gonna be, I'm like.
- I think there's a Benny Hana's around here. I don't know if they're, but I'm just like, I'm just waiting for that to latch somebody to be like, that'd be fun. Never, I never get any support on it. I'm always tossing the little Benny Hana, you know, test flare out there. But, you know, I guess we could do big group stuff. Benny Hana's, they got good tables. And I'm like, no one ever bites. I don't know why. I'm like, I've been, I'm over 12 on this thing. How is that, remember that guy you brought up on Instagram during the pandemic who started that cookie business that just made the most ridiculous cookies. Remember, what's that guy's? Like cookie dealer, I think is a good table. Mike, how's he doing?
- He's great. I checked him. I don't know. I think they're doing fine. I have not sure. I ordered cookies. Honestly, they were not great. So then I'm sort of like, uh, what's the fuss? But that's kind of how a lot of these food crazes are. Like the expectations get way out of whack. And what about me? Museum of ice cream. So the museum of ice cream, they started a little bit before the pandemic and you and I like, or a bunch of a lot of people made fun of them because they raised like $50 million at a $250 million valuation. And basically, I don't even think they serve ice cream there, right? It's just like a ball pit and like funny ice cream stuff. And you pay like 20 bucks and you go to take pictures, right?
- Yeah, you never been to it? No, but it's like a haunted house. You walk from room to room. Each room has its own like kind of crazy thing. And sometimes you get to eat a little bit, but most of the time it's just photos with like cool, in a cool room. It's Instagram content. In Manhattan, I walked by one recently and the line was around the block and I've gone by it a few times and there's always a long line to go in. I think they have to be killing it, right? I thought so, but then the SF one closed. So I don't know what happened, but well, SF closed.
- right. So, but the Manhattan one, the Manhattan one is just, I mean, that's really what it's like SF just like shut down for maintenance. So they just bid down for like four years. The museum vice you said the same thing that every like tech person in San Francisco said just like, fuck it. I'm out of here. Yeah. It was like an audible sigh of just like, fine. I'm out. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, I'm on board with this. I think it's good. We did a breakdown where we talked about like the companies like Corona and like fondue only stores and like all these companies. It was like, what do you have to do? You have to take like, you got to take a food and put it in a weird shape or a weird size or a weird color. Yeah. Or you match your container. Oh, we're going to get. Yeah. Or you match two things that are kind of related, but not entirely related like a burger in the shape of a hot dog or a crona. Or something like that. Rito's, Loco Taco, whatever the big Taco Bell thing. Exactly. Or you take something that's typically a side or topping and you make that the only thing like a cookie dough only place that serves it in an ice cream tin or an ice cream thing. What else were they? I forget what they were. You're like the the rain man of figuring out this food trick. Like everybody else just saw each one of these. It's like, oh, that's weird. That's weird. And you're like, I see the pattern. Yeah. What's wrong? What's wrong with the left side of your face right now? I need to go to your. I figured it out. It's it's all rooted in like an eating disorder. Like I go to I go to food therapy and like, you know, I need to go to your therapy and talk about I use I pay a lady $700 a month just to talk about food every single morning. Clearly there's issues there. Yeah. So I just want to roll under your pillow for some reason. Yeah. The amount of times that I've eaten a jar of Jiff peanut butter and one sitting is goddamn just way too high. It's way too high. We need a GIF of you just eating a jar of Jiff in one sitting. That's the. Have you ever done? I have tea. Dude, I've eaten a full jar with just a spoon multiple times. It's just too addicting.
- of the July and step are I have more let me give you I got maybe one maybe two more let's see how goes you probably don't watch the show but the show that's hot on Netflix called Indian matchmaker you see it of course I watch that show you watch it Okay, I thought this might be only entertaining to Indian people because it's like no Dude, you can't be I watch it all the time and in my head. I'm just thinking Y'all screwed up you guys are so weird Like why are you kidding me? Look I how is the suicide rate not higher amongst you people?
- You're like, yeah, don't make me send the British back in there. Are you guys? Yeah, shit together. What the hell, man? Like, there'll be this, like, beautiful doctor in her 30s, making money. She's pretty. She's nice. And her mom's like, y'all at her, like criticizing her for not being married. It's crazy. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or doing databases. HubSpot grow better.
- So my sister called me last night after she's like I finished season two and She just goes I need to ask you something. I hope it's not too personal. I was like, oh, what's it gonna be? She goes when you first met When you first met Sony did you did you have game because on the show? The Indian guys have zero game and I was like game Like what do you mean like I guess so and then she's like no think about it. She was like and she's like these guys They're nice guys. They're smart guys. They're like, you know, they're they've good job. They're normal people They've no crazy drug habits The reason they're still single is because they don't know how to look at talk to or touch a girl
- And I was like, oh yeah, I had that problem. Yeah, that's me too, actually, you're right. Dude, I saw someone post a picture of a painting of a naked woman from like the 1700s. And it was all Indian guys commenting saying like, hey, baby, I love you. I love you for a long time. Text me, copy. Yeah, that's like if you're ever a girl who does like live streaming on like whatever Twitch you're like.
- whatever, periscope, whatever whatever, whatever app. They're all like, what is, why are there so many men in like Turkey, the Middle East, and India who will just, they just flood their chat and they just keep saying show bobs, show bobs, show bobs, and they just say he's saying show bobs. So you didn't have game? You were, you were, you were. So so I asked, then I asked my wife, I was like, I was like, yeah, my sister asked me this. I don't think I did. Did I? She's like, no, you didn't. And I was like, uh, I was like, she's like, yeah, you had a different type. You had like intellectual game. Like she's like, you're good at like telling stories or you would say interesting things. And that counts. That's that's like the basic like man shit. She's like, you didn't know how to like, kind of like.
- You know, there was no smoothness to like the oh, we're walking down the street Like let's just I just hold my hand without like us having like the first time like how do you do that smooth? The first time or you know like in San Francisco the streets are a little dangerous Like you know you would always like walk on the inside of the street I'd be on the edge like right by the cars and the bums and like you know You didn't know to just like stand on that side Just like the little kind of male protective instincts a little bit like you know pull my chair out You know let me sit down first. That's like you know Don't give me a high five would we're like you know editing the day and don't say like see ya when we leave We're gonna say something else like you know like no dad Me and it's like I open the door for you. She's like yeah, you would like open the door and be like
- Scoot in like I like screw across and then I'll sit on this I'll get in after you It's like, you know, you're supposed to go to the other side and like yeah open the door for me And then you go to the other side. I was like oh, yeah, like that's so much effort like, you know, it's fine And so there was a whole bunch of things like that and I remember I dated a girl once In Australia and I'll always give her credit She was she kind of was like an amazing girl and she taught me one thing which was she was like, you know Whenever you're actually meeting her really debra's kind of in the flirting phase, but she was like She was teaching me how to she was like a dancer. She was teaching me how to do like she was like samba like champion or some shit like that And I think Sambo is fighting Yeah Samba I guess it's also and she was like, okay So just like put your hand here and then whatever and then she like looked at my hand I was like I put it right what you said and she's like yeah But look at it and I looked down at my hands like you know like limp basically It's like my head was there but like a dead fish firmness to it It was like, you know, it was nothing and she goes if you're gonna touch a girl touch with intent
- And I was like, oh, and I literally have never forgot that. That was like 15 years ago. And in my head, I'm always like, I got taught a real like lesson in like man stuff that day. I was like, how to do like do things with girls, like touch with intent. And I was like, I didn't even really understand what the hell she meant. But like that was the first time I got taught. So here's the idea. Basically it's swag school. And it just teaches Indian guys how to have a little more game. So you go to a seminar. It's like Toastmasters or Alcoholics Anonymous. And you go and you sit in a circle. And first you just say,
- You know, my name is Sean and I am awkward. And then Everest says, welcome Sean. And then the next guy says, hey, my name is Pradeep, Dr. Bay Area, and I am awkward. Everest is welcome, thank you for being. And it just goes around the circle. And it's going to teach you how to look at a girl, how to touch a girl, how to have some presence, how to sit straight, stand up straight, how to dress, how to go in for a kiss. And there's just a girl there to teach you how to do it. Because just what? You can't learn in a textbook. So that's it. Swag School, what do you think? Love it. Have you heard, do you remember Art of Charm? Our friend Jordan, he's got a new thing, Jordan Harbinger, but now it used to be called Art of Charm. Do you remember that? It's like a
- Was it like a five day boot camp for men? Was it five days? Do you remember? I don't really know. I know he has the podcast and I used to read the blog. So listen to this. He spoke at one of my events and he talked about it. And so it was him and two other guys. They had like a falling out. So this is like before they had the falling out and the business was called Art of Charm and it was teaching men how to be more charming. And he would also teach like, he would go and talk to like Navy SEALs and talk about like how to use charm to like, you know, like blend in and shit like that. And so they were making, if I remember correctly, $10 million a year hosting these. What did you just say? They used to go teach Navy SEALs how to use charm to blend in with what? Like the water? What do you mean? Like, you know what? All this espionage training you're doing? No, no, no. That's what he did. When he blended. You need to learn from him. He was like, you know what? All this espionage training you're doing? No, no, no. What did he do? That's what he did. You need to learn from me. No, that's what he did. It was like, like, I don't fucking know. Like, that's just what he told me. He was like, they called it operators or something like a special op, special op. That's right. Dude, I want to start a company that's just called Fortune 500. And so people can be like, oh yeah, I work with Fortune 500 companies. Like, you know, hey, you're not lying. It sounds cool when you're pitching your services. It's like, dmv.org or that. I want to make Navy Seals S E L S. And you could just say, I train Navy Seals. Well, dude, so he was making like $10 million a year hosting these like four day boot camps. And I knew a guy who went to one. And he said it changed my life. And this guy ended up, he was this dorky guy who I'm friends with. And he married this beautiful, awesome woman. And I was like, making a joke to him. Like, how did you pull that off? And he's like, man, I went to this articharm boot camp. And he just taught me how to like be more confident and like talk to women. And it totally worked. So long story short, swag school.
- down on DTF with swag school. All right, well, you validated me there. Okay, great. So I think I have so many more, but I think we save it. If people like this, we can make this a recurring thing. This is the second edition of Drunk Ideas. Let us know what you think in the YouTube comments. Pretty good, right? At least pretty good. All feedback now in the YouTube comments. I'm replying, I'm reading every single one. I don't want emails, I don't want Twitter. I only want YouTube comments now. Are you all, you're on board this YouTube train. It's going to my head. Is it going to your head? Dude, it's so much fun. Yeah, like, hey, the videos get more views now. We're out of the pathetic range where it's like 3.3,000 views.
- I'm just like, oh man, like, you know, it's like I kinda wanna, it's like I need to like make a disclaimer. It's like, but the podcast is bigger, like, you know? Like now. I used to say it all the time, I'd be like, well, the podcast is beating. It's mostly podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's mostly podcast. We just started YouTube. But now it's- You didn't have to print out your podcast. That's okay. Okay. No, now I think a lot of episodes will get 20, 30, 40,000 views on YouTube. So yeah, I'm about it. And the comments section, it is interesting. Also, some of these people are just-
- really stupid. There's so many stupid commenters. Like you see some of the stuff they post. It's like what do you what's this have to do with anything? So there's a lot of stupid stuff. And there's so many scammers. The typical scam is scammer is so annoying. So there's one scammer that acts like he's us. And then there's another scammer where it's like I totally agree with you. And that's why it's funny. The first guy, this guy is pretending to be us. He replies to every comment. And his thing is my first million. But he's using like emoji for the letters. It's like and the M is like a yellow. Yeah. That's a real thing. What's that group? Yeah, come in my WhatsApp group. He's trying to scam me when WhatsApp.
- And then the other one is so annoying. It's always the top comment on every video. And I like my mission in life is to like eviscerate this person. I hate it. And it says, I totally agree with what you just said. In fact, that's why I started following Aunt Linda. She's taught me all I need to know about 4x trading and crypto trading. If you're interested, here's her information. And then somehow they get like 80 people. Yeah, comment. And so like goes up number one and it looks legit. I hate those people. Linda is the best. I was skeptical at first, but she really turned it around for me. Oh, I turned 2000 to 18,000. Thank you so much, Linda. Linda, if you're reading this bubble, and it just goes on and that's all the comments. And it's the top comment on every YouTube video. I hate it. For any finance related channel, it's so annoying. It's like, you know, with the economy, the way totally agree, but with the economy, the way it is nowadays, investing is harder than ever. I'm so thankful for, you know, Dr. Baldwin's investing. What's that group? I, you know, it's really been a life changer for me. And then everyone's like, Dr. Baldwin is amazing. And it's like the same thing every single time. It's such a good. It's such a slick scam. It's a really well done scam and I can't, but I can't stand it. So anyway, yeah, I'm on board YouTube. That's our place now, which means you're going to have to start like where this is my jacket. So you got to like, you got to get like a jacket or something. You got to get like a look.
- Well, I just have this so Yes, I gotta have a look you're absolutely right. In fact, I tweeted that out I said I need a look and people gave me a bunch of bad ideas. So I'm still looking for a good idea All right, well who won? Okay, am I giving grades or am I not giving grades pick a pick a best idea? Honorable mention and a worst idea. Hmm. I think Only fans for therapy is the best idea. It is like both funny and is actually a good idea and I just like I would watch I know I could pass like four and a half hours on one afternoon Like the first half hour. I'm like this is so stupid But I don't quit the app and then like four hours later. I'm like this is so stupid. Yeah, honey comes like this guy He's so stupid. Hey everybody on social media come listen to this. It's so bad. Yeah, it's like me and Johnny K plus eight
- For worst idea, since I just pumped up Sean, I gotta take him down a notch. It's like Instagram, Ohana's worst idea. Cause I feel like you need one food. If you have your whole shtick, is like all these different foods that are Instagramable. Also just like, oh, a lot of people are doing this in different ways. Instagram, Ohana's zero out of 10. One food would be enough, but I just like to over deliver. So you don't want to buy greatest weaknesses. Hey, what was the thing you asked for?
- What is going to say you can honorable mention one of Sam's ideas perhaps because you know You know my honorable mention is I wish that Sam had done swag school I wish Sam had come on here and been like so you know how Indian guys have no game This opportunity Alright

6 Profitable Business Ideas You Should Start in 2022 [zWIxnWhDFWg].txt

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- Okay. This idea is called Milo again. Okay. So Milo is a company that got started back in the day that a guy who came on the pot, Jack Abraham started. Yeah. And what Milo did was a very simple thing. Milo said, if you if you said, Oh, I need to go buy scotch tape. It would say you would just type it was a search engine for finding where you can go by a specific product in person.
- So you'd be like, I want to buy, you know, whatever, like a, whatever, a Phillips razor or something like that. You just type it in and it would be like, it's in stock at this target near you. So it took where you are, and then it knew all the stores inventory, and it just told you if the product's in stock right there. And like there's like, the world is moving towards e-commerce, yes, but there's still like a very healthy slice of people that go shopping real stores and or they want something now today. And they don't want to wait for it to be delivered.
- and an extra amount of time. And so this idea of Milo got bought by eBay for like 75 million. And for like a couple of years. And then it kind of like, you know, like many acquisitions are just sort of faded away and disappeared inside of eBay. But this idea is still a great idea, dude. I completely agree, man. I tried buying something the other day, like some chairs or something. And I had to go to like eight different, like Home Depot.com, TractorSplat.com, Lowe's.com, Walmart. And even when you go, you're seeing the generic thing. You're not seeing like, you're seeing like those Home Depot carry this. Okay. Yeah. Now let's go to store locator, type in my thing. It sucks. And then I have to go to each one and do that. And it's like, I completely agree. I needed kids cough medicine. And I was like, dude, I see you didn't know. Do you have kids, robotessum or not? And then like usually like CVS or Home Depot, wherever they you type something in. And they're like, this is it near you. And it's like, oh, well, because up here, it says my zip code is like, you know, eight hours away when I was on vacation, you don't have like an easy way where it's just like, search, you know what I mean? It's a completely agree. It takes forever. And I was trying to do this the other day. It's a pain in the ass. I was using Google shopping, but it's not easy.
- Exactly. And I know it's also hard to build, right? Because you have to have like real-time inventory of physical stores. Yeah, but that's not that hard. If you go to target and ask for like a vacuum, they go to target.com and like type in like that vacuum to figure out where it is in the store. Right. So it's in some system. So you would need to build like integrations with like the major back end inventory systems in order to be able to do this. And you have a really strong reason why they should give you that access. It's like, Hey, dude, I'm going to send you a customer. Like I'm going to send you a foot traffic to your store. Like is there anything a store wants more than foot traffic to the store? I don't think so. So you know, like to me, Milo is an idea. And by the way, this just general thing, which is companies that go get it, that get acquired. And then like kind of like.
- dissolve in the big company, just restart those companies like three years later. Yeah, I actually think that's a really fantastic idea. That's one of, so that business model, I have said that I hate the advertising business model. I don't entirely hate it, but I do hate that when you're a publisher and you have to say stuff that you don't really want to because of an advertiser. But so I don't love that model, but I love non-publishing business advertising models because it's the perfect alignment. So basically with Milo, you have a site that gets lots of traffic and then you'll allow someone to pay money for a per click or a per view basis and it's very fair. It's the easiest sales process, I think. I'm all about that.
- Okay, I got some more random ideas. These ideas, by the way, they're a little bit more like the tipsy, the drunk ideas. So this might be another drunk idea segment. I might have to take a fake shot here and we might do drunk ideas because these are very, very loose. No, my low again is all right. Good bad ideas are bad ideas, but they're the good version. I'm giving you a good bad idea. Have you ever asked that guy, Jack? Well, he, if you could read, we could just email him and be like, is this cool? Was it, would this work again? No, I didn't ask. Yeah, we should ask him. Let's see what he says. But also the people should know this when a founder goes into a space, they can tell you a lot of things about it.
- But they have so much scar tissue about that space that they will always tell you like Nine times out of ten. I should say the nine times out of ten. They're gonna tell you don't do it because they have trauma and Like you shouldn't necessarily listen to the don't do it You should listen to all the reasons why they say don't do it and then assess are those still true? Or do I have a compelling reason why those are no longer true? But yeah, we should we should ask all right. So here's my here's drunk idea number two All right, you're You take zoom calls right?
- Yeah. You got a pulse. Yeah. What's the experience like? Okay, let's say you had a meeting with me before the era of Zoom. We were meeting in person. You come to my office for a meeting. What's that experience like while you're waiting for that meeting? In just three minutes before the meeting, what do you get? So lately nothing, but I recently did something where they had an ad on Zoom. And I thought that was intriguing. No, no, no, in real life, what do you get? What's the best version of a real life before your meeting? Show up at the building. You've done this. Yeah, water. In this New York, bougie places. You've been there.
- Someone attractive greets you. They ask you if you need anything to drink. They give you the drink that you have a seat You look around they got art everywhere. You start to feel like wow this company's pretty cool, huh? Like yeah, I was looking at that they got that wall over there with all the like cool, you know little Hey, little words that they want. Yeah, you know, like I went to one the other day like the bathroom sign Oh, by the way, there's another drunk idea This coming next coming next drunk idea the bathroom sign of this thing was It didn't say man. It said Batman and they had like a cape on the guy And I was like oh these guys they like to have a good time these guys. You have a great sense of humor So I got all of this
- All this information, all this persuasion before I even went into the meeting. Which office is this? I can't say. But Zoom needs this. Zoom needs a waiting room experience. This is a feature for some product manager at Zoom. We need a dope waiting room experience. Or even it can be built off Zoom, right? There's like whatever. A trillion Zoom calls a day. Give me a dope waiting room where I can send somebody that's connected to the Zoom call and then when they're ready, they can come in. But before that, they get up branded.
- They get a branded experience a virtual office a virtual vibe of who they're dealing with what that person's all about and Create a little a little website little website space for them to to hang out and have some fun have a drink and join yourselves I did this call with a company. I forget what they're making maybe they're making a game and I logged in and I was like a little bit early and they had like a teaser video Like a one minute long teaser video and because they were the host of the zoom It automatically played and so when I got to have the meeting I was like pretty like up psyched up Yeah, I was psyched up. It was awesome It was really cool and it almost felt like they were like but it it I was like is this what is this new feature is this was that an ad that you paid zoom to play and they're like no They have this new feature where they allow you to show like an amp up video like a video prior to the meeting starting And it was really cool, but dude how about the fact that zoom has been we've been in a pandemic for three or two years and
- It's like the same shit over and over and over again. Yeah, no features and the stock cut in half. What's going on? Yeah, this is not good. I'm more mad about one of those than the other. I'll let them figure out which one is actually bothering me. And there's so many people that go to that landing page where it says like click here to open up Zoom and it's just a blank page. Yeah, it's a blank page. There's so much real estate there. I get there when I've already clicked a Zoom link. Guess what? I do want to open Zoom. You don't have to re-ask me. Dude, it says yes means yes, Zoom. On similar web, zoom.com gets 1.7 billion visits a month and it's the 26th most popular website in the world. And that page is just this blank page. I cannot believe that. They could make maybe hundreds of millions of dollars a year just in like an ad. Yeah, just like the new Batman movie needs to play like a 15 second trailer to everybody today. That's what needs to happen. For real, I do think that's so much wasted space.
- Yeah, I'm more in the meeting room, the waiting room bucket. I want you to be able to like say something about who you are by showing what, you know, you can decorate it. You can put your little drinks there, a little interactive thing. You can play Jenga. You can do whatever you want, right? Like make it make it all right. So that's one idea. The second one is what I teased a second ago. It's called I don't have a personality. Give me one or I'm not funny. Make me funny. It's a it's a store like Spencer's back in the day. Remember Spencer's or what? I just went to Hot Topic. I just went to one day the other day. Yeah, it's awesome. All right, that's the actual check. For me and Sarah, we went up. We had like a date night on Friday and we're like, you want to go walk around the mall and go to the food court? So we did and it was awesome. I think you're in the school date night. It was awesome, man. It was so much fun. So Spencer's still a thing? Yes, and Hot Topic. We went to both of them. And this shirt that I'm wearing, I bought it from Abercrombie.
- Dude, Abercrombie's core right now. I believe you. I believe you. So my idea is it's the B2B version of Spencer's. So it's just shit for you to put around the office that's going to make your office more fun and interesting. I think it works out that name a little bit though. What was your name? I don't have a personality. Please give me one. Yeah. Maybe there's an acronym in there. We can do it. Yeah. We want like it needs to be a word that's like Botox, but it's for injecting personality into your company instead of like filler into your lips. So basically what this is Botox for your company, what it's going to do is it takes all the common items of a office of any office. So bathroom door, you know, the bathroom door signs, the exit sign, the emergency exit sign, room things, little chashkis on the table for meetings, you know, like your welcome desk sign in Matt and like little bell, you know, like it's just all items like that.
- And then it'll make you seem like the fun, interesting version of your company, because we just have them, we take the comment and we do it uncommonly. And that's what we do here. We set this exit sign. Do you remember this? We had this exit sign at the dojo where over the exit side, someone wrote IPO because that was like, that was the goal. The goal exit was an IPO. So we had an IPO sign instead of an exit sign. It was pretty awesome, but I completely agree. Yeah, like the office toilet paper, opportunity, opportunity in that toilet paper role. There's an opportunity in the bathroom mirrors. There's opportunity everywhere in your office to demonstrate a little personality. One time when I went to VaynerMedia, they had Vayner branded bottles of water. It was awesome. And I still remember it, it stuck out. Have you been to a company that has a pet up there and branded bottles of water? It was just,
- No, but I also I don't feel like I would have thought that was awesome. Why do you think that was so awesome? Was the label like just looked amazing or something? I just it was weird. I thought it was cool. It was quirky It stood out. It was just a body I mean it was just a normal cheap Costco bottle water and somehow some company They probably paid a quarter per bottle and they just wrap it was just had their label on it I thought it was neat I remember when I went to twitch for the first time when we were trying to sell the company and they were like you want Anything to drink, you know, here's the little fridge and I opened up there was a was my first time ever seeing boxed water It's I was like box water fun. I got that was like their gimmick and I was like that's cool. I picked it up
- You're a drink box water. Tastes nasty, by the way. Doesn't taste good. Tastes disgusting. And also, you're drinking from the old school milk carton. Yeah, it's like drinking orange juice out of like a thermal, like a metal thermos. It just doesn't taste good. It doesn't taste right. And then it doesn't even look right or feel right. So now I'm in this meeting, trying to sell my company biggest day of my life. And I'm like a toddler drinking from this like carton of water. And like the thing was just getting all wet and disintegrating. And I was like, oh God. Do you have a, do you have like a dumpster? I can go throw this away and just fit in any home trash. It's like a paper straw.
- All right, here's my next drunk idea So it's like fuck them turtles To save the turtles So the the next one is I don't know what I need to call this I need a catchy name I'm gonna call it You
- Discord property managers, because they can't think of a name. Okay, so basically there's a ton of Discords out there now. Basically, this is like community managers is a job title, right? A lot of people have communities, communities are all the rage now. And there's a ton of Discords, especially in the crypto world, there's a ton of Discords. They're so hard to figure out. That are just like noisy, there's spammers and scammers. And then there's new people coming in. They never use Discord and they never use crypto. This is a confusion all around. I think somebody should build the best property management company for your Discords. Just be like, dude, we are the best at managing Discords. And we will manage your Discord for this flat fee and just build a brand around being an amazing property manager for your digital property, for your digital spaces. That's a great idea.
- So VaynerMedia, who we'll talk about them again, when they started, their whole thing was like, social media's new, we're like the guys, we know how to handle it. And basically most of their job titles were called community managers. They're early on, a popular job title at their company was a community manager. We basically just meant we'll comment on everyone's comment. If you're Oreos and someone makes a comment on about Oreos, we just reply. And I actually think that, and they got big that way. I bet you VaynerMedia makes 200 plus million in revenue. It's a big ass company. And you do the exact same thing, but now the new community, or the new social is community. And I think that you've got- Our buddy, you know David Spinks.
- Yeah, of course. He was just it was way early. He was early dude. He just if he started that like two years ago instead of seven years ago That would be like a hundred million dollar company right now and he was just a little too early He was early making all the way so David Spinks had this company called CMX summit It originally was a conference for community managers then it was like an online community and everything and he sold it I don't remember who bad the big idea was like you have a you have a CEO They never see Tio they handle they're they're in charge of the technical
- part of things. You have a CIO. They're the chief information officer, CSO, CMO for marketing. So you have all these C-suites and his belief was that community is going to be a big part of companies. And so you're going to have a CXO, a Kim, I think it was the thing they were going for, which is like a chief community officer or some shit like that. I don't know why I was X, CMX, but basically it was, this is going to be a job title at the C-suite level. And then you're going to have then like a senior community manager and then like a junior community manager. And like, this is a whole new job function. And he was right. Don't know how to do it. And he was totally right.
- and totally early, which is the same thing as being totally wrong. And that's what it's like. Yeah, he was totally right and totally early. I completely agree. He was on that like, it felt like 10 years ago. Yeah. But I think this is a good idea. It would be a pain in the butt to run an agency, but I think this is an agency that could crush. Let me give you, okay, can I give you two ideas? So there's a guy, I'm going to, these are 100% stolen from another podcast I heard. So I listened to Bill Simmons' podcast, the sports podcast, and Bill has his buddy, Kevin Wild, or Wilds, something like that. He comes on and he does half-baked ideas.
- What's he is he is like we need to get him on this pod because his half baked ideas are like He does drunk ideas and he's been doing this for years and it's just a running bit This guy only comes only twice a year, but what he does he's got these amazing ones So can I give you yeah the two most recent ones he did and he's by the he's amazing of pitching them He's even better than me at pitching these these drunk ideas. All right, so first one is called fit furniture Okay fit furniture you might be wondering what is fit furniture, but hearing a lot about it lately
- Do we make the highest quality furniture? No, we do not. Do we have the best prices? Sure don't. Do we have furniture that fits through doorways? You bet your ass we do because moving furniture is a requirement of furniture. And all furniture is built as if everybody's home has just open walls that you can just drag these things through. So fit furniture is furniture optimized to fit through the standard doorway width. That's it. Do you know, do you know, uh, love sack? You remember love sack?
- Yeah, of course. So there's huge beanbags, right? Yeah, but their new shtick is furniture that fits through a door. It's modular. Oh my God. It's like, it's a couch that you take apart. And I tried. So at my Airbnb, the way it works, these guys are idiots. They put a spiral staircase going up and you on the second floor and I see only stairs and you can't carry anything up a spiral stairs. So I was like, I can't get a couch unless I could take it apart. And there was this company in Texas and they're the couch guys and they take apart your couch just for this problem. They take the whole thing apart and they rebuild it wherever you want it. And I was like, all right, well, I can't do that. So I looked at I looked at a lot because it's an Airbnb. I don't want to fancy couch. I looked at love sack. They're interesting, but it's like three grand for one of their couches or four grand for one of their couches. So I ended up going with a futon because I can build a futon upstairs. But dude, it was such a pain finding a couch that could fit into a certain doorways that wasn't like over $5,000. I completely agree. If you want to pay five star prices for that college experience, Sam short term rentals scotch covered sleep on a futon. Well, so stars, no, we don't call it a futon because if we call it a plot college because it's like crazy comfortable. It's basically like a mattress that you can sit on sometimes. But yeah, I didn't I was embarrassed to call people. I was embarrassed to call it a futon. That's for sure. That was your nickname in the college, right? The yeah. Second idea is called bulletin board material.
- So this is for this for I think this is for you. I think you are the target market for this. So it's for somebody somebody who you got a little chip on your shoulder and you like it. It's that chip on your shoulder has made you who you are. There would be no hustle if there weren't any doubters. Dude, they say chips on shoulders create chips and pockets. Exactly. But what happens if you grew up around nice people, you don't have a chip on your shoulder or maybe you had that chip sold the hustle and now everybody tells you you're so great. You don't know. You are so unlucky that you had a healthy father and a healthy mother who treated you well. Like you don't like me, right? You can do anything. I had such a disadvantage because I grew up in an emotionally healthy household.
- The biggest disadvantage there is. The biggest. And with money. We help solve that problem. We are for the healthy middle class family who has lost their edge. And what the more material is, is it is haters as a service. And so what we do is, we go and find the people, oh, my first moment, love the podcast. Every day people love the podcast. But guess what? In some corners of the internet, there's people who hate this podcast. And so what haters as a service does, it compiles that information. And it takes out the real toxic stuff that's gonna give you nightmares that night. So there's some filtering.
- And it just drips to you a little motivation every week that just reminds you that some people believe you can't do it. That some people say you're not so prepared for this podcast. Some people say, Sean, your camera's not working. And you gotta get that sorted. And so it just gives you that healthy dose of haterade so that you be your best. And we just hire a bunch of immigrant mothers who children are grown and they have some free time. And they'd be like, well, you know your brother's a doctor, Sean, you know. I actually know two women who can run the service single handedly. I'm not gonna name any names. They can serve thousands of customers. Yes. Well, you know, it's not too late to go back to school. So haters as a service. What do you think of that idea? Yeah. Yeah.
- Yeah, I'm down. We'll just call it like it has to it just touch your just nagging people all day. Yeah, exactly Mom calm. Yeah, yeah, live like an immigrant. Yeah, there's a reason why immigrants are always the best mentality that Alright, yeah, those are those are my drunk ideas. You got any drug ideas. I feel like I'm not creative like you All my ideas are just like legitimate money-making ideas, you know You
- It's hard for me to come up with bad ideas. How do you do it? Yeah, I'm like the Lady Gaga of ideas. There are no deep hits or there's no deep tracks. It's only. That's it. That's the episode. You

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- So he's got, is it the Daily Wire? Is that what it's called? Daily Wire. So this is like a subscription media company that he created because they're just sort of like anti mainstream media. That became a big thing like fake news. And if F the mainstream media, well, why don't we create an alternative, the Daily Wire? And the Daily Wire does some insane numbers. It's like only in year three or four, something like this, very new. And it does over 100 million a year in subscription revenue. Yeah. And have you heard of their spin off Jeremy's razors? No, it was a... Dude. I'm trying to go to this.
- Dude, I've had a hell of a of a of a day. I'm not gonna say who but check this out Friend wanted to come skateboarding with me. So naturally he got a concussion So I took him to the hospital by the way Did you even get like an hour of skateboarding in or was this like I got an hour in I got an hour in Yeah, then he was getting hyped up seeing me do stuff. He fell hit his head take him to the hospital to get his concussion Checked out turns out while we while we were there while they were getting the scan their appendix ruptured And they get rushed overnight or they get they have to stay there overnight get rushed to the different hospital Emergency appendix surgery. So this head injury basically saved his life and they were like I don't know like This is just a gift from God But you definitely could have died from this did the appendix get damaged in the skateboard fall or no separately Happened to be the same time Separate it's just a weird turn of events very separate. So that's where I've been so I'm a little disheveled But I'm wearing my cool guy jacket now. That's my new thing. I'm gonna be the token cool guy You could be the nerd. Yeah, no, this is real leather, bro This ain't the this ain't Tesla vegan leather, but I'm in my cool guy outfit. So I'm good to go
- Yeah. Cool is what I would describe that as. So that's good. All right. Where shall we start? Where do you want to start? Are we still, is Sam still showing up to the BYOB empty handed or is he bringing ideas to the table? Where are we at with this whole Sam does research thing? I know you started with a doctor's note there. So is that your excuse for why you don't have any topics? We I just went over a lot of my topics. I was the one who did the topics. Oh, you want to talk about your new seed oil only diet?
- And that what you told me that you're doing a seed oil only diet? So like seed oils are all the rage right now is it just in my world we started talking about them and now I'm seeing everywhere People are so anti seed oils my friend Dennis was like scurret. I'm only eating seed oils from now on I looked yesterday at the bag of I was like you know what I kind of want to have one of these little little bag of this little pretzel thing for a second I just let me just check the check the stats on this. I was like, that's not so bad. Not too many calories and whatever
- And I looked at the ingredients. I saw canola oil on there or something like that. You know, sunflower oil, whatever these things are. And it was a Sam voice in my head that just told me these things kill you. And so I decided to put it down, I drank a big tall glass of water instead. So pretty big net wind there for me. Yeah, I don't know why it's bad for you, but someone on Twitter told me it was, therefore it's true. If it's written down on Twitter or if it rhymes or if it's like a cute phrase, I automatically believe it. Alliterations rhymes or four people, I don't know. Either any one of those three and I'm in.
- Let me tell you two things. One, you said something about like, oh, it's beautiful, it's well done and it reminded me. Yesterday I found what would be an amazing DDC product. Not amazing, like hundreds of millions of dollars, but a DDC business that I know would just, it would work, it would work really well, it would be very profitable. I'm looking, if somebody wants to operate it, I will just simply give you an idea in a playbook and then I'll take my share and we can start this company. But basically it would require somebody who's good at things that are beautifully done. So this, I think requires the feminine touch. So,
- I'm sort of fishing in a dry pond here with this with this podcast but to our four female listeners if any of any of the four of you you got a 25% chance each here to step in and take it or to one of our male listeners if you I don't know see a female today let her know about this opportunity I'm looking for somebody who could do something that is a the product is beautifully done it would be a successful DDC product I have no doubt my mind you just need to be good at a couple things you know an aesthetically beautiful brand and
- Short form video content TikToks or getting them made by other people if you don't do them yourself But it's easier. All right. You have been the palm of your hand. Tell me what it is I can't tell you on air because I don't want everybody to copy it. I will tell you offer wait really yes Dude, this is the lame a segment ever Is that really it that's really what you want to do That's really what I'm gonna do here if it happens then we can we can reveal it And if it doesn't happen then I'll also reveal because I have nothing to lose at that point So just not yet. I I was gonna remind people this is usually
- segment where I remind people of our gentleman's agreement where we work for you now, but all you have to do is go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. That's a gentleman's agreement. It's called the Gentleman's Agreement because I can't check to see if it's true. So it's just based on trust. But after that, Lane violated it. Yeah. That's lame. So if you want to do the gentleman's agreement, we owe you now. All right. All right. I'm in the penalty box, but I'm going to fight my way out. Okay. So here we go. I tweeted something out the other day that I think is very interesting and reminds me of the Doug DeMuro, a YouTube creator. Yeah. YouTube creator who's not just going to make money off YouTube ad revenue, but has built a business that they built basically a $50 million plus empire off YouTube. Why did I ask this question? Well, your boy is going to start doing YouTube content, but your boy also wants to make more of the $50 million doing this process. And so I wanted to see who has done this before, because I'm not really interested in being a pioneer. The pioneers get slaughtered, right? So I don't want to be a pioneer doing this. I want to be sort of a fast follower. So I was looking for examples and I got a bunch out of this tweet. I want to read some of them off to you.
- see what you think about these. First one. By the way, when you tweeted that, I don't know if it's because I know you well or if everyone could read through the lines here, but it was very much like, tell me what to do with my life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, hey, can you just keep validating my parking pass here? Yeah, I need some needs. So the first one was right up your alley. More plates, more dates. Level. More plates, more dates. You probably know this story a little better than I do. I didn't know he was doing this because I watched his videos. He doesn't really pump product as much or at least in the clips that I've seen. If you watch closely, he does. Not an end up not just way. Right. So this guy, Derek, super likable guy, puts out great content. I'm not even really interested in like.
- testosterone and like steroid usage and something else occasionally I am with certain athletes But usually not but I find myself just watching this guy's videos because I like this guy a lot Apparently he's got a brand or maybe two brands one brand, you know the name of it. Yeah one's called Merrick health And the other one is called gorilla What's really mind gorilla mind? Yeah, so gorilla mind if you go to gorilla mind gorilla mind is getting I want to say Almost two million between one and two million visits a month, right? So let's say a million visits a month
- I think it's pretty safe that this brand is doing about a million dollars a month in revenue, so 12 million a year in revenue on his supplement's brand. I think more. I would take the more on that one. Yeah. That's a conservative estimate. I wouldn't be surprised if it was as high as 4 million a month. And supplements are an amazing niche to be in, right? Everybody wants to be in the supplement's niche. So that's great. Just gave you, by the way, two pronunciations of niche back to back, just to appeal to both sides of the aisle. You totally redeemed yourself. And then Merrick is this TRT clinic. So they basically do kind of like, you know, help men, you know, stay young. So hormone replacement, hair loss, sexual wellness, all this stuff. This thing's got to be doing pretty well too. And I think they also do the semi-gluteide stuff as well. I don't, did he start this or what? Because it has like 200 employees on LinkedIn. Is he just a partner or are he started?
- I think he's an equity owner. I don't know if he's the guy, but I think it's he's he's so popular that it appears as though He's a main guy and he's definitely pulling his weight. I know a lot of people he used to Maric Health I don't know anyone who uses Gorilla mind. I think Gorilla mind's a horrible name for a supplement company But I trust Derek. I think the branding on this is wrong, but it's interesting and it's what's really interesting is like he sells creatine Do you think about creatine? It's awesome for one and number two. It's basically like You ever heard of creatine? It's awesome. Yeah, but it was the typical Well, I'm I'm almost positive that creatine is like a commodity like it's almost like all the same And he's selling it, but he has an upset here. He has a he marked it up because it's Derek But yeah, that's a good example of a creator killing it and by the way these examples I specifically said I said
- You get kicked out of the party if you come in here and you say Joe Rogan or Mr. Beast Like it has to be somebody else like not the examples everybody always talks about so here's here's a couple others Okay, so here's some that I'll go in order of the ones you know to the ones. I think you don't know So another one you know Kayla It's seen as I don't know how you say your last name Kayla it's seen as I think So no, I think it's like it's new or something I think it's pronounced a little bit different But but if you're if you're one of the four women listeners they want hundred percent know who she is There's one time I try to pronounce like
- or me is there something like that on the podcast or like Hermes? Yeah, I got a lot of shit for that. Yeah, one time I heard you pronounce a dot. He you're not exactly good at pronouncing pronouncing things. My mouth doesn't fully work. Yeah, I got a stick tongue. So she created this app. So she's like a fitness influencer type person ends up creating an app called the sweat app. I believe they sold it for four hundred million dollars. So her and her husband or boyfriend and then they broke up, but they kept building the business together. I don't know what ended up happening there, but sounded like there was some drama. Four hundred million dollars on this exit. I thought that was a great example of not just saying cool. I'm going to hold up a detox tea and get paid five thousand dollars for a shout out. I'm actually going to create a business off of my following.
- Mark Rober. So Mark Rober, he's a former NASA engineer. He makes like engineering videos. Like, oh, I built the world's biggest t-shirt cannon. I love this guy. He built a, he's really likable guy. He's like, you know, the science teacher, everyone's favorite science teacher type of guy. He has a monthly subscription box. I think that does like, it's like a science kit and you're like, you get to build little products yourself. And that's a great idea. Super on brand. It's 25, 30 bucks. This thing is, I think, doing millions of dollars a year pretty safely. He's got a very, very big following. 23 million, I think, on YouTube. I mean, he's like one of the big guys. Yeah, he's been around for a long time. Okay. Another one you probably know, Ben Shapiro. So Ben Shapiro is
- By the way, I'm gonna make a little prediction. You don't agree with everything. He says but you kind of love this guy Yeah Yeah, yeah, that's up. Yeah I'm projecting. I also said wait. Yeah, I Like his nerd swagger And he's he's just fast-mouthed He just like says things very succinctly and quickly and I don't believe in most of things He says I believe in maybe some of them. He's pretty religious and I'm not into I'm not into religion But he says a lot of stuff that I'm like Dude, just the fact that you came with that like pretty brutal reply so quickly. I respect you Yeah, it's like a rap battle, right? like you just at the end of the day, you know, whoever kind of insults the other person the fastest and the best wins and He does not have a thick tongue like your boys Yeah, he's good man. So he's got is it the daily wire? Is that what it's called daily wire? So this is like a subscription media company that he created because they're just sort of like anti mainstream media That became a big thing like fake news and F the mainstream media
- Well, why don't we create an alternative, the daily wire? And the daily wire does some insane numbers. It's like only in year three or four, something like this, very new. And it does over a hundred million a year in subscription revenue. Yeah. And have you heard of their spinoff Jeremy's razors? No, it was a dude. You got to go to this. So go to it's just Google, like daily wire razor company. But so basically, uh, dollar share or Harry's razor was one of their spots. So basically, Ben Shapiro's conservative or he's right wing, whatever he's you call him. And so naturally, like the left hates him. Um, and the right loves him because they feel like they're being canceled all the time. And so Harry's razors was one of their biggest or big advertisers and they bailed. They, you know, said, you know, we're not going to associate with Ben, you know, you're screwed up. And so the founder or one of the co-founders and CEO of the daily wire, his name is Jeremy. And so if you go to Jeremy's razors, you'll see the website and they made this crazy video where they just said, like, it's actually pretty hilarious. Regardless if you agree with them or not, but they created this video that's like a hype video and it was launched nine months ago and it has 22 million views and they're selling millions and millions of dollars. They basically just took the Harry's razor. Like it's pretty much their site is identical to Harry's razors, but they just call it Jeremy's razors. And it's like, and the picture is this guy who's he's like smoking a cigar. It's basically a big middle finger to, uh, to Harry's razors. On the about page, it says, Harry's in the daily wire had a deal. They paid us. We advertise their razors. But after we said that boys and our boys and girls and girls, they publicly condemned our views as inexcusable and misaligned. And you know what? You're damn right. Our values are misaligned. We value truth and the right to speak. We embrace masculinity and the courage to uphold it. And so that's like the whole shtick. It's us versus them. Regardless of what you feel about that. If you think it's right or wrong, very, they capitalized on something and it's doing well. This is so good. This is a. Wow. This is an amazing, amazing little case here. The video that's the like, add the launch video for this. It starts with a, it's like professionally made and basically it starts with like you hear like a car and you're in a parking lot and it shows like the parking signs and it's like.
- you know, the Daily Wire and then it says God King and a guy pulls up and I'm a clarin and he gets out with a, with a blowtorch and he goes inside and just blow torches a bunch of like Harry's like merchandise and just sets it on fire and it's like such a, such a smart thing to do to take this like great business model, right? The classic kind of Gillette, you know, razor cartridge model and then just be like, no, this is the one done by us for us, right? Like, yeah, that is so smart. And I feel like that just opens the door for them to do this in.
- in five other categories. Yeah, it's a very intriguing case study of what these guys are doing. So yeah, that's a good one. Like, can you write the word Jeremy on a stick of deodorant? Yes, you can. All right, great. Can you write Jeremy on a stick of a toothpaste? Great. Yep. You sure can. What else can you write the word Jeremy on? That's not, there's now a guy running around grocery stores be like, we can write Jeremy on that. We can write Jeremy on this. Oh my God, guys, how many do these massive? Yeah, they're like, hey, Republicans like sunscreen. Let's do that. Why people get sunburned? This is totally work. Yeah, interesting case study. All right, what else is there? All right, so then there's kind of like the Emma Chamberlain. A lot of people talking about her coffee thing. People know that.
- Pat McAfee killing it. You know, he kind of did he did a hundred a four year $120 million deal with Van dual for his NFL show, which is pretty insane. That's like an absolutely insane, like brand deal to pull off. Okay, then there's some others that I hadn't even heard of so he's also the host of like WWE. Do you know that he's like an announcer there. He's kind of crossed. I went down a very deep Pat McAfee rabbit hole one night because I was like, I think I love this guy. He's amazing. And I was like, I'm doing this for the pod. This research.
- And then three hours in, I was like, this isn't for the pod, this is for my soul. I just enjoy this, watching this whole journey. And I was also like, I don't think there's even a story here for the podcast. I just think I really liked this content and I never talked about it. I just did three hours one night and I just never brought it up. There was one time where I thought about our setup and I'm like, we should do it standing up because he stands up when he records and I love it. He also wears a tank top, which I know you love. Yeah, so win-win. All right, so here's some others that I didn't even know who these people are. Danny Austin, have you ever heard of this person? No. Okay, so she created a brand called Divi and it's basically scalp care for women. So she basically took a problem in her life, which was, I think,
- maybe like as she was aging or postpartum maybe, she was struggling with hair loss, which is actually pretty common for women to struggle with hair loss. Like I know my wife like after we had, every time you go kind of like after you have a baby, like your body's just producing whatever different hormones and there's like, they all like complain about like, you know, their hair thinning or hair loss is a very common thing. So anyways, she creates a brand, she first was just talking about the struggle and then she stole the solution. So her content was everyone's like, oh my God, Danny, so vulnerable, so authentic. Oh my God, so like, I'm so glad you're speaking up on these issues and like, you're a beautiful queen, you're so beautiful, this is like, don't worry about it. And then she sold a solution, which was like the scalp care thing. And she did $20 million in the first like 10 months or something crazy. So it just like took off right away like a rocket. So I like that one. There's another one. Do you ever watch Dandruff videos on TikTok? That's like my favorite type of content. Are people just like flaking off Dandruff? You ever do that?
- People like pop in zits dude dude because I got crazy dandruff if I like it's my head there's gonna be a snow day. I'm always looking for like a good a good dandruff shampoo and I love watching dandruff videos on tiktok. It's a huge niche. Don't wear black around Sam. Yeah. Not good. So this is woman named Mindy McKnight. This is another cool example. So she started a brand called cute girl hair which she was because she was just doing hair style. Love that name. YouTube cut. Yeah. Great name. Honestly amazing name. Yeah.
- She was making YouTube content just doing hairstyles for her girls. That's cool content. Oh, here's how we do this hairstyle Here's how we do this one it's kind of like, you know, what your big sister should have taught you or something like that and I think her story is like she has five kids I'm my butcher this story because I just I don't remember This was like a couple weeks ago when I saw this but like I think she's got five kids or something like that And they all have different hairstyles or textures that may have adopted or something like that And so she's like her content is showing like this wide range of like hairstyles and how you can make them all look cute No matter what your hair is right. That's great
- She does a launch with Walmart and it's the second biggest launch with Walmart. She just they're doing nine figures in sales So over a hundred million in sales And her YouTube channel has five and a half million subs Her twin daughters have YouTube channel with seven million subs, right? Like this is just kind of insane how Big that launch can be when it's like total alignment between creator their personal story their content and then The product once they have the distribution and so that was pretty inspiring to me I really like that and now now I have a good excuse to spend all day
- Just making fun content for free and being like don't worry One day This is all gonna become actual like this will this will be real work This is not just me getting to play around and like you know beyond YouTube all day All right. Well, what else is there? I mean cute girl Harold great name. What else you got? Well, okay, I just gave you seven but like we can keep going if we if we'd like oh, I thought you had a few I there's one one guy that I find very fascinating that I saw someone mention on your thing goosman Is the impression I didn't know who this was a lot of people mentioned him so who's man? He's I guess a fitness influencer. He's got a pholet or something like that alpha. Yeah, his I don't know if his nit I think his niche is like Texans. I think he's Hispanic So I think he has like a huge Hispanic following but basically basically he's like a rip a rip guy But he like has like weaved in his family into his content So you like know about his life and he's like a family guy he launched something like a 50,000 square foot gym called alpha land So probably not in your wheelhouse, but it's called alpha land and For a day to do Like a gymnastics like part of that We stretch and watch other men work out. Yeah, it's called alpha land. It's like a 50,000 square foot gym I forget where it is San Antonio or Houston or Dallas or one of those folks one of those places where you'd expect an alpha land and And he also has a clothing line and I think he's killing it. I think he's doing a big business
- Right. I like how you acted like you hadn't been there. I don't have a membership, but like Okay, yeah, so this is my these are my $50 million creators and all these people I think have built off of their YouTube content You know an empire that's easily worth 50 million or more you You you made fun of me for not preparing and you prepared that list I think I knew more about all of them than you did Yeah, cuz you're you're like a real consumer of contents Right like I'll be like oh, they use this technology in this music video. You're like yeah I love that music video and I'm like watch the music video and it literally I spent 17 years since I've watched a single music video. I went to your house So you just had music videos on TV on loop
- I love music videos. I was like, this is what you watch. And you're like, I just leave it on. Yeah, I love you. I ran out of questions because I was like, wow, this is just a different thing that just doesn't happen in my world. No, I watch music videos constantly. So yeah, that's one of the ways I know about stuff. Also, my wife is a little bit younger. So she just turned 30. So when we were dating, you know, only a couple years ago, she was like, in her 20s. Yeah. Well, hey, I said younger than me. And she's got a younger sister. So I'm kind of, I got my toe in the cool kids market. Yeah, you like, you see people, you leave the house, you take supplements, you watch music videos, you watch movies, you read biographies. You do a lot of things that like, you know, I simply don't do. I'm like a...
- I'm just like a heat seeking missile for like what's the interesting story and then my stories are typically like Did you know that there's this and then for most normal people like yeah? I love that love their channel you're watching the marker for years you're a potato What you see is what you get you could pull the skin back a little bit it gets up a new I'm like an onion bro. There's layers. There's lots of layers. It goes all the way to the core the layers don't stop Yeah, but French fries are made out of me and I think that's kind of a win Dude, all right, let me tell you something interesting and this is more so I want to put this on record that I brought this up about
- two years ago. But have I remember when I told you about the company, bring a trailer? Yeah. Yeah. You said, you said you were talking about car companies or auction companies and like that. And you were like, dude, there's this thing. You even told that this is like a long time ago, a long time ago, you were like, dude, there's this thing called bring a trailer. It's sick. You could just buy a car on this auction thing. I don't even know how it works. Exactly. You're like, it started by this guy, Doug, Doug, you're confusing two things. Who's the guy from inbox or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it was started. The main guy, I forget his name, Nathan, I think the non main guy, but also co-founder, I think his name is Gentry Underwood. And he started this company called Mailbox, which is like an email thing that sold for reportedly $100 million to Dropbox, like before it even launched because it built up such a huge waitlist. And it sounded like a cool product. I don't even think it got launched. But anyway, it's this website called bring a trailer. And if you go to it, it just looks like almost like a blog. It's fairly unsophisticated. Honestly, I think it's WordPress.
- And what they do is there's this neat niche of car enthusiasts who like things from like the 70s to like early 90s, which Like you try I don't like my jacket. Yeah. Yeah, exactly like my jacket and it started out small but it sold recently and it was Recently ish announced that they last year in the trailing 12 months sold something like 1.2 billion dollars worth of cars in one year And they made something like a hundred million dollars in net revenue with like 80 employees And you go to their website and it's so basic and people love it And there's this guy named Doug tomorrow who has a YouTube channel where he reviews all types of cars And he does it just with an icon iPhone and he like always has like have you know like a bacon collar? Have you heard of a bacon collar? It's like where you wear an undershirt on your on your shirt in your white shirt the collars all like shuffle or like the The white sleeves are like coming down below your polo. You know I'm talking about okay So your undershirt is showing is that the idea? Yeah, we're you're like under like he's like it's like where you're wearing like imagine a guy wearing cargo shorts and like an old Navy t-shirt with like a Hollister polo above it and like you have a bacon collar like he just totally Disshuffle it's incredibly unprofessional looking. Okay. I got the definition
- shirts that have a wavy neck to do to be stretched out or from improper care. Yeah, it's just like the very typical, like. My shirt's lifted. You're a bacon collar guy. So that's what this guy is. He's a dog's a bacon collar guy, but he's hilarious and he's lovable and he's likable and he's built this YouTube channel. Like he'll review like a $2 million Ferrari as well as like a $30,000 Honda pilot. And it's pretty hilarious. He's got three or four million subscribers on YouTube now. I told you about two years ago, maybe, I forget when, maybe three years ago, he launched this new company called Cars and Bids and it's very similar to bring a trailer. And so I predict that this is actually gonna be a multi $100 million exit and I wanna make my prediction there now that that's gonna happen. But what's really interesting here is curated auctions. I think that's very fascinating because the reason it's fascinating is if you go to eBay, have you been to eBay in the last like five years?
- I have not. Dude, no, like, not a lot of people do. Of course, a lot of people do, but like, not a lot of people do. And it's because it's one of those things. No one goes there anymore. It's perfect description. It's got like a million visitors. You don't know any of them. Yeah, it's too crowded. No one goes there anymore. And so it's one of those things where like you go to eBay and you like that one. Oh, it was really the timing that I enjoyed there. You go to eBay and you get overwhelmed with options. And there's a couple of businesses that I've been looking at where I'm trying to think of what a curated auction could be. Because I think it's like, I think it's cool and it feels, it's just a beautiful experience, you know? That's what we, that's our phrase. It's just like a delightful. But it's just beautifully done.
- Yeah, it's beautifully done. Really well done. Anytime people can say like handcrafted or like ultra premium, that's what this is. And I really have been digging this. I invested in a company that is doing this for homes because I've been looking at like, what are big ticket items that people will buy online that they previously didn't, but they will because it's more well curated. So like, for example, we talked about, I can never say it right, but Hodynke, we had Kevin Rose, the founder, they sell like, you can buy like a $40,000 watch online. And they do a really good job of editorializing it. So I've been thinking, what are other categories where someone can buy something online that's 30 to $100,000, even a million dollars plus, but if you curate it nicely and you describe it nicely with beautiful photos, so in the same way that Airbnb, I don't know if you know this, but they used to send out photographers to the really nice listings because they're like, we charge $1,000 a night with better pictures, you can charge $1,500 a night. So it's worth it to us to help you make your shit look better. What else is like that, that these curated auctions can work out because I think they're really, really cool companies to run and they're really hard to break once they work. Once they work, it's like the people working there, you guys are important, but like the community has taken, you are just a, um,
- You're just there to help the community. It's no longer your business that you're pushing down people's throats. Golf equipment. Golf equipment? Golf equipment. Really? How much is it? Golf equipment. How much, why do you say that? Well, you have an enthusiast market. You have kind of like a knowledge gap of which one should I get, what's better, what's worse, blah, blah, blah. You have a super premium price point. And I think a golfer over the course of their lifetime is going to spend probably upwards of $10,000 on equipment. And I think that, because I think the thing you want is like cars, you want a high ticket, right? You need a high ticket, you need a ability to drive high ticket customers to something.
- And so I think that's one where people will nerd out on the content and and get there But I have other this what you said by the way is a perfect lead into two things. I want to talk about wait Let me say mine livestock livestock like animals hell yeah dog dude my my so listen to this my cousins They're their cowboys so they buckball. They price It's called If you ask them what they do they'll go I buck balls, which means They live in rural, Oklahoma And when I went to the house once and instead of like it was a Thursday night and instead of going like the community softball game We went to the community rodeo and there was only like 20 people in the stands But they are practicing their rodeo which is basically you get on a bowl and bowls are mean bowls want to kill you even if they Even if you raised them They're just like mean and they get on these bowls and they buck them off and the bull The person who stays on the longest get surprised but the bull who bucks the hardest based off of like judging wins a prize And some of these bowls cost 50 grand my parents bought into a bowl for $50,000 And they get a portion of the like the offspring like the the sperm that they they sell and they get a portion of the winnings from the bull
- They make money off of it. Yeah. And they, so they- What kind of money are we talking here? What did it do? The return is not like that great, but like you, like I don't know, you get a couple grand every once in a while. So it's like not that great. And like the bull can like break its leg and you're screwed. But like- Should we go have these on a bull? It is pretty interesting to own a bull, but it's a, it's a, it's a huge sport in certain parts of the country. My cousin went to college on a scholarship for bucking bulls for being a rodeo guy. And so, and all these folks, they, they, they, it's cash. So they'll come to the rodeo with like 10, 30, 40 grand in cash and they're like playing right there on it. It's very fascinating. You've never been to a livestock auction?
- Sure have it. Dude, it's dope. But I do think I do think we should go hazy on a bull. If there's a bull dealer in the audience, head us up. We are we're in the market for one and we'll live stream our our our bull purchase. Yeah, this is great. Okay. Okay. So livestock that's one. Yeah, sure. I like that. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most TRMs are cobbled together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new TRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot. Grow better.
- All right, I think I've kind of done this, but I went even deeper down this rabbit hole. So I got to bring him back as a new Billy of the week. $1 million isn't cool. You know what's cool? $1 billion. The new Billy of the week is an old Billy of the week. It's Sam Altman. And you would think Sam, you know, you got nothing new to say here. What is Sam Altman? We all know Sam Altman. Sam Altman.
- dude, Sam Altman's Sam Altman's onion status. He's got layers. Okay, so I want to read you some of the interesting I went down to Sam Altman rabbit hole last night. Here's why. He did an interview and I was watching. Well, you got to explain who he is for the new. Okay, for people who don't know Sam Altman is he's like an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He created one company he didn't go that far called looped sold it for 40 billion bucks. Then he but he had made he went through Y Combinator, the big accelerator down here when he was like 19 and the founder of Y Combiner super impressed with him and kept him on his partner and eventually named him president of YC, which is like one of like it's like being named the dean of Harvard after being a Harvard student because the dean thought you were so special. And so that's literally what he did. He became the president of YC grew YC. He then created he then created the nonprofit open AI. He then left to go work on open AI open AI is now behind chat GPT, which is like one of the fastest growing like tech waves that's out there basically an artificial intelligence platform.
- That's I think they launched chat GPT chat GPT and I think got 10 million users in like 10 days or something ridiculous like that. It's worth $40 billion companies were you know somewhere between 2040 billion dollars now and He's the you know the leader of that thing too plus he's a prolific investor was an investor much things All right, so I got some of those facts coming but that's and most people know Sam Altman I'm not bringing up a surprise if you listen to pot you probably know who he is. Okay, but here's some of the things I didn't know I Was listen in this interview and they go you invest in this fusion company I'm thinking okay fusion still know what the hell that is, but I know smart people talk about it Okay, great and they go you led the investment. Okay, that's fine. He led the investment
- You put you wrote a $375 million check into helium and I was like what you know like rewind what what are this person to say and I literally went back and I re-listened to it and I was like oh I Didn't know Stan Waltman has like a giant venture fund like Surely he's not writing a $375 million check himself As far as I could tell that is what he did he wrote a three hundred seventy five million check himself And that got me down the trap hole up where did Sam how does Sam Altman get so wealthy?
- Because I've heard several stories now. So for example, when he started OpenAI, or even when he was president of YC, he donated $10 million to a science research, like a project that he created, right? Like science research nonprofit. To donate $10 million means you got a lot more than $10 million. And at that time, I was like, how did he get $10 million? Because again, his first startup, which he was like, whatever, 18 or 19, sold for $41 million. Out of that, he said that he got $5 million.
- So somehow he parlayed $5 million in a very short amount of time, about four or five years, was now donating $10 million. So that was the first thing. Oh, wow. It was that short? That didn't make sense. And I was like, okay, so this is now maybe six years max later. Okay, then what else did he do? He also donated to, you know, when he started OpenAI, but it didn't say how much. And then this threw in a $75 million check. So I started going back and trying to figure out what's going on. So starts looped, sells it, and that's about $5 million. From there, how old was he at that $5 million, like $22, $23? Yeah, something like that. I don't have the exact timeline, but I think he's in his young early 20s is pretty safe to say.
- there. He then starts investing in startups. And so he's investing in startups. Second investment is normal, please, the best investment of the decade stripe. So he's one of the first investors in stripe. That was his second investment. And there's this like thing that I've noticed, which is in D2C brands, they call your first kind of like couple months, your golden cohort. It's like, I noticed this about our customers and my econ brand, but I noticed this across many brands, which is
- that first batch of customers you get, for some reason, their LTV is way higher. And it kind of makes sense, because it's actually like the people who immediately get it with your message are willing to adopt your thing before your big brand. They probably really have the problem or they're heavy enthusiasts. There's the equivalent thing in investing. For some reason, it's very common for people's first sort of five to 10 investments to do extremely well in the world of angel investing. When you're, for great investors, often their best hits come early, like Chris Saka, who's one of the best early stage investors of all time.
- his one of some of his earliest investments were basically, you know, the combination of Twitter, Uber, Instagram, you know, things like that. And they came in the kind of the first 10, 15 deals that he did. And I feel like that's the only stuff he did. Like those were the hits and then everything. He did so well, he retired, right? He became a billionaire and essentially retired from the game because he was like, well, my first fund was like a whatever, 6,000 X. I'm good. Sam said that in his first 40 deals, at that time, he had invested in 40 deals. He was two years in. And he said that five of the companies were doing really good. And then it was like, what's really good, mean? It was over 100 X. So like, so that's not really good. That's ridiculously good. So what's a $50,000? How big of it? Maybe 25,000? What's a hundred times a 25,000?
- Well, you're violating the no public math rule, but. Is that 2.5 or 25 million? So 50,000 turns into 5 million for a hundred X. Wow. Okay. And so you stack five of those. That's pretty good. I brought up that. I was like, okay, where do you get all this money? How was he doing all these deals? Was he just investing out of that 5 million? And the reality was, yes, he was investing personally, but I texted a friend. So I was like, yeah, I'm looking up Sam Altman. Like, did he write this check personally? How did he get all this money? And this is somebody else who's young, smart and friends with Sam and that crew. And he's like, I think it was. I think this check was personal.
- $375 million check is that you think so, but it might have been an SPV. And I was like, um, I was like, dude, I feel like there's like some underground, uh, you know, like teen prodigy thing where like there is if you're, if you turn 18 years old and you're like a phenom, Peter Thiel just gives you a hundred million dollars. And I was like, I was laughing and I was like, you know, I think you're in that club too. And he was just laughing. He's like, yeah, Peter does actually back it. So I go and I Google it. Sure enough. I'm all in right after he saw his first thing, raises a $21 million fund from Peter Thiel. This is like 100% is dude. I know a few of these prodigies. There is, there is a club. They exist. So people talk about like, uh, like, you know, oh, just like, what do they say? Uh, you know, it's that boys club and I can't ever break into it. Unfortunately that's true. It's real. They exist. You and I aren't in that club. Maybe we have our own club, but these type of like elite clubs, they're real. They're 100% real.
- So somebody said something they were like, you know, Sam, the wrestling program, I think they're like, what's what's stood out to you about Sam? Because from the very beginning, I've talked about this for from the very beginning, I think 2007, 2008, Paul Graham wrote a blog post about who are the five most impressive people he's meant to look at value or who's the admire look up to or whatever. And it was like Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey from Google and Sam Altman. And it was like, what one of these does not belong one guy invented Apple another guy invented Google. Who's this kid I've never heard of? And he was like, when I talked to Sam Altman, I think, Oh, this is what it would have been like to talk to Bill Gates when he was 20 years old.
- And I was just like, what an epic call for a guy who's now gone on to do some pretty amazing things. There was a story I had never heard though, or two stories I thought were pretty remarkable. I think there was a situation where at his school, when he was in high school, there was a protest from like the Christian or Catholic, some protesters that were like protesting. I forgot exactly what it was. He's from my hometown. He probably went to, he's from St. Louis, around from, and he went to a Catholic school if I had a bet. I think it was a...
- I don't remember exactly what the protest was, but it was like, you know, here we go. So basically a Christian group boycotted an assembly about sexuality. They're going to have an assembly about sexuality at his prep school, John Burroughs. Yeah, John Burroughs in St. Louis. And so Sam Altman basically takes the mic, announces that he's gay, and then asks the school whether they want to be a repressive place or a place open to different ideas. Baller. And then baller, right? And then the college counselor goes, what Sam did changed the school. It felt like somebody opened up a big box and then all kids of all kinds got to be let out into the world. Like, you know, it just kind of like, it drew a line publicly. That's a really good way to describe it, by the way. And that is just an amazing story. I love that story. He also talked about like, okay, I want to read you some other amazing quotables because this guy's kind of remarkable.
- We just respect people who kind of like would you say let their freak flag fly that people who just like do life their way and Their way happens to be different than like the craziest thing that he did was he did a speech about Announcing something big and he wore two double pop collars that were pink and green. I love that guy I saw I remember seeing that I'm a girl conference like a deal a life highlight for most people There's all these amazing anecdotes from these these articles that I was reading so one goes So they got in a him and his brothers who's got brothers Jack and
- other maps. Max. And so they, one of them started this company called Lattice and like, you know, he had some phrase about what Lattice was doing. And so Sam invests in Asana, the different company. And he writes this blog post about like, you know, just quickly, you have the morning of kind of writes this blog post where he goes, uh, he goes, he goes, he goes, um, yeah, I, uh, you know, I invest in Asana. Cause I think it's great. It's gonna make people more productive because they do A, B and C. And it turns out that A, B and C were like the same marketing material that Jack, his brother was using for Lattice. And so the article talking about it's like, Jack's like super pissed. He's like, dude, you just invested in them for the exact, you know, that's our mission statement. Why are you saying they do it? And Sam's like, Oh, dude, like I'm so, I totally, I must have just totally spaced. Like, I must have heard you say that so many times over the years that like it just kind of became like a set of words I know I totally didn't intend that edit it, edit it, edit it, but Jack's mad calls the mom and it's like, you know, Sam did this. And they're, and Sam's like, are you still mad at me or whatever? And they're fighting. And then they're like, and then the story goes like, uh, like, and then Jack looks over at a board game called Samurai that's on their bookshelf in their home and says, you know, Sam won every single game of Samurai when we were kids and always declared himself the Samurai leader because he's, he always has to win. He's always in charge of everything. This is Al and then says Sam, well, I'm in shot back. You want to play speed chess right now? I read this and I was like, that's literally like if I told chat GPT to like make up a story about like young Silicon Valley nerds who are competitive streak, you know, like, Oh, yeah, it's called Alpha Land. I'm gonna take this outside and play some speed chess and says he was a real man. Yeah, that's Alpha Land in Silicon Valley. Yeah, so I thought that was hilarious. There's another one that I thought was a kind of amazing thing. So.
- Did you know that at some point he basically sold what did he do he sold? Yeah, so the the story goes He decided to get rid of all his you know comforts except for the three or four things So he kept a four-bedroom house in San Francisco. He kept his cars because he loves cars Claire and like a race cars. He has two McLarens and something else. He kept a property on big sir in case the world ends and And he has a reserve of ten million dollars And he's like the annual interest should cover my living expenses And I can just spend the rest of my money and the rest of my time trying to improve humanity And so he's like I just whittle it down to what are the things I really care about yeah Yeah, the essentials you my McLarens my ten million dollar You know whatever and it sounds a little like trite because it's like oh, yeah, dude like that's it
- But in reality, like if you know people in Silicon Valley, like there's a never-ending appetite for more, more fame, more money, more everything. And I actually think that somebody who can sort of figure out, well, do just occurring these money points, doesn't do anything past a certain score. So what am I going to do with this money and my time to like make sure I use my, you know, my time on this little blueberry called Earth to the best advantage, right? So I like that he had that. Another thing that he said about being a prepper that I think you'll like, let me read this quote to you. Dude, I think he like, didn't he like, wasn't he like saying, you know, in case there's like a pandemic or something like that, I want a place to go to.
- exactly exactly so. So somebody goes like he goes up to these is the story goes up to these guys at this conference or like whatever at this hang meet up or whatever. He's like so what do you guys do and we just kind of work and whatever like what do you do for fun. He goes well I like racing cars I got five cars I have two McLarens and Old Tesla. I like to fly rented planes all around California. Oh and one weird one I like to prep for survival and they're like survival what he goes. You see I have a lot of friends that are constantly getting drunk and telling us telling me about all the way that the world all the ways that the world is going to end. And I read that this Dutch lab had modified the H5N1 bird bird food virus five years ago and it was super contagious by the way this is pre pandemic right it's pre covid.
- So he goes, I read about this lab that was modifying this thing, making it really contagious. And I realized that the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next 20 years was well, non zero. Not zero. That's such a that whenever I hear that phrase that that's like, Oh, you either are smart or you're trying to be smart. Either way, you've got my attention. Dude, I have another one that when I was reading this, I was like, he kept saying orders of magnitude orders of magnitude. I love this decided that that's going to be the name of my gang. And so if you want to join my gang, it's called orders of magnitude. And we fuck shit up at levels. That's an ex previous level. Dude, I'm going to have like the the sub committee on that. We're going to call it parabolic or something like that. Like I'm just here to come up with like crazy names like, Oh, you guys want to join the exponentials or not? Exactly. Yeah, it's the orders of Matthew D. versus that's the Crimson Bloods. So then he also says is before opening. The other one is that that AI might, you know, get really powerful, be used to attack us and nations will use it.
- And then people were getting sick. He goes, you know, I try not to think about it too much, but I have guns, gold, potassium, I died antibiotics, batteries, water, a gas mask from the Israeli Defense Force and a big patch of land, a big sir that I can fly to if the world ever ends. That's crazy. What a baller. There's also a story of him walking around with Brian Chesky. Brian Chesky was about to pitch at YC. And this is Brian Chesky started Airbnb Airbnb was just getting going. And Brian was explaining the idea to Sam. He goes, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I think it's great. Can I see your presentation? He shows him the presentation and he goes, yeah, I think we can make like $100 million a year doing this. He goes, Brian, do me a favor. Can you add a zero to every single number that you have up there? I need to see a billion in revenue, not 100 million. You guys change all your M's to B's. Yeah, change all your M's to B's. And that's, that's, that's actually going to be my new. I was talking about stuff as we say. Sam, you just needed our phrase. No smoke was done.
- Change all your M's to bees When I was a mic drop I used to work at this office and they took the exit sign So you know how there's exit signs and at offices like above the door They changed the exit sign to say they like molded it in such a way. So it said IPO So the exit was an IPO. It's always the IPO side the exit side And I always thought that was awesome and we need a new sign It says change it change the M's to bees and that's what he does did with Brian Chesky when he was my marshal Would like a word, but yeah I Survive only nerds look at that joke. So he had another yet another
- quote about that, the M's to B thing. He goes, he goes, he goes, look, I listen to your whole presentation and you need to change that. They're like, are you sure? And he goes, look, either you don't believe what you told me or I'm dumb. And I didn't understand what you told me or I don't know math. One of those three is what's true here. Like either you're ashamed to say it. You don't believe it or I'm dumb and I don't know math. That's great. That's a pretty baller way to say things. Um, I want to read you some of the other little like, you know, isms.
- Okay, let me give you some more. So here's some like quick chat advice. So I'm pretty into my meme of the year is that what I call the midwitt meme. You throw this up on YouTube so you can see it, but it's basically like there's the dumb in the ignorant kind of beginner on one side. There's the giant master on the other and every in between is the sort of like stressor type a personality that's like over analyzing everything. And my goal for the for the year slash life is to live life like either the dumb beginner or the giant master doesn't matter. They think the same way. And so and then not be the stressor stressor, achiever type a over analyzer type person. And I'm just seeing that meme everywhere. When I meet people, I just classify them instantaneously.
- So are they being right now? What do you think you've been historically? I started off for sure as the dumb troll. Like my first, my sushi restaurant started with that. That was the greatest thing in the world. My next thing, yes. Even just when I applied for my job and moved to Silicon Valley and got a job with a billionaire, like I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I was so dumb that I, like my approach was correct. I was like, well, I'll just reach out to the guy and I'll just send him a letter saying, why I'm the right guy for the job. And then I'm not really gonna apply for other jobs. I'm just gonna prove to this guy, I'm good at this job. And I just, that was my job search. All right, like I didn't do any of the traditional things. I just did what.
- to seem like the dumb thing to do. But that would also be the jet I moved to in that case. It's like, find the thing you really want and chase it with reckless abandon. Don't like just put a resume on 500 desks and see who calls you for the job. So, you know. I'm still a mouth breather. I think I'm still pretty far left on that. I'm still pretty stupid. So I'll glad. I do it from time to time. I'll often do it in my E-com biz. Like, Sully is my like kind of like mentor coach on that side and I feel like he's the jet guy. I know he's the jet guy because he's like.
- He says something about frameworks. He goes, everyone in Silicon Valley talks about frameworks. I don't know what a framework is. And at first I used to think, maybe I'm too dumb. Like, I should I learn this thing? I don't understand what everyone's talking about. And now I realize they're all dumb. And I think he's 100% right. Like, I'd be like, you know, hey, should we do influencer marketing for the brand? Blah, blah, blah, blah. He's like, remember, I told you Facebook ads? Just write the word Facebook ads under computer. And then every time you think about doing anything else besides Facebook ads, look at that sticky note again. That's hilarious. And he'd be like, if you're going to call me and talk to me about another idea, you better be doing 500,000 a month. And don't call me about another idea until Facebook ads has got you to 500,000 a month.
- And it's like the Jedi simplicity is something I like, you know, revere now. So he had a few Jedi quotes in this. I'm a read you. He goes, founders will come to me and be like, oh, you know, what if, you know, I'm worried about saying this to my investors because then they're going to think this that might affect our series B rays, but he goes, just tell them. And he goes, people are worried about, you know, you don't know how your customers are going to feel about this. Just ask them. You're worried about competitors. Don't worry about them until they're beating you in the market.
- And he's like, oh, you want to do these five things. You're trying to decide, like just pick one and do it. Most people just simply do too many things, do a few things relentlessly. Another one, he goes, you need to every year, you need to think about how you're going to add one zero to what you're doing. But don't think beyond one zero. And I thought that's a good Jediism. It's like a way to think big without being kind of like just a delusional talker and like, you know, living in fantasy land. Um, so you had a bunch of those as I was reading this, uh, then I thought which was pretty dope. He's, um, he's great, man. He, I always see.
- There's that famous conference in Idaho, like the Sun Valley thing, and you'll see pictures of him. The one-pumpet thing? Oh, no, the rich guy one. The rich guy one. It's almost like a Davos or something like that, but it's all like the Who's Who. I think it's mostly media though, which includes everyone. So like the Murdoch family, and the people who run CNN. And you see there's ex-presidents there. And then you see Sam Altman, and he's wearing cool running shoes with cool sunglasses, and his hair is all disheftled. He's a very interesting character. Sam Altman's cool. He's kind of been like a little bit under the radar while he's been building his company, but he said something the other day. Someone was like, we're really hyped about GPT-4. Can you tell us he goes, all I can say is like people are setting themselves up for a lot of disappointment. I don't think we're gonna live up to your expectations or something like that. And I was like, that's a pretty cool response. Now I'm interested.
- Yeah, he goes with AI. There's people who think AI's changed the whole game and everything Google searches dead AI is going to change everything GP4 is gonna be like, you know freaking Sentience and whatever it's gonna be amazing. He goes that's that's wrong and people who think oh chat GPT this thing's overrated It's a big nothing burger. It's you know, look it makes this mistake. It makes this mistake It can you could trick it into saying this stupid thing because they're also wrong. They're also being dumb But in a different way, you know, they're being dumb because they're not realizing how fast this thing's gonna improve and the other guys being dumb Because they think it's already there, but it's not there yet you know, the truth is like somewhere in the middle and I thought that was like a you know a much better like reply
- I also thought there was a couple of remarkable little things that I want to share as well. Things that I didn't know about Sam Altman. So that first fund that Peter Till gave him $21 million for in I think three years or so. Let's see, three years or so, the four years, the fund was up 10x already. So that's like what people want after a 10 year period and in four years he had done that. The second thing was how did he do it? He made pretty ridiculous bets. So he was like, all right, if I want to help create trillions of dollars of progress, that's going to come from science and technology, not just the next random app. And so he's like, all right, I got to invest in more science and technology.
- So he goes for he goes to Cruz and which was a self-driving car company that eventually got bought by GM for a billion dollars But at the time nobody was funding crews. Nobody was funding self-driving cars It just seemed too hard like hard work. It's like an obvious bet now looking back right? I mean that a plus completely non obvious back then and they were struggling He puts three million dollars directly into that one company And the same thing with this three hundred seventy five million dollar check The lady was like most people can't write that big of a check because especially not into extremely risky thing like nuclear fusion And it's completely right like that's gonna be like you know a zero or massive and he's writing massive checks into it And he did this several times He puts like millions of dollars into single bets that he like had conviction on
- He then reflected on it. He goes, of all the biggest winners, he goes, I looked at the five biggest winners that I haven't had in that early portfolio. He goes, four of the five, nobody wanted to fund. They were not oversubscribed. People generally thought there were bad ideas. In fact, I almost got talked out of doing them because smart people were telling me why these are bad ideas. Only one, optimisely was an idea. Everybody thought was a good idea that turned out to be a good idea. It didn't even do that well, I think. Well, it did. Okay. I think optimise did go public, I think, in the end. So, you know, it did make it, but maybe I'm wrong about that. But like, I thought it got bought by PE, but like it was it compared to the other. Oh, no, it says they have a thousand employees. I'm wrong. Yeah, it must have been a hit. So, so the other ones, you know, benefits, crews, you know, things like that.
- Basically, he was like, Stripe, he's like, at the time now stripes everything. But he's like, at the time, it was 18 year old kids saying we're going to like work with banks and change the payments industry. And the everybody was like, these guys don't know what they're getting into, except for like, you know, a handful of people that believed in them. Same thing with Airbnb. He was an early investor in Airbnb. That was not obvious. So he kind of got really into this like non obvious, but correct mentality, which is the Peter Teal, like school of thought too. Like, um, he's like the investments that didn't work out, people also told me those were bad ideas. So it's not that all bad ideas are good ideas.
- It's that some bad ideas are actually great ideas and that that's where all the returns are and so you need to be willing to go where it's unpopular Which is so easy to like talk about and it sounds like oh, yeah, just do not obvious things Therefore any bad idea I see I should invest in I get so many bad ideas and I think I would say no These are actually all bad ideas. That's such a challenging thing to figure out. That's that requires so much talent or skill I don't know what it is But it's really really really impressive and really hard because looking back Airbnb that sounds that sounds incredibly obvious, but
- It's just crazy that he was able to pull that off. Yeah, it's insane. So anyways, that's a giant, you know, Sam Altman gasm, but The guy's just really interesting. He's one of the more interesting characters. I think that exists in the tech world. So So yeah, like some of those quotes. I think this was a 10 out of 10 pod, you know, so here's how I know it's a good pod So it's a 12 30 in Texas where I'm recording this Usually I go and take a nap till about two o'clock after we have a good pot I require I require sleep and rest and that's how I feel after this pod. I'm like I need to take a nap And that's how I know it's good
- All right, great. Glad to hear it. Oh, and by the way, I'm going to show my tax return on the YouTube channel. Go subscribe and then you'll see it go. My first million hundred. Go. Go. If you want to see it, go subscribe. And if you find the glitch, you might be able to see his social security number. It's somewhere in there. Turn out. Turn out.

75_ Of Jobs Are Worthless [ZXZbtgxUERY].txt

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- So there's this book that I've been meaning to read. It's on my to read list and it's called bullshit jobs. And so it's this premise that like I think it was a professor, some guy from school and economics of London or something like that. And his whole like I'm again, this from memory. I didn't research this much. His whole idea here is that most jobs out there in the world, like at least in white color world.
- Like it's just kind of unnecessary. Like, and to summarize it is like take a company like HubSpot, Amazon, Twitter, like what would happen if you like laid off two thirds of the people? Like would it, would anything, do we think anything would change other than the company would just make more profit? And this guy says, in most cases, yeah, it would actually, it would run just fine. And most of the jobs that you have are just worthless. And I kind of agree with him. I kind of agree. I don't have knowledge of it other than just personal experience, but it does sound like it. And it's hard because there's no counterfactuals. So you don't get to run the test and actually.
- You know, you can't split test and run both versions and see which one ends up better. But I've had this inkling for a while when we were getting acquired and we were getting acquired by Twitch and as part of it, they're like, hey, you got to like, you know, basically like your whole team is going to come in for a day of interviews and that's going to decide kind of like if we take your whole team or not. And I had to do my interviews well. And so I'm going in there and they're like, you know, the classic job interview question, a job interview structure is like, I ask you a bunch of questions for 95% of it and then the last 5% of it, I'm like, so do you have any questions for us? And then you're supposed to say something that's also just you showing off to like, you know, show some other strength of yours, you know, in a different way.
- And I had one genuine question. I asked it to every single person and they were kind of like taken aback slash, they thought I was kind of a jerk. Some people thought they reacted kind of well, like, oh, that's refreshing. I don't know, you know, I haven't really thought about it. But I could tell other people were slightly offended by my question. And my question was, I would say, how many people work at Twitch? And they would be like, I think we're at 1800 or 2000 people now. I said, and how many people do you think, I forgot how I phrased it, but it was something like, how many people do you think Twitch needs?
- to hit its goals and I was like, how many people do you think should work here? All right, that's how many people do work here. How many people do you think should work here? And people were like, I asked the CEO of this question too. And he was, I give him credit because he's someone who like prioritizes the truth over being right. Like getting it right is way better than being right. But he's also like a kind of a fierce debater. So he's not just gonna like lay down and be like, oh, you know, yeah, you're right. I changed my opinion about things. So he like, he took the question and he didn't like, I would say nine out of 10 CEOs would get quite offended by this question because it basically implies you've mismanaged the company by bloating. It's a great question. I would not be offended.
- He was not offended either. And he was like, that's a good question. He's like, I think like 2,200. So he's like, yeah, I think we're a little short of what we need to hit his goal. And he's like, and then his take was basically like, you know, I'm not saying we have all the right people or the most talented people or that like there's not people who are underutilized or just kind of, you know, the fat, that wasn't really his point. It was like, I think we can be this much, this ambitious. And to do that, we would need, you know, like 2,200 awesome people like working in unison.
- I still think he was wrong. I think we I think you know the company kind of I would have followed up with a few questions. The first one would be okay, but do you think that you need to hire 2200 people because you know that only 10% of them are going to be actually value add and you just have to hire the rest in order to find that 10% and then I would say and also is it possible that you only that you think you need 2200 because you really only need like 20% effort from all those people and that's what your expectation is and then finally how much does redundancy come into play here. How much do people are you just paying them and you just don't want to mention to him but you're paying them to sit on the bench and when the person next to them quits they just are ready to roll.
- Right. Yeah, I didn't follow up that hardcore about it, but I think those were you know very like valid valid points And also, you know one thing I kind of learned from him was like let's take that redundancy one, right? It sounds bad, right? It sounds like oh man you're paying a bunch of people to kind of do nothing just sit around no his insurance and he's like It hit that was exactly his take which is like I Think it was on speed. I was complaining how slow we were going He's like speed he's like going slow sometimes a feature not a bug here and he's like or like innovation I was like, oh man, we're not really innovating everybody else's and he didn't say this outright But I you know I gathered this through our conversations, which is like
- There are some things we're going to innovate on, but actually the optimal strategy here is to let a bunch of startups go out and try to innovate. And then if anything works, either buy them or clone them, like that is actually the best way for us to innovate. It's like it's free. We get way more experiments done by super caliber, you know, super hungry, motivated people, like startup founders and their teams who are laser focused on just that one thing. And they'll try radical experiments that we would never otherwise do. And we don't have to fund it. So we can sit back and watch it. And then when we're ready, we can either go try to acquire them, partner with them. Or if they don't want to do either of those, we can build our own and just use our distribution and our brand, which, you know, we have, you know, X millions of users, then we should be able to out compete them from there. And I think that's actually is the optimal strategy.
- I agree with Emmett, I think, on most things. I imagine I would totally agree with you. And by the way, I should say, I'm not putting words in mouth. This is like, what I gathered from a bunch of different conversations, I'm sure he would disagree with like, you know, 40 or 50% of what I just said. Some paraphrasing him poorly. Yeah. And it's just like your opinion on your takeaway. My take of his takes. And I think I would agree with, I bet I would agree with a lot of what he thinks. My issue is when you're like a small company, like under 50 people, you're all in it. A lot of times you're in it for a mission. You're in it to achieve something. I think that you can get away with just being in it because people just like being in the thick of it with their friends.
- like they just like the action. When you get a little bit bigger, I think it's less mission oriented and it's just a job, but you still have to put on this face like this to inspire people. And it kind of sucks because the truth is, it's like, well, you know, I know that, you know, a lot of you are only working 40%. And that's okay, I'm okay with that. I baked that into this. I know that a lot of you aren't working at all, but you're really just hearing case the guy next to you quits. And then hopefully you're gonna train the next person. And I know that a lot of you want to innovate and try these new things, but that's not really what we're gonna do. We're gonna keep doing the same shit just a little bit better. And then maybe every once in a while, I'm gonna have a team that makes something totally new. And I know all of this, but just tough. And figuring out how to navigate and, but have that like to say what I just said, but in a really inspiring way, or unfortunately just lie, you got a lie or just act. Don't say it is actually the best way. Yeah, just act. You got to just act and pretend and be a politician a little bit. I find that to be incredibly challenging, but I think it's incredibly necessary.
- Yes, you're spot on with that. You are spot on with what you just said. Do you think you could do it? I think the thing you said, have you ever heard of Dunbar's number? Yeah. What's it mean again? Dunbar's number is basically it's 150, that's the number. And it's meant to represent the number of different, like how many people you can know. Because how many people do you know their name, their face? How many people can one person know actually? Somebody's like, I got 6,000 friends. Like, no, well, you don't really know 6,000 people.
- And so Dunbar's number was used to be 150. It's like in a tribe, you could know up to 150, you could know everybody in the tribe, past 150, you don't know everybody in the tribe. And then tools like social media and stuff came out, that kind of like, it's like a tool for the human body to like do more. So like you might be able to know and keep up with more than 150 people now, because Facebook makes it easy with the newsfeed and photos and their name is listed there and whatever, you get to see it all the time. I think what you're saying is like your version of Dunbar's number, which is 50. And it's like below, it's Dunbar's number. I'll call it. It's below 50. Below 50.
- The people who are there are like you know down for the cause like yeah The larger prior obviously they care about themselves, but like a bigger like one of the top factors either number one or two Can be like the cause and then like or even just like just like you know like that kid Who said he wants to do hood red stuff with his friends like that that could be the cause like I just wanna I just it's just There's a viral video like years ago and they interviewed this like nine-year-old who stole his grandmother's car and Crashed it and the guy was like why did you why did you steal her car? That's that was really bad of you and he goes
- He goes, I try to be good, but sometimes I just like doing hood rats stuff with my friends, like smoking cigarettes and driving cars. Play the video, play the video bed. You gotta play that really quick. Can you play it? Along the way, he ran over two mailboxes, hit two parked cars in a Costco parking lot, and struck two moving cars near Walmart. I want to do it because it's fun. It's fun to do bad things. It drives into a car. So did you know that you could perhaps kill somebody? Yes, but I wanted to do hood rest stuff with my friend. Personal. That's how I feel about startups. The YouTube feature for this podcast just took us to a holdy level already. First one is great. Second, we need to pull the clip of, yeah, sometimes I want to do hood ratchet with the friends. That needs to be a sound clip, Ben, that you can just play when Mir and Sam are talking about something dumb that we're doing. So just go ahead and cut that one out. That's the best part about startups. I don't care if it's ad tech. I don't care if I'm selling clothing. I don't get it feels like when you're pulling shit off and you're like kind of fib into people and like, yeah, you know, we've been, you know, we really care about our customers. Our team is like just three of you. And you know, it's like you're just like trying to pretend that you're a big deal. Like that's hood rat shit. And I love doing that with my friends. But I wanted to do hood rest stuff with my friend. By the way, have you?
- struggled to do that. Now that you're a big enterprise, you know, SaaS company that's like worth billions of dollars and Hood Ratchet is now frowned upon. And you're like, I just yanked it. I yanked it. You can't, and they're like, you just yanked it, Sam. Why did you do that? We have a process for that. You know, like, because I definitely could think of like two or three examples where I was bragging about something I did that was like the startup scrappy thing. And which, well, I would just be like, yeah, like, you know, like, for example, there was like a competitor.
- And I like went and I like talked to the founder and I was like yeah like you know I basically found out a bunch of their numbers and I was like oh yeah You know they're growing this fast this how they're doing blah blah and they're like well How do you know that and I was like well I talked to him. I told him I was in string blah blah blah and they're like oh I was like what and they're like well, you know, we just usually we don't we don't do You know what? I thought I was creating was like well, we're gonna need to talk to legal and all
- also, corp dev is going to have to, you know, we have a guy whose job is to have those conversations and we, we typically sign a lot of engagement before, you know, like whatever. It was like, not the exact example, but like things that in the startup, when I was doing the startup, I would be so proud of my hack about like whatever, or like, I remember once I was negotiating a partnership deal. And like, basically, else is like really negotiating for like every, like every inch, which as a startup, I used to love winning a deal, like doing it, we're getting a good deal for ourselves.
- And they were just like, you know, they're like, you know what? Like we'd rather just use our standard deal and it's more favorable for him. So he'll be happy and we don't have to like, you know, let you like negotiate deal by deal on these things. And like, you know, in general, we don't really want you negotiating directly with the person. We have like partnerships people who do that. You're like the big little mouse. Shading. You're like the big little mouse guy. It's like, dude, you need a toe. I'll get you a toe. I'll get you a toe if you need a toe. I'll get you a toe.

8 Profitable Side Hustles For The Halloween _ Christmas Season (#381) [3QVlWl-N3O8].txt

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- So what they're doing is they basically take like a vacant property, same thing as the Spirit store. They take a vacant property and they say, hey, we'll cut you a check for 10, 15 grand if we can use your house, right? Or they'll rent a property or they'll find a vacant property. And they basically just use it for the month. They have this operational thing where they could just spin up the haunted house and then they charge like 40 bucks, you know, to enter. You could sort of do the math and realize, man, they're probably making half a million to a million dollars in about a month.
- All right, you want to go with Rahul or you want to go with Rahul? All right Troll of the year we haven't even done our my our million awards for the end of the year thing that we always do I'm calling it out the troll of the year give the background So Elon takes over Twitter I guess the purchase went through I feel like there was never like confirmation like he actually wired them He just literally showed up the office and yeah there there hasn't been like a proper ribber ribbing ribbing ribbon cutting moment Like it's not like a water. You just like went into the office Have you ever heard of like a coup like a coup d'etat like with governments, you know, I was I read a lot of yeah They're pretty cool. Yeah, I read a lot of history history jokes or history jokes About whatever and they talk about like a coup and I'm like
- So you literally just like walked into the White House and you just said like, you know, this is mine and like the general has promised me that he's going to convince these soldiers to attack. You know what I mean? It's like an interesting concept. You're like, so it's all just made up, I guess. Like these rules that we're we live by. This is just this is fiction. And that's kind of like what I felt like he did. He just walked. He's like, well, I own this now. Thank you. Have you seen, you know, Derek Lewis, the UFC fighter? Have you seen that compilation of his thing where he says, just get up?
- No. So they're like, Derek, you're big like knockout artist, but like, you know, the knock on you. So it's been like, what if you get the wrestling thing? How's your jiu-jitsu? Are you training? Jitsu ain't real, man. And they're like, what? And he's like, man, you don't need jiu-jitsu. Just get up. And they're like, what? He's like, why do I want to stay on the ground? There's nothing man between my legs. No, I'm not into that. Like, I'm not into jiu-jitsu. I'm just going to get up. They're like, but you need jiu-jitsu to get up. He's like, no, I'm just going to get up. And then there's a clip of him saying that. And then there's like a six minute compilation of literally somebody takes a down. He doesn't do jiu-jitsu. He just stands back up. He's so powerful. That's how I feel. That's what Elon Musk did. He's like, no, just walk in. Yeah, he's like, what do you mean? He's like, well, I'm just going to walk in with a sink and take it. So anyway, he does this thing where he just, he says, this is mine. And there's all these reporters outside of Twitter's office.
- And painting for a story. They're waiting for the story about something going wrong. Elon comes here, oh, there's a protest, there's a walk. And so what happens is the first big story that happens is there's a picture of these two guys and kind of like, you know, kind of like nerdy sort of engineering looking guys and they're holding giant cardboard boxes. And it says, these two data scientists, the data engineers, data scientists were fired today from Twitter, here they're seen walking out with their possessions in their boxes. And I saw it and immediately something looked a little off.
- Because I was like, this guy just looks so goofy. But I was like, well, that's pretty believable. You know, that's much a goof of looking people are working tech. But okay. Oh my God. He looks wild man. They really found the perfect character. He looks pretty goofy. And then I read the name and it says, but he, but he had a box in his hand. So they each had a brown box like, which is just foreign because like if you work at a tech company, like you, you don't even probably own anything. You own enough just to put in a book bag, put your laptop in your backpack. And like if you do get far, do they even like, is that a thing where you like hand people a box anymore? I don't know. You know what I mean? They played it perfectly. So then it says, Rahul Ligma and something Johnson, uh, Daniel Johnson for fire today. Oh, and then, and I saw that and I was like, Oh my God, this guy executed a Ligma, like for those who don't know.
- Ligma is a little joke that people play on the internet where it's like, you say something about Ligma and then something's like, Ligma? What's Ligma? I'm not familiar. Ligma nuts. Right? So that's the joke. And they did this to basically, I think CNBC was the first one who like reported it and then it just kept getting the same photo kept getting spread ever because everybody wanted this story about. And the lady who was in a party. She was this CNBC reporter and I, the original tweet said something like, we're at the scene of Twitter. These two engineers just came out who said they're the first to be laid off. And it's just so clear how defeated they are. And like, there's like an audible or what does she say? She's like, there's just a visible, there's visibly defeated and totally broken. And Rahul Ligma says, now he has no idea how he's going to be able to afford his Tesla payments.
- And then he's sitting there holding a Michelle Obama book. And so it's like him with this box just holding this Michelle Obama book. I don't know why. And he just said, and she tweeted out like, this is just, they say the first of many that's going to happen. It was just like a crazy, crazy scene. So people are, people are, have heard this part of the story, but now we got that my first million exclusive juice on top of it. So somebody in our group chat knows this guy, who did this and he shared a text message that the guy said before he did it. So he goes,
- He goes, yo bro. And the person says, sup. He goes, are you doing anything in the next hour? Wanna help me pull off a stunt? I'm at the gym and I need a box, LOL. I'm gonna walk out in front of the Twitter office with a box in my hand. There's hella TV crews outside. And then this is literally how he pulled something. He just goes, he gets an empty box and a Michelle Obama book. There's nothing else in the box. And he walks out and the TV crews go for it. And so that was, I thought, amazing. And then he, so that was like, I mean, what kind of genius is this person? Then he goes.
- There's hella TV careers. Let's go get them. He goes he goes bro. The media is so dumb I literally put five minutes of planning it to this even my uncle in India seen the picture now He goes he goes the first thing that did you just see the cameras and just walk out there? He goes yeah, basically I got to the gym near Twitter headquarters. I saw all these cameras Amazing that is so funny better who is this guy? He's like a founder of like a tech startup basically. He just did this. Oh my god Yeah, I am ready to invest and his things as I stealth startups I'm like I'm ready to invest in whatever he's doing any TV Name your price Ligma So so he goes okay, so that was him. Did you see the interview with the other guy Daniel Johnson? He also had a little gem so that his was on videos that they're like, you know, how do you feel about this today? He's like, I don't know. I just gotta like I gotta go home. I gotta talk to my husband and wife and regroup Talk to my husband and wife Anyone comment on that Like they just played the clip and then I saw that I was like wow that is the funniest thing I've ever heard Perfect timing and these guys are like you know, community geniuses basically. So yeah, this is pretty gold amazingly well played
- Yeah, I do want to talk about the Elon War room, like what he's actually doing in there. Like do you want to talk about that or not really? Have you followed this? No, really. I mean, like I read that he said like, Hey guys, you have a week to get this one thing done. And I think that that's cool. That's that's a good way to run things. I'm nervous he's going to screw it all up and like because I make money from Twitter. So like I don't want it to go away. But I don't. Of course. I don't. I got consulting calls to take. So I don't really care though. Like when he talks about this shit, I'm like, it said it impacts me that much. I don't I don't care what you're going to do.
- Well, I just want, I don't care. It's not going to impact me, but I do find it interesting how we go about this. So basically the report is, it goes in. And the first report I thought again was another troll, but I guess this is real. Do you see this? He told every engineer to print out all the code that they've committed and they've written in the last three or six months and have it ready for review. Did you see this? Why print so you can just see the page link? I thought those and then they changed their mind. Like I guess they realized how bad of an idea that was. And like, you know, an hour later they're like, shred the papers, actually we're going to review on the computer, just be prepared to review. And so people are like, all these engineers like, I printed out like, you know.
- 300 pages of codes. I guess I'll just read this. I don't know what's going on here, dude And what's crazy is like if you go to business insider calm the headline is like, you know I think it says like the toil of working at Twitter and it's like painting it like these people here's there This one what yeah, this like this is what it's like to toil at Elon Musk's Twitter The expectation is literally to work 24 seven and I think that that's what I got straight clown behavior I can't believe they're doing that. I can believe it And it says this is it one of the people familiar said describing the feeling of the company under Musk your job is on the line It's like dude your job is always on the line like is it you know like this is it like it's not your right to work at Twitter You dumbass But I I thought it was funny because like
- Come on, man. Like you're coding this is it. Yeah, you're gonna have to work 50 hours maybe for a little while. But also, I think a lot of employees at Twitter probably like this is awesome. We've been sitting on our ass. Let's let's do it. And that side doesn't seem to be getting covered a lot. Yeah. And so he created, I guess, a war room. So he basically brought in a bunch of people he trusts. So he brought in people from his other companies like he brought in his chief legal person that guys now like the general counsel basically, he brought in, he created a war room. And here's who's reported to be in the war room. It's Elon, his his chief counsel, then it's Jason Calicanis. I think Jason's Jason's amazing. But like what the hell does he know? I guess. Yeah, it's Sri Ram from A16Z. So just venture capitalists who we have former PM used to work at Twitter is also how to run at Twitter.
- And then- And then- And then- And then- And then also, I guess like some other people, some engineers or people from like, or in company or Neuralink or whatever, like some people he trusts, like his cousin is there, like- And they basically just set up shop and they were like, all right, well we're gonna do it this thing. And they're like, change the logged out page. It forces you to sign up? No, you should be able to read tweets before you sign in. You know, you sign up. And then- Which is like an experiment's been tried many times before. And it's like, you know, we need to have this verification program. We have five days to deliver this, I guess. And so they're just like sort of trying to figure this out.
- Who stays who goes what are we building? How are we gonna turn this thing around and? Fascinating I wish I could be a fly on the wall in this in this war room I think that would be like probably the most interesting thing to do right now. I think it would be awesome I hope they don't screw it up though because I got some Fucking courses. I got a cell so don't screw it up a lot My point of view has always been very simple Which is are all the things he complains about are things that like power users would be annoyed at on Twitter like the bots problem or You know verification or the algorithm, you know like not serving me the tweets I want like the problem is that just only I don't know whether the 300 million people use Twitter
- And it's like, you know, five times smaller than like the other big social services and it doesn't really grow that much and like It's not like, you know My mom doesn't use Twitter because she's like, oh, there's too many bots if I tweet about crypto that will tell me to buy crypto Like that's not her problem. She just doesn't see value in it and like, you know, you just says I don't get it Yeah, I don't get it I don't know why I would need this like, you know, I don't need to check this whereas Instagram and WhatsApp and like Snapchat have all given Her a reason that she needs to have it like she needs to have Snapchat if she wants to see more pictures of our kids She needs to have Instagram if she wants to keep up with what's going on with like Bollywood or whatever, right? Like, you know, everybody finds a need in the service and like that's the core problem with Twitter is that the Coordinated addresses is only for like people like us and like it doesn't address the need for a whole bunch of other people on the planet And if they wanted it to be more valuable, then they would need to do that
- Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See most TRMs are a cobble together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new TRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. Happy Halloween, dude. Yeah, you too. Since I'm not 12, I don't dress up. I don't understand like- Shots fired at producer Ben. Well, I just don't understand why people are obsessed over Halloween. To me, it just seems like-
- When your wife was buying a wedding dress where you're like, this is bullshit, you're gonna spend all this money for something that you're literally gonna use for three hours in your entire life. And that's how I feel like Halloween is. Wow, just fart at wives, just fart at Halloween, just fart at weddings. Well, I mean, I just find it to be the most impractical thing there is, it's a lot of work for like a few hours. Bro, you probably bought like a giant sled so you could do sled pushes in your backyard. Like, you know, come on. I'm sure you have some ridiculous purchase up your sleeve too.
- I have a slide. I have a slide. Call it producer bed. What are you? You look more like a figure skater or some like like a figure skater in between rounds. Like that's a joke. I don't I don't always want to put the hood on, but it's a narwhal. It's got like a little horn on top little horn. I don't know why it's matching costume. A narwhals just a fake. It's a whale that has a yeah. If you're if you're a parent, then I get it. But like for the people who work really hard at this stuff to me, I'm just like, that's just seems like such a wasted time. My wife loves it. She's this person.
- Yeah, my wife, too. She like we bought a bunch of costumes, whatever. I'm Aladdin, which is pretty, you know, stereotypical, I felt. Yeah, lean in, bro. Is it racism if it's your wife? Yeah. Lean in. I said lean into it. I got the Cheryl Sandbird, Sam, Sam, I'm gonna lean in. But speaking of Halloween, I did a bunch of research about Halloween. I wanted to rant about it to you. I'm sure you know a bunch of things about Halloween because I feel like this is like... I would say that because this is a rabbit hole that's kind of obvious. And I feel like, you know, I went into this rabbit hole and I saw some footprints on the way out. I was like, I think that's Sam's size 11 right there. I don't know what's going on. But let me tell you some things I found. Okay, so...
- First and foremost, Halloween, okay, what the heck is this? So this was a, it's kind of crazy that today, Halloween is this like family neighborhood thing where everybody, young kids are going out and getting candy, older kids are dressing up with an excuse to dress up kind of slutty. And this is this giant occasion where people are spending $10 billion a year now on Halloween is what gets spent, which is kind of crazy. That's more than almost any other holiday, except for Christmas, which is,
- Off the charts at almost a trillion dollars get spent on Christmas and so So I was like what the heck is this holiday? Who made this up? Where did this come from? It's first of all, it's like some weird part of like, you know the Celtic calendar the Celtic calendar I don't know what it is, but like The Boston Celtics as you know, yeah, they called the yagging it just has a stop J So there was like all right. There's like this, you know festival where they would like they're like oh the demons are coming And so they would like dress up as demons themselves and like you know dancing again Whatever and that was like to ward off the demons like hey, we're already here Like that was the logic which is pretty pretty weak logic if you ask me and so, you know Then something had the Pope says something he's like oh this you know November 1st is like the the day of the Saints or whatever and say baby we in Catholic school We celebrate every year and so then the 31st became all Hallows Eve and so okay How did they go from that to kids dressing up as a lad and then going trick-or-treating? What was what was the gap? But basically it was like for a while it was this kind of like look like Nobody really spent money on this It was sort of like this more like adult dark holiday where you would buy like certain things you'd have people over for dinner Maybe things like that and then over time it got commercialized and at what I was trying to figure out Where did it get commercialized? How did we go from this like obscure pagan holiday to this mainstream? $10 billion a year thing and the best explanation I could find was that there was like kind of a society thing which was like
- People wanted to holiday. It was good excuse to celebrate. They liked that they could make it community and family oriented over time rather than like this kind of adult thing. And then the last thing was that retailers. So like the biggest winner from all of Halloween is Walmart. Walmart makes a killing on Halloween. It sells candy, it sells costumes, it sells decorations and it sells it to like everybody across America. And so what happened was retailers would have this giant spike in like kind of spring, maybe a little bit of summer. And then there was this dead time until the winter holidays.
- And so they were like, okay, sales always dip. Let's figure out what we could do to make sales not dip during that time. So they kinda needed to invent an occasion for you to spend on. And so they started. Which is pretty common, right? Like if you think about like, you know, like there's like the hallmark lobby, man. They've like really been pushing Valentine's Day on us for years. I mean, I think that's like a pretty common tactic. I imagine Amazon is thinking like prime day is gonna be a holiday of like just random deals. You know what I mean? And it's not like a coordinated attack, but it is like a bunch of people who all have an incentive. So they had an incentive to do, to just sell more stuff and put something in the store that's gonna drive people to come by.
- And so I just want to break down a couple of the numbers and a couple of the businesses. So like I said, about 10 billion and spending, 3 billion of that is costumes. 700 million of that is pet costumes, which is kind of crazy. There's basically like, you know, 3 billion on candy. And there's like a huge amount, like, I don't know, like basically, almost half the country is going to like give out candy during Halloween, which is kind of an insane level of adoption that's going on. So Walmart's the biggest winner. They not only make a bunch of money, they spend a bunch of money advertising during this period. They'll spend like...
- Tens of millions of dollars into week of Halloween, just like blasting ads. And so do all the companies that are stocked inside their skittles, Cheetos, Lunchable. Everybody's got like a Halloween-themed thing. And so a couple of the interesting finds I had when I was doing this. So the first is a lot of people know about Spirit, the Spirit Store, right? And people have heard about this, but like the backstory of Spirit's kind of cool. Have you ever heard the backstory of how it got started? It's owned by a popular company. Who's it owned by? Oh, your favorite. Data Sierra, your Thursday night date night, Spencer's.
- Spencer's that's what I thought yeah like Spencer's like you know like a hot topic alternative Spencer's also owns Spirit Halloween. Yeah, so they so the way this started was it's like in California in the 80s This guy owned a woman's clothing store and he was in October again Traditionally a super slow sales month and so he's just sitting there not really getting much sales. It looks around everybody struggling except for one store He sees that this one Halloween Store has a line out the door and so he's like well I'm not selling shit anyways and so he just turned like three fourths of a store into a Halloween store just for the month of October and So he says women's boutique So there's like women's clothes in like a quarter of the store and then three fourths became Halloween stuff And it it really works and so he just does that again the next year. He's like, oh, that's my Halloween playbook But now he's like, all right. Just forget my store I'll just open up another store and another store just for the month and so That's their model these guys basically what they do is they go find vacant property. So
- You know an empty box and they say hey landlord you don't have a lease Well, I'll lease it for two months. How about that? And the landlords initially were like well no like what about a two month lease like no Thank you. They're like okay. Well look here's my offer if you don't have a tenant by July Might as well take it some revenues better than no revenue and like especially after the 2008 real estate crash This became like a pretty enticing option for landlords to try to recoup some money And so they do these two month leases and it's a pop-up Halloween store same place every time No different places. They even have a kick out clause So they say hey look you could take look how can I get more real estate look if you find it if you do find a good tenant Who you want to do a long-term lease you can just kick us out like like anytime you can just kick us out basically
- And so they found this like no brainer proposition to landlords. And so they do these pop ups. They now have 1400 stores. So like fast, you know, rewind back to, you know, like 2010. They only had, you know, 700 stores. And the whole Halloween spend is on the same trend. So like I said, 10 billion this year. Well, rewind to 2010. That's what I graduated from college. It was five billion rewind to 2005. It was only like three billion. And so that's like kind of a big like just during our, you know, lifetime or adult lifetime. This thing is like, you know, more than doubled in size.
- And so, you don't imagine that by the way, all that work for a week. Like I know a guy who owns a Christmas tree light show business that I can't reveal how big it is, but whatever number you're thinking of how much revenue it does, times it by, times it by 20. We're talking like nine figures. And Christmas tree light show means what? You paid $20 and you and your family drive through a park and you look at light shows. And basically he's got a staff of, I don't even know how many step he is. I think over a hundred, they work all year round for four weeks of work. Can you imagine what your company's like? Like what happens if there's like a terrorist attack or you know, like whatever or COVID? I mean, something happens where it's just like all 50 weeks worth of work is ruined for those two weeks. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that is the risk. That is the risk with these. Like right now, like it's Halloween right today, their, the whole company is working on next year's Halloween real estate, how they're gonna do the logistics to like, cause they just get an empty shell. They gotta pop up the whole store, get all the inventory there, do all the decorations there and then run the staff the store just for this like, you know, real blitz and 90% of the traffic comes in the two weeks before Halloween because their main proposition is just like for people who were, you know, who procrastinated, it's like, hey, it's too late even now to order online. So, you know, just come into the store and just get what you can get. And it's that big of a business. They do like a billion dollars a year in revenue that the spirit stores. So that's just kind of crazy for a billion dollars and basically like probably a three week time period for the majority of that.
- of that spend 8% of all candy sales of the year happen like on Halloween. It's really crazy. That's wild. And so what a wild stat Here's some other interesting little businesses that were around this. Okay, so have you ever heard of rubies? No, what is rubies rubies is probably the biggest I think costume maker I don't know if they're still the biggest that they were at a point in time So here's the kind of interesting story for rubies started in New York and they're like oh we're doing decorations at costumes for Halloween Halloween wasn't as big of a deal It's like in the 70s they were doing this and at the time Halloween costumes were all the same It was all just ghosts and witches, but then in the 70s and 80s It transitioned into basically like Hollywood and it was like oh movie characters and like TV characters would became like the big thing
- And so, and Ruby's kind of fell behind because there were these other companies, Collegeville and Ben Cooper, that like got all the licenses. So they were winning, they were crushing it and poor Ruby's was just sort of like puttering along until that fateful thing happened. I didn't even know about this, but there was something called the cyanide killer. You ever hear about this? There was this big scandal where I guess in Tylenol package, there's like a whole bunch of Tylenol got laced with cyanide and people died. And they never caught, they never caught the person. They never caught the guy and it scared a bunch of people. It's like, holy shit, Tylenol, like this like safe thing. How many people died like three or four? I'm not sure. I think it was more than that, but it was a big story, it definitely was big news. And so people, so candy sales plummet. People start getting pretty afraid. And so these companies got a little over their skis because everything was going so great. And they start to falter during this sort of like this crash when people started to, the Halloween sales crash because people did not want to go eat candy from strangers during the sort of cyanide rush, I guess. And so Ruby's ends up buying up Ben Cooper and Collegeville and basically consolidates all the licenses under one roof during that time. And so now they have Disney, Marvel, whoever, they got like, and their job is basically, there's like a, you would think, this is like, I don't know, a bunch of theater geeks that run this company, but in actuality, like the big thing they have to do right is like operations for the supply chain. Like cash management. No, no, no forecasting. They gotta predict who is gonna be popular next year for Halloween. So they're like, okay, Donald Trump is, a Trump mask is gonna be here or here or here. And then they work with all the studios. The studios give them like a little like sketch sheet of like, hey, here's the movies coming out next year and a year after. And here's who's the good guy, here's the bad guy. And here's what their costumes look like. And like, you know, you're under extreme locking key, but like, yeah, we make a lot of money. We make the movie industry make hundreds of millions off of Halloween costume royalties. They get like an eight to 10% royalty.
- And so they're like, all right, fine, you can get access to these designs in order to start prepping for future costumes. I wonder what their research methodology is. We've talked about that company, WGSN, it always interests me. It's a hundred million dollar a year business that does like 30 million in profit. And all they do is they help, I mean, all they do is simple, but it is like a pretty amazing thing. But they like help, they had helped predict which color is gonna be popular. So Starbucks makes sure that their labels on shit is like the right colored pink or like apparently they predicted that pineapples were gonna be popular. Did you know that pineapple was a popular thing this year? Yeah, yeah, I'm all about it.
- And they like somehow knew that and they're saying next year it's gonna be the lemon which I don't know I don't know what they said or you just make it out. What up. I think it yes I think it was the lemon like next year lemons are gonna be like a new thing instead of pineapple Which I don't even know how you would draw a lemon on like an iPhone case I mean it just looks like in the Sun, but anyway, they said that like I wonder problem your brain just went to it will like have you ever see you know like pine apples on iPhone cases It's like how do you make like a round like yellow thing? There's like no density to it like I don't know We could workshop that afterwards so so so so I think you know these guys probably you know You know like that meme like the hello hello fellow kids or whatever Children like the guy shows up at the high school was like 40 years old you have to skateboard on his back And he's like yeah, okay, it's like what is the good? You know, what's the good buzz this year and like you know, I'm trying to figure out like what's gonna be hot Yeah, I don't know I don't know the research method, but I am I am intrigued But basically they got to be fortune tellers. They got to figure out your movies politics
- All that stuff. Is it Pokemon? Is it Wonder Woman? Is it Trump? Is it what what is it gonna be the costumes? And so so that's one interesting one a couple other, you know pretty interesting Pretty interesting things. I'll give you some like I'll give you some like smaller niche like side hustle things so So first Haunted houses so haunted houses apparently do three hundred million dollars a year. It's kind of crazy Kind of a big number for something that's like useful, you know like I hate haunted houses What do you go?
- I've been, I'm not like, I'm not a big like thrill seeker, like roller coaster, haunted house kind of guy. I'm not trying to pay money to be afraid. I don't pay money to be scared. That's my, that's my rule of movies in haunted houses. I pay money to do the opposite. Yeah. It's like, you know, those guys who pay girls to like, you know, slap them and stuff, it's like, no, thanks, you know, pretty sure, pretty sure I should be getting paid if I'm getting scared or slapped. That's my rule and I'm sticking to it. So, so there's like, you know, haunted house is kind of interesting. There's a guy who, somebody tweeted this at me. They're like, yo, this local one near our place. And I did the math. So this basically was like small, like, haunted house. What they're doing is they basically take like a vacant property. Same thing as the spirit store. They take a vacant property and they say, hey, we'll cut you a check for 10, 15 grand if we can use your house, right? Or they'll, they'll rent a property or they'll find a vacant property.
- And they basically just use it for the month. They have this operational thing where they could just spin up the haunted house and then they charge like 40 bucks to enter. You could sort of do the math and realize, man, they're probably making half a million to a million dollars in about a month just off these things. And they have like, it's pretty crazy how, like as a little side hustle, you could do a haunted house. Let me give you some other ones that I think are kind of interesting. There's a guy who created this website called Zombie Pumpkins. You ever seen this?
- No, so it's like I think it's zombie pumpkins calm. So 2 million people a year go to this site Just to print out a stencil that they can use to carve their pumpkin. So he was like, you know what? If you go try to do pumpkin carving, it's gonna be a pretty generic face I'm gonna make like super accurately drawn things so that you could have like a really dope looking pumpkin Like you can have like a really cool site really like you know Michael Jackson looking pumpkin It'll look like it if you just follow my stencil and so you know 2 million people go to this thing It gets like a million of those hits you know like at the last week of October or something and You know he donates a bunch of the money that that comes from this to to charity Which I thought was pretty cool and he charges money so you pay money and you get stencils yep And every year he releases new ones. Okay. Here's another one pumpkin stimes
- So how would you like a pumpkin that instead of carving a pumpkin to look like something? What if the pumpkin just grew and only looked like like a Frankenstein head? That's what this guy did. So this guy's got a crazy story. He's like a father. He's like some farmer somewhere and he Spent four years trying to solve this problem. He's like what if I could just grow a pumpkin that was already a decoration So you don't have to do any work. So you try like this part Pumpkin Stein like Frankenstein. Yeah, he tries to grow it doesn't work doesn't work. Doesn't work finally the fourth year He's like what if I tried this like I don't know type of seed or whatever it was and he got it to grow into this mold And the mold basically just looks like a Frankenstein head
- And so he started selling them and he says like, you know, a few hundred sales and he does a few thousand sales Retailers start coming to him. He opts to go with Sam's Club Because he's like, you know what like he was selling these for a hundred dollars pumpkin He's like, you know what Sam's Club we can sell for thirty dollars and make money doing that with at their volume and these are amazing These are amazing and so he goes and he's like, all right. He's like this can be kind of a thing He said he got 90,000 orders last year So that's like four or five million dollars in sales of these I pump because he started going to other farms and bribing them being like, hey I'll pay you eleven dollars ahead follow this blueprint. I need more production I cannot possibly keep up with the production at my rate And so he goes and he gives other farms like eleven dollars per pumpkin that they can produce that can be sold this way And then they had they had like a malfunction and like the face still looked right But the back got all screwed up and it like looks like it like exploded and then that was way more popular people like Oh, that's cool. Like exploded in the back and he's like, oh shit Now I gotta figure how to do this intentionally. It's like this crazy little like, you know, like accidental, you know side hobby
- Wow, these are cool. Another one, Home Depot. Have you heard about the 12-foot skeleton? No. So this is like one of these viral, I think maybe from TikTok, I don't know where, but like my wife has been talking about this. She's like, oh, I really want to get the 12-foot thing. It's always sold out and I was like, I can't be that. I mean, let's just go to Home Depot and get it. Like, have you seen Home Depot? It's just like full of shit. Like this is no way they're just like out every Home Depot. She's like, you don't understand. And she shows me, there's like buy and sell groups on Facebook where people are buying these things for $1,000 plus. Like they've retailed for like 300 or something like that. And eBay is there selling for $1,000. It became such a hit. Home Depot figured out this giant lawn.
- Skeleton was like the big hit then Lowe's came out this year and Lowe's was like the 12 foot mummy And I was like wow, you know who's gonna come out with the 12 foot one inch, you know, you know ghost next year It's like this crazy little trend But there's all these things so all these things that really weren't categories before are becoming categories like the inflatable lawn You know decorations are just like surging in popularity Different types of candy different types of costumes like it's all sort of surging in popularity because people are just more and more willing to spend I got thinking I was like why is Halloween so awesome. I love Halloween You know, you don't have the spirit. You're sort of the the Grinch Halloween as you're known And I realized as I'm known Halloween is the anti holiday. It's not the cookie cutter woman fuzzy It's dark. It's kind of more adult. It's more creative. It's one of the few creative holidays and Social media is the boom for Halloween because social media. What is social media? It's a hey look at me
- And Halloween is the perfect, hey, look at me moment. It's, hey, look at my house, hey, look at my costume, hey, look at my body, hey, look at my candy, hey, look at my kids, I look at everything, right? So it's the, hey, look at me thing. And also it's an excuse to act like a kid. And I'm bullish on anything that gives people an excuse to act like a kid. I think that's why Burning Man is popular. I think that's why Halloween is popular. And, you know, even things like the ice cream museum and stuff like that, I think is, you know, really popular for that reason. Dude, it feels like you just prepared a debate on why Halloween's great and why I should dig it. And you have totally won me over. So you're saying there's a chance. Yeah. Like you just put together this big speech on why Halloween is cool and I'm into it. I think it's awesome. This 12 foot skeleton thing is awesome. This pumpkin Stein is awesome. I'm all about it. This is awesome.
- And so let me tell you more ideas or Or a little little little niche so I'll tell you a couple niches and a couple ideas niche thing We had a guy come rig up lights to our house this week Because he did every single house in our neighborhood and we just moved into this place and then our neighbor was like Oh, yeah, you want lights you got hit the lights guy He's booked but like if he can try to squeeze you and you'll have lights for this season And we were just getting sucked in all the suburban traps and by the way for the listener I went to Sean's house the other day for dinner and I walked in and I'm like oh, that's a really cool Kids shopping cart like he's got like a play like check out aisle and I was like oh wow that cart says target on it and he goes yeah Or maybe it was your wife, but it's one of you guys were like yeah, this has been one of the most in-demand toys We had to like find this cart on eBay for however hundreds of dollars one and we bought the other Yeah, you're like we had to get this car like the kids wanted this cart Which they didn't but you guys did I think Yeah, the moms what it was like we wanted this target toy cart and I just thought
- You know, that's kind of interesting now. I'm hearing this you are totally becoming a suburban dad. This is awesome I like this side of you sir, you know, I have a fanny pack So this guy comes up comes over and he's like I'm like how much for the lights and he's like I'll do it in I'll do it this day at this morning. You get like a one-hour window and It's like $600 to put up lights, you know, like 200 bucks for the lights themselves They last you for 10 years and then it'll be like 60 bucks to take them down in January
- And I was like, all right, I guess like, I'm not gonna fucking climb up there. So yeah, go ahead, like, you know, either we're not gonna have lights or like we're gonna get in the spirit of things. And this guy just cleaned up around the neighborhood. It took him an hour. But why would he do it this way? He should do it where I'll come and pick them up on, like right after Thanksgiving. And hey, by the way, while I'm here, do you want Christmas lights? Well, these were Christmas lights actually. It's like they start the Christmas stuff now. And then you can use it. I feel you, okay. I thought it's Halloween lights, whichever that is. Yeah, I don't even know, start being like, you want Halloween? And I'll do a bulb change in like November. He should be upselling. He was too honest of a guy in general. Cause like, he was like 60 bucks to take him down. I was like, bro, once you put the lights up, you could charge me $6,000 to take them down. What am I gonna do? Like, you know, like, where's the gouging? You shouldn't have even told me that price until like gen one, you should have called me, like, hey, dude, you need those down. It's actually illegal to have those up here right now. Yeah. It's like a, it's like a redneck. You gotta take those things down. We were pretty redneck when I was young and we'd leave them up all year round. And we would call them party lights.
- Well, they're called February lights now. They're March lights in April. So this guy, I'm pretty sure this guy made like $20,000 this month in my one neighborhood with like essentially zero cost. All he had to do was know how to string up lights and you know, that's a skill that I think could be learned. And so like, you know, there's a like neighborhood side also here that I think is like a $10,000 side also like there's, you know, probably like a hundred houses in this area, flyer them and then go start putting up lights and just say, Hey, knock on the door. Yeah, we just put up their lights. Would you guys want lights this year? Like, I think that's a, that's kind of an easy win.
- Okay, let me give you now some ideas. So you don't like haunted houses. I'm fine with the haunted house, but man, the effort to get out there is probably going to be cold, going to get the kids ready, going to go in the car, you know, all that stuff. Why isn't there a haunted house I could just do from the seat of my chair at home? That's right. VR haunted house. If you ever put on a VR headset, there's one thing VR is kind of amazing at. VR is kind of amazing at this immersive experience where you can look left, look right, and you can just get scared. If you've ever done the demo where you're rock climbing and they're like, look down, and you look down, it's legit scary, and then they'll make your character start to slip.
- Yeah, you get that feeling in your stomach and so VR haunted house no brainer. I don't know if there is one or not But like you know these there are I think a hundred VR apps that do over a million dollars a year I feel like the VR Halloween app the VR haunted house app Yeah, you could sell this thing for 20 bucks a pop and probably make you know I don't know a couple hundred thousand if not a million dollars in a year just with the amount of sales that go on in VR But you'll be completely it's nobody and they'll feature you right because you're cool content for that month So you'll get like free promotion basically through the Oculus store
- That's an eight. I dig it. Eight. All right. Cool. Okay. My next one is going to be Spirit Store for Christmas. Am I dumb? Is there no Spirit Store for Christmas? I don't know, but I do know that my wife is like your wife, where like this weekend we are walking around and she's like anything that had a pumpkin flavored candle. She was walking in and like she bought like a caramel apple. She's like, I got to get a caramel apple today. Like we have to have one today. Yeah. Like what is that motherfucker Pavlov been doing to our wife? Man, like there is something with this certain scent and certain color that like, you know, I must have must have this in my life. I just learned this weekend. Have you ever heard of nesting? Do you know what that is? Yes.
- I didn't know what that was. So I just- It's a real thing, dude, by the way. It's, it's so like for the single guys listening, I guess for 98% of our audience. Yeah, to all the neckbeards out there. For all the people listening to this on a Peloton. In your one bedroom San Francisco apartment. But basically when a woman, I guess, is like, I don't know when it happens, but like I think later in the pregnancy, she starts to nest. I guess that means like you start like preparing for the baby. You want to like clean constantly. Yeah. You want to have an environment where the baby can come to and be safe. And so you want to clean, you want to organize, you want to make sure that there are so corners. That's, so that's a real thing. It's what, well, I definitely experienced it. Like we were like, what's going on? Other people who had already had to be like, Oh, nesting, yeah, baby's coming soon. You know, you could sort of feel this. It's like, is your wife suddenly cleaning, organizing? All of a sudden the to-do list just gets like knocked out because it's like, oh, there's like burst of clarity and energy and like urgency around preparing the home for a certain thing.
- That's crazy. So, you know, it's interesting. Like we think that we are like these civilized, like creatures different from an animal. But then like there's these situations that happen. For example, if you're a man, if someone like disrespects you publicly, you start feeling this like, what is this rage I feel inside of me? Like I wanna go, do I wanna go fight right now? Or like with a woman, it's like the nesting thing. And like there's all these like things and having a kid is like a really good example of when like these weird things just start happening that like I thought I was different. I thought I wasn't just one of those animals, but it turns out I'm just a beast like, you know, the rest of the animal kingdom. And nesting is one of them. And maybe...
- There's something about Halloween where just Sarah just has to drink or eat pumpkin flavored shit just constantly well and it's this and like it's the same way with Christmas She's like oh we gotta go get the cinnamon thing. Yep. I'm like we don't need it Hold with both of my hands My nose like a small koala And it's like what is this what is this position that all women assumed during winter So the spirit CEO even said this he goes
- fall, the turning of the leaves, the pumpkin spice latte, and the spirit store. We have become a symbol of the changing of seasons. People now wait for our store to pop up. That's how they mark time, the passage of time in their lives. So anyways, I thought, you know, I thought, why is it there a spirit for Christmas? What a spirit do well. Decorations, desserts, and bag gone, good gift ideas. That's the three days of spirit. You are a suburban, I'm a circle, you're dead. Dead puri. You're going to see some words like that. Dagon. Dagon, I need to know, dude, the Dagon, good gift ideas. So Christmas has all the things. Triple D, baby. Yeah, Triple D has decorations, it has specific dessert, eggnog, candy canes, all this stuff. And you need gift ideas. You need to go try out toys and things like that.
- And so you know Hallmark tries to capture this I think they're doing it wrong I think spirit needs to get in the spirit of things spirit needs to pop up for Halloween Stick around for Thanksgiving and the Christmas push and then wind things down right after Valentine's Day That's the spirit you need to get you need to get on this this six to eight month program I'm sure you've thought of this and you have a good reason why you don't but I like to play pretense Dude, you know like I think that's something that you and I or whoever listening don't think about an office When you're thinking about a company to build you rarely do you think this would be awesome to run and?
- Being CEO of the holiday company would be awesome. Yeah. I mean, that would just be like a fun thing. Are you changing the world? Nah. Are you having a blast? For sure. You know what I mean? It is the season as we say at the holiday company. Yeah, that's the holiday comes season. Yeah. Yeah. What a beautiful word. Yeah. It is purely under you. Yeah, I love the tis. Yeah. So I'm about this. We're on to something.
- So okay a couple other interesting things to this pet costume thing. I think is like a real trend You know, we've seen pet vitamin companies like zesty pause cell for six hundred million dollars We've seen pet every you know pets is like a huge niche and so if seven hundred million is spent a year on pet costumes I feel like you could just kind of like I Mean I can't tell you off top my head who is the the go-to for pet you know for pet costumes And so that tells me you know, there's more than enough room on the e-commerce side for it You know that the story behind Halloween costumes comms also crazy. It's all the same thing It's basically like somebody stumbled into this idea and then couldn't even keep up a demand as Halloween grew and now it's effing huge All right, so that's my that's my Halloween rant. That's my that was a good one. You know break down and backstory
- Let's see. I miss anything. Dude, so I wanted to talk about a few things. Well, we go to this one topic really quick. It's, I think it's only okay, so I don't want to spend that much time on it. But then I want to hear your Sulli story, the Twitter thing and the warm buffer thing. I think those are all awesome. But this is just one thing to put on your radar. Have you heard of this company called Humane? Humane, is this the phone on your chest? Yes. So basically, this is just, it's hard for the city. Sorry for the shitty pitch, Humane. Yeah. I don't actually know what it is. And I don't think anyone knows what it is. But basically, I saw this YouTube video talking about it. It's the first thing I've ever heard about it, which is interesting because they've raised $130 million from some of the best VCs out there. And the people who started, it's this husband and wife company. I think they spent like, one of the husband spent 20 years at iPhone, or at Apple building the iPhone. I think he was like one of like a six or 10 person team to the original team to come up with the iPhone. His wife was also a director of engineering, I think of Apple or something like pretty impressive like that. And they've recruited like a hundred plus employees. Most all are from Apple. Like 60 or 70 of them are from Apple. And they're like Apple ballers. They're not just like the average, just like entry level person. And so it's kind of an interesting signal. And they filed for all these patents. One is like a wearable multimedia device in cloud computing platform with laser projection. So in other words, like a portable, yeah, I mean, that could go anyway. You know what I mean? Like we're gonna see it, but just six stuff. Another one's like a portable battery pack. I mean, like they've done all these amazing things.
- They don't even have a website like you can't you can't really learn anything about it You go to the website first of all if you go to the website you got to commit three typos to get there It's hue dot ma that Any humane but split up with three two different periods and then you get there and it's a picture of like the Sun and it just says Like change everything Yeah, so I have a I have a strong take on that But let me finish this which is basically their whole point is that they view phones as a divider between us in the world And they want your phone or whatever this gonna replace a phone to be an extension of our bodies, which that's like pretty vague I don't know what the hell that means, but I guess it means like
- They want to build a new iPhone, but it's not going to be a handheld device It's gonna be like clothes that you wear or lenses in your eyes. I'm not exactly sure but two tanks one I Completely agree and I think that as an industry we're like way and we're too early to say that there's something actionable right now But I do think in like 10 20 years We're gonna be anti phone. We're gonna be like like what the fuck you're looking at this shit This is like cancer. Why are you doing this? Why you're smoking? What are you doing smoking? It's kind of like I'm looking at smoking number two I think unfortunately, I don't know you guys Bethany and Imran. I think those are the two founders. I'm sure you're wonderful people but
- I think any company that raises that much money and has a site that says change everything and It has raised a hundred twenty million dollars and has never shown anything. I think they always fail Nine out of ten times. I think that they're gonna fail because of their hubris and it's like what the hell are we making here? What's one that didn't fail? Is there an example like quibi was the most recent one that was like this and quibi failed magically before that magically failing in progress What were the other ones like you zero that one failed. I mean the only one I could think of is jet calm
- And- But one would argue that that didn't succeed. Exactly. What would say it didn't fail, but they probably sold a slightly above the valuation in which they raised that. Yeah, I don't know if the underlying business was healthy or not. I didn't feel like Jet.com became this main big consumer thing that was going on, but who knows? The world is really big. Maybe there were a ton of loyal Jet.com users who were using it all the time and the business was working. But it did seem like it was the team, the story, the technology that got acquired by Walmart in order to make Walmart's online think better. But nonetheless, still a definite win.
- Mark Laurie, friend of the pod, love the guy. You know. Oh, it's a fucking NBA team. So like it worked. You know, in terms of the well-creation. Oh, it's a place in my heart. It's more importantly. But like, you know, how many of these dream big, raise big, hype big, build instilled for multiple years and then like launch with the world changing device or world changing product? Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. I'm reviewing the track record here. Yeah. Yeah. If I had a nickel every time that happened, I mean, I would maybe have a dime. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't happen a lot. You're putting the game in mind, sweeper. It looks like that. You know, okay. So, so here's a couple of things. Number one, we did talk about this before because when it came out, the patent, I think, got leaked and it looked like at that time, the device was some kind of clip on.
- Sort of like camera that you basically would wear on your your chest sort of like a GoPro, but for everybody I Don't know if this is still the product or not, but I remember that was the the idea And it was like oh, that's cool. You'd kind of have this like hands-free You know camera audio device that sort of thing. Oh, yes I do remember that and so that was kind of interesting, but that that would only be to capture it wouldn't be to You couldn't like look at that and read something or watch video or anything like that So wouldn't totally replace the phone, but I'll say a couple things I think they're solving the right problem, which is the phone is not the last
- It's not the last frontier. There's certainly going to be some kind of wearable device after this. Is it a watch? Is it glasses? Is it something like this? Is it a drone that's floating above your head all the time? I don't know. But most likely it's going to be glasses. That seems to be where everybody's going. And so we'll see. But definitely will happen and definitely will change the world when whoever does get that form factor right. So it is inevitable, in my opinion. The next thing, the phone really is causing a lot of damage and problems in terms of how society, with the extreme strength that came from this device that helps us never get lost, never be bored, never be alone, all that good stuff. I remember going to a doctor and he did a scan. He's like, oh, yeah, you have a little slight thing up here, C4, C5, whatever, your vertebrae. He's like, oh shit. What did I get wrong? What did I get wrong? He's like, oh, no, everybody has this now. It's from looking at the phone. He's like, it's like the most chronic problem in the country right now. People's vertebrae are messed up because their neck is always craned down. And I was like, oh, damn, man, I got to really start raising my phone higher when I'm looking. I got to really get a selfie stick or something. Is there a neck brace? And he sells them. Yeah, then the doctor sells them. It's like the drop shipping store. So I think they're solving the right problem. I also think that the people think, the common thing people would say, and this is kind of the white knight.
- thing that I hate, which is I don't want to have more technology. I don't want to have glasses that have my phone on them, and my eyes all day, shoot me now. I'm like, all right, I will shoot you now. You're impression of a white knight. You're basically like a white Californian guy. I think you put a little more like lowerness in your voice. And I think you've got the best white guy impression I've ever heard of. Yeah.
- social media. I'm like saying they need a wrong link in their life. So we'll talk about it in a second. But dude, so I think that there's this idea of like, oh, you know, social media is too crazy. I want to detox. I want to, I'm not going to, I don't want more technology. Oh my God, I don't want to live in a world like that. Guess what? It's coming and you're going to love it and you're going to do it. And I guess it will have some negatives associated with it like anything, but like it is going to happen. One thing that's going to happen with it is Zuckerberg has this law. He said, I don't remember this back of the day, but he coined this term Zuckerberg's law. Did you ever hear what this was? No. He tried to get away from it. He said it one time and every who never said it again because it was like, sounded bad, but like it stuck with me, which was because every year people are basically willing to share up to twice as much as they were willing to share the year before. So in terms of life.
- You know, we weren't sharing our status updates about what we were doing all the time But then like you know a Twitter comes out and now people are just you know sharing every random thought on their mind We weren't sharing our location before but then for Square and others came out now we started sharing location Photos we were only sharing you know, we weren't sharing online then we shared albums Then we shared a single photo and then with snapchat We'll just share like you know tons of photos because they all disappear So like basically as long as a product can unlock there is like pent up demand to share twice as much as you're currently sharing And I feel this all the time there are so many moments of the day that I wish I had captured my kids did something cute or
- My trainer said something awesome to me in a workout, but I'm not in my hands on the keyboard at that moment to capture that video, that note, or that image. And so I think that there is a big pent up demand to be able to share way more moments or capture way more moments and share some portion of those than is happening today. And that will happen with either glasses, maybe a drone camera or this wearable thing on your chest. So I think those things are all working for it. The thing that's working against it is once you get this cute ass domain and you raise like a hundred million dollars and you go into stealth and you hire a hundred people and you're basically like, we're gonna change the world. You're basically saying, I'm going to follow this path. I'm gonna walk off this cliff like the many before me, that many companies before me that have done this. Hey, magically, if I can see you down there, right? That is the challenge with some of this stuff.
- Yeah, I don't think it's gonna work, but I think it's a cool move. I'm glad they're doing it. Yeah. What do you say? Face tags to cornrows. Yeah, it's like, hey, like what do you say to his wife? I'm like, hey, you want to feel what it's, you want to feel what it feels like to spend $130 billion? Like, you know what I mean? They're just like, like, you feel like spending money? Like, you know, they just like are coming over the way just to blow this cash, but pick one more of these things for the last few minutes. Sully or Warren Buffett? They both are incredibly interesting. Let's do the Sully one. All right. So he tells the story, he goes, you know, when I sold my company Tiny, Tiny Co, it was the name of his...
- his company was a mobile gaming company. He says, there was two parts. There was our original games that we had been making, like tiny monsters, tiny zoo, stuff like that. And our license game, like we made the family guy game, the Harry Potter game, the Marvel game. And we got acquired, the choir, the people who bought us, they really wanted the licensed famous IP games. And so after the acquisition, we decided to sell the first one and there was a bunch of potential acquirers and they offered us 500K for it. I thought it was a good offer, but we could get more. So I created a new bidder. I hit a performer engineer from Tyne Deco and I told him to bid. I said,
- You're gonna need to offer like a million dollars like two times the current offer to get the deal because you're just like a random guy And he did and it was a lot more than James City imagine It was more than the market price and as such he won the bid and I was like congrats all right you had a million dollars Right it was only a million dollars. I was like congrats. You got it. Okay now Here's the deal you we've under invested in these games You should you know just you got to work like 60 hours a week Just put some money into ads to grow it add these features that'll help you know retain it better And like you're gonna be able to three or four X the revenue in the next 12 months And the guy like you know sat there and he's like
- I got a better idea. He's like, I'm working today as an engineer at this company. I'm just going to quit. And then he's like, I'm just going to do the absolute minimum to keep this thing refreshed and working. And so he goes, instead of doing more work, he goes, you know what? I'm good with this. I'm just going to tap out of the workforce at age 31, and I'm going to retire. I don't need to spend any more money. I'm going to live within my means. And this app that I just bought for $1 million is going to keep giving me cash flow forever. I don't need a job anymore. And I'll just always maintain it so it keeps bringing me that cash flow. And in the meantime, I'm going to work on my hobby projects and other software things that just scratch my itch.
- And he goes, then, you know, just like the world started working in his favor on top of that. He goes, you know, like Epic and Apple gone into a lawsuit. Apple had to change their rev share deal. So they said for anybody making less than a million in revenue, we'll give you 30 percent. Instead of taking a 30 percent cut, we'll take a 15 percent cut. So immediately profit went up by 15 percent for this guy. He goes, the business has generated more than three million in profits since he bought it. The purchase price assumed that revenue would go down over time, but it remains steady and actually grew during COVID. And he goes, takeaways. The only way to win the rat race is to opt out.
- This is a takeaway that I understand intellectually, but I have not accepted emotionally frankly I'm still blown away by my friends act of saying yeah, I have enough and He was number two when I tell you something to buy something buy it and I tell you to work harder on something don't do it And then he was like, you know, yeah The self-serving part of this thread was like, you know a lot of businesses have these little baby businesses inside that are undervalued Like if you have one of these like, you know, I want to buy one I think these businesses have a lot of value in them and so You
- And so, yeah, so basically, and I think by the way, he didn't just buy the whole million with a million dollars of cash upfront. He financed the portion of it. So he put down maybe three, four, hundred thousand and financed the rest as an example. And so. Would you ever do that? Could you see yourself tapping out? Yeah, I think about that all the time. Really? Yeah, not tapping out forever, but I feel like tapping out in the sense that I really have this urge to work on whatever the most like creative and fun project is, which might make zero dollars or negative dollars. But don't you do that now, in a way? Like that's how I started this podcast. My plan when I started this podcast was I was like, I think I'll probably lose 10 grand a year all in on production.
- paying my editor a couple hundred bucks a month. And I was like booking the studio four times a month, that's 400 bucks. I was like, I'll probably net will lose 10 grand. I'll have some sponsors, but net will lose 10 grand. I was like, yeah, I'm totally happy to do that. Cause I think this project will be a lot of fun. And instead of starting a new business, I started this podcast. And this podcast turned out to be like, my favorite thing I've ever done, the best project I've ever started. And actually turned out to be a pretty good business, actually on top of that. And I kind of want to do that again. So I kind of want to go look at like, what's something I would be willing to lose money doing? Cause it's that fun to me or that intriguing to me.
- Because I think that that's probably a better signal of like what I really want to do and therefore we'll take an interesting shot at doing something Dude, I think that like a lot of people dream about retiring and I've a few times in my career I've taken like as much as a month off to the year off the bad thing and yeah, I used to call it a sand badacle and I was like I'm on a sand badacle and And every single time I love it at first and at the end I'm like dude I gotta go do something. I can't I can't just do this I like it like your your friends can't hang out with you on a Wednesday out You know one o'clock like you're just so bored and you're like I need to go create I need to produce I need to like and then I just realized I am not built in men or you know all people But I can always be from a man's perspective. We are not built to sit idle. We are You know created to work I don't think we're actually created to work a hundred hours a week But I think we are created to work like 30 hours a week and like that's the minimum words like you just have to produce And you have to contribute otherwise you feel pointless and I think you die sooner
- Well, Jesus, for first, I don't think that's a man's name. I don't think that's a man's name. I think women are way more active in general, men are more lazy. Yeah, sure. As a stereotype. Yeah, I don't mean men. I mean, human, but also, I mean, I only know what men are like because I'm a man. That's what I mean. So, yeah, sure, all humans, I'm sure, are like that. I just haven't had this conversation with a lot of people. But I think that when you retire, I've got family and they're like, I'm going to retire. I'm like, I don't think you should retire. I just think you should work a little bit less or do a six month vacation because I think the sooner you retire, you're just actually taken off four years on your life. Do you know what I mean? Like, if you're going to retire, you at least got to go volunteer. Yeah. You got to contribute in some capacity. You got to have something that you're living for.
- Yeah, yeah, totally. I wouldn't take a sabbatical. I would just pour my energy into a more creative project that is not the best business use of time. I have a bunch of ideas that I think could make a bunch of money. And then I have a bunch of ideas that I think would be really fun to do that would probably not make any money. And might not even get anybody to use it or like it. Maybe it'll turn out crappy, but I'm intrigued to do it. And so that's the temptation to make a time out of it. I think that is all the things I want to do. They all cost money. I don't like fuck I need to earn more. You know what I mean? Like in reality you don't. Yeah, but you don't.
- Well, it's only, you know, I guess perceptions reality. Who knows? Yeah, all right. You can change perception easier than you can change reality. So, just change that. Yeah, I got to run. But yeah, good episode. All right, that's a pod.

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- There's a new era and I'm not part of it. And that's kind of how I feel when I see this. And how do you feel when you see this? And how do you intend to kind of get your hands? You know, we're a bunch of scheming, greedy, you know, horrible people. How are you gonna get your hands on this? How are you gonna get your stick and pause in this game? Okay, this is the AI episode.
- It's all AI. Everything is AI. I was mind blown, I would say that's the right word. Like to me, this is the biggest holy shit moment I've had when it comes to technology of seeing what's going on in AI. For you, you got emotional, which is a strange response. I think I'm more emotional than you are. I think I like, I get touched more than you do. I like it. Let me give you the background really quick. So it's a company called play.ht. One of their side projects is a thing called podcast.ai. Basically, what they did was,
- They gave their AI algorithm or program, whatever you want to call it. They gave their program Steve Jobs' biography, which is, and I think they actually gave him one or two of his biographies because there's two major ones. Then they basically gave the program every single Steve Jobs recording, I think ever, or any that they could find on the internet, along with every Joe Rogan episode ever. And they made Joe Rogan interview Steve Jobs. And in the interview, it's like 25 minutes long. They talk about all types of stuff, but they say some amazing things like Joe Rogan does the intro and he goes, he teases out who it is, just like he does in real life. He goes, what's up, freak bitches? Which I don't even think he says anymore. But he said that in all the early episodes. He goes, what's up, freak bitches? Today's guest is someone who's incredibly smart, incredibly weird. Oh, we should just play it, right? Let it let it let it let it. And it's sufforable. Well, he says it's sufforable, which I thought was crazy. This podcast is brought to you by play dot ht.
- All content is generated by artificial intelligence. Weird voice choice for this part. Listener discretion is advised. Hello, freak bitches. Welcome to another episode of the Bro Jogan Experience. Bro Jogan Experience. And on this episode, I welcome my friend who's difficult to describe. Fascinated by him, and I hope you'll be too. And he is weird and brilliant and sometimes totally insufferable. But my guest today has made me
- made some of the great technological products of our age, and he's always pushing the envelope in innovation. Like, for example, with his next computer, he developed a new programming language and operating system, and then he became even more famous for making three applications for that computer. Word processor, a spreadsheet, and an image editor. That just showed me that this dude was brilliant, had amazing taste, and I would just hope that I could be even more famous.
- like one-tenth of the genius that my friend today is. And I can't even say his name. So yeah. So super psyched about having him in the house today. First time, or yeah, we've had you on before, but not for a long time. You know, like Patrick Swayze and I'm Demi Moore and Ghost, you're a memory from the past. So without further ado, my friend who is difficult to describe and wonderful, and I'm so grateful he came on the show. How's it going? Good to see you, buddy. It's been a long time since I've been on the show. I've missed this. It's always fun.
- Wow, like just pause there. Okay. So the things that like first the voice quality, the voice quality is incredible. Like that sounds just like Joe Rogan. It sounds just like Steve Jobs. It has gotten so much better than like how this used to be. I remember like, you know, when you had like the Garmin GPS in your car and you could like choose the Morgan Freeman voice or whatever, like anytime you'd have like this voice robot that was trying to say something new, it sounded totally computerized.
- And this doesn't. So the voice quality is one thing. The fact that it kind of like, it makes more sense, it makes more sense than it should. Like he's doing an intro, it understands that. He's teasing, like this my friend who's here today, this person's a genius, but not saying who it is and what it is right away. That's like a showmanship thing that I thought was like really interesting. The back and forth banter, like he gives that long intro and then Steve Jobs just kind of laughs. Like you would if you had sat down for this kind of interview with Joe Rogan.
- I just thought that was incredible the way it felt like a real conversation and obviously there's some stuff that's like You know he's talking about word processors and documents and a little too much like nobody would do that but like Damn if 80% of that is not amazing and the reason I felt emotional listening to this was It's I felt both like in awe but also scared because as I was listening to this it I was agreeing with what Steve says and What we'll do in a second Ben is fast forward like maybe 10 minutes in and basically Jobs goes on this long rant about LSD saying You know LSD changed my life and I don't think it's for everyone But it changed my life and it opened my mind up and let me read all these books I never previously would have read and he says something like I don't I wouldn't take LSD a bunch of times in a row because I only needed it once or twice and it opened my mind and Introduced me and he goes in depth. He goes it introduced me to India and it's just He's talking about God. He's talking about like all kinds of things that you're like
- It's not just like reading a Wikipedia page, you know what I mean? Like, it's very philosophical. He's like, when people think about God, they think about this. But to me, it's, and it's like, well, that's a fully formed thought and philosophy. And like, that sounds like something somebody would say when they're having like an in-depth podcast and not just like, I did this in 1979 in March when I was living in Albuquerque. And then in 1981, I once again, it was, it wasn't that. It was like a very real sounding thing. And he has this amazing. Did you hear, there's this beautiful quote that he says. And basically the way that this company, if you ever listen to a bunch of Steve Jobs interviews, you'll notice that at points, it almost sounds like they're just chopping up some of his clips and just weaving them together because he has talked about this before. So I don't actually know if he's ever said this particular line before, but he starts talking about India and why he loves like that part of the world. And he basically says like, well, it's so old and it influenced the rest of society. And he goes, there's an Indian epic that's 10 times as long as the Bible, the Koran, and all these other things combined. The only thing that's combined in the Odyssey, yeah. That's what he says. Yeah. He's like basically Indian history influenced the rest of the world. And there's an epic that's 10 times as long as all these other books. And I just thought that was, that's just like such an interesting. By the way, he doesn't say the name. So it kind of leaves you wanting there, but he is talking about the the Gita, which is like is, I think that long, it's like a 16 part.
- series or whatever. It's like this really, really long thing. I would bet that it actually is multiples longer than the Elliot and the Odyssey. So I don't think it was a really interesting that he said that. I, I, wait, and this is the point is that when he said that, I said, I gotta find that book. Like he just sold me on this book. He influenced you. Yeah, the dead jobs influenced me. So Ben, click play just for like 30 seconds. But there is some kind of deeper meaning to life and it can't just be something that somebody made up because if it was, it wouldn't be compelling. It would seem contrived and everyone would see through it. So I think that the.
- meaning and the purpose is by the cosmos, the nature of the cosmos, which is pretty bold thinking. I mean, I don't know how else to put it, but it's not religious in the way people usually talk about. Taking LSD was a profound experience for me. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin and you can't remember it when it wears off, but it washes over you and tells you that everything is connected. You're not here by accident. You were put here for a purpose. And if you can figure out what that is, then you'll learn more about yourself than anything else could.
- it's pretty intense. So that quote is a real quote of his. Taking L.C. was a proud experience, one of the most important things in my life, it shows you that there's another side of the coin. You can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. Okay, so that is like an actual quote of his, but it's weaved into the conversation. Like there's a part in the conversation where he says, he's talking about how he's a fan of Joe Rogan. He's like, it's nice to just sit back in the car and listen to you rant. And it's like, okay, so the first one where he's, the LSD, you know, okay, they just took, they just took his good read section or his quotes. And they're like, okay, cool. He says things like this.
- But how did it know to say to Jill Rogan that I love to listen to your podcast and the car just love to sit back and listen to your rant? Where would that have come from? How does that happen? There's little moments like that that are like, I just don't understand this technology well enough to know how it could know to say something like that in that moment. So the first half of the call, he talks all about India and these like kind of life advice type of things, which were pretty amazing. But then the second half, which Ben just started playing a little bit, he talks about Google and they actually say Yahoo run. They call it Yahoo. They put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. But he does all these like, it says all these interesting quotes, which I actually think are things that he said again in the past. But he says stuff like, you know, that's the problem I've always had with Microsoft. In many ways, they're smart people and they've done good work, but they've never had any tastes. They've never had any aesthetic taste. And then he goes on and he talks about Adobe and he criticizes Adobe's business model and he goes, Joe Rogan actually says, what would you do to fix Adobe? And Job says, well, they've got 800 people working on Adobe's business model. That's just way too many people. And the fact that they charge just a little bit of money for a small bit of the product, it's like buying a car, but only getting part of the car and having to pay more money to get the rest of the engine. And he like says these criticisms about Adobe, which frankly, I have no idea if it's true, but it must have went on like a rant about this, you know, in the past. And then he goes, you know, I had a lunch recently with Bob, whatever, at Adobe and he like says their full name and he leads up this part of Adobe and he actually agreed to me that they need to fix it and they're working on fixing it. And so anyway, he like actually gives
- almost more advice and his opinions on what I think are current events. I'm not well versed enough with the Adobe, but it seems like current events. It's pretty magical. It's amazing. Yeah, this basically was like bring back someone from the dead technology. Ben, do you have anything to add? You're a history guy. What did this like? Do you have anything that you felt when you when you watch this? I really agree to Sam. It made me oddly emotional listening to it. It also scared me a little bit just because I thought of the application of like what if you like you did this to my grandpa and like what emotions would that bring back and then that like frightened me of like, I don't know if that's a good thing to be able to experience like
- is representation by grandpa that would feel like the real thing, but isn't, right? Like where are these thoughts coming from? So it's equal parts like really compelling, really cool. It's like a treat to be able to hear, well, I think it's like a pretty accurate representation of how Steve Jobs would approach some of these things that are happening today. But then also just like scary to us, but it's not really him. And what is it really? Well, it's like a video, right? Today you could watch a home video and it's like you see their face, you hear their voice, Steve, but you can't capture that moment in time.
- To me, this is an extension of that, which is like, now it's going to be somewhat interactive that you can kind of interact with these people or hear them talk about new things. And you know that it's not like the real thing, but there's a Black Mirror episode that's a lot like this where the woman uploads her boyfriend's consciousness to this robot. She's kind of still dating him, even though he's gone, but there's the shadow of him that can simulate him. I think there's more good than bad. Sam, what do you want to say? Yeah, so let me add two points about why this is going to give it even stranger. Well, the first point is almost scary. So basically in 1985, this is a quote from Steve Jobs. He goes, my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer. And someday some student will not be only be able to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. So Steve Jobs wrote that in 1985, which is interesting. Now here's where things get really interesting. Wow, I can't tell from that. Because that's what he just described is what just happened to him. It's magical. Now here's where things are going to get even more magical.
- So play.ai or play.ht. I want to. So part of their website, you can actually vote for new episodes. And some of the top episodes that people have voted for is Elon Musk interviewing Nikola Tesla, Kanye West and Bob Larr, Marley talking about music, Jesus interviews God. And then I believe there's Einstein and Buddha having a conversation on science and spirituality. And Trump interviews himself. Trump interviews himself. There's Lex Friedman interviewing Richard Feynman. And then there's Joe Rogan mediates peace between Russia and US. And that sounds like a joke. And it is a joke, but it's actually an interesting tool where you're like,
- Well, like let's hear Joe Roghler. Let's see if Joe Rogan can like bring together these two two different people and hear each other's perspective and we'll actually find out where one another is coming from even if it's Make believe and but it will still be like maybe that is actually how they feel and I could work through this argument So that's why this stuff is actually really really interesting and powerful So let's switch gears. I want to give you My kind of like big picture Framework on how I think about AI. So I was having lunch
- with this guy who has built this AI app. He built one app called Wombos, the name of it had like 100 million downloads. It basically could take a picture of you and make you like make it look like you're singing. Then they got copied a bunch and got taken out of the app store because of music problems and then like. I saw that. Now he has another one which is basically like one of these text to image creators on mobile and it's like really popular. He started saying this thing and I kind of remixed what he was saying and here's kind of like how here's where we landed with like what's going on with AI. So the last I don't know, 10 years have been what I'll call left brain AI.
- And like, you know, you have your left brain and your right brain. Left brain is your analytical brain. And that's what artificial intelligence could do. You had big data, you had machine learning, you had, you know, oh, the computer can play chess and it's amazing. The computer can play Go and it's amazing. It beats the best players in the world. You had self-driving cars where a car is taking in sensor data, camera data, and it's basically processing it and trying to make decisions like a human being using analytical decision-making processes. It's trying to make the right judgment at the right time to maximize safety.
- And so that's what, I think that's where we've been and it's also in a way what we expected. That sounds like the type of thing that supercomputer should be able to do is like, hey, computer, just like you can multiply huge numbers and I can't do that in my head. You should be able to drive perfectly every time. You should be able to play chess better than a human. Like, great, I get that stuff. And then was this game changer where it changed into right brain AI. Your right brain is your creative brain. So this is where you got GPT-3, which is what generates text, like what we just talked about with the Joe Rogan thing. So you can just give it a prompt and it'll just write an essay for you. It'll be creative. It can write rap lyrics for you. That's where you got Dali, which is art. So you could just say, give me a picture of a starry night but with, it takes place in Hogwarts and it'll just generate images that create that scene. It'll paint pictures for you. And so all of a sudden the artists are looking at this saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. It was fine when you were just messing with chess. But now you're holding the paintbrush. What's going on here? And then you have that, what we just played, play HT or Unreal Speech, they're doing this for audio. Like, how do you generate audio? Whether that's music, whether that's podcast, it's just creating it from scratch. And like, here's pod caches like us that wake up and we sit at our microphone and we have to come up with this content.
- But now the machines are doing it too and and some we're competing with that and then you have people doing this with video There's a company called runway that's doing this where you could just describe a video like walking through the streets of Tokyo And it's really busy and then it creates that scene and they go can you add some rain and then it adds rain What what's that called runway? ML can I go on right now and just use it then pull up the demo for runway? ML I don't know if it's like launched yet, but they put out a sick demo of what I just described And so now you got this right brain AI that's doing creative shit creative images creative text creative videos It's writing blog posts is writing essays. It's making paintings. It's making patterns. It's making music It's making podcasts. It's making videos and so now it's doing both sides And that's the big change that's happened and that's the big holy shit moment in the same way that NFTs brought a whole bunch of people into crypto who you know crypto when it was just cryptography or it was just finance
- There was certain people that were interested. Then NFTs came out and it was like, oh cool, there's a whole art angle, like celebrity access, it brought a new audience in. This is that on steroids where the new AI stuff that's creative and is creating art and creating music and creating audio and creating text, that's bringing in a whole new wave of people beyond just people who were interested in a chess bot or the Alpha Zero bot that plays Go. Those were kind of limited to just the nerds. Now we got the nerds and the artists, both in the mix. That's my framework for what's going on with AI. And the next 10 years I think are this right brain side, taken over.
- And this is that is that it? What is that? Yes, so let's see. Oh my god like it's like make it feel more romantic at a Remove the you just highlight object. It's like remove this I don't want this in the video and it just removes the street lamp and then it's like make it a lush garden Make it look like it is hand-drawn make it look like a jungle where there's whatever going on Wow
- So like that last thing it just did is so crazy. It just, you dropped a video in and it goes, green screen the character and it's a guy walking around and it just like immediately removes the background. And then it says, add a sunny sky. And it adds a sunny sky. And then it says blur the sun a little bit, blur the background a little bit and it blurs the background. While this guy's like skateboarding or whatever, like that's crazy that it can do that. You know, and now obviously, you know, a demo is generally like massive overpromise for what the tech can actually do. Yeah, but it's, we can all see it. We can all see that like if they're not doing it now, like it's reasonable that in the neck, in the near term of 10 years, like this is going to be normal and.
- Add two inches to that guy's neck beard and this is done. Like yeah. Yeah. We're measuring timelines by, by hair growth. This is one of those things and it doesn't happen often where you see something and you say to yourself, it's not there yet, but it will be. And it's almost like where you like test, it's almost like when I was in a Tesla for the first time and it went and it was like a practical car that also went zero to 60 in three seconds. Even though the range wasn't good and like this other thing wasn't good, but I get into it and I'm like, oh, well, yeah, like in 10 years, this is what this is just the norm. This will be normal. And those types of puberty, it's like there's a bunch of changes happening. The voice is changing, but it still cracks and you're like, all right, this doesn't sound great yet, but it'll get there. Yeah. And this is one of those things.
- It's pretty magical when you see it and like a really some seemingly basic but actually quite profound Ways that this is gonna impact thing. I mean it's basically it's almost like I don't know if you know anything about music But like I was listening to this documentary on Nirvana and Dave Grohl was talking about his newest album. He's gonna use analog like which is like tape recording He's gonna like record it like with the all in one room But because he's like with pro tools like you know, it's the technology is the recording technology. They use it's called pro tools It's kind of like Photoshop but for music and he was like we could record all this music and like we only got to do it one Time and then we get like drag and drop different stuff and we make like the sound Perfect like the every snare is like exactly on the beat that it should be and it's perfect And he's like we kind of wanted it to be a little sloppier to feel more human because pro tools has made this stuff perfect And that's an example of what's gonna happen and like some really mundane but interesting Examples are basically, you know, have you ever done like?
- like high ticket sales, or you're trying to sell software, or sometimes for service that requires tons of back and forth on email of you like cold emailing someone, and then like them saying like, oh, well this is kind of interesting, but we need this, this, and this. And then you have to like reply back. That costs so much money worth of people. You gotta train people on the right things to say. You've gotta give them documentation on all the right things to say. Then you gotta like add in like the wow factor of like, can you like flirt with them the right way, and can you like play this game the right way? Like that shit, like reasonably, it's reasonable to see that that will all be automated. And in the near turn, like a call center won't be a thing.
- There's gonna be like your AI call center or whatever we want to call that your operations hub And then there's gonna be like just in case that doesn't work. We'll have a couple people there, right? Well, I I invent one with companies I invested it's called infinitus and the funny thing that they did was They're like, oh man, doctors spend so much time their back office like just trying to do billing with insurance So you'll call up the basically, you know patient gives you information for insurance You then have to call the insurance company You have to verify the name and the number and you have to get it like here's the reference code for what treatment They had or whatever right all this back and forth
- And most entrepreneurs solution was like, oh, this is so much back and forth. We need to eliminate this and re-change the system from scratch. And what these guys did was way smarter. They were like, oh, why don't we just save the doctors a ton of time? Let's make a robot that calls their robot. And so they created a robot that will call, you know, whoever, insurance providers robot. And insurance providers are like, please enter the patient's identification number. And then the robot goes, nine, two, four, three, three, six. And it's like, thank you for your patient's robot. And it's like, please say if you want number one. And then the robot has infinite patients to just do the whole call by itself. And it saves doctors a ton of time. They're doing really, really well. Let me give you. We have to talk about interior AI. Yeah, so let's do a couple other examples. So here's another one where, you know, Peter Levels who came on the pod, you know, massive, fan favorite. This guy's got like a killer following. And one of the reasons why is because,
- He loves to just hack together and make stuff. I think when you were looking at his thing, you called him and what did you call him? You called him an artist in that way too. You're like, I forgot your description of him, but you're like, you're a, I can't remember. It was something like, you called him basically like a code artist or something like that. Well, I don't know, remember what I called him, but to me, he's like a craftsman, you know? Like he's like a, he's like a punk rocker who like, he's like a musician who just, instead of playing on a, a musical keyboard, he's playing on a computer keyboard and he's pretty magical. He's a pretty magical like creator, I think. Yeah, there's definitely an element of punk to him where he's like, for example, he's like, I don't do email or phone calls, ever. If you want to, if you have a question for me, here's a frequently asked question thing. Like, why? Because I like to just work on my shit and then I like to go swimming. And like, those are the things I want to do, right? He's like, you know, I don't want to live in one place. I'm going to just move around and like be a nomad. And I think that's cool. And he did that before remote work was popular. So he explained what this is. He's been building his publicly on Twitter for a while now. About three or four months, maybe. So no, not even dude, like a couple of weeks. So he created this thing. It's interior AI, like interior design. And what you do is you could basically upload a photo of any space.
- And you say what it is. You say you drag and drop a photo of a face week, by the way. I want to create a YouTube video that does all these demos live one by one. But like you upload a space and then you say what type of room it is. You say what type of style you want. Like do you want ski, chalet? Do you want tropical? Do you want like minimalist? Do you want a maximalist? Look, and then you say how many versions you want and then you click render my idea. And it just creates like an interior designer would. A super realistic like go to his Twitter and just look at the.
- look at his demos there, Ben. It generates a super realistic looking interior. So he took, for example, Kim Kardashian's house, and he took the photo from their living room, and then he uploaded, he said, give me some inspiration, and it turned it into a hot spring. It turned it into a whole different thing, and it all together. But it's really amazing. It's like, yeah, here's all the stuff you would need to make your house look like this. Do you like this look? Nope, you want a new one? Push a button, get another one. Push a button, get another one. Push another, and which is, what you were saying, that would be so much back and forth with a human being. You would sit down for design meetings.
- and then they would have create a lookbook and then you'd give your feedback and then they would maybe give you a rendering but that takes time and energy on their part and then you'd say no and then you'd have to go back and forth. Here, you just push buttons and you just immediately get this dream, just like you just get to dream out loud and you're just dreaming and it's just generating images of like, that for you to kind of like remix off of which is a totally different creative process. Like that cuts so much friction out of the creative process that even somebody like me who doesn't have design taste
- This is A, the superpower to give you design tastes, but B, it takes all the friction out so you don't have the impatience, right? Okay, look at this one, yeah, go back and forth with this. So it's this crappy warehouse like space, just empty, I don't know, Sam, like describe what you're looking at here. So this is clearly an old factory that someone's trying to turn into an apartment. So it's an industrial style, thousand to 2,000 square foot room. That looks beautiful, but it's too rustic to live in and entirely empty. And he says, I found an original empty loft photo. I wanted to add interior decorating that was industrial style. And I wanted to auto detect different parts around the building. So it looks like there's like a pillar in the middle of the room. So he said, I wanted to decorate around that. And he said, all right, go ahead, interior AI, do it. And let's look at the next picture.
- and then it turns it into this like modern looking loft. It's the same place and then it replaces the floor and then it does this and it does that. And you could, I think here's another version that it creates like, it creates like multiple versions of it. Oh my gosh. Yeah, somebody's a little outlandish. This was crazy, right? They have like replaced the roof with like bamboo and like you could see through the roof now. So some of this is not super realistic, but you said something earlier that I think is worth noting, which is, um,
- It's not perfect and there's like definitely some weird stuff that it's like well that doesn't make any sense but You have to see through that right now because that stuff's gonna get better And there's this great blog post from back in the day by this guy Paul boot kite He created Gmail when he was inside Google and then the blog post is called if you're great You don't have to be good Which honestly is kind of the motto of my life, right like Sam do I show up late to this podcast? Yeah, I do am I wearing my boxers right now. Yeah, I am
- Did I prepare for this podcast? Not fully, but if you're great, you don't have to be good. And like, that's true. He's like, you know, with Gmail, people were like, oh my God, it doesn't have this. And it doesn't have a contact book on it. It doesn't have this. He's like, yeah, but look, it's lightning fast, has unlimited storage and the search is amazing. You could find any file in any email instantly. And he's like, when you're great, you don't have to be good. He's like the iPad, people were like, oh my God, it doesn't have a keyboard. It doesn't have a USB port. It doesn't have this. It doesn't have that. He's like, yeah, but watch this. You tap a button and they're like instantly is on. It doesn't have like a boot up process. And like, you swipe and you're on the internet. And it just lets you browse the internet from your like, your couch, you know, where you're on the go, where you don't have your laptop, or you don't have your desktop computer. He's like, so when you're great, you don't have to be good. And he had released that when the iPad came out. He's like, look, iPad just got released. All these critics are saying how that's a huge flop. I think they're wrong because they're making this mistake. They want things to be good everywhere, but you just need to be great in like three things that matter. And everything else can be kind of sucky and it'll still win. And he was absolutely right about the iPad.
- Are you so? Let's talk about opinions a little bit. Where's your head out with all this? I mean when I see this I think a I am not capable like I don't have the ability to work on this I just I simply don't have the horsepower and like I appreciate it, but I Stairs, it's more of a go-kart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm like I'm very much either gonna be a spectator Or a only semi in back active person in this in this game like, you know, you made up You made a funny joke when we were talking you and I so Sean and I are obsessed with tiktok So we watch tiktok constantly and we made a joke or John made a joke he goes We're content creators in the same way that a horse carriage person In 1912 and they just saw Henry Ford drive by on his car Oh shit
- Yeah, how was that? Yeah, like, I see like I watch TikToks. Yeah, I seen 18 year old with Vans who like makes this like spectacular like video love. And it's just the funniest thing ever. And I'm like, oh, there's a new era and I'm not part of it. And that's kind of how I, that's a little bit how I feel when I see this. And I don't, how do you feel when you see this and how do you intend to kind of like get your hands? You know, we're a bunch of scheming, greedy, you know, horrible people. How are you going to get your hands on this? How are you going to get your, your stick and pause in this game? Well, that's a great question. It's a question I've been asking myself. I'm a little bit different than you in that I give my, I have a little more self delusion where I'm like, I could do this.
- You know, I could if I hired the right people, you know, I could be the vision guy. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, I'll be the vision guy and like you know, I'll have the idea and then all these geniuses will just make it happen Because you you you previously had a company that was a Prop my I would tell my parents I had a tech company, but it was really just an email newsletter. It wasn't a tech company You actually had a proper technology business right, right. Yeah, you you were just basically like writing brochures and Whereas I was running a silicate. Yeah. Yeah, enterprise. I'm like I'm like a Restaurant who has an online ordering menu calling themselves a tech company The next Google Yeah, yeah, I'm used to working with people that are way smarter than me and I like go over to the I rolled my chair over to Their screen and they're just like what do you want? I'm like hey, bud Um Again where you made the thing like bounce during the animation like that was so cool I want to just like upload this to my Twitter. Can you do it again? And they're like, oh, yeah sure
- So I'm used to working with designers and students that are way talented. So I kind of look at it as following. My plan is this, invest in everything because investing is easy and great. I'm a believer in this wave. I'm excited about this. And I think that I can help because a lot of the people who can build this stuff, they don't know A, where to apply it. Like what's the actual pain point I should be solving? And B, they don't know how to build maybe a defensible business or a go-to-market strategy that might make sense for them. So I'm like, okay, cool. I'm gonna invest in a bunch of these companies. That's plan A, that's already in motion. Would you say that this is the most interesting sector?
- For sure, and I kind of feel like an idiot because it's like, oh cool. Now you're interested in the new thing. And it's like, on one hand, I get that. You know, crypto. You are, you are in fact a dumb idiot who chases. Yeah, I just chase the next shiny object. And there's some truth to that. Like crypto was the more crypto prices went up, the more I invested in the more, you know, then I created the milk road and like that, you know, I turn my content attention to it. Um, so, you know, no, you know, it's like that meme. It's like, you know, the guy, the guy who looks back at the new, the new thing. That's like, you know, the hot thing behind it. It's like, yeah, AI is that new thing.
- But at the same time, what am I supposed to do? I just saw a fucking flying object. I just saw UFO. What am I supposed to do pretend I'm not interested? Like, no, I'm super interested. Like, you know, count me in, like, beat me up and, you know, have your way with me, aliens. That's how I feel about AI. Did I ever tell you the time that in our office, there was a porn studio across the street that would leave their windows open? No. So, so my office in San Francisco was at Bush and Kearney in the financial district of San Francisco. And we were on maybe the fifth floor. And there used to be this company called Breather. And it was almost like Airbnb, but for office space. Maybe like we work where they would like pre-rent tons of like one single small room. A meeting room, yeah. Yeah, a meeting room. And then you could rent it by the hour. And we had these huge, beautiful windows at our office. And you could see across the street, which was only...
- 20 yards, you know, just the size of a small street and you can see across where this other room was and eventually this softcore porn company started renting it. It was a breather and they would rent it by the hour and I think it was for only fans. I think it was where a freelance photographer who's specialized in like webcam girls or something like that and they would come and take like their portfolio pictures and they would always comment like two days a week at like two o'clock and they would get completely naked And they would just be there and take pictures and I had this woman working for me named Edie who's probably 65 and her and I Sat next to each other and I remember like it happened and big Yeah, they're there again today and like you can't not look at Edie's like hardcore Catholic and she used to like do The cross through here. Yeah, she would do like the side of the cross and like start holding on to her like rosary Whenever they would come in and she would like oh gee like she would say like oh baby Jesus like you know Dear you were saying Peter but for different reasons. Yeah for different reason She was more so unlike wow I was like wow And it was one of those things where I remember sitting there and our office was like
- six young men and then like Edie and This this like porn was just not not porn But this nude photophotography which is happening right there and we just like had to stare at it all day And I remember it being so challenging to work when that was happening. That's sort of like AI. That's my long tangent Where's he going with this? Okay? Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you on that. That's that is you remember that You knew you were never there when the they got naked No, I've never saw that But you know, thanks for not inviting me So so yeah, that that is how I feel about this one like what am I supposed to do not look Edie? No, I'm looking I'm looking and you know I'm looking as long as they're there. That's how I feel about AI. So I'm gonna invest in this stuff I'm gonna keep learning about it. And then who knows maybe start a company in this space, you know, it's pretty exciting really
- Yeah, it's exciting. I mean like this is like a it is exciting. It's an unlock It's like oh we got new toys to play with like I can't leave them in the box Like I gotta unbox it and see what I could do with it. So You know, I don't know. We'll see what happens with this, but let me give you a couple other Kind of mind-blowing, you know examples here. So Okay, so another one is Jasper. So I just invested in this company called Jasper Jasper dude the valuation was steep I'm shocked you did it Yeah, the revenue curve is also steep. It's what it's working really well And now I went in and I told him this I go
- Your numbers are insane. This might be fraud. That's okay. We'll see. I don't think it's fraud, but the numbers are so impressive that it's like, you know, when you say, wow, that's unbelievable. There's a part of you that's like, is it, wait, is this believable? So, you know, there's that. And I said, the other thing is, you know, sometimes these companies, they get off to really hot starts. They don't necessarily sustain. Like sometimes that explosive growth can make you, but it can also break you. You know, during COVID, Hoppen was an example of this, where Hoppen was like,
- You know started and it was like the perfect thing at the perfect time and it just took off like a rocket ship And it became worth five billion dollars and then now there's like they just laid off like whatever a thousand people because COVID ended the demand went down they couldn't sustain that sales growth They had forecasted that they'll always keep growing like a rocket and maybe that didn't happen. So you know and by the way the founder Took a hundred million dollars in secondary Yeah, you know just had to secure the bag for his family, right? He's like I got kids Don't but I I'm gonna have kids. I better get this bag I'm gonna use that excuse all the time across him. I got kids do I got kids to feed I got a family I'm such a good uncle Okay, so check out this demo of what Jasper can do so basically I teach like a Writing course called power writing and my home goal is like hey if you're gonna write something on your website or an email or your Twitter bio or you want to write content for blogs like you're either gonna write it and no one's gonna read it It's gonna go nowhere. It's gonna drive no results. No clicks. No signups. No followers or it's gonna like actually like achieve the thing
- So it's like a genie, right? You say what you want and you just give it like a little guy and it's like make it funny. I want an ad that's gonna like promote my gym. It's called Crunch. We have this welcome offer where you get it for 20 bucks, make it funny and I want it as a Facebook ad. And then I want it as a cold email. And then just give me 10 options and it gives you 10 options. And then you could just like edit them or whatever. Or you can literally highlight it and just say, rephrase this, I didn't like the way, I didn't like this intro, give me a new one. And I'll just give you a new one. You're like, give it another one. And it's like gives you another one. I mean, it's like the best employee that's like creative, super prompt, just immediately delivers the thing you want. It's kind of like amazing. So like watch like another 30 seconds. This is like the boss mode version. Access to documents. Now you want you to imagine documents is kind of like Google Docs if you had an assistant in there and you're the boss giving your assistant instructions on how to do stuff. Now for our first example, imagine a real estate agent.
- who has a lot of outbound sales emails to send out this week. And he wants to save some time by using his AI assistant Jasper. Now, you're probably getting a hang of this by now. On the left, we give Jasper some context of our situation and he background information we need, along with tone of voice and keywords. And then on the right, we can supply a pattern. So Jasper can follow that because Jasper's really good at following patterns and apply that with all of the information it knows from the internet. So here, we just provided a really good example of what good behavior would look like and then we provided some merge tags and do little slots that we want Jasper to fill in. In our situation, the real estate agent's Dave, clients, James, markets, awesome Texas. It's the New Year season. Demand is up, inventory is down, and we want them to hop on a call. So now we're going to write with AI. We're going to do a Jasper command. Remember that feature for later, okay? Now, what we're going to do is activate voice mode.
- Hey Jasper write an email from Dave to James about an update on the Austin Texas real estate market and ask for a call later this week All right, we're submitting that command imagine if you're the boss and Jasper's your assistant now. He's following your directions Look at that. It's perfect. You go ahead and ship it imagine all the sales emails You can say dude. So isn't that crazy? So like so that's why these guys are taking off because they basically say You know where you had employees you no longer need employees or if you had a good employee They're now they can they can now be ten times more productive When they do this, you know, so so this is like kind of mind-blowing on the like text generation for business side of things This is crazy. Let me tell you like absolutely another wild example
- Are you going to use this for your business? Yeah, so yeah, exactly. So I'm using it. I just started using this for ours. And I just playing with it. Well, two things. One is I'm going to try to use it when we do our prior writing course. I'm going to teach people how to use this, but also use it in the like kind of the sales process. But like with our e-com thing, I want to try it. Even with Milk Road, like there's cases where maybe our writers can be more productive if we give them this tool. For example, every day at the Milk Road, we start with an opener. That's like, yo, hey, what's up? This is the Milk Road, the crypto news that brings you news so fresh, you'll think it's, you know,
- It's new so fresh. It'll smell like laundry straight out of the dryer. I love that smell and it's like that's what we Like I just made that up off top my head But you give it three of those and then we could just tell Jasper generate and it'll generate like 500 Opener clever openers like that Which is great because that's like one thing our writers every day have to come up with a cool new one And like you know it takes like you know a little and mental energy to do that and it's not the easiest thing But now they can get better doing things like that Let me give you a wild example. So go to I don't know where this is gonna be
- I don't know if they have a website. And how are they any different than copy AI? Cause I invested in copy AI and they do the same thing. They're kind of the same thing. Just imagine copy AI with more revenue. No, first to copy AI. Those guys are cool. It's kind of like LeBron James just not good. What's the difference between me and LeBron? Cause the best to be taller, faster, stronger, more handsome, more successful, and richer. I think, no, I've been in that. By the way, I'm an investor in copy AI. I love those guys. Paul is the founder of my investment. They're at 10 million in revenue. Yeah, they're doing great. It looks like they're actually quite similar, but I think they're geared towards a different user. But yeah, I would have to dig deeper into Jasper to truly understand. But anyway, go ahead. So okay. So here's other examples of things that I think are amazing. So this same, by the way, the same thing, the way this just helped a content marketer or a salesperson generate text for their emails and blog posts, like this thing will write whole blog posts for you. And by the way, you can write a blog post and then you click the SEO button and it'll score how SEO friendly this is and how much it thinks it's going to drive for you. Right? So that's pretty smart to like link these things together. Because on the surface, what are all these companies doing? They're just using basically the same.
- sort of like GPT-3 engine. So on one hand, these companies are not very defensible because anybody could take these open source language models and build a user interface on top of it. And so I can create another competitor to CopyAI or Jasper or one of these things. But it's all in the user interface, the applications, and how much business utility you add to it. So let me give you another example of business utility. So this is now in the photography use case. So for example, for my e-commerce brand, we spend a lot of money every month, maybe something like five to $10,000 a month easily on photography. So you have to take pictures of your products, you have to take model photos, you have to do castings and then book models, then they come to your studio and then they use your products or whatever, and then you take photos or videos of that, you use that for your website, you use that for your ads, that sort of thing.
- And so that whole process takes like multiple people, like you've got a photographer, you might have a casting person, you have an editor maybe, it takes time. So like we can't just have it instantaneously, like you have to schedule these things, they take weeks. They don't always turn out good, like maybe you have somebody that didn't turn out, the shot didn't turn out how you wanted it, whatever. So check out Dream Booth. So Dream Booth, let me give you the link for this. So there's two here, Osmosis AI and Dream Booth, try.
- Let me give you this link. So this guy- I think you have one. No, this one I think works at Shopify, I'm correct. Yeah, so this guy works in the future division at Shopify, I believe. Strange Native is Twitter handle. And so basically what he does is he shows like, AI can unlock unlimited product photography. So basically you could take a generic image. So like the left image here is just like- Oh my God. A shoe on grass, it's not a particularly good, like kind of a glare, it's on grass. It looks like you didn't put a lot of effort. You just went out in your backyard or a soccer field and took this picture. And then you could just say, make this shoe look epic. And then it takes that shoe, cuts out the background, puts it, and it automatically puts it on this lightning background or whatever. But like look at the other examples. So like the second example, I think is better. Look at the training image. So it's a dude taking a selfie in this hoodie. And it looks okay. Actually it doesn't look okay. It looks bad. You can't use this on your website for e-commerce.
- And then it generates a model, like studio looking photo of this same hoodie. This one is kind of unbelievable to me. This is that good where it's like, dude, if I could just take me wearing some crappy, we made me wearing my product and like, don't care about the lighting, don't care about the background, don't care if I have my hair done that day. And it'll just generate like, it gave this dude pecs. And it gave him like, you know, better shoulders and like a jawline and like, you know, it fixed the lighting and it put him on a background image and like, what the hell is it? How do I use this?
- How do I use this? You just click like on the tweet for now. I don't think you can use this yet. I think this is like proof of concept. I don't think this one's like a product product yet. I could be wrong, but I think a lot of these are like, they're doing demos, training models, just to see what happens. Dude, this is crazy to me. And then some of them, they open source the codes, right? Here's this photo of this chair. Oh, wow, put this chair in like this epic thing. So there's this and then there's someone doing, so this woman doing this thing called osmosis, which I think is more of a real product. Let me give you the link to this. Mickey Friedman.
- is her name. So what she's doing is basically you give it like an image and then you say, turn this into an ad and it'll turn it into Facebook ad creative for you by turning it into a video, making it look cooler, that sort of thing. Now again, I haven't tested these products for like for real, for real to see if it's like any good or not, but the concepts are good and whether these exact products are the ones that do it, someone's gonna do it because all these are really valuable business use cases that like, if I could do this, now a process that's costing me 10 grand a month cost me. Just cost $29 a month. Yeah, $29.99 a month and it's instantaneous and it's better. Now you're 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper and 10 times better. And like that's the makings of like, those are billion dollar companies when they do that. And so that's really exciting. This is just 100% frame breaking is what it is. When I see this stuff, it's just like, I just got a little peek into the future.
- And so then there's- And by the way, this is still super early. These products work, but so few, there are, there's a lot of people, hundreds of thousands and millions of people who know and care about this, but comparatively to how much of an impact this is going to have is where no one knows about it. Yeah, so check this guy out. So I just talked to these guys yesterday, young guys, I want to invest in them, but I didn't love their idea. So check out this guy. I'm going to send you a link.
- So I'm gonna send you this link, but in the meantime, you should just hear me out. So these guys basically, young guys, they started, one guy started a company out of college, raised a little money, didn't end up working out, failed. And he's like, then I was just thinking about what to do next. I was kind of joining these different communities. And he's like, then I met Hugh through TikTok. I was like, how'd you guys meet? I always ask every co-founder pair. How'd you guys meet? They go, we met through TikTok. I was like, you met through TikTok. Like, people, kids meet through TikTok nowadays. You do YouTube? What? So he's like, yeah, Hugh has been making Jarvis. So I don't know if you've seen the movie Iron Man, but basically an Iron Man, I guess I haven't seen it. So, but it's like, you know, there's a AI assistant who he like talks to and like takes care of shit.
- So this guy for the last year has been building in public on TikTok trying to create Jarvis like trying to create the real-life Jarvis on on on TikTok He's got like a million followers on TikTok as he's been building this So they met through this process and they decided to like create an AI company together That actually like does you know some version of this and one of the things that they made The first thing that they made is this thing called Carter and what they're doing with Carter is they're like you know in games You you walk around there's just like you know you walk into the store. It's Grand Theft Auto There's like a guy working at the store and they call these NPCs non playable characters It's just like a character that's in the game
- So that the game's not empty, but they don't do much. You can just like punch them or like talk to them and they say the same three words. So what these guys started off doing was saying, hey, any game developer who wants their characters in game to actually just be able to talk using AI, just plug this like line of code in and all of your non-playable characters will all of a sudden be like able to hold conversations with the players, chit chat back and forth. Do all the stuff we've been showing that like, you know, the AI, Joe Rogan, AI, Steve Jobs thing, like just like hold a full conversation as long as you want. Or guide the player to go do something like, hey, I'm looking for the sword to like, well, if it's the sword you seek, you should go check behind the waterfall. Now, maybe there's some answers there for you. And like it guides you automatically. You don't have to hard code that response because if the player asks for something else, they'll say something else, but like kind of guide them towards that answer.
- I don't know if it all works yet, it's like in beta, whatever. And honestly, I don't love this use case, but it is a cool use case. It's a cool idea of like, oh yeah, I guess in the future, games just these stock characters that are walking around are gonna not just be like random objects. They're gonna actually be like things you can interact with, which will change the way that the games work. Like you'll be able to spend hours and hours in the games. This guy's huge, just retweeted a tweet from this guy named Alex Wang, who's the CEO of Scale AI, which I don't even know what entirely scale AI is, other than it's like a $10 billion software company. And so he's, you know, labeling data, it's like to make your machine learning smarter, you need to label data, let's say you're a self-driving car company, you need to like look at a million images and point out which, what was a shadow versus a dog crossing the street? So they basically do you software that will let you upload your images and then there's humans like, I don't know, the Philippines or somewhere, I think that like will label your data for you and you just pay per image like two cents or one cent or whatever.
- So presumably he's quite intelligent and he has like a really grand perspective because this company is so big and he sees lots of information. This guy's hue retweeted something from Alex and he says we're at a critical turning point for humanity. Children born today are likely to have more AI friends than human friends. AI friends are going to be more reliable. I don't even know what that word, a conciliatory. What's that mean agreeable and consider it? What does this mean? What does this mean for childhood development and social norms? We will find out. That's wild. I completely agree with him. And then he says loneliness is an epidemic. It's on the rise in a real public health problem. This technology when it exists has a lot of potential for good.
- Yeah, I love that. And I'm a- This is so fascinating. So let me tell you three ideas that I think somebody could build that are not in the demos we just talked about. All right. Good. Idea one is exactly what he's talking about. And I call it, you know, some version of either the AI friend or the AI therapist. So there are a lot of people out there that would benefit from therapy. And there are apps that will connect you with a therapist on your phone, like, I don't know, seven cups of tea or like, I don't know.
- talk space or shout it out. It's some companies. You're like, I don't know, I'm not one of those therapy losers. Yeah. But you broke people, you know what you use. So these companies, and these companies do them well. They make, you know, like $100 million plus year. It's great, but it's very expensive. And so if you were a- They're cute. It's just, it's a cute little company. You know, they're, whenever like you need like a, you know, what the crypto bro is like you, you, you, you started using the word web 3.0. And you're like, those, those web 2.0 dorks, like that's what you have to describe, like whatever is just like human, you know, old school. Yeah, exactly. Reality 2.0. AI replaces DNA. That's what I, that's what I believe. And so what they were doing was they're connecting you with a real life therapist was licensed and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And because of that, you know, they've maybe taken in person visit, which might be $150 or $200 and they turn it to a,
- $60 or $90 a month subscription where you get three visits or something like that. I don't know the exact economics, but something like that where you're paying a kind of meaningful amount of money, but you're getting it more conveniently than if you just went to a, you were going in person. And you also don't have the, you know, the stigma, the taboo of telling your friends where you're going, I'm going to this. No, they're just on your phone in your pocket. Well, there are, I don't know, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people who would benefit from having someone to talk to, either a therapist or just a friend, a companion, somebody that they can confide in, somebody that won't judge them, somebody that will be positive and helpful, somebody that will maybe offer good advice.
- Somebody that will never share their secrets and somebody that has, you know, no self-interest in the matter. You could now provide that for like, I don't know, a dollar or something like that, right? Like the cost and the accessibility of curing, you know, sort of like loneliness or helping people talk through what's on their mind and get things off their chest, that's going to drop dramatically. So, AI therapy slash AI companion and friend, I think is
- a mega, mega idea. I think that is a tens of billions of dollars worth idea. Now, I think maybe there's going to be a lot of competition. There's not clear, like the network effects around that. But I do think that that is a very, very big idea. And I think it's very impactful. So that's one startup idea. You want to react to that and I'll give you the next one. Yeah, that's pretty plain and obvious to me. Like, like that's a pretty obvious straightforward solution. That's obviously challenging to pull off. But like, straightforward, and we can all predict that. So yes, I agree.
- The next one is a little sexier. This is called AI Spotify. So what's AI Spotify? Okay, so traditionally, the music business has been like, what's a situation where people just run into like a burning building? People just make terrible decisions. It's like a horror movie when you're like, don't go in there. They're like, but I heard a sound. I wanna just get check it out. You know, like it's like, you're gonna get slaughtered. That's basically what the music business was. Basically you're competing. It's like everybody loves music. So you are competing with a bunch of people who wanna like, make it better. It's like someone creating like a to-do list app or something.
- Yeah. The next thing you like, do you like pain because you're going to get pain? Yeah, exactly. Oh, you're like music? I guess you like pain too, because that's what you're going to get. Music and pain. So the second thing, so you know, unlikely you would even ever break out of the like thousands of people trying this. If you did, guess what? Here's your prize. A lawsuit, your suit out of existence, whether you're a Napster or like one of the many, many music companies that came in between. Okay, you survived the lawsuit, your Pandora, your Spotify, you didn't even get sued out of existence. Congratulations. Huge shitty economics. Because guess what? To deliver music, you have to have the rights of the record labels. They can always, they own the pricing power. And that's why you know, Spotify after, you know, like building the best in class product, getting everybody to use it after 15 years or whatever, like does not have impressive economics. It does not, does not spit off a bunch of cash the way Google or Facebook or other tech companies are able to.
- Okay, so why is AI Spotify different? Now, basically you can create a really cool music app that doesn't have to pay musicians a dollar. All right, musicians everywhere are getting pissed, but here's the good news. Here's what the service would look like. The same way Interior AI was just like, you want an industrial look, you want a minimal look, give me a starting image and I'll riff off that. What you're gonna be able to do with AI Spotify is you could basically upload a playlist or you could just like, you know, like pick a song that you really like, like Pandora. Yeah, it's just gonna be Pandora radio, but they don't exist. But these songs don't exist. So it's just gonna generate a new song on the fly for you. And like TikTok's algorithm, it's gonna learn. Like when you skip, okay, that was not good. Where did they skip? Why did they skip? What songs get liked? If you like this song, will you like this song? That sort of thing. So it's gonna generate an algorithm, the algorithm's gonna generate music on the fly for you.
- And then you can add crypto to it where I would be able to say, if I hear a good song, like by default, all the songs are like, they're here today, gone tomorrow. They're like ephemeral. You don't get to hang on to them. But if you like the song, you're like, oh, I want to keep this song. I want to, you don't just get to keep it and save it. You get to own it. So you'll click Mint. You'll Mint an NFT that now you own that song. Why? Because it was your tastes. It was your directing the engine that created that song. Now you own that and maybe it could split royalties with all the artists that like inspired that music or the algorithm just owns, you know, 50% and the user owns 50%. Did you just come up with that or is someone working on this?
- Off the dome baby got that big brain got that big boy brain no small boy stuff just great big boy ideas This is wonderful. I think yeah, this is finally you web 3 nerds are probably finally coming up with interesting shit We got a great day. Absolutely big Seriously But but I do think this idea is really great I think that the I think it's great make this and it's it's not ready yet So for example what happened was with GPT 3 somebody you know open AI basically like Downloaded all the text of the internet to create this text generation engine
- And then with Dali, they did the same thing. They downloaded all the images of the internet to create this image generation engine. And what these guys from the podcast thing or the speech stuff, they're downloading all of Joe Rogan's back catalog to generate Joe Rogan's voice as a voice engine. Somebody's about to do that for music. They're about to download all the music. They're about to go download all the music off Spotify. And then they're gonna train an engine to say, hey, create new music. This is what music is, create new music. And that's what's gonna happen. They're gonna release an open source model.
- That will say would you like to generate music? Here's an API that will just let you generate music using this this engine that we've we've been training by downloading all the music that exists Wow brilliant finally finally Finally Finally We're so stupid it's like the reason button made a few bucks Yeah, you might have artificial intelligence, but we got that real stupidity over here So stupid what's the third one I don't know I lost my list I Okay, the last thing I want to leave everybody with is
- There's this guy who's I think the I think you should be the Billy of the week Dollars isn't cool. You know it's cool a billion dollars In mad moustache so emad is his name. He's the guy who is behind Stable diffusion so you know what stable diffusion is No, I know that the tweet that you just referenced was talking all about stable diffusion
- So stable diffusion was basically an open source competitor to Dali. So open AI created Dali. It took over. Everybody was excited about it, but you had to get permission to even use it. We were asking, hey, who can get us permission for GPT-3? We want to get access. Who can get us access to Dali? Oh, you have to pay for all these credits. Oh, you don't know XYZ. So stable diffusion is basically a like here. Here's the tagline. Their tagline's great. AI buy the people for the people. Designing and implementing solutions using collective intelligence and augmented technology. They're just, they're like the fubu of the AI world. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Anybody who does this... Orus bias. Who does forus bias? Generally, they're full of shit, but this guy, I watched one interview with him.
- And I can confidently say from the bottom of me heart, after this one interview I watched, this guy's the real deal Holy field. Somebody tell you about this guy. So he's my Billy of the Week. He's not a billionaire yet, but this guy's going to be a billionaire. He basically forced to stable diffusion. He put in $600,000, I think, to fund the development of it. The company's worth a billion dollars already. What was the wealthy from? So the guy, he's born in Jordan. He's got like a British accent for some reason. He's like a math background, want type guy. You could just tell in like the first few minutes talking to him. It's like.
- I bet this guy could say more than five prime numbers and it's like yeah, he definitely can't so he works at a hedge fund and he's like I'm the quant guy at this hedge fund I'm doing trading and it's good like I'm It felt good to try to win that game and I was winning that game. Okay good. So he does that Then he has this life change. He has his first kid and his son is diagnosed with autism So he he decides to take a few years off I don't know because it was the autism or just because he had a kid, but he decided okay I'm not gonna do the hedge fund thing. I just kind of retired early after winning the hedge fund game Retires and he's like, okay, go to the doctor and he's like, what do I do about this like, you know What can we do when it comes to autism? And he's like well, there's no like
- There's no solution. And he's like, but I'm an engineer. Like I have a problem. That means there must be a solution. Like, and he's like, no, there's no solution. He's like, doesn't accept that response. So he starts doing his own research and basically ends up like, I don't know, curing his son's autism or at least making it a lot better. So here's how he did it. He basically was like, all right, there's a lot of like literature out there, like research papers, but if I try to read this one by one, it's gonna take me forever. So he creates an engine that just ingests all the papers and does a semantic search on it and basically creates like this machine learning thing to learn what is all the research about autism telling us.
- And by the way, I didn't verify any of this. I don't know if any of this was real. This sounds a little too good to be true. But again, just judging the book by its cover, I think this guy's legit. So I choose to believe. This is the biggest hedge ever. It takes like three weeks from now. This guy turns out to like, you know, this guy pivots to selling his NFT collection. And it's like, oh wait, this guy changed his name. And like he's to longer money for a living. In case that comes out, let me just say, there's a chance. Probably. Probably he's just a super nerd who's amazing. OK, let me tell you why I think that's true. Just because he's a brown guy with a British accent is what you're saying. You say, just based off of what he looks like. And the vocabulary is stunning. So he's describing autism. And he's like, you know, the way that he's like, autism is sort of like, it's a phenotype. It's like a behavioral description. And it has an underlying causes, which is like a certain body chemistry things. He's like, well, what causes those? And could we rebalance the body chemistry so that the behavior changes?
- And what he realized was that autism as a whole comes from many different types of these imbalances. And he's like, so he's like, their doctors are correct that we can't just like fix it or cure it because there's so it's a multimodal system. There's so many different like inputs that create this output. He's like, but on an individual level, if you can understand where in one individual, the body chemistry is maybe slightly different. Perhaps there is a treatment that we could do or there is a rebalancing that you could do of the body's biochemistry. And so he starts to create like a
- a process for himself over a couple of years to try to help this. And he said, in this interview I was watching, he was like, yeah, his, my son is doing so much better. And like, you know, he didn't claim like, oh, I've cured autism or anything like that. But he's like, I learned, you know, deeply like, you know, what was, what goes into these kind of like biological systems and like what we can do, you know, how maybe science is gonna get better in the future using AI. So that's kind of where his AI itch got started. You know, machine learning and AI is gonna be able to help these things. And so then in 2020, he's at a dinner in Davos.
- as you do. Yeah, as one does. Yeah, as people with British accents are future vocabulary, right? I did a chiffa-way last night. Okay, so this guy was at a dinner in Davos, and he's there, you know, and people are talking about this virus coming out of China. And he's like, huh, that's the way they're describing this virus as COVID-19 thing, and he looks into it, he's like, sounds very similar to autism, where it's like, he calls it a multi-stelmic inflammatory disease. And his basically, his main thing was like, this thing is complicated, and he's like, it was pretty clear right away that developing a vaccine for this was going to take some time. Like, we weren't going to be able to do this in months. It was probably going to take, you know, a year or more to try to figure this out.
- And even if we did, it wouldn't work for everybody, because again, this is like a multimodal system. And like, you know, these are like one size fits all solutions are not, I'm not going to work very well. And so he starts this like thing to try to help use data to help, you know, policymakers for COVID, like do a better job, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he goes through this process, the bureaucracy of like this whole like, you know, dealing with these world health organizations and UNESCO and World Bank and all this stuff. It ends up being too bureaucratic and he like, you know, gets fed up with it. And it's just like sort of the whole initiative collapses.
- And then he comes up with what he calls his permithian mission. The permithius, the myth of the guy who sort of like gives fire to humans. He's like, I want to open source all of the powerful AI and ML tools that exist so that they're not controlled by large private corporations. I like that. And so that's why the- For us bias, baby. Like open AI is called open AI, but it's a private organization. They're very close to the vest about what they're working on and then when they release it, they release it kind of like not to everybody all at once and all that stuff. And if you look at the charts, like stable diffusion has like far surpassed open AI. And then the tweet that went viral on this was like,
- You know, open AI, meaning the actual open sourced AI is beating open AI, right? So the people who actually are taking an open approach are crushing now the company, the private organization. How do they make money then? I think it's the same sort of thing you like, you know, you pay for some credits or usage along the way, like they open source the model. But if you want to run it blah blah blah, who knows, maybe they're gonna have some like, you know, open source companies have these like weird weird models where it's like Linux, you know, Red Hat makes a bunch of money through services and things like that that are not like
- what you would expect. So, he says he starts stable diffusion because his daughter asked him if he could do the same thing he did for COVID or whatever, for art. Oh, by the way, in between, he wins this grant that, or this like X prize, I think Elon Musk and somebody else put up this $15 million prize for who can, what was it? So it was like who can basically create a system that teaches kids in foreign countries, like, I don't know, I forgot what it was, like English or mathematics for less than like, you know, $75 total cost, just like that. Basically, they created this thing on an iPad that you could just give to kids in like countries and they would basically like be able to learn or pass certain tests within 75 days or something like that. I don't know the exact specifics, but he wins this like $15 million thing, again, doing good in the world.
- And so anyways, he creates stable diffusion and, or his company's stability AI creates, releases stable diffusion. It kind of takes off. And he also has, you know what that thing, what's it called, like a Fantasia, where it's like, you say a word and it creates an image in your head, or something like that, or like emotions have colors or something like that. It's like these senses are linked in your brain in a way that's not normal. Like numbers have smells, they know the shit like that. He has one of those.
- What has it been? Sinesthesia. There's Sinesthesia, but he has a different one. He has another one I think called If and Tasia. Anyway, so he's supporting researchers and he's trying to give the money to open source this thing. And then he's like, okay, I'm gonna bring together 20 of the best engineers, like Manhattan Project Style. And I'm gonna self fund this thing. And I'm going to, we're gonna create a project in this space and they create a stable diffusion. And basically, he self-funded 600,000 and got these 20 engineers to come in and they created this thing that's taken off and now valued over a billion dollars. And- It's kind of the same. It's kind of the same. It's kind of the same. Just like, it just-
- When I talked to Ryan Holiday the other day for the pod, I felt inspired at the end because I was like, your type of success is awesome and inspiring to me because I too can work hard and achieve what you achieve. And then I hear a story like this guy and I'm like, that story just bitch slapped me in the face. You know what I mean? Like, I just, I am, I am nothing and I am nobody. And this guy is going to steal my lunch money. That's it. That idea just bullied me. No, he's going to steal your lunch buddy. He's going to give you lunch money. And you're going to be like, who is it? Why are you giving me lunch buddy? And he's just like, don't even worry about it son. And you're like, wow, thanks dad. Yeah, like this guy. He just straight dad. Yeah, I just feel inadequate. Yeah, that's actually what the week section is. It's really the inadequacy of the week. Yeah, it's like, ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to feel like shit? I got a story for you. This guy who's young man. Better than you. Shorter than you. Ritter than you. Did it faster than you. Doing the same thing you said you wanted to do. But he actually did it. And guess what? He's also ripped. And you know, like that. That's what I feel about Ahmad. Is there a world where he's full of shit?
- Like I said, I didn't know of this guy's existence to like three weeks ago. So yeah, like there's definitely a world where everything I just said turns out to be like, you know, not true or this guy turns out to be, you know, he's like, yeah, I taught those kids math, but then, you know, they work for me now. And it's like, whoa, what's going on here? Like, where are the kids in Kenya working for you, bro? There's like this commercial for a car commercial and there's like, they're on the highway and it's in bumper to bumper traffic and this guy pulls off on the side of the road and starts going through this bumpy force. And the guy in the passenger seat goes, dude, this is pretty scary. Have you ever taken this shortcut before? And the guy driving goes, yeah, once, including this time, that's like you telling these stories. You just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know all about this guy. I just learned about him an hour ago. Yeah, I'm literally reading it while I'm talking. I'm reading my researcher's notes while we're talking because I watched the interview, but I wasn't taking notes because I was driving at the time. And so all I remember is my feeling, right? What's the Maya Angelou quote?
- You won't remember the facts of what you're researching. You'll just remember how it made you feel. That's what happened to me. I don't remember any of the words this guy said, and I didn't go fact check them. But I remember how it made me feel. And to lose said that. Yeah, they're famous quotes. Like people don't remember what you say. They'll remember how you made them feel. So it's basically that. I remember how this guy made me feel. And he made me feel the same way I felt when I heard Vitalik talk for the first time about, you know, we get the knees. You know, Vitalik when I heard him talk, Zuckerberg when you hear them talk. Like people who are extremely mission driven.
- while also being slightly Asperger's and also being extremely impressive in their past accomplishments. And they're just very matter of fact about the way they think the world is going and they're not trying to hype you up. They're not trying to sell you on it. So you ask them a question that gave you their answer and then you're like, that answer just broke your frame and so you keep asking them questions. And then it's almost like the tone of their voice is sort of like, I said what I said. I'm like, yes, this is what I believe and this is what I'm doing with my time. And yes, like, this is what I think is important. And you're just like, you know, you just sort of like you look stupid when you're talking to them because you just come from like, it's like you're speaking a different language. They're speaking a language of like being mission driven and confident and like knowing their shit. And you're just like, you know, me, you know, just being silly old me trying to understand what the hell they're talking about. This is one of those episodes that we record. And I, it's like I have to take a nap at the end. I'm so exhausted from excitement.
- Do you ever get like that? You're like a, you know, like my dog, like if I like feed them too many treats, like in such a way where it like gets pumped up and hyper about it, he's gonna take a nap just from the excitement. That's how I feel. Like I gotta go like rest my eyes. Like I'm gonna go like, I'm gonna go buy a dad chair just to take this nap that I need. I need to be reclined at a 34 degree angle and my feet keeps me above my hips. Yeah. At the end of this episode, I'm gonna get up to make a grunting noise just because, just because of, not from pain. Just, just out of habit. This is just so fascinating to me. I think this episode has had a lot of mind blowing things. I'm eager to see what people say. I think that I feel just amped after. This is almost like a quit and dedicate your life to this topic, type of thing.
- You're like almost Not actually It's like with someone who has worked at your company forever and it's their last day You just you got to go say goodbye and hug them, but they're like all the way across the room Work for you for like 10 years and you know their Nives name and their kids names and you're so excited to give them a hug and tell them how much they mean to you, but
- It's the couch is really comfortable. They're just all the way across. They're all the way across the, it's gonna be at least 50 steps. That's what it is, AI is all the way across the room. That's so good. All right, we're ending it on that. We're out of here.

9 Leadership Frameworks From Elon Musk, Dr. House, _ More [T3_XtJS2290].txt

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- What's up, y'all? Sean here. Sam is in Europe traveling around with the fam. And so I'm on my own today. And I wanted to do something cool and I think I got a great idea. So I believe, here's my guess. I think this pod is going to be one that people really, really like because I know I would have wanted to hear this at some point in time. And the reason why is because most of the people who listen to this podcast are some form of leadership, right? You might have started your own company or your own business.
- You might be kind of an exec somewhere or a manager somewhere or you want to be a leader, right? So most people who don't want to be leaders are not listening to a podcast like this. So the problem is me and everybody else sucks. You know, everybody sucks the first time that they are managing people. And And this isn't like, you know, how to manage people 101. There's a lot of books that are written about this. There's some best practices. There's common sense. But I wanted to share some of the unorthodox some of the weird things that I do that I have found work for me. And they might not work for everybody, but they work for me.
- And not all of these people are gonna agree with. Not all of these will work for you, but again, they all work for me. Nobody, I couldn't find any of this stuff in a book. I heard about these either from somebody or I just kind of made it up on my own. And so I think I have five, maybe six different things that I do that are unorthodox, but work. Okay, so let me start with number one. And this is called Doctor House. It's inspired by Doctor House. So if anybody watches the TV show House, he always does this thing. The show is like there's this genius doctor, but he's kind of like a crumogen. And all the other doctors really respect him because he's amazing, but he's kind of hard to work with. One of the things he does that's amazing but hard to work with is he has these like three junior doctors who are kind of like, he's like,
- I don't know, advising them or whatever. They work under him. And when a patient comes in and they run a test to try to figure out what's wrong with the person, he doesn't just look at it and say, here's what's wrong with the person, right? First of all, it's usually not that straightforward. Second of all, even if he kind of has an idea, he doesn't spoon feed it to his, um, to his team. Instead, he will usually slap the, the, the, the, like maybe the scan or the data or the, the X-ray or whatever up on a screen and he'll say, what do you see here? Or he'll say, what's weird about this? Or he'll say, what's interesting about this? And then the team has to start thinking and getting curious and looking at the thing and saying, well, there must be something there. What do I see?
- And this is really effective. I do this all the time. I will take, let's say some data I'm looking at when I'm curious about some messy, something that makes me go, hmm. And what I used to do is I used to just like share that with the team. Hey guys, here's what I found. Look at this data. This data shows that A is B and C, right? I like give them a conclusion. I'm basically spoon feeding them an answer. They'll read it. They'd say, yeah, that makes sense. And then they would go on with their day, right? Because they didn't have to struggle to understand it. They didn't have to be curious enough to go find it. They just got spoon fed an answer and they say, yeah, yeah, I'm not surprised by that. All right, I'm gonna move on. Or, oh, that's weird.
- Okay, sounds like you got to answer. I'm gonna again move on So I do it the other way, which does three things One it trains the team to be curious and clever, right? Because you're not looking for some luck I'm not telling you to go do 10 more analyses. I'm saying there's something in this. What is it? It's a little bit of a riddle The second is it's not a gotcha, right? Like I'm at genuinely asking Because they will see things that you don't see so even if you saw one of the interesting things they might find two others that you didn't really Appreciate
- And the last is it trains everybody on how to, because maybe one person out of the group will see the interesting thing, but the other four will say, why didn't I see that? And that trial and error, that like guess and check is how people get better at stuff. So you'll train a team of curious, clever people who get good at finding insights in data. And so that's the Dr. House technique. I recommend you try it rather than spoon feeding your team answers. Okay, the second one I learned from my wife. My wife was a consultant.
- And she used to go to these companies and it was like, it was always like, I'm getting alignment, right? So it would be a board meeting of like, you know, Yahoo's board meeting. It's like, you have 10 executives at Yahoo and they cannot, you know, they all think they're on the same page. And then only when you ask them certain questions, do you realize that like everybody has like a different, you know, game plan, vision of what we're trying to do here, et cetera, et cetera. So she got good assessing that out, but people are a little bit, not defensive, but they're a little bit limited when you just ask them very literal logical questions that tap into only the analytical part of their brain. Like if you say, what are our three key objectives for the year, they sort of feels like they're taking a math test.
- And so she does this thing that was called the holiday party. The holiday party tactic is she had me go to a whiteboard and she goes, all right, let's fast forward. It's Christmas Eve of this year. And we're at the company holiday party. I want you to start drawing what's at that company holiday party. I'm like, what do you mean? Just like, just draw things that would make it an awesome company holiday party. So I'm like, okay, so all of a sudden I'm having kind of fun. I'm something creative, I'm drawing. I'm just thinking of cool shit that could be at a party, right? So my guard is down. And so I'll draw like whatever. There's a DJ and we kind of laugh because the DJ booth is like, you know, my drawing is bad. And then I'll draw the next thing. And then she'll say, OK, what's on the script? What are you celebrating?
- And that question, what are we celebrating is like, that's kind of like, what are we trying to do this year? Right? What's the milestone that we hit? And instead of saying, what are we trying to do? It's assuming it's already done, that we're already celebrating, we're popping bottles because we hit 1 million users or 10 million downloads or 100 million in revenue, whatever it is. And so it's, you know, we'd say our big North Star goal. Cause it's like that screen can only have one big thing on it that we're all choosing our glass to. So what is that North Star metric? And then she would say, cool, let's walk around, like, you know, who's at this party? And you know, there's this little exercise. And as she unfolded this party, it kind of, it first got me in the mood for winning, right? Because it's like, I'm already working backwards from the assumption that we've won.
- Then I identify the North Star goal and then after we do that little game and only takes two minutes then we would say alright So how are we gonna get there right? Well, what would be the things that we would need to do now so that that party happens and all of a sudden we're we're talking and brainstorming from a place of certainty and confidence Rather than fear and doubt about not being able to pull it off and distress right because when you're in fight or flight your brain only works in a very limited capacity Compared to when you are you know at ease relax Which is why you know great ideas come to you in the shower because you're you're relaxed You have warm water pouring on top of your head And so your brain kind of melts away and can start to you know put together different data points that That are not there when you're tense and so I love this tactic of the holiday party drawing game It really loosens people up it gets them thinking it focuses them on the North Star goal and then when you make a plan after that they go into that plan from in a state of mind of we already won
- Okay, now here's the opposite. This is called the Misery Loves Company tactic. Okay, so whenever we're making a plan, at the beginning of any plan, everything seems achievable and everyone's optimistic. And it's hard to say, it's one thing to ask somebody, what are the key risks in this? And then people, you know, again, they get a little defensive, they're using the logical part of your brain. So a better question is, you know, if I was to, let's say, you know, we go do this, I go do my thing and we get busy. And you know, six months from now, 12 months from now, we catch back up, we're getting a beer here at the local pub.
- In the afternoon, it's four in the afternoon, we go grab a beer and we say, man, that idea was so cool. Let's assume it went wrong. Right? So man, that idea was so cool. I can't believe it didn't work out. What happened? What is the most likely reason we would give that things went south? And this is a way to identify the core risk, the chief assumption, the riskiest proposition in your plan. It's to sort of work backwards from we're getting a beer, we're hanging out. It's already failed. And we say, man, that thing had so much potential. What went wrong? What do you think is the number one reason it might go wrong? And then because you're identifying that up front, you can now work against that. You can get you can game plan around that.
- Okay, here's another one. I find that people get very defensive about the status quo, especially the leaders because as a leader, you're sort of responsible for the way that the company works, right? You're responsible for how many people work at your company, right? If I said, did you hire too many people, most people don't want to say yes. And the reality is that certainly, I don't know, 20, 30, 40% of the time, the answer truly is yes, you've hired too many people. But if you ask CEOs, they'll rarely ever say yes.
- And in the same way, you'll say, are you working on a bunch of useless stuff? Or are you working on a bunch of extraneous things? They would say, no, I mean, these are all important. They're valuable. Right. So people get defensive about their current plan. And so how do you get how do you get people to identify the fat in their their plan, right? Be able to trim the fat without the pressure and the stress of them feeling like they're wrong, or they're being blamed, or that they're going to have to make some tough decisions to have some hard conversations. Because of that, they just want to avoid it. So here's what I do.
- We play a game. It's sort of like that, you know that F murder mary game, right? Or you decide, you know, if out of these three choices, who would you who would you murder? Who would you marry? Who would you F? So similarly, let's just focus on the murder part, which is like If I asked you right so I could sit down with some with any manager in my company. I could say in your team If you I know you love your team and I know they're they're they're all great. They're all great in their own ways But if you had to do it What would be the three who would be the three people that you would cut if you had to cut not say any well We're you're not gonna cut anybody, but who wouldn't those three people be?
- Similarly, like out of all the projects and initiatives you're doing, what are the three that you would cut if you had to cut three initiatives off? Which one would go? You could do this with anything, right? Customers. All your customers on the roster, your clients, who are the three that you would cut? Or they're just a pain in the ass that's not worth, the juice is not worth the squeeze? And if you can create a safe space, basically, where somebody can freely identify what they would cut if they were gonna cut, but don't worry, we're not asking you to cut anything, and you do it yourself, right? You're not just asking others to do this, but you do it yourself, and you think aloud, maybe do it as a group, like, hey, what projects would we cut? Which team members are really not, you know, are at the bottom, right? There certainly is a top and a bottom. Who is that, right? Which customers are the top and the bottom?
- And if you can identify those, it plants a seed. And once they've set it out loud, they've heard a truth. It's very hard to unsee a truth. And it might be a month later, or two months later, or three months later, but eventually they will decide to trim some of the fat, either on their team, their projects, or the client list, that will help the team grow. So that's the F-Bird and Mary tactic. Okay, I think I've done, what is that? It's four tactics, okay, let's do another one. This is the superpower one. So this is a way to build people up. So I did this at my last startup.
- And people really resonate with this which is I made a presentation About each person of the team. I did this on a Friday afternoon. I said hey guys Let's go do a little happy hour and I said I got a presentation for you guys. I said You know I've learned that in it in any team You can you can look for two types of people you can look for people who? Lack weaknesses meaning they're pretty well-rounded. They have no fatal flaws, but they may not be great at anything Right? They're they're just good. They're at least good at everything Or you can have some people that are amazing at some things in kind of week and other areas And I've learned that the the best performing teams are filled with people who are amazing and at least one area So you're hiring for an extreme strength not a lack of weakness, right? That's a Andreessen Horowitz
- framework that I really loved. And so I said, I'd like to, you know, I said, but the funny thing is for most people, they're not even aware of what their extreme strength is. And because you're too close to it, so normal for you to be great at it, you don't even really realize you're great at that, at some point. It's other people who pointed out, so I'd like to point out for you the superpower that I've seen each of you have. And then I would give, and so I put each person's face on a slide, I would say, hey, this is like, for example, hey, this is Derek. Derek's our designer.
- Derek, what I've noticed is your superpower. I don't know if you're aware of this, but most designers that I've worked with, their creative types, they're sort of like, messy desk, procrastinator types, they'd pull all nighters when they get creative inspiration and they'd do amazing work sometimes. And other times, you know, they get stuck with sort of a creative writer's block of sorts. I said, Derek, your superpower is that you're a great designer, but you're like the mailman. You deliver every day at the same time, right? Like I give you the brief. I scribble a poorly written address of where I'm trying to get this package. You're able to interpret it like a mailman and say, oh, I know where this is trying to go. And then you deliver it every day at 5 p.m. before you leave.
- And I said, you're like the mailman. I said, and you don't work on the weekends. I know that you're not the type of guy that I should be hitting up for that crazy project we're gonna do on the weekend. So you're like the mailman. You deliver every day of the week except for Sundays. And so I gave him basically a superpower, which is you have this amazing ability to consistently take a loose set of instructions and deliver on it. And I gave him a nickname that goes with it. That's why I call you the mailman. And then that's your super on. I gave it a little symbol. And then I went to the next person. I said, oh, this is FurCon. FurCon is.
- He's not going to win any awards for being the most eloquent speaker or the most politically polished kind of guy. But man, when you talk to Furcon, it's almost like he's allergic to bullshit. Like you know when someone's allergic to peanuts, you can't even have a peanut dish. You feel uncomfortable taking peanuts around them because you might kill them. I said, that's what it's like when I bring bullshit around you. I don't even feel comfortable saying bullshit around you because you're so good at seeing through bullshit and saying, that doesn't make sense or wait, I thought you said this other thing so how can both of those be true? And so you were allergic to bullshit. That is your superpower. You just can't stand it and that because of that, it makes the rest of us up our game and not bring half-baked plans or incongruent illogical plans to you because you'll sniff it out in a second.
- And the beautiful thing is these things are both true and aspirational, meaning they are this way, but by giving it their superpower, they then want to live up to that identity you've given them. And so you can kind of architect the type of team you want by calling out areas they're good, but they may not be the best at it or they may not be doing it all the time, but by giving them their superpower, they will start to do it more often. Okay, so that's the superpower technique. Okay, I'm going to give you three quick ones. The Tesla master plan. If you've never read it, you must wrote a master plan for Tesla.
- back when it started. So he wrote the master plan V1 like 10 years ago, and then V2, and basically he said, master plan V1 basically was like, you should go read it. I've handwritten his many times, and then wrote my own plan for my own business after writing his. And so his plan basically says, Tesla's job is to accelerate the society's move off of fossil fuels onto sustainable energy. To do that, we need to create a car that's high performance and high efficiency.
- And so we're going to start with the Roadster, the expensive car, then we're going to make the next car, then we're going to make the mass market Model 3 car blah blah blah. And he's like, you know, so in summary, here's the master plan, build an expensive car to build a brand, build a less expensive car to get more people on it, then build the, use the economies of scale and the learnings from production to build a mass market car that will get to everybody, right? That's the master plan. And then he wrote a mass market of V2, but it is very powerful if you can write the master plan for your company, right? It's basically, and it doesn't have to be right, right? But it's you putting it out there. What are we here to do? How do we plan to do it? And like, you know, here's the takeaway. And if you look at his writing style, it's a very empowering style. And so I like to take his master plan and then write my own.
- All right, the next one comes from the CEO coach called Matt Macari or something like that. This is a technique called the calendar audit. It was very simple. Imagine you print out your calendar from the last week and you look at every meeting that was scheduled every kind of block of time that you used and you take three highlighters. You take a green highlighter that says that was something that I enjoyed that gave me energy. You highlight those in green. And you take a red highlighter, you say, these ones that I highlighted in red are the ones that I felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body. These are the soul crushing, energy draining, things that I dread, things of my day that I don't look forward to. You put those in red. And then you have the yellow that are neutral.
- And you look at that and then you say, okay, this is an audit. I now need to take these red things and I need to figure out over time how I'm going to get more green than red, right? How I'm going to phase all the red away and get to only green. And that might be hiring somebody who likes doing that thing because what's red for you might be green for them or just getting rid of it or minimizing the time you do it and saying, do we really need three meetings for this? Could we not just do it in one? Could this meeting be an email, right? Or whatever. So calendar audit is a very valuable technique. Okay, so that was so so far we've had number one, the Dr. House screenshot technique.
- Number two, my wife's holiday party worked backwards question. Number three, if we got a beer saying, you know, saying, man, it's a bummer that thing failed. Why did it fail? Right? That's number three. Number four is creating a safe space for the F. Merger-Mary game. Right? Who are the three that you would double down on? Who are the three that you would cut? Three is just a magic number. It might be 3000 for you. I don't know, whatever. The number doesn't matter. Same idea. What are the bottom 20% of things? What are the top 20% of things? So what you're trying to identify? And with the promise of, we're not taking action on this right now.
- So that's what, four, yeah, that's four. Number five was tell each person their superpower and give it to your team as a presentation. They will live up to that reputation. Number six is the Tesla Master Plan. Number seven is the calendar audit. Okay, I'm gonna do two more, maybe three. Number eight is peer groups. So anytime I have an objective, like let's say, I wanna become a great poker player or I wanna get to 100,000 Twitter followers or I wanna build a DDC brand that does $50 million a year. I will create a text chat group.
- of five other people who are in the same ballpark as me of where they're at now and have that same ambition as their top ambition. Mentors and advisors overrated peer group underrated. And so that's what I would do. And I would start by texting them and then I would do like a once a month kind of call where we could spend three hours on the phone or in person hanging out shooting the shit together, sharing tactics and strategies, what's working for them and trying to achieve, your mutually shared goal. Okay, last one is the kickoff document. I think this is number nine.
- A kickoff document is a template that I have, and I could share this, but if you subscribe to my newsletter, I think you get it. So just go to SeanPourey.com, and I think you can get it. Or if not, just email me at Sean at SeanPourey.com. Okay, so the kickoff document is basically something I do before I start a project, because I believe that clarity is power. I think too often people go into doing something without actually being clear of, what are we trying to do here? Why are we trying to do it? How will we measure success? And what's the first thing that we should really do?
- And that's what a kickoff document does. So the kickoff doc has three sections. The first is, what are we trying to do? It's one liner. The next is, what's a win look like? And I define a win in two ways. I say, what's the floor of this win? Meaning what is the minimum that I would consider like a successful good outcome? Like what's achievable thing? And then what's the F yeah win? Which is the like the result that would make me safe. F yeah, then that really worked. And so now I get kind of like a range. I have like the bottom goal, my floor goal, and then I have my stretch goal. And then I also do an anti-goal, meaning.
- What are some traps that I could fall into along the way that would like make this whole thing even if I hit my goals I would feel bad at the end of it because I like did this other thing right like for example We all have these in life like a You know, I would love to Be successful, but I don't want to you know screw over people along the way and carry that guilt with me, right? So that's like Being successful financially would be your goal. I mean you'd put some numbers around it But then your anti goal would be I don't want to do this in a way that makes me feel unethical or
- or ashamed in any way of what I did. I'd like to feel proud of it. So those become your antigules, or like, I'd like to be successful, but I want to be able to make sure I'm home with my kids every day at five, because that's really important to me. So an antigul would be, yeah, I made it happen, but I'm never home. So my antigul would be never getting home before, next time. And so it's important to identify your antigules. They're very clarifying for you. And the kickoff ends with your power hour, basically like, what's something I could do in the next hour that would just create like momentum? Get me to a win. And so this is not like do some research or make a list. It's like, get momentum towards the actual outcome. So if I want to, you know, increase sales, it's like, make a sale, make one sale, or like, if I wanted to grow my list, my email list, it's like, I don't know, post a thread on Twitter in the next hour that will get some subscribers to my list. Just something to get the ball rolling that's action oriented. So you're not just always in planning,
- So those are nine different little tips and tricks that really work for me that I don't think you'll learn most of those and I don't know, business school or, you know, at your job that people, you know, even if people try to do management training, it's usually not things like this. These are my kind of like, you know, unorthodox pet tricks that I like to do that help me, you know, with my companies. And so hopefully that's helpful for you. If it is, let me know. You can tweet it at me at Sean VP. If it's not helpful, tweet at me saying, Hey, you know, wasn't that helpful? Honest feedback. I love honest feedback. So either way works for me.

9 Underrated Apps, Twitter Accounts _ Tools You_re Missing Out On (#360) [viL8ykYJqKo].txt

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- Hey, Sam and Sean, this is Colby from Woodbridge, Virginia. It seems like you guys are always finding cool stuff, whether that's media or cool tools. So anyway, my question is, what have you been into recently? Thanks. Okay. So the question of the one question Friday we got was basically around what are just random. We seem to be into really random things. What are some of these random things that we're really into right now stuff that we really like? It could be a podcast, it could be a video, it could be a book, it could be an app or a tool, anything like that. What are we into? It's kind of like our info diet or the tools in our tool belt that we really like right now. So Sam, what do you got? All right. I'll write off all three of mine because they're all related. So the first one, the both of these might sound all three might sound a little obvious, but hear me out. So YouTube premium. What's the most surprising thing? I'm a long time YouTube premium subscriber. Most people aren't. And so I actually unsubscribed from Spotify. So I don't use paid Spotify anymore. I only use YouTube. And the reason being is, hey, I watch all my TV on there, but be you can listen to any music and they make playlists for you. And then you can lock your phone and put it in your pocket and you could listen to music, playlists, and it's way better.
- even Spotify because they have live versions and like unreleased versions and like illegal stuff, you know, like things that were like, you know, aren't copyrighted, things like that. So I like YouTube premium. The second one, do you ever listen to Audible? I am not an audiobook. I always found it boring and a little slow. I kind of tuned it out. So there's this thing called audible original. So first of all, there's audible plus, which is if you pay for it, you get all these free audiobooks. So I'm always clicking around, but they've got some that are as short as 30 minutes. So like short stories or like a short like class, but then they have audible originals and they'll do like courses. Remember YouTube or iTunes University? It's almost like that. So they like put like whole like Stanford lectures. So I just click on one of the lectures and listen for a few minutes on audible originals or they do this other thing where they have these like huge productions where it's an audiobook, but there's like famous actors and multiple of them. So it's almost like a play or a movie, but audible only. And it's free if you're a subscriber. So I like that. And the last thing all related. Have you ever used the app Libby? Have you heard of Libby? Never heard of this. Do you have a library card? No. Okay. So if you go to your local library and you get a card, which is free, you can enter in your library card to this app called Libby and you could access unlimited amounts of ebooks and audiobooks so long as the library in your town has it. And what? Oh, oh, oh, oh.
- only from that one library. No, no, no, no, from like, it's like everything. Like anything you could imagine, it's likely there. Yeah, but listen, there's one major downside, which is some things like the popular titles, they'll like, are they only allocated? I don't know how they do this. They're only allocated a certain amount, like 10 copies. So like there's this book called Catch Me If You Can that I wanted to read and it was pretty popular. So I had a click request hold, and then like I got it like three days later. So you just request like you want like 10, 20, 30, 50 things and like, you know, each thing is released like every couple of days. And so it's not always instantaneous, but a lot of times it is. But it's called Libby, free audio books and free ebooks. It's pretty sick. That's kind of amazing. I had never heard of that. And I feel like nobody knows about that. So they're not going to be checked out when I go do it, or at least where I'm from. Okay, so I'm going to give you a few things that I'm really into right now. I'm just going to go quick because none of these are super revolutionary, but they're just things I like. So sending voice notes and I message. I have, I went from, I never sent a voice note. And I was like, why is this feature even here? And I heard that people in China and Asia love to know.
- to do it because it's slow to type there. I think because now my dad, I'm always just like on the go or not buy my computer all the time. I can't I'm holding a kid in one arm. I'm just trying to type in the other. I have gone all in on on voice notes. It's basically how I run my business now is I'm just sending voice notes all day to my team. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the clients hold history calls, tickets, emails and here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot grow better. Dude I hate voice notes. I hate them. Well, you hate receiving them. You hate receiving them. So if we're if you and I are in friend mode, I'm not listening to one. If you and I are in work mode, well, no, not even you or me. If mean an employee are in work mode, I expect they're going to listen to mind if I'm the boss. And so I get why that's cool. But if we're peers and you send me one, I just automatically default to. Yeah. That's the response. It's definitely an F you to the receiver. It's like, you know, sit here and listen to me talk slowly and ramble for a minute. But like, hey, that's kind of what the podcast is to. So you know, whatever. All right. My second one, this app that's called I think it's called compounding. I think you use this to compound or compounding. You have this app. The personal finance one. Yeah, it's basically just one app that lets you plug in basic metrics. Like if you started with 100 grand and it's compounding at a 6% rate in 10 years, it'll be here 15 years, it'll be here 25 years, it'll be here. And the reason I do this is not because every day I need to run a compounding interest calculation. But every day I should just as a reminder of the power of simple compounding. I think Warren Buffett has said, you know, compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world or something like that. 100% true. And I think it is very like compounding interest basically breaks your brain. It's very hard to like foresee how a simple change between 5% or 8% will matter over a 10 year or 15 year period. But it matters in a big way. Yeah, it's really fun because I just have a compound interest one. Yeah, this is this is all that's all it does. Okay, but it's simple. And it's my reminder that Sloan steady wins the race because I'm pretty ADD when it comes to investments, ideas, things like that. So I need to remind myself of the power of compound interest over a long term. Okay, related. There's a Twitter account that you should follow.
- that everybody I think should follow called I never give Twitter accounts is kind of shine because We do got that influence. It's gonna blow them up But this person deserves it their name is 10k diver. Have you ever seen this again? Love them love 10k diver is based is just basic Personal finance so it's just basic. I'm not personal finance basic financial knowledge. So it'll be like Hey, if you're ever looking at a company a cup of coffee and sit down because this Sunday We're talking about balance sheets how to look at him what to learn and blah blah and he just breaks it down so simply so beautifully very like simple finance finance concept is being broken down by this person they've shot up they have like 250,000 followers now and After this they'll have at least 252,000 followers I believe and so that this account is to me one of my favorite high signal things I normally hate Twitter threads. I love this guy's Twitter threads I find a lot of benefit in just re reviewing the basics or learning the basics for the first time of something that I didn't really Understand or no, so 10k divers my next one. There's a billion websites on Chrome But most people are using it Ineffectively here's the five best plugins that you need to be using right now. I got Jack did you see he did a mock thread on these? He goes there are 26 letters in the alphabet, but most people don't know how to use them My favorite letters and how to use them a
- A is an awesome letter. I sent it to him right when he did it. I go, this is amazing. That thread did over a hundred thousand hundred thousand likes, maybe 200,000. All right. Second thing. Next one is I talked about this before the trigger point massage ball. So when we were at Camp MFM, Mike, I had like a Achilles problem. You were like, Hey, you need to use this there gun to loosen it up. And this other guy was like, yo, use this. He threw me like a lacrosse ball. Yeah. And he's like, use this to roll out your calf. And I did. And it like I went from, I wasn't going to be able to play to like, I was able to play, you know, like, just because that thing loosened it up so well. And I forgot to give it back to the guy. So I ended up bringing this lacrosse ball home. And two things happen. One, start playing the cross. Love.
- No, I love just having a ball in my hand at all times. Like just walking through the airport. I was just bouncing it around. Dude, just I'm like a little child. Having a ball just makes my life 15% better. I love fiddling with like, you know, a lacrosse ball. It's amazing. And so I had it through the airport, the airplane, I haven't at home all the time now I'm playing with this thing. And I'm also using it for these trigger point massages for this like, you know, fashion release or whatever they call it. It's like this thing that helps you feel more limber and loose. Okay, I have another fitness related one that sounds gross. But for somebody out there, this might be helpful. Goat milk, you ever drink goat milk? Not much. I eat a lot of that goat cheese, but no goat milk kind of has grossed me out. Oh, well goat cheese is the creme de la creme. We all know that milk. Most people are a little bit grossed out about it, or they just don't know about it. I got put onto this by my trainer. He's like, Hey, if you want to put something in your, your smoothies or shakes, protein shakes or whatever, instead of using normal milk, use goat milk, for most adults, you're able to digest goat milk better. And I think also like the enzymes in goat milk don't like block the protein. And so if you're drinking a protein shake and you drink normal, like, like lactose based milk, I think there's like some inhibition where it doesn't like work as well, but tastes better, but doesn't work as well. So goat milk has been a little trick. And my last fitness one, walking backwards, which is from the the knees over toes guy playbook. I have had knee problems in both knees of
- on my MCL on both sides. I've dislocated both kneecaps before. I do not have good knees in general. And I'm trying to work on that. And one of the things that's helped me feel better and like, you know, run better, all the stuff is doing, you know, what do they call it? Like regression movements, basically going in the opposite way that you normally go. So let's say you always sit hunched over to computer, then you need to do specific exercise going in the opposite direction, just sort of like, you know, counterbalance this other movement you've been habituated to. Most of us only run and walk forward. So back pedaling is an amazing way to sort of like strengthen and push blood flow into the parts of your body that need it. And I feel better doing like this like five minute backwards walk every single day. So looks goofy as hell walking around the neighborhood backwards. But it's a thing that I'm doing that I
- I enjoy right now. Chad Puri. You're talking about the cross balls and walking back. Yeah. Chaddington. Yeah. First name Sean middle name Tucker. I'm here. All right. Well, that's one question Friday.

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- When we think of entrepreneurship and we think of starting stuff, we think, how can I be innovative? How can I be new in reality in order to make a lot of money? It's how do I get locked into this to the point to where like, it's going to be a pain in the ass to go anywhere else. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel never looking back. All right, everyone. We've got a good episode. We're going to talk about class ring. The class ring business shockingly brings in
- close to a billion dollars a year for a company that you might have heard of, but we're going to do a breakdown of them. What else is there? We're going to talk about stretching gyms. I'm a huge fan of paying $100 and going to the stretch lab. We're going to break that business down. What else are we going to talk about? We talk about the business of ephemeral tattoos. Tattoos that only last year, this is a trend that I'm watching. We talk about some of the pod stuff, how we're looking at YouTube, how we're thinking about content right now. And then last but not least, we talk about a couple of businesses that are interesting, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google,
- base businesses. I call them couch cushion businesses because it's like these little things in the cracks that you do that you don't really, you don't really, once you go look in the couch cushion, you find some money, but you don't really think about these. And some of them are scams. Some of them are not. We talk about those at the end. Yeah, in my opinion, most of them are scams. And we actually do a breakdown of them around the 50th minute of this podcast. So wait till the end and we'll get to it. You'll love it. Talk soon. Did you see, did you listen to the episode that I released today or today's Monday? It's did you
- listen to that? No, what is it? So I consumed like eight or nine, like pretty interesting pieces of content last week or, and I talked about four or five of them. Did you see this guy named Ben Mula, who I talked about? No, who's that? Okay, so Ben Mula, I put it in the doc. If you've heard the Monday episode today, this is a little bit of a repeat, but I cannot stop watching this guy. He's this big old fat guy, like 400 pounds fat because he's probably like six to three. And he's disgusting. He's like smoked cigarette. And he like, looks like he smells. And he like always hits.
- It's people like on the back real hard. He's just precarious and in your face. And on the surface, he appears like incredibly dislikeable and cocky. And I love him. He turns out to be, he seems pretty quite charming. And he's a real estate tycoon down in South Florida. And all he does. Should I Google this guy? Ben Mulah. Yeah. All the photos of him, it's an immediate turn off. But then you get into the videos. And he's basically, he's like a successful guy who's now just starting to do YouTube. He's probably in his mid-figure.
- 50s. And so he's not like a YouTuber who, you know, he's he's does it the right way where he's successful. And now he's doing YouTube. Very fascinating. I can't stop watching this guy. You see what he looks like. Yeah. So he's a Ben Mala. So he looks like what's Joe Rogan's friends name Joey Diaz. He looks like Joey Diaz does real estate. Joey Diaz moves to Florida. It does real estate. And he he wears like gaudy clothes and he's sitting there smoking Marburles outside of like a Ramada in or like a holiday in that he's about
- to buy for $20 million. But then he gets into like a $500,000 Bentley. And so it's like a really funny juxtaposition, really interesting guy, great advice on real estate and business. Nice. Very fun YouTube. You'll have to start watching this guy. He's brilliant. I'm going to subscribe. He's beautiful. And that's actually what we need to do with our podcast. Our podcast, actually, I'm going to, I got to figure out how to do this. We need to become a YouTube channel that happens to have a pod. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I know what you mean. Explain why you say that, though.
- So for one, I've been a YouTube fan for five years. I've been a paying subscriber and it's my life. If it's not on YouTube, I only watch YouTube, including YouTube TV though, which is TV. But so that's a little cheating. But the discoverability is so good. And I've been watching Gary Tan's video, you know, Gary Tan. Yeah. He's wonderful. I don't think his content is any better than us, but I think it's packaged better than us. For sure. And there's a lot to learn from that. And I think that whenever I see a video, he's
- he does, I'm like, oh man, I totally could have done that. He just packaged it in such a wonderful way. And the discovery of discoverability on YouTube is significantly better than podcast. For sure. And it's just more fun. It's more fun to watch a YouTube video. And like, I don't know if we have it kind of skewed because we're able to, we have YouTube Red or whatever the premium thing's called. So we're able to go in the background and basically make it a podcast whenever we want. I think for a lot of people, they don't pay for that thing. So that's probably the main difference. But once you pay for that, YouTube is just amazing.
- It's so good. Yeah, we're going to make that shift. I'm going to work on that this week, actually. And then one last quick update. One thing that I'm trying to do that I've actually done for the last, tell me what you think about this. I've done it for the last five or six days and I didn't mean to do it at first, but now I don't want to break it. I've walked around 20,000 steps a day for the blast about five, six days. What are you using to track it? Well, just my iPhone. So I was using the health app, then I downloaded like a what's it called?
- It's called the PETA. What's the, anyway, I downloaded an app for it. Gotcha. And it's awesome. A pit pedometer, that's what it is, a pedometer. It's awesome. Have you ever walked? Have you ever tried to do like 10 to 50,000 a day? Bro, walking? That's, walking is the new running. No, I don't know. I've never really liked step counters. I always found them to be like kind of underwhelming. So for example, I was like, you know, like, I've got like a Fit Beta, whatever the first, whatever the early ones of those were. And I hit 10,000 steps on what I felt like was a very lazy.
- and immediately in my head I was like, oh, this is for like old sedentary people and I can't use this as like a barometer of success for me. But you're really fit and you seem to care that you hit 20,000 steps. Who cares? Right? Isn't like an hour of intense exercise really what you want and not 20,000 steps? Yes and no. So there's a pros and cons. So the con is that for walking the amount that I'm walking, it takes forever, like three hours. There's just three hours of straight walking. Some regards that's a problem.
- because it's fun to be out there and seeing stuff. I'm in a new place exploring, so it's fun. But the Pro is also, so basically, if you run 10 miles, that will, like if you run 10 miles really fast, that will take you 60 minutes, right? If you walk 10 miles, that's gonna take you three, four hours. But you can actually burn the same amount of calories doing it, which is kind of interesting. It takes the same amount of energy to move your body, that distance. But when you walk that much, you don't get that hungry. The problem whenever I run a lot, or whenever I work.
- I get really hungry and I and I out eat the calories that I consumed with walking. I haven't done that I don't I don't eat the calories Like I don't get starving. So it's been like a really easy way to slim down anyway. I just thought I Thought I'd bring that up. You want to get into it Yeah, let's do it. All right, which one you want to go with first No, Jossens, right? Actually, you just on your random life updates. So two things on that One, I don't know where this came from but over the weekend I guess you were talking about step counting and I was just remembering
- there's this little clip I watch on YouTube from the office about when Dwight gets a standing desk. I don't know if you watch the office, but you've seen this. I don't know if you remember this, probably not. It's pretty obscure, but a deaf dude. I mean, I'm like a I'm a normal 30 year old that I could quote every single. Right. So Dwight gets a standing desk and like everybody who gets a standing desk, like it's like awesome for 15 minutes. And then you start doing the thing where like you're on one foot while you're like kind of letting the other foot like chill for a second. You're like stretching out your ankle and then you're doing the other side and then you're kind of like squatting a little bit because you're tired of standing.
- and they're basically like, oh wow, Dwight. The first he's like shitting on everybody, like, oh, you're sitting, you're, you know, this is, he goes, I feel like I'm working in a suicide cult, like, because you guys are all deciding to sit. And so then they like turn the tables on him when they know he's getting tired, and they're like, Dwight, wow, I can't believe you've made such a great decision, you're for sure gonna just do this forever, right? Like there's no way you go back on this, right? And he's like, of course not, but he's like, secretly like fatiguing really hard from the standing desk. And anyway, so they sort of like guilt.
- and he like ends up with this little like, like hidden stool in his pants so that he can like stand. He can like sit while he's like pretending to stand. And so that reminds me of the step counting thing, which are these like little phases that everybody goes through, every you're just like, you know what? I need to hit my 10,000 steps. Like I feel like everybody has this phase of their life where they're like, get into that, they buy the device, they do the thing for a bit, and then they like get off of it. Most people do at least. But anyways, the reason I say this is over the weekend, I was supposed to be working.
- because I got back from this trip and I supposed to be working. And instead I was just watching a bunch of content. I was watching, you know, you know, Aaron Sorkin. So I was like, yeah, I mean, the famous director. Yeah, writer, you know, kind of like, I don't know if he's producer, director, or writer, but all three, maybe he created West Wing, newsroom, the social network movie. And he's like, amazing. He's brilliant. He's known for his dialogue. So I was just kind of like trying to branch out trying to learn about what is, how do you even write dialogue? What is that? What makes it great? Why is this guy so much better than everybody?
- else. So I was watching a bunch of his videos where he talks about how he does it, and it really made me want to write a TV show. And not to like make a TV show or make a career out of it, but I just want to write one episode. And so I decided I'm going to write an episode of the office and I'm going to release it. So that's my challenge for this next 30 days. In the next 30 days, I'm going to write an episode and it's just going to be text. And it's going to be I'm just going to steal all the characters from the office. And I'm going to see what I could do. And I think this is going to be a lot of fun. And I'm going to release it to anybody who I guess follows me on Twitter, my newsletter, or something like that.
- is that it will at worst be mildly good. I think you're good. I think you're good at it. I think you're good at it. I've never done it. Right. So like that's the beginner part of it. But I think I could be I'm also like, I think you could. I think I'm like cocky about it. I feel like I can do a good job. Did you ever read this guy Ross wrote an episode of Silicon Valley? So this guy, he used to he was an early Facebook employee. He's the creator of Mozilla, the browser. Yeah. Or Firefox or whatever. Or no, his name's Blake. I think Blake Ross is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he went he just like for fun wrote an episode.
- of the Silicon Valley HBO show. And it's amazing. If you never read this, you should definitely Google this and read it. And if you watch the show, when you read it, it's like as good as a normal episode of the show. It's crazy. And so I was very inspired by that. I was like, man, what a polymath, right? Like the guy can create a browser, early Facebook employee, and is just able to like write a screenplay based on his first try, which was, I thought, incredible. I think you're, I think at worst, it's going to be pretty mildly good. I think at best you could actually have a.
- a home run. That's my prediction for how this is going to be. And so today's July 19th, you now have now you're on the ball. Well, no, let's do August the end of August. August what is there 20? How many days are 31 days? All right, you have to August 31. And then now you're on the hook. And in general, I'm thinking about content like, okay, content strategy, because I'm kind of like, I haven't been posting much on Twitter or anything like that. And I feel like once I started getting really to Twitter, I just noticed all the other kind of like Twitter thread wannabe people like me out there who were just like doing the same thing. And it was really a
- like I enjoyed doing it and I enjoyed the results of it. That's what I told you. But I hated that everybody else was doing it. It made me feel like such a schmuck. I felt like, you know, going to a club in order and then being like, you need to get a table if you want into this club. It's like, oh, okay, here's my credit card. I guess I'll pay 1000 times with the bottle cost. Like that was the, I felt like a big chump, the first time I did bottle service. And the second time I felt like a chump in life was when I was doing Twitter threads of, you know, generic business advice like everybody else. And so now I think I'm gonna go, I'm gonna zig and zag the opposite direction where I'm just gonna go with like, I'm gonna go with like,
- to do a few like what I think are pretty badass pieces of content that are extremely challenging for me. And if they flop, they flop, but I'm going to like go ham on them. Like I'm going to, you know, like, I'm going to write a rap song or I'm going to write a screenplay. I'm going to like, like, try to create something that's like much more intense and possibly awesome. I think you're right. And I'm going to take credit because I wrote about this and I talked on this podcast about this about six or seven months ago. I was like, these threads are killing me. I think longer form blog posts are going to be
- because everyone's like, I want to start a newsletter. I want to get popular on Twitter. I'm like, all right, great, do that. I actually think that there could be a bigger opportunity to create a more in-depth blog post. I have a feeling that this is kind of what humans are craving at the, or like this is like, I don't know, what people are craving. I mean, I think every type of content will always be- Can I release one tenth as much content, but have it be 10 times as good? And because of that, stand out from the crowd and have more fun, because I'm not constantly just doing quick hits. I'm like,
- trying to do great work each time, which I think is harder but more fun maybe. Something that I've been thinking about is related to content, because I ask myself all the time about how you can, I like repackaging content. There's a few things that I've always been interested in content. So there's this thing with email. So a lot of people think of email as like 2300 words that you can fit in there, or whatever, I forget what the space is. It's a certain megabyte space, but you should actually think of it like, I'm just gonna make these numbers up. These aren't right. It's 150 megabytes, and it just so happens that 250 megabytes.
- 200, 2500 words is 150 megabytes. But what else can you tell in that story? And there's some interesting technology that I've tinkered with, and we've never gotten into it at the hustle, but I think we should. So you can actually host a GIF on your own server, and this might change with Apple's new update, but you can make it so when you send someone an email, you can have like a 30 second GIF on there. And a GIF is basically a video with text, which is the same thing as Instagram without sound, right? It's the same thing. And what about what I've always...
- wanted to do was to put that on there and then have a part one. And then you tell at the end of the part one at the end of the 22nd thing. You are all right. Now hit refresh and you actually hit refresh and part two shows up on your interesting and I've always wanted to do things like that. Like I think that's an interesting medium. I think that could like be hacked and be and you could have a really, really cool story telling. Yeah, I think so I would suggest someone try that on email. It is possible. Like it's technically possible to do that. I think that could be really cool. Another thing is I've always asked.
- If you were using Twitter for a longer form blog post, what would it look like if you had a blog post on Twitter that was something like 500 tweets long? Right. I've been thinking about like, how do you hack the rules? Yeah, that's kind of interesting to me. Anyway, let's look at it. Okay, so that's my content. I'm putting my stake in the ground. I'm announcing it publicly. So now I'm committed to having to do it. Do you want to talk about? Let's talk about stretching labs or stretching gyms. Can we talk about that?
- Yeah, let's do it because you were talking about walking and this is actually what I was gonna transition to which is gonna like the The slow exercise movement so I was working out with somebody who's I think they're 41 and I was like they're your former bodybuilder and I was like so You know so like what's it? What's what are you working on nowadays? You're trying to get like shredded or like your build muscle? What's the he's like bro just function? I was like what and you've been talking about the super mobility training. He's like I have a personal trainer He's like we he's like they pointed at the bench press and pointed out
- at the like kind of like the stretching table. And it was like, I want to spend more time there, not there. And I was like, interesting. And by the way, I woke up with like massive shoulder pain today, so I'm all about it right now. But I noticed there's a trend. So I have this, this is my segment called trend watching. I got two trends today. So trend watching, the first one is stretching lab. So I never really heard of this, but there's gyms that dedicated to stretching. I don't know if you've ever been to one. One is called, yeah, one is called stretch lab. It's a franchise. They have like 1,000 locations and just like.
- five years or something crazy like that. So definitely like franchising pretty hardcore nationwide. And then there's another one. I like the name of this one, Stretch Relief, which is kind of like Stretch Relief in its base in New York. And it was like a physical place. So then with COVID, now they do like online, whatever. But I'm kind of into this. So place you go and you're not, it's not yoga. It's not Pilates. It's like it's not cycling. It's not spin glass. It's not, you know, high intensity training. It's another one stretching. And like I just think there's a market for all of these. What do you think about this? You've definitely.
- you thought about mobility and stretching a lot? I am obsessed with stretching. I stretch a ton. I download all types of different apps because I enjoyed trying them all, but I stretch on the consistent basis. You're like trying to do the splits and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. Like I work really hard at it and I like study different types of stretching. The only type, or one of the very few types of stretching that's proven to work, I forget exactly what it's called, but basically it's this idea where if you wanna stretch your hamstring, like in a split, let's say you're doing the front splits and you wanna stretch your hamstring, you actually.
- need to push down for 10 seconds really hard. So you're, you're, you want your hamstring to flex for 10 seconds and then you release. And that allows you to stretch even further. I don't, it does something with the brain. I don't entirely understand how it works. But I, I've read a lot of studies and it's one of the few proven ways. And so I've been obsessed with that. I've gone to stretch lab. It's $100. I've did it in San Francisco and in Austin. And totally, totally fun, totally worth it. I loved it. I've been trying to go in Brooklyn where I'm staying now. I can't find a place that does this. I'm completely on board with this. I've also tried to buy different stretching.
- stretching machines. Stretching machines have always fascinated me because stretching is one of the few exercises where you don't actually have to put that much effort into it and to get results. Like someone can kind of do it to you. It's not like with running where it's just like, I gotta put all the up. Like I can just kind of be numb and someone can do it. And so there's split machines where you can do side splits and you like sit in this thing and you crank this wheel and your legs open up. That's okay. That's fine. But what I've been looking for is front split machines and different types of stretching machines I have found close to nothing. And so at my
- Jim in my house, I was thinking about buying a set of winches, like a winch, like it goes in the beat on the, on a Jeep to like pull a cord. I was going to put some on each side of my wall and create a stretching machine. It's probably going to look like a sex machine. Yeah. I think these, you could just buy something else and just use it for a different purpose. I guess you could just buy a sex machine or like a, a reformer. But anyway, I'm totally on board with this. I think stretching is actually a trend that's going to continue to grow. We've talked about it now for a year now. We've talked about ROM, ROMWOD, which is called range of motion workout of the day.
- which is an app that's killing it. We've talked about Kelly's star. We've talked about a lot of this. I'm totally on board with stretching. Yeah, stretch tech. So I'm keeping an eye on that trend. I have another trend if you're ready to move on to my second trend. Really quick. Another thing, you could do it stretching. So it's stretching in order to have one of these franchises. You really just need a table, right? Like nice tables with some bands. Two other things that are really interesting to me in this space. The first is chanting and breathing work. So I went to breath work. I went to this one class where I.
- paid $30 and we just sat there with 30 other people doing breathing and then eventually you like chant. I don't understand the science behind it, but I know that I felt great. It was fun. It was a good experience. Absolute high. So before not in a fitness context, but one time I was when I started the sushi restaurant, I was staying in LA with the sushi chef his mandate was, or if I'm going to start this business with you guys, you're going to each come at three co-founders, there's three of us. He said, you're each going to come, you're going to live with me. You're going to work every day at my restaurant for three weeks each and only one at a time.
- so you don't have each other as your little safety net. And I said, okay, so one guy went out there, a second guy went out there, then I went out there. And with me, he goes, it was like, you know, kind of a life altering experience. It's a very wise guy, like kind of like a Mr. Biyagi sort of character for me. And one of the things he did, he's like, are you religious? And I said, no, I don't believe. He said, I'm Buddhist. I said, okay, cool. Do you know anything about Buddhism? No. And he goes, all right, tomorrow morning, 7 a.m., like meet me in the living room. Out there. Oh shit, here we go.
- And we went there and so I didn't know anything about Buddhism. And I still know very little about Buddhism, but Buddhists have this chant that they do as like, or at least his practice or his, maybe his sect or whatever it was. They have this one chant. It's called Namyo Harengekyo. So it'd be like Namyo Harengekyo, Namyo Harengekyo. And you repeat that for like one hour straight, you're chanting Namyo Harengekyo, Namyo Harenge. It's just one hour straight. And so we start and I'm just trying to be nice. And I'm like, OK, I guess I'll just kind of sit here and like.
- What are these five words? Do I need to know what they mean? No? I don't need to know. What do you mean? He was just like, just the sound. Is there a pewdieck? And I was like, oh, that's interesting because I can Hinduism. Oh, I was like, oh, M is like the, it's like, oh, M. And like, you hear that in yoga a lot too. And there's something about the vibration of making this sound, audibly making the sound, that by the end of it, you feel different than you did at the beginning. And so by the end of this hour, I had this like, I don't know what it was. It's like a rush of euphoria, basically, from chanting. And he was like, I do that every morning.
- It's like a media, it's like a audio, I forgot it's called transcendental meditation or something. It's a form of meditation where you're not trying to, it's like a way to quiet the mind by chanting the same thing on loop. And when you quiet the mind, you know, you finally, you know, you get a sense of peace. That's very hard to achieve otherwise. And after I did that, I was like a big believer in chanting. So I've continued to, I'm not Buddhist, but I've continued to do this chanting thing on and off for like the last 10 years of my life. Well, and you feel like an idiot doing it. So if I told you without your guy there.
- you would feel like a fool. And I went and I felt like a fool too. So I went to one of these classes and you do breath work, which I don't understand the science mind, but it felt awesome. It felt like I was it felt like a very mild drug. Yeah. And part of it is chanting and it felt great. And when I talked, the guy was like, yeah, this is like our MVP. Like I found it on a vent right. He's like, we're thinking about scaling this and doing it was all start to be a guy. And I was like, dude, this is greatest business ever. You just need like a space for like 50 people and nothing else. Yeah.
- Yeah, you don't eat anything. Like I'm in. If you ever like, so anyway, I think that's interesting. I also think ice baths are interesting. I know I've been noticing on Instagram loads and loads and ice baths. We talked about this company. What was the ice bath company called the barrel company? Ice barrel. Ice barrel. So ice barrel dot co or something. It's, um, I know the guy who started it and they're selling in ice barrel for like 12 or $1,300. I'm seeing them everywhere. I think ice baths, particularly places that you can go just to take an ice bath. I think are going to get quite popular. I think an ice bath also has a slightly meditative.
- purpose to it. So the I would add that I would add those two things to stretching to look out. Yeah, same. I just yesterday I sent this TikTok this guy's like, Hey guys, just want to take you through my morning routine. He's like a 60 year old dude who's just like absolutely chiseled somehow. It's like, okay, I don't know. I don't know how your body looks like that a little unnatural. But okay, was it Mark Sisson? No, I don't he wasn't like a famous guy. He's just like a guy. He's like, first things first, I get in the cold plunge. And he's like, I get in, I don't do a lot of like this. He's like, I just get in. That's it. And then he's like, and then I three minutes.
- I get out, I go in the jacuzzi, he hops over his pool to get to his jacuzzi. He's like, and then we're going to go to the sauna. And like all the comments are like, sir, I don't have these amenities at my house. Like I don't have all these things. And I think that's the opportunity, which is that when people have these things, they sort of swear by them. Like our friend Ramones, where's by Tony Robbins, always talks about this, how he starts his day, he goes straight into the ice plant, then goes straight to heat. And so there's definitely some like anti-inflammatory and like sort of neurological effects waking the body up like this with something, a drastic physiological change.
- change is stimulus. And you don't need caffeine, you don't need drugs to be able to get your body to respond. And, um, but I think there's a problem, which is that they're so inaccessible. So one, we talked about Ice Barrel and then somebody reached out, a guy who's in my club LTV, like, uh, the e-commerce group I have for people who have an e-commerce store of a million dollars are up. And he said, Oh, yeah, I have this one, uh, brand now, but I'm starting a new brand. And, um, his first brand is pretty successful. I think probably 20, 30 million dollars. And his new brand is going to do ice baths, but it's just a device you put it
- into any tub, like your normal bathtub and it makes your bathtub water really cold. And I was like, oh, that's way better because I don't want to do like ice management. I don't want to buy ice all the time. That's a huge pain in the ass. And this like ice barrel thing, like is a $2,000 barrel. Yeah, and you can only, you can't use it if you have an apartment. Right. And so I'm like, well, if I already have a tub and you just let me fill it up with normal water and I put this thing in for 10 minutes and it gets cold, that's awesome actually. Now you just built like a $150.
- device that does this without the headache. Is it like electronic? Like you plug it in. Yeah, I don't know how you put electric things in water. Like I'm a little bit. Well, it's like a it's like the opposite of a heating pad. Yeah, exactly. And so it cools water. So I'm very excited about this. But if anybody has like either ice or sauna technology, send it to me. So show me show it to me. I really want to try these. I'm very big on this stuff. Great. Same. So the second for trans modding is tattoos. Yeah, ephemeral tattoos specifically. So if you go to ephemeral, which is kind of hard to spell, EPH, E-R-E-M-L ephemeral. tattoo, check that out.
- So basically this is a trend I've been noticing first there was a company called inkbox that just made temporary you know temporary tattoos kind of like Essentially, it's a body sticker and and they started doing pretty well They came out a while ago and they you know, they do kind of like 20 30 million dollars plus in revenue last I had heard which was few years ago and So inkbox had done pretty well and this new one ephemeral tattoo just raised 20 million dollars. I got my attention I said what's going on here? So what these guys have is a biodegradable ink That you that can go into even like a normal tattoo
- to gun. So you got to go to a place. So ink box is sort of like a sticker you just put on your skin and then it fades away. This is like actually a legit tattoo, but it's a one year commitment instead of a 50 year commitment or whatever like a normal tattoo is. So you go you actually get it into you know tattooed onto your body and it degrades after 12 to 15 months it fades away. And so they have like one studio open in like LA, one in like New York, and they raised 20 million dollars to do two things. One is to release like colored tattoos because right now it's just black and white. And the other is like to open more studios because the way it
- works is you put down, it's like Tesla, you put down a $20 deposit. And that lets you basically book a reservation at this thing. And they have like a million dollars worth of like pre booked reservations at their studios that they just are backlogged on and need to need to do. And what I thought was interesting about this, I was like, okay, cool. It's like some kind of like material innovation on the material science of the ink. But I like that this can go into a normal tattoo. Because I think what I think the best, I think it's sort of stupid to open up their own tattoo parlors. Maybe you'll do a.
- few of those. But there's 21,000 tattoo parlors in the United States. That's like the same number of like high schools are in the United States. So there's one one tattoo parlor for every high school essentially. Is that is that a real stat? Yeah, there's estimated 21,000 tattoo parlors and there's about 20, 20, 20, 24, I think you're wrong, by the way, them having the studio is awesome. It doesn't matter. I guess what I'm saying is I think what they should do is they should sell this to every tattoo parlor as the Hey, you want diet Coke, right? You want the diet tattoo you don't
- You want the not lifelong tattoo commitment? Hey, we sell this thing. It plugs right into our normal thing and we're we have the staff We have the brick and mortar locations. So I think they could roll out to 10,000 locations like this rather than opening up their own store brick after brick. So anyways, I'm pretty excited about this I think it's kind of a cool idea. I I'm gonna sign up. I'll go to it. They have a Brooklyn one I was about to get some more tattoos. I would totally do that right? You have a few a few interesting tattoos on your body that you could talk about I've got a few bad ones. So I have one
- I've got four homemade ones and the way that you do, the way that you do homemade ones is you use a sewing needle and ink and you just make a ton of dots. I did that when I was like 21 and like partying. I was highly intoxicated. I don't entirely regret them, but they'd look silly. And then it says like, what do you have on your foot? You have like something on your foot. I saw like mom or something. That's like, no, it says wow or mom, it depends. And then I have a feet tattoos that say act now, which they are kind of cool. But yeah, like they're self-administered.
- tattoo is that yeah, every day you see one of those, which is actually quite popular is homemade tattoos. It's called stick and poke when I did it. I didn't think that they were that popular, but I think they actually are quite popular. But anyway, this had two business I taught 100% sign up for that looks sign up for them. It looks pretty sick. They are black and white. So like they do look yeah, they look pretty like like I would get it. But if you're like a cute girl, and you probably don't know what the black and white it looks like they're not like colored in. So they're just like an outline of a shape or at least that's what I see on the website. It's like a cat, but like the cat.
- It's just like the outline of a cat. Yeah, I'm into this. I think I can't change it. A femoral tattoo. I think you're on board there. It just opens up the market, right? If there's a circle that says this is a circle that represents a number of people who are willing to get tattoos for life. And now there's an option that you can have a tattoo, but it's only going to last a year and it'll fade away. Okay, that circle just got like three times bigger, four times bigger. You're just increasing the size of the addressable market for tattoos, which is smart. So I think that's cool because you get to try something for a year.
- that you could potentially impact the rest of your life. You know, it's always freaked me out. Like, and we don't discuss it too much, but, or like as a society, we accept that that's normal. Buying a home, you basically go into it for like 10 minutes and you're willing to spend all of your money, like every dollar that you have and 30 years of your life after like a 15 minute walk through. Is that crazy? Is that nice? You know, it's going to give you a 100 page disclosure that you can't understand and then you read some scary stuff in there and then you're just
- like, I guess, I guess I just live with that termite issue. I always just thought it was mind boggling that you can you have to spend 15 minutes for making a decision that in most for most people, it's all their money. And also it's for 30 plus years of their life off a off a 15 minute walkthrough. That's always that's always been crazy to me. So this is that that's well, this is good for tattoos that they get that moment. You want to talk about these, uh, these top two things I think. Yeah. So, so I was thinking about
- class rings or I think somebody Ben shared a tweet with me though just like a meme it was like the if you want to know how we get ideas for this so me and Ben just sent these other shit off Twitter all day and then some of it you know it's just like a memes but but yeah I thought started thinking about he goes some guy Coleman notes he goes you'll remember when a company would come to your high school and gaslight you into buying a $400 for class ring and you know there's just like whenever like a hundred likes on this tweet and I just thought it was so funny and I remember that happening I remember buying a class ring and I don't know I lost
- I don't know where it is. There's like a waste of money. It's so ugly. I was never going to wear it. But I bought it because I was like, oh, I guess this is like the moment I'm supposed to commemorate these four years. And you know, it's now we're never basically to buy this ring. So I like kind of got pressured into buying it. And so I started thinking about this class ring business. So let me tell you some things I discovered. All right. So this guy is kind of like my Billy of the Week. I got two very boring business people that I'm going to feature here. So the first guy, it's called Otto Justin. And Otto Justin.
- is the founder of Jostens, which is the number one class ring maker. And Otto Jostens, he invents the class ring basically. So they started this thing in 1897. In Ottawa, right? This is like, you know, over 100 years old. And so he invents this thing and basically says, okay, great, we're gonna have these rings that commemorate the occasion. And and so he he creates a class ring. And so what how does this work? So basically, high school or college, you go to the school at the end of your senior year, you get
- It upsold into all this stuff. You get upsold into like shirts, yearbooks, but the class ring is like kind of like one of the more expensive items, $400, $500, $600 for a class ring sometimes. And so I was looking into the industry of this company. So basically the company existed for a long time, goes public in like 1965 or whatever, stays public for a while, ends up getting acquired by private equity. So it gets acquired by something called Newell Brands. And this is an interesting company to look into. They own Rubbermaid, Crock Pot.
- Oster, like all these like home appliance companies, then they old like Elmer's Glue, Sharpie, Yankee candles, like all these brands that we know about. They have 10 billion in revenue across their portfolio brands. And so they had, they bought Jossons and they were like, look, this company makes about $700 million a year, but it's been flat or declining, like the yearbook and classroom industry is sort of like declining 5% a year. And so it was like, maybe there's room to turn around. So they buy it for 1.5 billion, I think. And then they try it for free.
- years, can't do anything with it. They sell it to another company, platinum equity, for 1.3 billion. So they take a $200 million loss on it, sell the company. So it's still owned by platinum equity and it says this thing that exists. So it's already getting me interested. Like, how does this whole business model work? What I couldn't find is what's in it for the schools? Because the schools definitely give these people like real estate on campus or on premises to sell this stuff. So I wonder if there's a rev share. I couldn't find that detail. But it got me thinking, how would I compete with this if I was going to compete with this? I thought this would be a fun brainstorm. So,
- business, how would you compete with this? Well, let's walk through how seniors come into this. You know, I use, did you use Josh, Josh's and high school? I think, I think we bought Josh's. Yeah. So basically, if I remember correctly, you're a senior and you get a magazine, you get a magazine, like do the hand, the hand like a pamphlet to all seniors. I remember buying it from a table. There was like a table set up with a little like tablecloth and on it was a bunch of rings. I think they did have a brochure of like, here's all the different models you can order, try them on, and then like you place your order and you pay the thing and then
- and it arrives months later. And your school knows who's ordering, I think, because I didn't order one. I was like, this is nonsense. I don't like high school this much. Like I don't want to ring. And my school came to me and they were like, are you having trouble at home? And I was like, no, they're like, do you need money to buy the ring, we'll buy it for you? And I was like, no, that's lovely. I appreciate you guys, but I just think it's stupid. I don't want, I don't want to ring. And then they had a ring ceremony and they just handed me a plain box. And it had like, I went to a Catholic school and they had like a cross.
- or something in it so that they just- Is this high school you're talking about? Yeah. So they had some type of thing to give me, and I was like, I appreciate you guys, but I don't want any of this stuff. But anyway, the school knows who orders as well. Right. And so, okay, I was thinking about, okay, I think there's two models in this. There's distribution and then there's product. So on the distribution side, I would definitely try to figure out how do I partner with either the school themselves or a sub-entity in the school? And so, did you invest in that company, Copper, that I sent you? Well, we passed.
- Okay. So one of the clever things that they do, I won't go into their whole playbook, but they have an awesome playbook on how to, they're, they make like a debit card, essentially, for high school students. And they grow really well. And the people who were behind it, they created a different product for high schoolers. And they had a playbook of basically, how do you get high schoolers on board for your thing? And one of the things that they do, one of the pieces of the playbook is that they go, they partner with one of the like organizations at the school. So they can't partner with the school itself too complicated, but they'll go to like the baseball team or like the volleyball team and they'll say, Hey, you guys need like 500 bucks for your like uniforms this year.
- Great, we'll sponsor it in exchange. You guys help us promote our thing. You guys become an affiliate and for every additional student you bring on board, you get more money for your org. And so it ends up being like, you know, a direct ad affiliate deal with the groups and they're obviously highly motivated because they need to pay for their stuff. So similarly, I guess what I would do is I would try for the distribution side. I would partner with either the school or partner with like, you know, the band or like, you know, some group in the school and say, hey, if you guys help us sell this, yeah, you get a rev share with this thing. So that's how I would get my foot in the door. Then the question is what product? Cause I think class rings are.
- incredibly ugly. And I think there's sometimes a good thing about ugly things because they stand out and they seem special or unique or different versus like a different. They're not ugly. They just all look alike. Like every class ring since, you know, this thing has been invented. I'll be like 1890. Like it's the exact same thing. If you see someone wearing a class ring, it's like, all right, Al Bundy, like you're living in the past here, right? Like you're a fucking, like you're a dork. You peaked. It's a dork move, right? So how do you, so first, if you can make it and how you're supposed to. You were like one of the early classes of Harvard. All right, I get it. Unless you won like, you know,
- and say a championship, then you wear your championship ring. Yes. And even then you should probably just keep that on a shelf in the house. But like, I think it's okay. It's not meant to be worn necessarily. So here's the opportunity. So my, my best idea that I came up with, and this was like an hour before we started recording this, my best idea is class sneakers. So I think sneakers are like hot real estate. And I don't know if you've ever seen people who make custom sneakers, like either for celebrities or for like brands, they're awesome. They have like a paint gun or like, it's like a.
- tattoo gun basically. Yeah, they can like create it's like a graffiti mural on a pair of Air Force ones. So that's the first thing I would try to do is class sneakers. I would try to basically say, great, how do I come up with a base model? Maybe it's like con versus or Air Force ones or something like that, plain play white shoe. And then, okay, everybody's graduating right now, they're all let's say class of 21. So I'm gonna have class of 21. And then I'm just gonna make different color schemes for the different schools. And and then if you pay extra, like you can get your name sort of like embroidered on the thing or like whatever.
- your phrase or whatever you want on the back of it. And I would basically sell commemorative class sneakers that can either be worn or they just put on the wall, put it in the house somewhere as a piece of work. Which shoe, which brand and model? I think maybe I'm out of touch here, but I like kind of just like the old school playing white Air Force ones. I think those are like, Yeah, that's what I thought you were to do. One of the best canvases to use for something like this. But I don't think it really matters. I think you basically, you need some shoe that, but in reality, if I was doing this, I'd.
- I probably would find something that's shaped like that, but it's not already like $100, right? Because I need to get the shoe for like $12. And then I need to do the custom, the paintwork on it for like another $8. And then I need to sell that shoe for like $180 or $200, something like that. I think that's the model here. And I think you can do this with Instagram ads, Facebook ads and partnering with school organizations to do like kind of rev shares. And I think it could be cool. I think it's like a status symbol. So that's how I would attack Justin's, right? If they're making 700 feet or a million dollars.
- dollars a year under ugly ass class rings. I would start with class sneakers as my first idea. I think that's good. So I'm looking at, I'm looking at it. Dude, they sell some ugly ass shit. I cannot believe this business is in place. And here's the take. Here's the takeaway here is that once you get locked into some, to a certain contract, yeah, I would actually phrase it like, it's hard to fuck up. Boring default. If you're the boring default, it's so good. Such a good position being. And a lot of times when I think of like, when I always think of
- entrepreneurship and we think of starting stuff, we think, how can I be innovative? How can I be new in reality in order to make a lot of money? It's how do I get locked into this to, to the point to where like it's going to be a pain in the ass to go anywhere else. And that's the takeaway here. I'm looking at Josh since they, they started, you said in, in 1897. Yeah. Okay. So if you started something 124 years ago and you are still in cahoots with these high schools, this is significantly better than any enterprise ass company. This is significantly better than a newsletter.
- Do this. I think of this is idiot proof. Jossons is idiot proof. I used to say that real estate has the highest number of low IQ millionaires. Jossons is the best example of that I've ever seen. I love this company and I think that when I start stuff, that's what I should think of. How can I just create something that people buy forever and I have to innovate on the product zero? That's exactly what they've done. The best example of this that we came up with that we had on the product.
- on the podcast was the workplace compliance poster that you have to have for like the HR or safety or whatever work that the poster every office has in the break room that poster you just have to buy every year it's like $100 or something. And you just have to get it every year otherwise you're out of your like out of compliance you're like out of code. And you know zero employees just sort of like an auto renew where I send you this like one cent poster for $100 is like such a beautiful, beautiful business. And in fact, I almost want to just come up with like another compliance poster. Actually, this is my next idea here live on the podcast. What's another like bullshit ass compliance poster that I could make that's like a cool thing.
- that I could sell to every company. Like maybe it's like something with like the modern day woke stuff, like it's about like, you know, anti her openness and anti harassment and like pronouns and like everything. It's just like a reminders of like how to not be canceled. So, so it's basically like a reminders poster that gets updated every year with the latest cancellation policy and you just need to make it seem like a totally boring company thing. And you just sell this to every age. You send it to them once and then you like get them on file to like have this in their, you know, restrooms every year.
- or something like that. If you work for a company like this, like what you're describing are Jossons. So it looks like on Glassdoor, they've got 3000 employees. Dude, if you weren't a Josson. What did you do? Wait, you're asleep. You've been able to sleep for 65 straight years. What do you do? Like I'm there in hibernation. What do you, like, why didn't you even need employees? That's what, like, I'm looking through this. Like, what's the point of having a person do this? Like, you could fire most of all your people and just build stuff that it automates it. And you simply have salespeople that just try to, like, sell stuff. But, like, you...
- You don't need anything. I'm looking at their class door. I'm like, what? They have a thousand to 5,000 people. I thought it said 3,000 in another place. I don't even know what you do. Like, what do you, if you're the CEO of this company, what do you do every day? Are you like, hey, this week we're gonna try this. It's like, no, you're just keeping the lights on the whole time. And I'm okay with that. It sounds like I'm criticizing it. I'm not. What the fuck do you do if you work with this company? It absolutely has the little mini putting green in their office, you know, that little putting green of a one whole putt putt golf you could put in your office. Michael Burris. Michael Burris.
- he has one of those in office. He's probably listening to this right now, looking at the putting green and being like, God damn it. Those guys are wrong about everything, but they're right about the damn putting green. I got to get rid of this thing. This is what I want to start something like this, where you just have to do no work ever. I mean, I just, I just undercut them, right? So I think I think you could advertise on Facebook and Instagram and be like, Hey, seniors, don't get ripped off by Justin's same ring, half the price. Yeah, this amazes me. I have none of the employees and I'm going to drop ship this out of China. So like, Hey, don't get ripped off by Justin.
- That's better. That's my ad creative again. Somebody wants to do this. Just keep me up I just want to hear how this plays out if you end up doing this just Advertising against us. All right, so that's this is crazy I'm gonna talk about the second one the this paint when this is interesting to an Instagram There's another person to try to compete with them and they're just making a classroom that doesn't look tacky So that was also like one model, which is like these rings look cool. It's someone called J Hannah or something like that That's your Instagram J.Hanna and Meaning meaningful traction. Yeah, these are your clannick clash. These are clashing There's only four it's like they just stand for like kind of like
- Earth wind fire and ice or something like that, but they're just kind of class rings with the year and they just look better They look cool when you wear them. So that's another way you can go about this. All right Here's you want to know about here's another company that you're gonna be mind blown about Do you know what the Pantone color chart is the Pantone matching system? I Googled it googled it and I see things that I recognize like a color wheel. Yeah, but okay So here's here's the story. Here's the story you need to know. Okay, so There's a guy Frank who sent this to me on Twitter. So shout out to Frank
- He's got like an egg profile on Twitter, but he listens to the body. He just goes, Hey, Pantone, this has got to be a huge business. These guys sell this frickin color book for $500. And so I said, wait, I have one of those color books on my desk. What the what's this business behind this? And sure enough, okay, so here's the backstory. There's this guy. Okay, so Otto Justin was our first, you know, Billy of the week. Lawrence Herbert is my second. Lawrence Herbert basically, these guys, they owned a print company, a printing company, and they got tired.
- of the fact that like they had all these inconsistencies in colors, right? So you would try to just describe a color or it's blue color, but like which shade of blue, and then all these different inks that were trying to keep track of a name or whatever. And they said, screw it. We're going to create the global standard for colors. So all they did was they took every single shade of color, and they put a number on it. And they gave this to every like manufacturer, fashion house, architecture firm, like you're picking the colors for your curtains, what pantom color you're going to use. You're picking, you know,
- of the color of your fabric for your clothing brand, what's color you're going to use? You're you know, crazy. Like Ben and Jerry's uses color chart for they have a quality assurance group that basically looks at the brownies that are going to go in the brownie fudge bites or whatever. And if the brownie color is between you know brown 690 and brown 669, then it's good. It's properly baked. And if it's under or over, it's like too baked or it's under baked. So they just hold this up and they look at the brownie and they say does this match this color or not. And so this thing.
- is used ubiquitously. So they created this Pantone Color System, the matching system. It's like 2,500 colors. They make over $100 million a year just sending out this little brochure, this little pamphlet, this little booklet with all the colors in it. And everybody buys these things. We have one here because when we need to communicate with our manufacturer for our brand, we have to tell them, hey, use Pantone Color 506C or whatever it is. So they know that we want that specific shade of blue. How does products start? So the guy owns the printing company, decides to create a product.
- create the Pantone matching system. And the number one way they got the word out was this marketing stunt. Like we talked about Michelin Star and we talked about like that system. So they started coming out with Color of the Year. So they just, they would put a ton of money in effort behind Color of the Year. So 2016 Rose Quartz 2015 Marsala. You know, 2012 Tangerine Tango is the Color of the Year. 2011 Classic Honey Suckle Color of the Year. So they do this big marketing blitz around. What is the Color of the Year?
- And in order to come up with that they have this hush hush process where they invite 12 like trend spotters to their office And then they each give presentations and kind of like debate around like culture and where the where society is moving And then they come out and they're like honeysuckle is it and then they immediately blitz the market with that They send that to all the like fashion houses at agencies And then they start using that in their campaigns and they start you'll start getting emails Which is like oh buy our thing? It's got the color of the year This is honeysuckle the color of the year for this dress and so brands start using that for their own market
- And so it started spreading that way. And so they sell these booklets for like, you know, $85 up to $500. These booklets. And then every year they launch like a hundred new colors. So you got to get a new booklet with all the new colors in it. It's like the dictionary. And I just thought this was amazing. I didn't know there was even a company behind this and it makes over $100 million. All right. I'm going to blow your mind. All right. We're going to, we're going to build off this. Go to WGSN.com. So WGSN.com. Do you see that? I think you've told me about this one.
- These are the trend trend makers, right? They have like a cent of the year or something like that. No colors. It's called exactly what you described. They do almost exactly that. We were forced. Except it's a it's really like one or two reports a year, but it's a subscription service and they sell to businesses and they're public companies. So I can look up the revenue. So their revenue last year was 90, 90 million euros. I think this is a euro. So a hundred million dollars. Yeah. A hundred million dollars. And it's been doing a hundred million dollars.
- or it's been doing around that forever. So it's currently on by research reports, basically. But it's we could dumb it down. We had the founder of David's T's on here and he was talking about how he uses a brand that he used to pay for stuff like this. And I remember asking him, like, is it just bullshit or is this like, why are you buying this? Like, I don't know how much this report is like thousands of dollars for this report. Thousands. Thousands. And he was like, oh, totally worth it. Like that's how we got the new like flavors and fragrances for the news T's every year. I was like, wow, okay, interesting. So it's called WGSN.
- WGSN.com and to dumb it down, Starbucks who will buy a hundred thousand uniforms or a hundred fucking 10 million coffee sleeves, they want to know which color for Christmas, what shade of red is going to be interesting enough? Or if we're buying these uniforms for this promotion, which color is the right color? By the way, that Starbucks red thing, my wife loves Starbucks.
- the time she can. And she literally looks forward to the red cup moment where they switch the cups. And like, it's like an emotional thing almost. It's like, it's basically like, oh, shit, like, like the season has changed. Christmas time is here. I get these warm fuzzy feelings and part of that I associate with is the red cups, which I just found to be like crazy that anyone cares. Well, yeah, it just means that it's winter time. And so this company called WGSN companies pay, I think it's 18 grand a year. And they also have someone you could talk
- So you can ask them a question. That's what they call their advisory service. They just ask people questions. But then they also, so I believe the way the business works is they do two things. They look at loads of different data on what type of color is selling well. And I imagine it's just someone else's data. The second thing is they survey people. And so they'll survey like people who they deem as experts and they ask them questions. And then they create this like survey response of like, all right, here's according to all the experts, this color, these colors for this type of niches are gonna be the colors that you're gonna use.
- use in the future. And if you have a company that's not like growing that much, but it's worth 90 million euro a year in subscription revenue, I mean, that's like a three, four, five hundred million dollar a year company or a company that I think makes like 30 million dollars a year in profit only off colors. And this is the second one in a few minutes that we've named. Colors are very interesting. And by the way, these guys, the Pantone guys, they've been partnered with some other firm to come out with the so that the Pantone became has become the universal like language of color.
- color to somebody you described it the Pantone chart. And by the way, the reason why there's like a sign, there's a bit of a mechanical reason why. So like a normal printer, if you use a printer, I think a normal like household printer, well, it has this thing called CMYK, if you've ever seen that capital CMYK. What does that mean? It's like cyan, magenta, magenta, yellow and black or something. And basically, you can mix those four colors, you can make a whole bunch of combinations of colors just using those four, it's like RGB for TVs. And, but Pantone, if you have a Pantone machine,
- Then the Pantone machine basically has like 18 base colors. And so you can mix and you can mix it because it's 18 specific base colors. You can create all these really specific shades. So when you give somebody the color, it's not just so that their eye knows what it is. It's that they can punch it into the machine and create that specific pigment or that specific ink or that specific printed color on top of whatever it is. So there's like, you know, they needed something like that, which is pretty cool. But anyways, these guys partnered with somebody to come out with like the Pantone of taste and the Pantone of smell also, right? How do you describe a fragrance?
- Well, how do you do this? And so they partnered with some company. They also tried to own that space. And this thing is awesome to be like kind of the global authority and naming of a color. And somehow a private company owns that, which is insane. It's like owning the periodic table or something. And we are talking about, you call that boring. I think this is fun. I think this is actually kind of fun. I don't know if I would want to do it all the time, but this is like a fun thing because you can kind of shape culture. I mean, we were talking about that red. That Starbucks.
- like you or like the Coca-Cola red or the fact that, do you know that Coca-Cola invented Santa Claus pretty much? Or like the way that we envision Santa Claus? I don't want to go to a much off the cuff because I didn't actually research this, but I'm like old stuff like in American history. And so I've read stories about this, but like the modern day Santa with like that red suit, fat guy who's got a white beard, that's a Coca-Cola invented that. Oh shit, we need to go deep on that one. We should go back. Okay.
- All right, so I'm gonna call this business, I discovered this business the hard way. So we were traveling, we left something at, you know, the TSA security checkpoint, where you're like putting all your stuff in the bins or whatever, and we left something in there. And so we get on the plane, my wife's like, oh no, where's that thing? Oh, don't worry, I'm sure we can just sort of call them or like, you know, file a report and- Are you trying not to say what it is? What the item? Yeah. Oh, there's, I mean, it's just like a baby stroller bag thing. You know, it's like a $150 item, but-
- like not, you know, whatever, nobody can. It doesn't matter what it is. Left an item there. So I'm like, okay, let me Google like just, hey, item left TSA Las Vegas airport. And the first thing that comes up is a single insta file, get your file file, you're claiming to get your thing back. I click it and it's like, oh, just tell us what your item is and we'll get it back to you. Don't don't worry about it. And then you go through the flow and then it tries to charge you $29 at the end. I'm like, okay, whatever. And as I'm doing this, so I go through.
- I'm starting to follow this thing and I start to get my Spidey Spent since I was tingling, I scroll down and I see, you know, Instafile is not associated with any airport, TSA or anything like that. I'm like, oh, what is this? Pretty interesting business. So, first, I think it's clever, a clever move. I call these couch cushion businesses. It's like finding change in the couch cushion. It's like these little cracks in the system where you can just like slip right in and create a business. So, of course, people are going to be losing, you know, one out of a thousand people are going to lose something in TSA. What are they going to do? And these guys are the top.
- up ranking result for that, for every airport, I think. And so they just, well, all they do is, filing a claim is actually free. What they do is they just rank at the top, they get you to pay for it, and then they go file the claim on your behalf, and just forge your, they just forge your report to them, and then they forge you their response. And it's like a scam. It's not a scam. It's like a kind of a managed service. It's very misrepresentative. And so you go read the reviews, people are very angry at them. I don't get angry about this sort of thing. I actually, I'm like, oh.
- clever, clever, you've found a way to like, you know, capitalize on this. Um, and you know, there is some value ad service because again, there is like an agent in the middle. I don't know how much that's why I'm saying it's very, it's very, uh, technically it's not a scam. It's just misleading. It depends if they're actually better at, if they actually save you time of money, uh, or like, you know, increase your odds for getting your thing back. If they're really just forwarding your report and then forwarding their email back to you, then there's like zero value ad. But if they are actually like, you know, filing it right, following
- up for you calling and getting the answer, then great. Dude, I can't find anyone online who works at this company. Yeah, you can't find the owner, you can't find the about page, and that's what I'm like, okay, yeah, and probably more towards scam. But anyways, I just thought this was fascinating, and how many different businesses are there like this? There's probably a ton of different business like this that are just like these really hyper specific scenario searches that you can rank number one for. And then when you do, I bet you kind of print money, I bet you this business is profitable seven figures business just off this one.
- this one thing. Like mugshots.com or mugshot websites. What is that to look up mugshots? Yeah, you've never tried to look at someone's mugshot. Oh my God, it's littered with scams. So Google like a fine mugshot California, or like, you know, like imagine, like what, imagine a friend gets arrested and you're trying to find a mugshot. Google whatever you're gonna Google. All right, so I'm seeing a bunch of ads, four ads at the top. All right, let me find mugshots for free. Looks like a search bar.
- It searches their name and it goes, finds the public records and I'm guessing it's going to charge me something at some point. Crazy, right? Yeah. It's pretty wild. So a lot of these mug shots they get, they're just public. So if you know where someone gets arrested, you can just go, not all counties are that way, but you can just go to like San Francisco or so that would be like Alameda County mug shots and you guys should go to the website and find it and they just like, and they just aggregate it, but they have super, super slick onboarding ways to like get you to give the money and then. The website's super awesome.
- Right? Like this, right next to the search bar, it says Norton security and McCaffee secure. Why do I, what does that have? That's a virus scanning protocol. What does that have to do with my me typing in someone's name to search for them? Like, but it's just like these random ass trust building badges right next to the search bar just to get me to do this for free. Yeah. So it's not actually going to be free. It's incredibly scammy. And anyway, it's very similar to what you're describing. We can actually do a, I'll actually do a breakdown about this very soon. Maybe next week, I'll do a breakdown on this business. Historically, incredibly scammy. Probably you could own the person who
- who can own one of these businesses and make like 10, 15 million dollars a year in profit. Although you had to like, you know, live this shitty life where like you're just kind of a piece of shit scamming someone. But it's like, it's crazy fascinating that these mug shop businesses, I think they crush. Yeah. So I do know who Naveen Jane is? Yes. So he is like a billionaire guy now, but he, the way that became a billionaire, he's kind of done a good job of rebranding himself as like inspirational Tony Robbins guy. But he owned a bunch of stamming businesses and I believe some.
- of him were Ponzi schemes that he took public. So what was it a Ponzi scheme I don't think exactly but basically during the dot com boom there was a company called InfoSpace and he was the CEO of InfoSpace and I don't know the full story I should look it up but I remember reading it because I met his son his son his guy Anker Jane really interesting guy and you know like he's it was kind of like I was sort of like why is this kid so like polished why do I feel like when he's talking to me he's talking like on CNBC or something like that like I got this like politics
- petitioned vibe from him. And so I was looking at him up like, oh, he's the son of this billionaire. They grew up in the same neighborhood as like, whatever, Bill Gates and other guys. And then somebody had told me, somebody was like, yeah, his dad's kind of controversial. So why is that? And he started Infospace, took Infospace public. And then before Infospace crashed in the dot com crash, he had like, I don't know, sold a bunch of his stock. He ended up doing great. All of his employees, you know, lost their kind of like, the company went under, but he ended up doing very well. That's the like,
- a short of it. Now, I don't know if it was like, you know, some kind of like underhanded stuff. I'm not sure. But definitely there's like a long kind of like report that's pretty hard to Google for it because I think he's like scrubbed it. But you can find it from the old like Seattle Times or something like that. But then he started another company that also had controversy called Intellius. And Intellius is the one you're thinking about. And Intellius, I think it sold like for over $100 million. But what it was is sort of like in the it's a way for people to peruse criminal records.
- and conduct background searches online. But the way it worked, if you look at Google, like Intelli is scam or Intelli is shady, you'll see that it basically looked like one of those free credit report services, where it's like, oh, just type your name, you'll get your data, your report. And there's this tiny checkbox that's like, you agree to pay $19.99 for the rest of your life if you do this. And so that's how they were making a bunch of their money, was they were just aggregating public records, making them a little more searchable, and they had this sort of like.
- hard to see subscription that you were paying for at the end of it. Maybe, I don't know exactly, you must have entered your credit card, so it can't be that hard to see, but there's a bunch of controversy around Intellius, I remember. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a subscription service. Now he's got like this company, Moon Express, that's like sending rockets to the moon, and like, and now he's got something called VioM. It's like, imagine a world where illness is optional, and it's like, you know, it's trying to save the world, save the planet, type a guy. And if you hear him talk, he's extremely charismatic as people who you tend to, you know, run schemes tend to be. And so,
- I don't know, I don't really have an opinion myself. I just know that there is some controversy around this guy, but I find him to be a pretty fascinating character. I find him very interesting to hear when he talks, inspirational type of speaker. And now he's doing these kind of like big picture Elon Musk type of things, but got his start doing something much less savory. We should have someone come on and talk about some of the stuff. I didn't realize that, I knew what a telly is was, but whenever I do these background checks, I like doing background checks up. It's fun. Thanks.
- Don't you ever do it to see, have my parents ever been arrested? Let's find out. No, I had never do anything like that, but I'm also not ancestry.com or 23andMe. I think there's a lot of people who are just big into self exploration, kind of like my past, other people's past, things like that. And I just haven't done that a ton. Well, so that's me. So I understand why there's a lot of people. Most people, like answers.com is a huge business. So I think, anyway, I think this, yeah, I didn't realize, I thought that someone could make 10 or 20.
- million from this. But now that I remember and tell you, I think was doing hundreds of millions from this. Yeah, I ran into some another business like this that was looking for people's addresses. So when we had that, like, I came up with a pod I talked about, somebody was stealing from us and we knew who they were. We're going to find them. It's in the cops of their house, stuff like that. Well, I needed to find somebody's address. And so I started, basically, if you have like a couple pieces of information, a name, a phone number, stuff like that, there's these like websites that will come up, they'll say, Hey, yeah, we'll give you this. We have a huge database of all everyone's address, just put in their info. And then you get like three steps down the phone.
- It's like oh to unblur the address you got to pay $9.99 in a month. It's like why do I need this monthly? I'm not doing this every month, but okay sure I really want this address and like they're just like I bet you'll forget to cancel this A lot of times with those services you can do a good enough job of if you actually cross reference a ton of them You can actually find the name unblur because they'll show you three like pieces three possible Options and like the third one which is likely it is is blurred But then you could like do some weird like triangulation and figure out which one it is. It's kind of interesting I've done it before as well. Yeah, this is like sort of the dark part
- of the internet and all they're doing, like you said, is they basically take stuff that's public record or they take guesses and then they aggregate it and put a fancy kind of search bar and they just do a good job of ranking and Google are paying for Google AdWords and that's their business model. But I don't know too much about these. I've never thought about doing a business like this, but when I run into them as a customer, I'm like, what's underneath this? How the heck does this thing work? And it's pretty fascinating. Me too. And I'm just a classic. I'm going to do some interest in a mugshot. I'm going to tell Jay to do it to like.

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- Propped to this guy for doing this. I got to give him credit. I'm more into this than you are. I kind of love that a guy's dreaming like this. So we were we just did this other intro. Mike's got screwed up. We're going to do it again. We could say what we said even faster, though. We're talking about the stuff that we're investing in. I actually put it into a format. So like the name of the deal.
- Why each of us did it why it can be great, but I also want to say why it can suck why it will fail Yeah, this is like the disclaimer here we have a stake in everything that you're gonna we're gonna be talking about I I frankly don't care if people use it or not. I mean this is more so entertainment I have a feeling some people will use it But that's and also this isn't like investment advice a lot of these companies are very likely gonna go out of business Because that's just how start up investing works Yeah, and you couldn't invest in them if you wanted to most likely The the good outcome of this would be a you hear about some cool startups that are doing interesting things and it just gets your wheels turning about like Oh shit, I never even thought about that. That's exciting
- And then the other is you get a taste of what it's like to invest in deals and how you think how an angel investor thinks about investing in early-stage startups. All right. I always say really quick, I just didn't want people to know. I'll say for me, I'm not necessarily, I'm not saying I'm good at this. But I'm just kind of doing it like publicly. So people are watching me learn, like get in shape publicly. I've probably done 30 deals. But anyway, you want to, all right, let me go first because I have this deal that I have to make an introduction to because they specifically ask for you.
- It's the top one. It's called abstract ops and I need to know if you want to join this or not I actually I just emailed the guy today because I was like shit when I saw you write this I was like oh shit. I forgot to reply to that guy. Did I introduce you? You told me about it and I was like I forgot to ask about it. So I email him Yeah, he I offered you him or him one somehow you're already in the know and He said he wants to talk to you. So I know this guy. There's two guys I don't know the second one the first one his name is Adam specter. He's one of the founders I think he's the COO. I've known him since 2014 or 15 maybe
- I've been in a book club with them. There's four of us who have a book club. And I invested in the seed round. I didn't have much money at the time, but I think I invested either $1,000 or $2,000. I don't remember, but I got prorata. So what that basically means is when they were gonna raise again, I got to invest again. And that's how I find out about this. Adam's amazing. I ended up investing around $400,000. And I got a preference list that's saying that I do my own money that comes straight out of my checking account. And then I also have this thing called HamptonVC. So HamptonVC.com or is it.com or .co? And you can, it's where I use Angelos, where I invest, it's HamptonVC.com. It's where I invest like my own money. And then if someone wants to join, they can. So in this deal, I did both my own and Hampton's money. And we invested about $400,000. Basically you claim what it is. What's most abstract ops?
- So have you like if you're like know what you're talking about a little bit It's you would say it's like net net suite for startups if you don't know what that is Which a lot of people don't know what that is it basically I don't know what that's we this so when you start a company There's all I don't actually know if you had to do this because you actually had people earlier on on but when I started my company There's a lot of stuff that I would always forget to do because I'm just an absent-minded person so for example if you have Employees and different states to file taxes into each state or even just to register in each state and it's not like a huge penalty It's like a hundred dollar penalty if you don't do it correctly and you get a notice But it's important to do it all right. Otherwise it adds up or
- Another example is like certain HR practices and certain back-end practices like onboarding contractors in a very particular type of way getting them to reset a sign like an intellectual property release There's just a thousand different things and abstract ops is software that helps you that basically adds in what all those things are And it's workflow so you can see which tasks need to get done Does that make sense? It's a little bit fluffy, but does that make sense? That's a little bit fluffy, but I recommend people actually go to their landing page not because That has anything to do with the investment, but
- It's such a good landing page. So what you see if you go there. So I'll just point out a couple of brilliant things. I'm going to use this in my Power Writing course because this is an example of an amazing landing page for a fairly boring business that would normally have a cookie cutter, very boring stock photo type of website. And so it says, stop running from your back office tasks, which is basically like, they had a million ways they could explain their business. Like we make it easy to handle, you know, your back office tasks or to handle HR legal and finance ops.
- And so stop running from it. I think it's great. It shows me this person understands like how founders are, which is like we put the shit off as far as we possibly can, because it's a pain in the ass, so we just don't wanna think about it. And then it has this stick figure running away from a tornado, like a little hand drawn tornado, and I love it. And then the first like sub headline is, I started a company to do a bunch of back office work, literally no founder ever, right? And it's like, I just get that I love that they have personality. I think what that does is it makes it way easier. It shows me that whoever's behind this knows marketing, and they're gonna have a much easier time recruiting like customers and users, because they're taking the average mundane things and they're turning them into little sales moments where I start to love this brand. And I think Slack did this extremely well. If you open up Slack, there's like 10 little delightful details that make you kinda like Slack, even though it's a pretty boring like work chat tool.
- And so that was something that stood out to me right away. So I'll explain why I made the decision to invest. The first is I know the founder, his name is Adam, and he had previously sold the company to Twitter. I don't know if it was incredibly successful, but I don't care to me. It's like, all right. It's in what we call the sweet spot. You know, you did just enough that I don't think you're an idiot, but you didn't get rich enough where I'm worried that you're going to be some lazy, want to be Steve Jobs visionary type for your next thing. It's like you're hungrier than you were the first time and you're smarter than you were the first time too. Yeah. And so that's one of the reasons why. The second reason is the product. I know like, frankly, I think they're still figuring out the product. They have like close to seven figures in recurring revenue, but I think they're still even figuring out the product, which frankly is a reason why you shouldn't have it. I shouldn't have invested is like, they're still kind of tinkering exactly what is going to be.
- But I do know that when it comes to the back office of startups This was something that I failed at for years like I struggled so hard to like make sure I filed my taxes in Washington Because we had one guy who was working more than 40 hours a week there Yeah, like it was just like a nightmare and it stressed me out and there when I was selling my company There was so much stuff that was like loose paperwork the the The things that make me worried though is that Zenefits gusto or the thousand of other companies that they can just want you because like it's hard to get Once you start using gusto or some payroll provider getting out of that is a pain in the ass So if these companies are smart which some of them are but they're still big slow companies then they're gonna do a good job of ripping abstract Ops off and offering the
- these features as a add-on. But I think that could be said for a lot of different companies. Also, because it's this like huge, it's kind of vague now, because it's not a very narrow product, because it's like huge idea. I get nervous that they're not gonna be able to sell this to customers, but they've done a pretty good job of getting some of like the cooler, HIPAA companies already as beta customers. So it's incredibly interesting to me. What about you? And so I kind of agree. So I guess like the one thing for me is, it's not super clear, like even on their website, they have a bunch of these like little examples. So it says, you're a CEO, we handle and automate your HR, legal ops finance, so you don't have to. And then I like how it says, be scrappy, not sloppy, which is definitely a distinction. I've failed at many, many times, falling into sloppy, but calling it scrappy as my cover. But they have a bunch of like use cases, like pay legal invoice.
- Send equity grant to advisor, set up health insurance, compose investor update. And so I'm not sure how one platform can either do all those things, or is it just a to-do list so that you actually do this? So I don't actually know the product well enough because I haven't used it. But I would say that's one challenge is it seems like it's trying to do a whole bunch of things, which means it's either a very generic horizontal tool or it's a complicated tool. Which one is it? I think it's going to be a complicated tool at first. That said, I think that a company like a NetSuite, which is like a NetEel QuickBooks.
- Yeah, NetSuite is like that, but plus a lot more. And what I've noticed is that being, particularly being a HubSpot, once I can get, you could be a good enough salesman and get someone to start buying your shit, it's incredibly easy just to start selling them more and building more stuff on top of that. And I'm hoping that's what we can do with AppShark Ops. And one of the kind of question marks here is, is this automated or are there just humans in the back end that are like helping do all this stuff? A little bit of both. But currently, a little bit of both. But I think that's the question is, can they get it to be more software than humans so that it's scale?
- else better. Are you going to invest? Uh, we'll see. I want to actually use the product because I, I'm guilty of this. Like I said, so like I have a company that, um, that, you know, my, basically my, my personal company that's like back offices, kind of sloppy is kind of a mess. Like our quick books, like I don't want to open any of those tabs. Like I don't want to open gusto. I don't want to open quick books. It's like something I like choose to avoid. I'd rather like, I'd rather put it off until shit breaks and then it's, I know it's too late, but like fuck. I hate thinking about the stuff. I only run. I only want to think about growth if I can. And so I actually think I would be a potential user for this. And so I'm going to use it and I'm going to.
- see, is this magical for me or not? And that'll be the make or break for investing, which is always the best. If you can be, if you are the customer, it's way easier to invest than things that you're guessing about. Tell me about one that you're excited about. All right. I'm going to tell you about one called jar. So I think I emailed you this deal because I think you should do it. But what is it? So jar is, you know that app Acorns, it's like kind of a big FinTech app. Didn't they go public? I don't know if they, I think they're like spacking or something like that. They're like a, they're like over a billion dollar valuation.
- And what the genius there was like, you would buy something and they would just be like, hey, do you want to like, do you want to, it would just tell you upfront, do you want to be a saver? Okay, you want to be a saver. Great. Well, here's, here's why we can make it easy for you. You don't have to think too much when you buy Starbucks and it's your bill is, you know, 323. Let's just round up to four and we'll just round up the savings and we'll just deposit that and oh, look, over time, if we just keep rounding up, you'll, you'll save. That's how it started at least and it was a pretty clever idea. People like that.
- And so what these guys are doing is they're taking the acorns model And tweaking a little bit, but they're doing it in India and so here's what I like about it You most apps when you want to go invest it's like you download some FinTech app And then you got to like link your account So you got a deposit money and then it's like great. What do you want to invest in or how do you want to set this up? You know, do you want to do a mutual fund? You want to do an index fund? Like what do you want to do and it's like shit? I need knowledge now and then it's like hey, by the way, you can't just start investing right away Like we have to verify your identity so like scan your driver's license hold it up to the screen
- you know, with a nude photo and whatever else, right? There's like all these steps that go into just getting started with any investing app because that's the law. And what these guys figured out is a Did this be called Spenny? No. Are you sure? Yeah, I think they're I don't remember spending. They didn't mention that at least. It's called their URL was like changed jar. I am. And so what they were doing is they were like, look, the average person in India is this was like their story. They were like, I got my job when I was 21, like most people.
- But I didn't start saving anything or investing until I was 30. And when I was 30, I was like, oh shit, I wanna buy a house sometime and I wanna get married. And I really should start doing adult stuff. And so he's like, that lost decade between 20 and 30 is a huge difference in your net results if you had started saving earlier. Like everybody's seen these compound savings charts where if you started 21 versus 31, you end up with millions of dollars more because you've been able to like save for an extra decade. And even in small amounts.
- And so what they said was how do we solve that problem? How do we get you to start investing at 21 instead of 31? And what they did was they're like, we're gonna simplify the shit out of this. We're gonna simplify it where in 45 seconds, you can have your first investment done. So how do you do that? And they said, well, here's the thing. In India, everybody believes in gold. And I know this because my family in India has like gold shops. They like sell jewelry and whatnot. And gold is like the thing. Every like, if you ask a mom there about stocks, they can't tell you a single thing. It's not even a big, stocks is not like a big thing there. But everybody has like a gold set of jewelry as they're like safety nets. Crazy man. Like if we ever have to flee, we're just gonna grab the gold and we're gonna run. And like this was literally happened in India where there's like a, where Pakistan and India split up. So people literally did have to flee. So it's like kind of baked in that way.
- And so they're like, we only offer one asset, it's gold. Everybody already believes in it and they want it. The second thing is, you're first up to a certain weight of gold, you don't have to do all the financial compliance that you have to do for stocks or real estate or other larger investments or different asset classes. So they're like, there's this loophole where basically we can get you to start saving right away. You don't have to verify your ID and you don't have to link your accounts and do all this other stuff. So I love that like the simplicity that was in their go to market because I was like, oh, people will actually do that. If I can in 45 seconds get saving, great. And then once I reach this threshold where I've bought a certain weight of gold,
- Then it asks you to put your put your put way more information in. But by then I'm kind of pot committed because I already have my already have wealth here, even a small amount. I'll like protect that versus a normal app. You just bounce before you even put the first dollar in. Was this your own money that you invested or the funds money? Well, I put my own money into the fund, but then all my investments have to go through the fund unless the founder itself won't let the fund invest. And so it's like a like an angelless rule. Well, that's the rule I set when I started the fund because I didn't want to have a conflict of interest where I'm doing the good deals and my own money and I'm doing the borderline deals in the funds money. No, I wanted it to be clean so that, hey.
- Every deal I do, I just do it through this one vehicle. How much do you invest? So I put in 150k and it's got a $12 million valuation and a 20% discount. And so I put in 150k, they're raising about a million bucks. They already have good traction. So like, what do you look for? You like the team, you like the product, and then you got to like the traction in the market size. And so market size, I like because I think this micro savings thing can add up really big in India. There's just so many people. And so like their average user after I think like two or three months has saved $300 already in the US dollars.
- And so that's like pretty significant for a very early like just putting micropayman after micropayman in of just rounding up your expenses or just automating and saying every day I want to put in 50 rupees, which is like, you know, whatever, a dollar or less than a dollar. And so it's like, every day I want to put in 50 rupees and because my goal is to save up enough where I can pay for my wedding, you know, in five years. And so it's kind of like sets the goal and then it says, great, you should put in 75 a day. And you say, yes. And then India also has this crazy thing. I don't know if you've heard of UPI. No. So basically the country, like, you know, how like in the States, you have like every bank just kind of has their own clunky software and there's different payment, you know, you can use stripe for payments, you can use something else for payments. And there's no like.
- There's no country level payments rails. And so in India, the government came in and was like, yo, in the next year, everybody has to move to this news payment standard. It's the universal payments, whatever infrastructure or something like that. And this will just make it so that anybody who's taking payments, you just build on top of these rails. And we're gonna modernize payments in India through this. And so they did that big change. And so that's changed the game. That's why there's a lot of innovation in India right now because this UPI thing was like a pretty major breakthrough. And the second thing is they just released this feature called Autopay, which is basically a recurring auto investment. And so these guys are using that new feature of UPI. So I just think the like why now makes a lot of sense
- for this and I like the hack that they have around just buying gold so that you reduce all the friction of getting somebody started. So are you're totally okay with investing in India? Because I've only invested in American-based companies. I've had Australia, I've had all over Europe and I'm like, for some reason that gap freaks me out a little. Yeah, it kind of does for me too, but I've been investing in India. And so when I invest in India, there is definitely some trepidation. So that's my why it could fail. I just wrote, India, question mark, question mark, like easy for me to be fooled, right? Like these guys could be well-known scammers in India that I don't know, right? These guys could be, I mean, they weren't, right? They went through YC, I think. So, so, so, so, you know, I actually, I don't know if they went to YC, but I know. Well, well, the other companies I invest in know these guys. And they went, their competitor went to YC, which is your second point why they could fail. There's a lot of people in the space. Exactly. So FinTech is just super hot worldwide right now. There's like every day there's a new credit card, a new debit card, a new meal bank that's popping up. And then there's bigger players that are trying to modernize. And so I think the one way they could fail is that there's probably like 10 between 10 and 50 legit competitors to the
- in India that are not doing directly this, but they can add this as a feature or they could pivot into this, or they could like recognize that the clever things that these guys are doing and implement them. So I think that's the, those are the two, which is like there's a bunch of competitors in FinTech right now for every idea. And the second thing is, India is always a little bit of a question mark. And it's something, it's very easy for shit to look good in India because, you know, it costs no customer acquisitions, always super cheap. It's like, oh man, you're getting users for 80 cents. That's awesome. But like the reality is not all these Indian companies can be great. So so I got to like my own filter for India is off because I come at it with a US point of view. Having said all that,
- The two indie investments I've done so far are probably two of my best investments and so I'm gonna keep betting there because I think that the country is like It's in a sweet spot where there's just a lot of innovation There's just gonna be a lot of winners out of this batch and I just need to bet and on enough of them that okay Even if I get fooled by one or two or I didn't understand the market landscape I get into enough winners is my goal also because I'm Indian I kind of have this advantage where a lot of people in India follow me through this podcast or through Twitter And so I am able to get into like any deal like these guys when they were reaching out there like we asked only for two intros
- you and Navall. And I was like, okay, bro, you have one of us in the wrong league there. But the reality is that's kind of an opportunity for me. I agree. If I build my brand bigger there, I can get into any deal I want there. I agree. I think it's why like Bruno Mars is like the most watched person on YouTube. It's because what you see, because where's he from? In Philippines, wherever he's from, if you see someone who you recognize in America who's crushing and kicking ass, everyone rallies around that person from the outside country to like, oh, he's one of us. So it's like Manny Pacquiao in the Philippines. He's like the president there. And he's just because he's like a famous boxer here. They just want to go all out for their guy. Yeah, or Bjork in Iceland. So you're like the, you're the, Manny Pacquiao of India. I'm saying, if I keep betting, then I have a path to do that. But if I'm never investing there, then I can't build that like, it takes a stack of reasons why you should be like known and respected in a place. And I think one of the reasons why you could be known and respected is having invested in some winners. But I got to plant those seeds now. All right, can I tell you one I'm really excited about? And I wasn't excited at first. And then I started using it and I'm like, oh, I'm in. Okay. So the name is bad and they're going to change it. They're going to change the name, I think. It's called, the names are really bad. It's called rumor. So I'm actually highlighting it. You can see the memo that I wrote for you. When you say it, the name's fine.
- When you spell it, you know, it sounds like you've got a cotton in your mouth or something like that. Yeah. So I've talked about bring a trailer. Bring a trailer is this website that originally started as like a car where they would show off cool cars that were on sale from around the web. They eventually launched their own auction platform, but they just did a really good job of making editorializing it, making it like a community so you can buy classic or even newer cars that fit a certain demographic. Rumor is doing that for houses. And by the way, if you want to invest Sean, let me know. I mentioned it. I wouldn't have been interested in this except for the bring it when you've educated me on how bring a trailer is a great business and we've looked into different auctions through the podcast. So now when I look at this, I see it differently than like, Oh, just another home buying website. Okay. I don't really, how are you different than? No, it'll be cool because look at some of the example auctions and then click comments and read the comments. That's kind of like why it's neat. How do I go to an auction? I don't even know if those are fake auctions or what the founder bought a bunch of homes just to put on that site for auctions. And so go to the web. You bought a bunch of homes to see the marketplace. I think he like owns like 20. He's like a, he was like a, he's a property owner. Like he owns, he's like a landlord. So let's just, let's just explain it. So I'm on rumor. It's are you.
- UMR.com right now, they're by change of the name. So I go, Washington looks to be the only market that's open, so I'm there right now. And I'm just looking at this for the first time. So I see that there's this house in Washington, there's a bunch of pictures, and it's on sale for $103,000. And it says that there's 13 hours left, presumably in this auction. And then there's some details about it, like all the normal house details. And then I can log in, I can make an offer, and then I see people who are making offers, but then I see people who are also commenting like, is the electric heating system based board or something else?
- And then you see replies from like, I assume either the owner or the agent, like answering questions in the chat here. Well, people are bidding 100,000, 100, 1000, 100, 2000. And it's currently at 103,000 is the option. It's even for houses. Yeah, but it's a little bit different than eBay. It's a little bit different, but yeah, that is, but the reason it's one of the reasons why I think this can exist is let's say you're buying a house for half a million dollars and they do like a first and final offer process where everyone submits your offer on a Friday. If you're bidding half a million dollars for a house and you see that the winning bid was 505, you're like, well, fuck, if you guys would have told me, I would have met 510 and you would have made more money and I would have got what I wanted. Right. And so it's kind of trying to solve for that. But let me explain to you why I think this could be.
- be cool. So first, I'm the founder was pretty interesting. He's a military guy. So I like military folks. He also started stay Alfred, you know, stay Alfred. By the way, we should we should highlight the groups that we are inherently biased to invest in Mormons, military guys, Russians. Jews. What else are you guys? It's really Jews is what we said. Right. You know, who will immigrate? I'm always partial to immigrate. Any any immigrant, anybody who's lived in the US illegally, you know, for a period of time, anybody who
- is single parent, I'm in, you already did the hardest thing of your life. Like, can you? Oh, because you know, that's a no for me. The other ones that I guess like are almost like, I lean in, I'm a little bit interested, is like, oh, how do you, what were you doing? Like, when you were younger, and it's like, well, I was like, you know, flipping cars, or I was flipping shoes on eBay, or I kind of don't want to say, because I was like this affiliate marketer for these like, shape of dating sites. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand. That's like, that's an eight plus. That's like, yeah, shady internet arbitrage.
- So this guy started stay Alfred which was like a you know, sonder It's like a competitor to sonder where they would like rent out entire buildings and then sublease them for Work travel got to a hundred million in revenue raised sixty million dollars crash and burned and went out of business And you know what that's awesome. I love that. So that's initially why I was interested I told them I love bring a trailer and he goes. Oh great Their co-founder works here and so does three other team bring a trailer sold the rumors like half a million dollars And since 2000 billion half, sorry half a billion since 2012. I remember in 2012. I was playing around with Real estate stuff online, and I thought homes to
- to be bought and sold online just like we buy and sell clothing. And I, a lot of people with rumor, you can actually still go and see the house and open home like at an open house. But in my mind, I still think that in 10, 20, 30 years, it will be normal actually to buy a house site on scene, even though a lot of people don't think that now I think I think that will be the case and check this out. So why would I, okay, so let's say, let's say I'm a seller. So why would I sell here when I feel like, okay, I'm going to have this 13 hour auction. I don't know what's going to happen. Do I have to take the offers or do I just reject all? Yeah, you can have a reserve.
- Okay, great. And then, is it because I think I'm going to get a higher price or because I save money through the fees? So what's the reason I choose this over like traditional listings? Yeah, the higher price. That's the goal. Higher price by creating like a like a, they take the same fee as like a normal 5% or whatever agent fees. They take less because what the problem at real estate is the agents are still like integral, like they're so very important to the industry. If you cut the agents out, then like the agents are going to be like, Oh, fuck you guys, I'm going to bad mouth you. I'm going to make sure no one ever uses them. So they actually get the agent in on the deal.
- and they just like make the agents job a little bit better and a little bit easier. Right. And so we'll see if it works. But let me explain two things. First is we invested along, and the reason why I was intrigued is all of Stay Alfred's competitors, this guy's whole company, all the CEOs all invested in this company. And I was like, that's kind of an interesting signal. If your competitors respect you, like I'll bet on your next thing, that means something. Yeah, and they were all real estate guys. So this is still related to that business business. So I was like, that's intriguing. Second, so I invested and then I get a call, Jordan calls me. The guy who's starting this he goes.
- Adam Newman just put two million bucks in. I was like, fucking a, got it. Like I think that's pretty good. I think that's a good sign. Why is that a good sign? Cause some people would think that's a bad sign. No, no, no, no. First of all, like I'm not saying what Adam did is great. I frankly don't even know the entire story, but I'm pretty sure. He's the founder of WeWork, who like kind of like, whatever, did a bunch of shit and ended up walking away, kind of like drove the company into a weird spot and was accused of a lot of things. And then he walked away, you know, pretty wealthy as part of his agreement to leave.
- And my thing is Adam Newman, regardless, let's say he did a lot of bad stuff. Let's say he was unethical. Let's say all that's true. I'm not saying it is, but let's just for argument's sake, say it is. He still built something huge and amazing in a very short amount of time and has access to all types of stuff and sees all types of stuff. So I think if he's interested, it's a good thing. And then why can they fail? I think if they execute this poorly, it's going to be bad. I also think that, like, oh, I put it could be if they raise too much money. I actually don't think that's going to be the case. I think they have to actually, this company's going to have to raise a ton, a ton, a ton of money. What can make this fail? I don't know. Maybe if Zillow offers this. Well, also, I think it's a new behavior. And anytime you're betting on a new behavior, that's like...
- The risk of it failing is that like maybe people won't want to buy the house sight unseen or maybe we won't want to sell the house In this way they want their hand held through a traditional process because it's the biggest asset in their life And they they don't want to risk it which is and You can buy this you can go this is not entirely sight unseen But yeah, it's a new behavior. There's a lot of new stuff about it But my thing was like when I was doing the math I'm like you don't need that much volume to build something quite large And once you have the home on there you can upsell like property Assessment or what's it called? Inspections, I think you can upsell a lot
- I just thought it was interesting. I think that's closing. So one thing that's good here is you don't want all your bets to be logical, clear, good ideas, because that means your risk profile wasn't right with start investing. You need a few ideas that sound like they're going to fail when you invest in them, and then either they fail, and you're like, yeah, well, duh. Or you end up looking like a genius six years later, seven years later, because that non-obvious, contrarian idea turned out to be something people actually
- to do. It turned out to be a new behavior people were willing to do. And so I think it's good to have. This was the one note I told my team who like helps me with investing. I said, I don't think we're taking weird enough bets. I don't think we're taking wild enough bets because that's where the big outsized crazy returns are going to be is in things that are non-obvious. Today, you know, like low valuation, not everybody wants to invest in them, the sort of thing. Do you, did you do, SACE? Yes. Does that interest you to talk about or no? We've kind of talked about them before.
- or I want to do another one. All right. I want to do one. OK, you'll kind of I think you'll like this one. I think you'll want in on this one, although it might be too late. So it's called one build. So what one build is is here's the problem as the guy describes it. So I taught. So I meet the guy. How did you meet him? Ben or Zach found him and then they really liked him and they were like, hey, you really got to talk to this guy. So I said, OK, great. Let's do it. And I forgot. I don't know how they found him. I think he was like in some lacy batch or something like that. So so basically I talked to this guy. And he's like, yeah, I was working at cloud kitchens.
- the startup started by Travis Clannick. He's like, I was one of the first 20 people there. And my job was like, you know, they wanted to go build out all these cloud kitchens around the world and they were like, all right, you know, we want to build this $10 million project. We want to build this $20 million project. And he's like, I'm a data guy. Like my background is like data science. And they were like, look, we need you to like be intelligent about how we're going to like plan out these builds. We're trying to spend this much this year. It's a big number. So like help us out with the data side of building out. So he's like, all right, no problem. How hard could it be? And he goes into it and he's like, OK, great. So we have this, let's say we're doing this deal and we're trying to build out this kitchen in Seattle.
- And the estimate is like 10 million, but like it could be plus or minus like four or five million. And that's a pretty big difference. Like if it's 15, it's different than 10, which is different than six. So like which one is it? And the guys were like, well, like it depends. Like it depends on what? He's like, it depends on the cost of construction. And he's like, okay, well, what does that depend on? And it all comes down to like one of the biggest variables is material costs. So there are many ways that your construction costs can go out of whack. Like if you don't get the permits in time, so it gets delayed labor errors, but one big one is materials. And so
- what he was like, he was like, okay, well, how hard can that be? Like let's just figure out the material cost and let's just spec it out. And they're like, no, no, no, it doesn't work like that. Like here's the spec, here's the plan, like a construction plan. And now to cost this, you either, you need to hire a cost estimator. And what they do and what you would do if you wanted to do this yourself is there's this book that gets printed once a year, which is like the, this is like the bit, the blue book of like all materials cost. Like if you want a three foot piece of lumber, it's going to cost you this much. But like, as anybody seen, especially during COVID, like material costs, like lumber has like had huge amounts of variance. I don't know if you've seen this, but like, yeah, yeah, like a truck carrying lumber is like, like right now it's like a truck carrying bricks of gold. It's like, if you robbed that truck, you would have like so much value right now because lumber was so expensive.
- And so he's like, the problem is that there's no real time data. And he said, so that's what I decided to leave and go build is basically an API that will give you real time material pricing for construction. So all you do is you upload what your construction plan is. And then it basically gives you an accurate real time cost of it. And if that's changing over time, you'll see how it's changing week by week, day by day. And companies who are building, I don't know any of the companies, but companies who are building.
- Construction, companies who work in the construction business who are designing stuff, they will use one build software to integrate with their software. So it says in real time, how much is this costing? Exactly. So basically you are a production plan. And they're selling straight to the company. They're selling to the builder and to cost estimators who do this as their job. It's like, hey, here's a way to do your job faster. But I think over time, my sense is that over time it eliminates the need for cost estimators as a profession. But I think the main thing is if you're a contractor, if you're building your own project, you want to know what are my real costs going to be and you want to know how those change over time and then, oh, if we swap this out for this, how does that change your pricing?
- And the other thing is, let's say you're a contractor, you had to go bid for a job. If you bid too high, if you put the cost too high, you may not get the job, right? Because that's your sales pitches. Hey, I'll build it for 12. And if 12 is too high of a number, they're going to give it to some other guy who bid 8. But if the guy who bid 8 is underestimating it and it actually costs him 10, he has to eat that loss. And so bidding for jobs and accurately bidding for a job is basically like a huge part of the sales process of construction. All right. I like that. This problem seems real.
- I talked to a few people in real estate and they were like, yeah, of course, this is like this is a huge problem You know the just the material cost for construction is twice the amount annually of all of e-commerce So it's like humongous market. I say a multi it's a trillion dollar plus market of just the just material construction costs and Smart guy I like their approach. I think they're kind of like the leader in that space. It doesn't seem like they have a ton of competition like I don't think Like what I was saying before about savings app micro saving apps or credit cards. It's like there's a hundred of those startups Right now. I don't think there's a hundred of this startup
- And then they already have some traction, right? They have seven figures of ARR already booked. And so I invested in this thing in their series A. And I think there's also a big idea that I like, which is after you cost it for them, after you say, oh, here's your estimated cost for this. You could also just add a buy button down the road and then be like, cool, purchase all those supplies and actually build a marketplace where suppliers can sell the supplies through their thing because the person's already at the, they already have their invoice basically ready to buy. This is amazing.
- The thing it can fail, right? So why would I hesitate? First, the valuation was higher. So it was like at over $50 million valuation. So I put in a hundred K, I don't own a big piece of this, but I want it in rather than being on the outside. And then the second thing is, I think construction is a pretty old school industry. It's all pen and paper. Like that trillion dollars of material purchasing is all done just through pen and paper offline right now. It's a bringing it online can be a brutally hard thing to do. Look at my metaprop.
- I've seen who all invested in these folks. I think maybe I know some of these people. Who's leading this series A? You know, I don't actually know. I don't remember off of my head. Wow. This is sick. This is great. I think it's a cool one. If they're still raising, I would talk to them in a heartbeat. My fear about this, like if I had to like say what the downsides are is, can you easily replicate this? Like can... I don't think so because what they're doing is not just the, it's not just the app that says, great, upload your thing and get your cost. It's like, where does that data even live? So this is like, you know that company climate corporation that basically...
- Like what they did was they basically organized all that agriculture weather data. Solved for billions. Solved for billions. And basically what they offered to like, you know, hey farmers, like here's all farmers and others. It's basically like we took this unstructured offline data and we made it structured and online. So for example, they're first taking all of the material, all of the materials and they're turning them into SKUs. Like if you've ever done e-commerce, SKU is just like, you know, if you're out of grocery store, a Hershey's chocolate bar. That's one SKU.
- And then a Twix bar will be another SKU and the large Twix bar is another SKU. So basically they took everything you can buy in construction and they're turning them all into SKUs first. So first, that's the first step. Then they have to get the price feeds. Okay. How are we going to get real time price data on all these things when prices vary from supplier to supplier, vendor to vendor? And so then they're, they have to do that. And then they have to turn that whole thing into an API that like can be queried easily and get accurate price data. And so, so I think they have a, I think that's the real innovation here is being the one to organize and collect all that data.
- Then after that, really anybody can build an app that just asks them, hey, what's the price of lumber right now in Tucson, Arizona for this size of this type of lumber? And they should get back in answer. And then if that changes in three months, they should get that change notification that the price is increasing. That's sick. I'm into this. I'm looking at all this now. I'm taking down notes. I think this is amazing. I'm into this one a lot. You want to do one more you like? Yeah. One more interesting one. Okay, here's a boring one. Wait, let me look. Let's do a boring one. Okay, so I actually included this email in here because I wanted to show it and I blacked out a couple things. So don't read those things. But this one's like boring. It's not a seed investment. But I just wanted people to see how this works.
- Yeah. So my friend, Nathan Barry, Nathan Barry started this company called ConvertKit. You know ConvertKit? I'm a user. Yeah. I pay them. I'm a looks ear. Love ConvertKit. If you Google ConvertKit revenue, you can see all their metrics, all their numbers. It's amazing. Nathan is, you know, he's young. He's like 28 maybe, but he like comes off way older. He owns, I think almost the entire company. So ConvertKit is like a mail chimp competitor, but slightly different. It's hard to explain unless you're an email marketing nerd, but it's just like mail chimp. It's just like HubSpot. It's just like a lot of these companies, but geared particularly, I believe, towards bloggers.
- And he has grown the company very steady for about she years. And he asked me if I wanted to buy some secondary at a 7X multiple. So the revenue is 28 million and he's raising at 7X that. What's that? I don't even know. 300. 200 million. 200 million dollars. I invested. I invested $50,000 of my own money. And the reason why. I would do that in the heartbeat. Yeah. Well, you want to? Yeah, I do want to. That's great. That's a no-brainer. All right. I'll make an intro. Hold on. Let me write this. I know the guy, but yeah. I didn't really make any interest. So I get credit. So he owes me one. So the way that it worked was he goes, Nathan emailed me about a week ago. He goes, funny story. After you and I talked on how secondary liquidity works on my podcast, I guess I can say his name. Darmesh heard the episode. Darmesh is the founder of HubSpot, who's going to be on in a few days. Heard the podcast. And he reached out saying if you could buy X worth of shares directly from our shareholders. After surveying former and current teammates with sold hold stock options, we're putting together a secondary round at seven times ARR. And we're looking to raise $2.5 million total with $2.05. So $2 million already committed. ARR is $28 million. Net revenue is $27.3 million, which is up 34%. Revenue churn, 3.8%. Customers, $36,000. Profit this year, $11%. 12% profit. He sent me that email. And I just said, here's what I replied. I go, how will I get liquidity? He goes, I'm either going to keep buying more companies. And then I'll go public or I'm going to do more offerings.
- in the future to sell and I go, great, in 50,000. Right. Yeah. And so here's my thinking. My thinking is I'm super safe, right? Like the odds of this going south are under sub 5% easily. And so this is my safe bet. So to me, this is not. So the way that I'm doing my net worth is 1% of the vast majority, let's say 95% is in index funds. 4% is going to be in angel investing.
- And this is considered private equity, I guess. But it's not angel investing to me. It's more of the boring stuff. This goes in your boring stuff budget. Yes, but it's not quite boring. Like I can't sell it overnight, but I know Nathan, he's trustworthy, he's ethical, he's amazing. I've been asking to invest in him since he started the company. So I put 50 grand in my own money in this. And this is gonna come straight from, this is coming out of like the boring pool. What do you think about this? You like this? I like it a lot. I think that this is a really defensible stable company.
- There's a lot of people that are super interested in email software. There's like bigger companies and then there's like the sub stacks of the world that are trying to do things. But I've used all their products. ConvertKit is the best product out there of this batch. Once you're hooked on it, it's hard to stop paying. In fact, I told my team, I was like, hey, guys, our ConvertKit bill is like two to three grand a year. Like, we should just, isn't there like a free thing that will just let us do all this? I feel like email software is everywhere. And then sure enough, they go kick the tires of a bunch of different things. They're like, ah, we can switch, we can get it cheaper, but we're going to give up X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, X, Y, and Z all seem like the important things. I don't want to give those up. And so, so I think he's built a very steady business.
- that today I think ConvertKit could sell for more than 200 million. I think if you wanted to sell this business today, you could probably sell it for somewhere like 30 to 40% higher than that. That'd be my guess. And it's just going to keep growing, I think, 25 to 35% a year. And there's a world compounding. I can see Nathan being the type of guy, and a lot of people say this, but I actually believe if he told me this is what he wanted to do, he was like, I think I'll run it for 25 years and try to grow at 25% every single year through buying different companies. I'd be like, oh, okay, cool, I believe you in. I believe you're going to try that, and I believe you're capable of that. And we see...
- pretty much every major like creator economy deal and they're all just like you I think you're sick of creator economy at this I'm very sick of it There's just so many creator tools and creator economy startups and honestly most of them are not very good It's like there's more funding in the creator economy startups than there is like actual revenue in the creator economy right now So so there's like this there's like this I don't know over hype in that space, but this is an actual bit This is a real business in the creator economy, right? This is like independent creators use this as they're like back-end for sending emails to their audience bloggers and
- and newsletter folks. And I think that there's a lot of room to run. Like the thing I would do if I was him is I would figure out, I would go into the ClickFunnels market. I think ClickFunnels is a bigger company. I think ClickFunnels has over 100 million a year. Yeah, but they're trying to shit. They're trying to shit, but you know, the, I think as a upsell, I think there's a lot of people who use ConvertKit that also create landing pages and try to like sell stuff. And I think that ClickFunnels is actually one of the better products for doing that, even though it's for Janky. It's just, it's very effective at actually converting people. And I think that that's the way I would go with this.
- as a route to getting bigger. But yeah, I think this is a pretty safe bet. Well, I already made an introduction, Nathan, it's in your inbox. Awesome. Do you want to do one more? Yeah, let's do one more. Okay, I have a crazy one. Yeah, I have a crazy one. Actually, can we talk about that other crazy one that you were telling me about? Let's do that one. Let's do that one. Okay, so what, Cam, his name's Cam. I had this guy reach out to me because he was a volunteer at Halsilcon years ago. And I've always stayed in touch with him. I love Cam. He's a nice guy. And I thought he would always go places. He emailed me like a week ago or a five weeks ago, maybe a month ago. And he's like, I got this idea. I'm going to build the world fair. And I, you and me, Sean are way different. Immediately I said, nope, nope, I'm up. Like I was never even entertaining this. Explain, because I didn't even really know what the world fair is. So explain what that even means. I'm going to build the world fair. Because it's like, it's, I'm just not imaginative or smart enough to understand these things. So you go ahead.
- So, and actually if you can link the memo in here, because I think it'll be useful to talk about. But basically what I understand, the World Fair is an event that has happened like 70 years ago, and then 20 years before that, or whatever. It's sort of like the Olympics. It's basically this world-scale event. And in the same way that the Olympics, every four years it happens and it goes into some country, and it takes over the whole city and it brings like tons and tons, millions and millions of tourists.
- the previous World Fair. So here's, here's previous World Fair's. So Seville 1992 had 42 million attendees. Shanghai 2010 had 73 million and Milan in 2015 had 23 million attendees. So basically this guy's trying to throw an event with 50 million attendees. And so that's like the, that's the premise is, hey, I'm going to build this event. And it's going to have 50 million people attend and I think I can make billions of dollars. He he estimates, you know, over $5 billion per fair that he'll generate in some combination of
- tickets plus additional spend when you're there, as well as the virtual live stream media rights to the thing. And forget about the fact that the city itself gets this huge amount of economic activity when you get 50 million people come into town that generates a lot of economic activity for the city. So this idea is basically go city to city and say, hey, do you want this jumpstart of economic activity? Like put up, put your city up and put funding up and put resources up.
- Let me host a world fair here. So and it's like Disney World on crack. I told Cameron this earlier today And so he's a listener. So I wanted you to let him know I love this guy and I think he's very competent I just think this idea. I think it's stupid particularly for like a VC fun thing I have hosted of like we're calling this a world's fair venture thing. This is a conference This is a trade show can conferences and trade shows make money? Yeah, they can but like just start Coachella Coachella makes a hundred million dollars a year and they've been around for like third No, 20 years now or a lot of the Palooza 20 years like right this is
- Oh my God. The degree of difficulty on this is like at an insane level, I would say. And insane level. So that's the reason not to invest. The reason to invest is also that the degree of difficulty is insane and the person behind this is insane and it's going to compete against nobody. And it's sort of this like. What do you mean it gets nobody? There's tons of these like like this. Who wants to do this? I mean, Web Summit did something like this. Like, what do you do? Do you want to compete against the Olympics? What happened to the Olympics last year? That's the thing. Who is competing against the Olympics? Nobody. It's like when Elon goes and competes against NASA. It's like nobody else is competing against NASA. There's a Commonwealth Games. There's World Championships and different sports. There's all types of stuff. They're you know, who like entrepreneurial nobody who's
- who's trying to do it for capitalism, basically. Nobody's trying to make a profit. There was one person, Ted Turner, he launched the common, what did Ted Turner launch? The Goodwill Games. Yeah, I mean, does that even do that work? Do that not work? What do you know about that? I don't know if it made profit, but I know that it was a thing. He invented it because he needed a programming for TV stations. Yeah, I believe it was called The Goodwill Games. Anyway, no. I mean, do they work? Yeah, they don't not work. It's kind of like, does the American pageant work? Well, it kind of probably makes money. It's an annuity. It works every year for 40 years, and it does only OK. So, what's your criticism? Is your criticism that he's not going to be able to do it at the scale, or that even if you do it at the scale, it's not going to make that much money? It will never, ever, ever happen at that scale. I'm just saying that, look, like, and this is me saying someone betting my own money. Like, I'm not willing to bet my money that it will. I bet my money that Cam will do many amazing things. I just think it's like, literally, like, it's this is like against physics. I think like, like, do you know what I mean? So the most, most relatable version of this,
- is the summit, right? So the guys who created summit and then they bought the mountain and they're like, you know, doing that. I think that's the closest analog that I know and I've personally seen. And it's not a good business. And that was not a great business. It was no where in your, well, okay, why do you think it's a horrible business? They ran out of money multiple times. It doesn't make a profit. The event part or you're talking about the mountain part? The event, both, all. What are you talking about? Ryan will tell you first, Ryan made all his money selling trade shows and ads for a real estate newsletter and trade show business. That was a killer business. Then they invested it in this other thing and it was just okay. Like, would you want to have invested your money?
- Like I just it is this bag was my mind. I have only a few dollars to pick between X Y and Z This like doesn't even come up on the like I'd rather go all it on abstract ox Just like give me some boring ass software. That's just gonna make money for 50 years So I agree with you from that point of view if I'm if I'm gonna invest I'm not personally gonna invest in this but I think from his point of view from the guy who's Billy this point of view I Don't know you could be if you're alone to take you can do some kind of amazing things you can really exceed
- where others have gone. For example, I know Patty who started a web summit. And you know him, that's cool, what's he like? Awesome, awesome guy. Like, you know, should be the whatever of Ireland someday, Prime Minister, President or whatever they have over there. He's amazing, he's a really amazing guy. But at the same time, if you are trying to build a huge conference, you're gonna approach it very differently than trying to create a world fair, than trying to create like an Olympics. And so I think it is really not that much harder. And I think maybe it's...
- It's harder, but it's not that much harder than pulling off what Patty did over seven years of web summit The good thing with web summit is he was able to iterate so he was able to start super small like oh great I got a hundred people to come to Ireland for this conference and the next year I got a thousand next year I got ten thousand and then I get a hundred thousand like he was able to step it up whereas I don't I think with the world fair thing There's no like tiny world fair. I don't think so I'm not sure You know how he's gonna possibly do this. I yeah Two is two phases are phase one host 25 million guests phase two host another 25 million guests
- I don't want to say props to this guy. Is he like young? I hope he's young. It's 26. He props to this guy for doing this. I got to give him credit. I'm more into this that you are. I kind of love that a guy's dream in like this. I also think it's insane and slightly impulsive. You don't put your money in it. I will not put my money into it. But I did put my money into something slightly crazy also. I put a very small amount, but 25k into a which is like below what I would invest in any other startup into a guy trying to build a startup city.
- but I think that that has better odds of succeeding than this world fair. Yeah, because you have rent every month. Yeah, well, can I talk about that real quick? I know we're late for the other thing, but basically what this guy's doing, so we've heard about Startup Cities. Balaji came on this podcast and he kind of said, I think the 2010s were about crypto and I think the 2020s are gonna be about Startup Cities. Balaji also invested in this. So it's this thing called Praxis. And basically what they did was they created this social network kind of like a club in New York, LA, SF with just a bunch of cool people.
- like founders, people from entertainment, like Hollywood, New York stuff. Circle Hollywood. You need all that. Aspiring actors. You need the filmmakers. If you want to create the next Silicon Valley, you need the VCs and the entrepreneurs and the engineers to build stuff. And so these guys premise is basically like if you're going to build a new city, you need to have a network effect of dope people who want to be around each other. And so he's been curating this community for a while and then they're going to
- the Mediterranean and they're going to these countries like, hey Croatia, can we get like a piece of land that's ours? Like give us this land for free. That's beautiful land by the ocean. And let us come up with our own financial regulation rule of law and we're not going to do Croatian law. We're going to do our own law and like just give us total sovereignty and an exchange. You own a piece of equity in this land and we're going to bring like the best American cool kid talent to this like this startup city basically to come live here.
- And then basically it's a real estate company that's just building buildings and renting out the office space and all the residences to the cool kids. Theoretically, I'm into this. I would wanna know are the people buttoned up real estate people or they like people from Burning Man who wear like Coachella hats all the time and like leather shoes, like leather pants. I need to know what they look like and what they're about. If they're buttoned up, maybe this is- I don't want to buff. You want the- You want to buff, I agree. And that guy who's just gonna be out there recruiting the community and then you need the real estate guy who's like, yeah, yeah, go do your thing. Let me actually set this thing up so that this works. Right. So, and by the way, on the website for practice, Cameron Weiss from the last company, he started blogging about the world's fair on March 16, 2021. I linked it to you. Yeah, he's a member. That's the kind of dreamers you'll get in this community. So I put a small amount of money into it because I'm just really interested to learn. And like, this is a wild idea that-
- I think the portfolio has to have some wild ideas. It cannot just be things that are easy to understand and easy to imagine working, because I think we'll miss out on the large outlier winners. So all right, Pimp your, can people sign up for your rolling fund? Yeah, go to AngelList, type my name in, and then you don't even need to email me. You could just subscribe to my rolling fund and then I'll email you. So you can invest with me. We're doing, we have about four million, and four million a year we invest across about 30 startups.
- And for me, I don't do a rolling fund. I have a syndicate. If you go on to Angelus and type in like, it's called Hampton VC, cause I used to live on a street called Hampton, not cause I'm from the Hamptons, but HamptonVC.com, if you just go there and then just click learn more, you'll get taken straight to the Angelus page and just click apply. And then whenever I have a deal, you just are notified and you can invest or not invest. It's up to you. And Sam's memos are dope. So you should go subscribe. Well, thank you. By the way, everyone's saying great stuff about power writing. Oh yeah, I love it. I'm putting my heart into it. I was like too embarrassed if it sucked. So I like really, really tried.

Andrew Tate_s 3rd Month in Prison, Jake Paul vs Tommy Fury, _ Covid Lab Leak Theory (#426) [CVViMedA0yg].txt

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- I told you I'm in content mode, baby. I'm writing and I got some gems I'll give you the headline of something I'm writing right now. I haven't even released this than any of this stuff yet But but it's called congratulations. You climbed Mount stupid All right, what's up fellas? It's Friday. How you guys doing? Doing great. Good. Good We're reacting to the news. We got some good ones this week
- Let's start with Jake Paul versus Tommy Fury. Jake Paul, of course, is famous influencer, has since become a professional boxer. For the first time, he lost a fight losing to Tommy Fury, a professional boxer and social media influencer. And not just the fight is notable, but it's also notable, is that Sam, you basically called exactly what would happen in the fight. So do you want to take your victory lap right now, Sam? No, I didn't call exactly. But I have been getting good at predicting fights. I'm a huge combat sports fan, but I didn't exactly get it. But I loved it. You don't know why I love it. I love freak shows. This was a freak show, and I am always going to pay for that pay-per-view and watch freak shows. I thought it was awesome. Second, I think if you're listening to this, whether you're a man or a woman, you should go and train boxing just for like three months and actually spar, not like Rumble where you're just hitting the bag, but I think you should spar. And I'm not talking spar, like where you kick someone's ass or you get beat up, because Sean, you remember when we sparred, it doesn't hurt, right? If you do it with someone who like, it doesn't have to hurt, but when you know what it does, it scares you. It's a very sk- It gets the heart rate up. It gets the heart rate up. If you do it right with someone who's been there, done that, you're not going to get hurt. I promise you're going to get hurt by running more than you will actually sparring if you do it with someone who knows what they're doing. But that like fight or flight response, we never get that. And so I love that he did that. I find it very courageous that he actually stood in front of all these people and fought, so kudos to him. But uh...
- Yeah, I don't think he's gonna like be a great boxer. I mean, props to him. First of all, came on the show. So got a credit for that. Came on our show. Now he's doing other shows. These are all highlights of his life, I'm sure. It's just a correlation. Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying one caused the other, but like... Probably. We did do our show before, you know, a lot of this stuff happened. We did do our show before he did every other show. And so I thought it was great. I think the transition from like...
- Disney kid, Vine star, YouTuber, kind of shithead, you know, brand to... He's legitimately good. He is legitimately good. He is not... I would not call him a celebrity boxer. He's like an amateur boxer, actually. He's a very good amateur boxer. He's a very good amateur boxer. And he's an entertainer. And like, he, you know, he's done an amazing job staying relevant, but evolving the game with him. I think that a lot of people hate on this guy or laugh at him or whatever else. I think there's a lot of good lessons you can take about reinventing yourself and finding a way to merge maybe things you're interested in or passionate about with...
- your skills in the world of business or entertainment and he's done it phenomenally well and thinking from first principles like him and his brother Logan They didn't just ask what should I do next as a youtuber? They were like what can I do next using this audience in this fame and they came up with different answers then 99.9% of other Youtubers out there you got any credit for that? Yeah, and he's tough. I don't think he's gonna be a great boxer, but he's super tough for doing that. So that's awesome next
- Next, from one controversial social media star to another, Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are being detained for a third 30-day sentence in Romania. Of course, they're charged with human trafficking. They claim that there is no evidence and they still haven't had a trial. What do you guys take? Andrew Tate, human trafficker or wrongly imprisoned? Oof. I don't know much about it, do you? No, I mean, who knows what he did, but first of all, Romania, guilty until proven innocent. What's going on here? Why is he in these? He says, because he's tweeting out, he says he's like in solitary confinement, basically, while he hasn't had a trial. That's a little strange. He also said, dude, he said, I've been in this thing for 30 days now. They don't let me out. Just imagine locking yourself in your bedroom for 24 hours. Just go ahead and do that. Now, think about where I'm going through. I wanted to cry. But then he said, but I realized I'm too tough for that. I don't know why he's not doing that. I don't know exactly what it's like. Does anybody can explain this to me? Because he tweeted out two hours ago, my body is in jail, but my mind is not in jail. Do you understand? But I don't understand is how do you have Twitter right now? Yeah, I don't know either. We got a lax prison is this.
- Yeah, and you said, are you going to be putting free tape in your Twitter bio? No, I'm not going to be putting that. I don't care. You can do it. I will pay you $100 to put a free cobra tape in your Twitter bio. That would be so funny for 24 hours. Just do it. That'd be amazing. Oh, no, not a chance. I'm not team and your tape. I wouldn't say I'm not. I don't like how he talks to people. So I guess I would say I'm kind of against them. I have no idea about the story other than if he did do what he's accused of, then yeah, this sounds pretty fair, but I have no idea what the truth is.
- Yeah, he's kind of cringe to be honest with you, but yeah, let's go on. All right. Let's move on to the lab leak theory. So multiple government sources are now saying that they think the lab leak theory for the origins of COVID-19 is true. This includes the Department of Energy and the FBI. So fellas, are you surprised? I am not surprised. I am not surprised. Ever since that won John Stewart clip, have you seen this John Stewart clip, Sam, where he goes on the middle bear show? He was bringing the bell early on, right? Yeah, it was pretty early on. This was like when it was still...
- unpopular and in fact you would get like sex or videos taken down or like a giant flag saying this person's a conspiracy theorist for saying it and he goes on the Colbert show and he does this little bit where he goes, he says something about the lab leak and it's leaked from a lab and it's crazy and then Colbert goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, lab leak, I mean you're saying that, we don't know that there's no evidence, because evidence, there's a coronavirus that originated in Wuhan where there is the Wuhan coronavirus lab because it's in the name and he just keeps going off, he's like, there's a chocolate leak in Hershey, Pennsylvania, is this, you know, is this random or maybe it's the chocolate factory, you know, like, and he brings this up and it was just like so obvious at that point, it's like what, how unlikely would it be that in all places, the novel, he's like the novel coronavirus.
- originated Wuhan where there is the Wuhan novel coronavirus research lab. You're telling me that that just happened to be the case? Seems like the odds are that it came from that lab, not that it just happened to be in that same area. I remember my friend Jack telling me about this early on, and my friend Jack is not quite a... He's not a conspiracy theorist at all, but he is very open-minded. He doesn't believe lots of things, but when people say that, they originally were thinking, well that's crazy, and his response was like, okay, well let's see what the evidence is, and maybe we'll explore it. I remember him telling me that, and I'm like, Jack, you're pretty crazy for thinking that. My big lesson over these last three years as regards to this story is not like, did it or did it not come out of that? But now it's...
- Looking like maybe it did or at least for sure did somewhere in between maybe and for sure not for sure it didn't and my takeaway is There's things that I would use to dismiss as just crazy and only crazy people would believe this But I've seen over the last five or ten years as I've like become more of an adult and like paid attention these things I've seen that like Man crazy things do happen and also a lot of huge life-changing things are just accidents They just happen like and and and now I have a little bit more of an open mind when people say like well this person is Conspiring with this other person to make this happen or whatever and I'm like oh baby there Let's let's have an open mind and explore the facts if we can right? Yeah, there's a I remember back when this first started it was basically considered racist to say that
- The virus might have leaked from the lab in China and I never understood that I was like why would that be racist? How is that racist? I lived in China. I don't find this racist in any way like what are you talking about and It reminds me of one time I tweeted out my favorite books I have tweeted out five of my favorite books or something like that and then the comment goes The bunch of you start commenting they go. There's not one woman on this list And I go these are my favorite books. What are you talking? What are you talking about? I have to have 50% diversity in my favorite books and I just replied I go all my favorite NBA players are black
- And that just sent people off. That totally triggered everybody. Because I was like, no, I am not apologizing because I named five of my favorite books. And they just so happened to be written by men. Like that is not at all what I'm talking about. And you're trying to like, you know, I call these people meter maids. They just run around the internet looking for little tickets that the cars that they could take it. Like where can I go be offended? You didn't, you were not inclusive enough for me ticket. And it's like, what are you talking about? That's not even what this was about. Did you invent meter maid? Yeah, yeah, I did that last night. I told you about content mode, baby, I'm writing and I got some gems. I'll give you the headline of something I'm writing right now. I haven't even released this, any of this stuff yet. But it's called, congratulations, you climbed Mount stupid.
- And I'm just working backwards from that headline to be like, what's the, what is the content here? But I, but I've just got a bunch of jams that I'm putting in my, on my email list. By the way, go, go subscribe to my email list. I'll put in the, the show notes just champery.com and go, go put your thing in there. I'm writing 365 original pieces in the next, uh, in the next year. So one a day we'll go out and one of them is going to be called congratulations. You climbed Mount stupid. What are you doing? Like a daily email? Yeah. But it's a sequence. That would never work. It'll, it'll work.
- I know I'm joking because we both had Okay, gotcha. That joke. Ha ha ha. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See most TRMs are a cobble together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. Alright Ben, what do you got? Alright, let's go with a rapid fire through a few of these. I don't know if you guys saw this, the Felix Dennis house. So Felix Dennis, very famous entrepreneur. Your boy. I love him. Yeah, publisher of Oz and author of How to Be Rich. So he built this house for five million pounds. It just sold for four million pounds. It's really cool, but one of the weirdest houses you'll ever see. It's mostly a pool in the middle and it's treasure island themed with like palm trees and like a bunch of pirate stuff. And the whole house only has two bedrooms.
- So the question is, fellas, does this make you guys into themed houses? Are you guys going to be building themed houses now? Well, the takeaway here for me is F-legacy because this guy built something that he wanted. And oftentimes people will say things like, well, what about the resale value of this thing? Or how is this going to impact your legacy? And my reply to that lately has been like, well, I don't know, like I'm going to be dead. I don't care. And so what I appreciate about this is that he spent his money the way he wanted to. And he made something cool, even if it didn't do make any financial sense. So I think it's cool. And if you haven't read his book, How to Get Rich, we talked about a bunch here. It changed my life. Whenever we talk about that book, it like goes up to like number 10, top 10 in the business category. So go read it. It's awesome.
- There's a picture in this article of him with a extremely voluptuous person that says, Felix Dennis spent $100 million on sex, drugs, and rock and roll in his lifetime. Yeah, that's what he talks about. He basically says from the age- I don't know about your book list, right, Sam? Wasn't that your new company's mission statement? Core values? Dude. Close. Close. He basically from age like 35 to like 40, he was addicted to crack. That was his drug. I swear to God, crack cocaine. He loved it.
- And he died single. He had a partner, but they had an open relationship. So the guy's been doing a lot of psychedelics and open relationships before it was cool. No, he was a very weird and quirky guy. And he basically says he spent a hundred, north of a hundred million dollars in his book. He goes, I spent 100 million on hookers and crack. So, you know, whatever. Dude, everyone's happy. Wilk Chamberlain said he slept with 10,000 women in his lifetime and if you do the math, his math on that is like crazy. It's crazy. Dude, you got to sleep with two women a day for, you know, many years. Yeah, I think it's even more than that. Yeah, because he wasn't in that old at that time. By the way, you said something about themed houses. I'm in on themed houses. I think themed houses are great. And more than the theme actually is
- Epic common area, he said two bedrooms. That's, I think bedrooms are a giant waste. I think you only need a couple bedrooms and you should have epic common areas if you're gonna have a mansion. I don't like the eight bedroom mansion. You know, like I got opinions on mansions and that's one of them. You gotta have epic common spaces and only a couple bedrooms, three or four bedrooms, max. I don't wanna see a fifth bedroom. And you know what his charity was that he left all of his money to, was creating forests. So he's like the Johnny Applesy of England. The guy, he like has like thousands of acres of forests that he owns. And I think this house, it's known for having all types of trees. So in Columbia. He's like the Cracked and Cane Foundation. I'm doing my well. All right, thanks.
- All right, I love this one the Minnesota Department of Transportation ran a snow plow naming contest So they got a new snow plow they needed a name and they out they crowd sourced it to the public Here's some of the top vote getters. You're a blizzard Harry Blizzo clear Opathra better call salt and Han Snow low so guys do you have a favorite from this list The last one I think I like clear clear Opatha I think that was pretty good. I did not see that one coming remember when they did a bodey McBoatface
- when like I think it was like I think it was like either a fairy or a tugboat or something like that like a town let people Vote on it and it read it got a hold of it and they made the number one voted thing boating McBoatface And so I love these viral stars. I think they're awesome. Well Sam I don't want to steal your thunder, but you did want to announce your tattoo naming contest Sam is willing to get a tattoo on his back That any that is gonna be a contest from the fans of my first million. Isn't that right Sam? You
- That is totally wrong. I was, that is, I think I did, what I did say, there's this, you remember how we talked about mini Katana? Yeah. They're sending me a gold sword, I guess. Katana, I don't know the difference, that has MFM on it. So I'm collecting all ties to MFM stuff. I don't know if you have- It's pretty racist to call it a Katana sword, by the way. Is it? What the meter maids are running around, they're excited about that one. Oof. Well, I have a gold Katana on my way that has my first million on it. So I'll accept all MFM stuff, but I'm not gonna attach to with these degenerates. Okay, how about a million YouTube subscribers? Will you get a crowd source tattoo? I will get a tattoo at a million, for sure. When I went and did this podcast in LA with like this, I got Cody Ko. So he's like a comedy YouTuber guy.
- And his studio was telling us about they have this other network and they have some other show called trillionaire energy or something like that. And so they put it up on the screen. There's like a screen you can see while we're sitting there. And it was the two hosts in slow motion with music just getting closer together. And these two guys just made out and I go, whoa, what's the show about? And he goes, no, they had said if they get to whatever 100,000 subs that they would kiss. And I go, oh, yeah, that's a good idea. That's how like you comedy, youtuber Hollywood people think, yeah, that's a good idea. We're not going to do that. But, but that's a great idea. Did they really do it? Like it's hilarious video. It's in slow mo as they get closer and closer and then just make out. And they tongue. It's intense. I'd rather be I'd rather be unsuccessful. You know, people say like, how bad do you want it? I don't want it that bad. This is a good success. You got to find the price of success and then pay it.
- too expensive for me. Yeah, it's out of my budget. Yeah, I'm out. We have food at home. You want to do one more? Yeah, it's the last one. All right, last one. So, Blue Sky is a new Twitter clone back by Jack Dorsey. And unlike Twitter, it is decentralized. And so the question is, fellas, are you supporting our comrades over at Blue Sky or are you supporting the capitalist pigs over at Twitter? What's your move? Dude, Jack Dorsey owns a bank. How are you going to call him a comrade?
- Right? I mean, he's moving away from capital. He's seen the air of his way. Dude, when I hear, okay, so here's some of the words. They use open source social protocol and decentralized. When I hear those words, I just don't care. I just don't care at all. Like they want me to care about it. And that's wonderful. And maybe sometimes I'll act like I do. But I don't. I don't care at all. If you tell me probiotic and dioxide, right? Yeah, I don't care. If you want to shove it in there and I'll drink it if it tastes good. But I don't need to know. I don't even know. I'll drink it if it tastes good. That's my take on this as well. I'll use this app if it's awesome. If the content is great and the people on are interesting and if it's something different than Twitter, if it's Twitter, but the database is different, I'm out. I don't care about that. That's not what draws people in. That doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Great. Do it differently under the hood. But it has to result in something different that the person actually gets to use.
- Yeah, and the same thing happened with Web3 where they like, they give me this horrible pitch and then they end it with Web3 and I'm like, well, I don't care if it's Web3. Just does this thing work? Is it awesome? And I feel the same way about this. So I don't care. And also Matt, have you tried Mastodon? Yeah. Dude, it's stupid too. It's stupid. No, like it's, it's dumb. So anyway, I'm not on board with this. All right. All right. Best of all.

Andrew Wilkinson On The Secretive Billionaire Who Acquired Burger King ｜ My First Million -185 [GvuZrrsCoYs].txt

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- And you said you'd want to invest your own money in this. That's what you said here. Yeah, I would love if anyone wants to do this, I will 100% invest. So please email me. But this is one of those things where like. All right, everyone. We have a special episode with Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew Wilkinson started a company called Metalab, which grew to make tens of millions of dollars.
- and using the profits from his agency, Metalab, he eventually bought dozens of more companies. So he's collectively his companies do hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales and have created over a billion dollars with the value. So he's seen a lot of interesting stuff. In today's episode, we talk about an incredibly successful business person that he looks up to. It's our segment called Billie of the Week. And then we talk about some of the ideas that he has for starting and growing companies. He currently launched a local news business. So it's kind of like my company, the Hustle.
- but for different cities, it's very fascinating. I'm asking him if I can join as an advisor. And then he started a few more things or wants to start more stuff. And he's even said that if you are starting some of these companies to holler at them because he wants to invest. So give it a listen. And by the way, if you're in Miami, Sean and I, on June 4th, are gonna be in Miami. We're doing Austin on June 3rd, but that's already sold out. But June 4th, we have room for up to 400 people. I think already 200 people have RSVPed. It's free. Go to my Twitter handle, the usantpar, and scroll down, you'll see the event.
- Event right link. It's totally free June 4th. It's a Friday Come and by the way, we've been working our ass off to make content for you just for you can you do me a favor and click subscribe in iTunes and Click follow on Spotify when you do that we go higher up in the charts Which means more people can see us which means we get more views and if we get more views We can keep doing this more and more and more because we're making some more money from it And we're able to dedicate more time to this so please I work my butt off for you
- just click subscribe and click follow one spotify and subscribe in iTunes. I appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Andrew, what's going on, dude? Hey, man. How you doing? Um, I got a really bad, uh, really bad cold. I spent all day yesterday with Kleenex up my nose. So, uh, if my voice sounds a little froggy, that's why it only sounds froggy because you said it sounded froggy. I think you're okay. Um, so Andrew Wilkinson, good friend of mine, good friend of the pod is this description that I used three or four weeks ago, the same description. Is that, is that the same thing? Are you wearing that same personality? Is that the same life or have you done something new and amazing?
- because you're always are pulling something obviously. Yeah, I've got I think since then I've launched a couple of businesses actually, but no, the description is still accurate. And so we're going to talk about a couple things. The first thing we're going to talk about is well, you got a bunch of ideas here. I'm excited for the ideas, but I want to talk about Billy of the Week because we talked about two people last time you were here and that was it's right next to the biology episode as the most listened episode ever. Really? No way. Which episode was that the one where we did the?
- the two billies. Yeah. Yeah. Something like, I think almost 50,000 people listened to it, which is like, it's an hour long thing. It's a lot of time. Crazy. Um, and then the third most listened thing was the one we did after that. So. You know, it could just be okay. Yeah. So it's side, uh, move aside, Sean. Yeah. So it's like biology is like, whatever it is, you're like within hundreds or like a thousand of it. And then you're the next two. And so that's why I think we'll start off with that one. But you sent me, I, yesterday I asked you, to tell me an interesting.
- person and I'm going to go do a ton of research on them and I did. And I have a feeling you already know a lot about this person. But what's this person's name? So his name is, I don't know how to say it. I think it's, or George a Paulo. It's a Brazilian name. Oh, there you go. Okay. Can you say his name? Please. And every time we need to say his name, we'll just say it. I'll say his first name, his last name is German. So I don't know if there's a right way of saying it. But his first name is Joshy Paulo. And like they, um, Paulo is his considered his first
- as well because in a lot of the articles I read about them, they call them a Jarshe, sorry, Jarshe Paolo. It might be his middle, Paolo might be his middle name or it might be like a double first name, I'm not sure, but Jarshe Paolo Lemon. Yeah, but anyway, this guy's totally mysterious. He doesn't like to talk about what he does. There's only a few interviews with him online. But he basically, I mean, if you think about the businesses that he owns, you would know them. So Burger King, Budweiser,
- Tim Hortons, craft foods, Popeyes, Heinz ketchup, right? So he basically goes out, he finds these amazing, you know, multi-generational businesses that have been around for 50 plus years that do something very, very simple. It's just getting grow over time. He goes out, he usually raises a ton of debt and then he goes and buys them and takes them over. And he's been doing this for, I don't know, 40 years or something like that, starting in Brazil. Let's give a little bit of background of him. So, how old is he? He's about 75 years old.
- right? And he's based out of Brazil. He's a Brazilian guy. And when he started at the time, I don't think that there were these like Brazilian tycoons. You know, every article that I read about, they said that he was one of the first folks in Brazil to become one of these private equity or more and buffet like people out of Brazil. And like you said, very little is known about him. And he doesn't give interviews. And a lot of the interviews that I read about him, they said, we actually try to talk to a bunch of his friends and nearly all of his friends said, you know, thank you for reaching
- out, but he's politely asked us not to speak about him in interviews. So he prefers to stay behind the scenes. And the way that his career started in is in 1931 at the age of 32, he had some jobs forehand where he was a banker, but he started this one bank. Abreya, you want to help me out here? Here's what it's pronounced. Here's how you pronounce it. You see that right there? It's called grandia. I don't see it. You put it in the chat? It's highlighted. It's highlighted in the back. Okay. I think it's grandia or something like that. I've got into you.
- And it was described as like the Goldman of Brazil. I don't know if it was described at the time like that, but he was 32 when he launched it. It was 1971. And what made it kind of famous was he had a very, I wouldn't call it a laid back culture, but he didn't look at resumes, but instead he looked for what he described as PSD, which was poor, or let me see, what does PSD stand for? A poor, smart and deep desire to get rich. Yeah, poor, smart.
- and beat this hire to get rich. That's what he looked for, was people who had PSD, and he would hire these folks, and in previously at different companies, you would automatically get a bonus if you were one of the partner, but they created some type of system that was, they tried to make it as based off of merits as much as possible, so a lot of different people can get bonuses, and also the bonuses. You could choose, do you want more stock, or do you want more cash? And it was a great way to incentivize people, and it kind of created this iconic culture
- with their famous for. And it grew to be quite huge. It was something like a billion dollars in profit at one year. But he said that they got cocky and they screwed up. They overbought some stuff. And it eventually went south. And it sold for $650 million, which is still a ton of money. But I think it was minuscule compared to how big it got. So I have a question for you, Andrew. And then we're going to get into this 3G thing. So then after he sold it for $650, he started buying Gillette stock. And with his other older founders of the old company, he started 3G.
- which was a play on their name and there was three partners and they ended up buying Burger King Tim Hortons, all the companies that you said and at this point he's worth something like $25 billion and one of the richest people in the world but I had a ton of questions about this guy that I think that you might know or at least you have a better input than I do. The first is how on earth like when people say they're starting a bank like he did, what's that process like? That sounds so ambiguous and so hard to understand. Well I think like people here bank and they think oh a big pile of money like Wells Fargo.
- or something, but bank, the term banker means so many different things. It could be somebody who works at a bank and lends out money or whatever, but a banker is really like a real estate agent for businesses, right? Or for bonds or equities or whatever it is. So it's like a person you go to or a group of people you go to who will figure out problems for you and facilitate transactions. So let's say you, Sam, go, I need to raise $100 million of debt for the hustle because I need to expand.
- a banker will go out and they will go to all the wealthy people they know and all the different Corporations and say hey, here's this great guy You should lend the money and then they take a fee in between and so in a lot of ways is the world's best business You're a middleman on these huge Transactions multi-billion dollar transactions and you're taking a two and a half to five percent fee on everything you do So with like 50 to 100 people you can do crazy amounts of money What skill set so when this guy started at 31 32 what skill set would he have needed in?
- in order to make this happen? Well, it's really heavy on two things. One, it's like sales and stuff. And then the other is kind of financial acumen and modeling and all that. So you'd probably get a bunch of people in the office who are like super hardcore spreadsheet junkie excel types who can like figure out, you know, how to structure a deal. And then you'd also have people who can do the very high level sales, right? So they're basically smooth talking and calling and selling and positioning everything to facilitate all the deals. Do you consider yourself a bank?
- No, I actually generally really hate dealing with bankers. And I think it's kind of like real estate agents, right? Like I'm very skeptical of real estate agents. I think in the next 50 years they probably won't exist. A lot of the time a real estate agent is just a person who puts up a listing online for you, opens the door for a few people and then takes a huge fee, which seems crazy and out of line, right? And now there's great real estate agents. Let's say you have a weird property that might not sell. You know how to spruce up. There's one in 100 that's amazing.
- and we'll sell your property for more, but a lot of the time they're useless. And the same thing is kind of true with bankers. I think if you've got a great business and you want to raise money, you should just go and call a bunch of wealthy people and try and raise the money yourself. Because at the end of the day, a lot of the time what bankers do is build some decks and then breathe on the phone while you talk to other people and then take a huge fee. How much money have you raised? We've raised maybe... Well, it depends on how you think about it.
- I would say in the neighborhood of about $200, $250 million or something like that, if you include our IPO or our reverse takeover we just did. Not including that. What's it? $100? $200 maybe? Oh, so the the SPAC that you did wasn't a six million. Not including. It was $60 million. That was that was how much we raised when we took that business public. Wow. So then your funds have well over a hundred. Yeah. And you didn't use a banker for any of that. No, we just called people we knew. I mean, we had we bumbled into this.
- like I had no idea five years ago, six years ago, even I didn't know what the difference between a banker and a bank teller was, I had no idea. And because of that, we just kind of kept meeting interesting business people. And as you met interesting business people, they'd keep saying, hey, are you guys raising money? Cause I'd love to invest with you. And so eventually when we had big enough deals that were interesting and we wanted partners, I just called those people and we did it ourselves. So back to this guy, he, like when you're starting something like this. And this is, you like this guy because I,
- imagine, like, you kind of want to, you want to steal some of his life, right? I mean, you want to, you want to emulate some parts that he's done. Yeah. Well, I think like we're probably similar in that, like, we're both attracted to these really simple businesses, like selling beer or razors. Like there's both of us come from like this weird tech world where we do this, like knowledge work, you, you write an email newsletter, I do a design, and then two years later, it doesn't exist, right? I like the longevity and the kind of simplicity of more traditional.
- businesses. So I love that. And I think the idea of just buying these super safe, boring, steady, eddy businesses that do something simple in the world and just making them better actually sounds like a lot of fun. And I wrote a note below, but the key thing about that, what he does is generally they have one key insight, right? So it'll be something as simple as when they bought Budweiser. It was on the third generation. They'd gotten super rich, right? So it was like the first generation built it.
- The second generation like we're amazing, they went to Harvard, they grew it. The third generation took over, they got sloppy, didn't really care about growth. They had fancy offices and private jets and stuff. And so when they bought it, they just look at it and go, oh, it's been running a kind of a sloppy way and they've lost their discipline. We can buy it with a lot of debt and then we can just make it way better, pay off our debt and then we own Budweiser. And so it's this crazy coup for these guys from Brazil who they came from basically
- You know started at zero although I think they were you know upper middle class in Brazil But starting there to owning Budweiser's crazy And I want to ask you about how to get into those deals and when I read about him It sounded like he was the young guy of a three-person partnership Which definitely I think he's actually the old guy So there's the two younger guys the younger guys actually go and they run the businesses So like one of the partners I believe went in and runs Runs what is it called? QSR which is like owns Tim
- and all that stuff. Sorry, I meant from his first thing. So his first thing got him his big nut. His first thing made him like 650, or they sold for 650. And from what it sounds like, it was like a little bit of an older guy who had a little bit been there, done that, kind of brought him along. And he was the young guy of that partnership. Totally, yeah. And then he did the same thing, and now he has younger partners. Right. And so I have a few questions about this, but I wanted to, so let's just talk about this guy's strategy at 3G and his whole life at CNC. He's done the same thing, which is he's a cheapskate, he's frugal.
- He's incredibly frugal. So he's done a couple of things. He has a few phrases that they would say, which is like, he's like, cost or like fingernails. You have to cut them constantly. And he would do famous things like, when they bought Burger King, they banned color copies. Meaning when you're using the photo copy machine, he was like, just black and white only. You also, what was the thing you said about private jets? They also forced people to print on both sides. They'd say, not only can you not print color, you have to print double-sided.
- So the first thing they would always do whenever they buy a business is they sell all the private jets Immediately right and let's be real most fortune 500 companies have like between one and ten private jets And they just say f that we don't need those They sell them and it's kind of a statement and then from that point on the new CEO and all the executives They have to fly economy and they have to stay in motels and they all they it's I love that right I think it just sets the tone from the top in a really interesting way and these are people I mean the CEO of AB in bev. He's probably worth like hundreds of millions at all
- and he's staying at like a quality in, but I think there's something to demonstrating that at the top if you want your lower level employees to care to. I actually think that that's a stupid thing. So I get staying at cheap hotels because staying at like a Marriott courtyard, which is like a $89 thing, I'm on board with that. It's probably even cheaper, somebody's 50 bucks. I'm cool with that. It's just that you can have a fine, clean, comfortable place, although I do like having room service because if you get into a place late, you want that. But whatever these people say, they flag.
- I'm like, that's kind of stupid. If I'm flying overnight, I need a comfortable, I need to be comfortable so I could like be ready to roll. You know, you're like, you don't want your athlete to like work off the two hours sleep. Do you actually believe that people do that? I think they do. I mean, maybe it's just lore. Maybe these guys are super rich and they pay for it personally or something like that. But I don't know. I mean, I think if you're, I know like Walmart has a big corporate jet fleet and they actually have a really good argument for it, which is they're constantly visiting stores.
- And that's their way of kind of like whipping all the store managers and making sure they do a good job And so they have all these tiny little jets that fly between small towns And if they were to fly commercial it would take ten days to do two days of work So I think there's a good argument for it there But I can't imagine the CEO of AB in bev needs to be flying all over the world constantly if he's flying once or twice a month It's not a big deal to be on a commercial plane or whatever. I just think it's kind of a I Think it's a neat thing to do I personally like you know, I I wouldn't I would feel bad like I would be worried that I'm gonna get the worst CEO because they want like
- like their perks or whatever. But the kind of people these guys hire, like these guys, when they took over Burger King, they hired a 35 year old as a CFO. Right? Or maybe even a 30 year old. And the owner is the CEO. Yeah. I wrote about it. They hired a 32 year old who was part of their management company. And he took it over and he kicked ass. A few things that he did was at the time, Burger King was trying to advertise predominantly towards young men. And he goes, no, we're gonna be for everyone. So we're gonna advertise for everyone. Another thing that he did was, do you remember the...
- Burger King, like the king. He was like, that's kind of creepy. Get rid of that. And then the third thing that he did was at the time, Burger King employed something, like 28,000 people. So they owned most of their restaurants and they would hire the people. He goes, nah, we're gonna switch to a franchise and we're gonna help all these franchise owners line up alone so you guys can make your own places really nice and we're gonna help you make it nice. And that was the big switch that he did. Now Burger King, I believe, precious it. Well, we've seen this in our own investing, like often having one thesis, right? So the thesis could be, hey, margins are really shitty.
- you know, they're five percent, they should be 15 percent. And we can do that via, via very simple improvements or something simple like this Burger King deal where they went into big debt and they actually paid up a really high price to do it. But the insight they had was, well, as soon as we take over, we're just going to spin out all of our corporately owned locations and franchise them. And by doing that, we're going to raise all the money to pay off our debt, right? And so they did that and then they ended up taking it public with Ackman actually and did
- insanely well in it. Oh, that's interesting. And when they did it, there was a funny story about the guy who we're talking about. I'm going to try and say his name over time. What is it? I bring you. Josh, you're Paul. When I see it, I want to say Jorge. But anyway, so there's a funny story about him that he had never had Burger King until they bought the company and it was like a multi-billion dollar deal. He didn't eat it until they bought the company. And when he ate it, he was like,
- like, this is too big. And he's known for like really only drinking water and eating really healthy, but he owns, you know, non-healthy stuff. What's your take on that? Do you think that, does that rub you the wrong way? Or are you like, I know? I think it rubs me the wrong way. I think he sounds like he's really good at kind of being secretive and PR. That's exactly the sort of thing I wouldn't want to give out. I wouldn't want it out in public or whatever. I think it sounds kind of lame. So this type of business that you like, and I enjoy too, but when I was reading all about him.
- Would you say this, to me, it boils down to you have to be good at fundraising money. So you have to be good at getting, convincing some type of rich institution or rich people to give you money. The second thing you have to get good at is you have to recruit really, really talented people, typically people that are highly recruited to other places, typically people who could start their own thing, typically people who are probably already wealthy, you have to hire them. And then third and probably most important, you have to be really good at inspiring and leading them. So you have to be a leader of leaders. Is that like the three?
- Three pillars to this. Am I missing exactly nailed it? It's a really and it's really really hard the hardest part is recruiting the amazing people like our biggest challenge Isn't doing deals. It's like we could do a deal every month It's how can we find enough amazing people to run all these businesses and then how can we validate that? They're gonna be able to do what we need from them And you know you think about like that 32 year old he was probably working in head office for 10 years and they saw all this stuff But it's a huge chance to hand that to him and that could have gone really really
- poorly. But I think that's exactly that's the Warren Buffett playbook, right? It's like, how do you be a leader of leaders? How do you give them positive coaching without like getting too involved in the day to day? And the fundraising part actually seems like the easiest. The fundraising honestly, like it was so when we did we have a we have a fund and which we raised during COVID just because we thought we were going to get mobbed. And it was really weird. We actually was like, you thought that you were going to have this? No, no, we thought we were going to have like overwhelming amounts of deals to do.
- And we thought it would be a great time to have an excess capital. And that didn't happen, right? Everyone was actually weirdly optimistic and the government wrote the check and all that stuff. But doing, doing the money raising wasn't actually that hard. Like running an agency for, or owning an agency for 15 years and doing sales for a long time. Like that's easy. You just have a fun conversation with someone. You walk them through a deck, you point to track record. That, that was totally fine. The hard part is really the execution of the actual.
- deals and hiring the right people. And I would argue, I mean, I don't know really what I'm talking about entirely, just strictly from reading. It seems like executing the deals is hard, but it's not that hard. The hard part is really the people part. I mean, we've done deals. We just did our biggest deal ever, and it was over $100 million, and it was no more work or complexity than doing a $1 million deal. In fact,
- It was simpler than a $1 million deal because it's just a better business with a better team in place and more momentum. What did you do? It was always complicated people. Well, in our in our public company, we bought a company called Stamp, which is one of the top ratings and reviews apps on Shopify. We just closed that deal. There's a hundred and hundred and ten, I believe total. It gets paid out. It's a structure. You'd have to look at the press release for the exact structure, but wow, it's in and around there. And when I was reading this, I'm in the middle of reading human nature.
- by Robert Greene. And the reason, have you heard of that? It's an amazing book. I've been reading that too. Have you really? Wow. It's amazing. Isn't it crazy? It's so good. Yes. It's so everything he does is great. The laws of human nature, isn't it called? Yeah. The laws of human nature. And I already read it, and now I'm rereading it again, but I'm studying it. Like I'm taking a semester of Robert Greene. And the reason why I am reading it is because I thought that when I was getting into business, all that would matter is like business. And you're like, well, what's business? It's like, I don't know.
- Like, I guess selling stuff, making the product really good. In my business, it was like, I'm just going to write words that people like. It's really simple. But what I've learned is it's far more important to understand and motivate human beings and have really effective day-to-day interactions with people. In order to do that, you have to have a little bit of a, I'll call it like a Machiavellian type of thing to you where like people love you, yet they're far a little bit fearful of you. They kind of.
- you is like a little bit of mysterious, like you have to attract these people and they have to both want to be around you yet think that you're formidable and be a little bit like nervous of like, oh man, if I don't join this person, they're going to crush me. And live up to your expectations. What do you mean? Well, like basically, how do you, one of the things like some of the some people I've worked with have this thing where you just want you always want to raise the bar and you always want to live up to their expectations. So they say, this is the bar. This is what I expect from you, but they do it in a very flattering way. Like, you're really smart. You work really hard. I'm so impressed with you.
- I know you can achieve this, right? And then they set this crazy bar and you just naturally wanna live up to the expectations. And I've always trouble with that. Well, just different partner, business partners and stuff. I've dealt with over the last couple of years. But with employees and stuff, I've always had this habit of wanting to be liked. And I still wanna be liked, but I wanna be firm and I wanna have boundaries because in the past what I've done is in wanting to be liked, I've excused somebody failing. And so like, it's okay, don't worry about it.
- it's fine. And then I'd quietly just dismiss them and then not use them for tasks like that. Whereas I think it's actually really important to be like, hey, look, like it's okay, you effed up, but like you let me down. And here's why you let me down. And here's how this impacted everything. Or here's the bar and here's how what I need from you and whatever it is. And I've always been terrible at that. It's crazy. I mean, Elon Musk has a bill Ackman who you know has this guy who we're talking about. He definitely had it when I looked at it him. And I like would see how he would dress and how he helped him.
- self, Travis Kalinik kind of has it where they're just like, you're just, you're afraid of them in a way of like, they inspire me, but like, they can crush it. Like whatever they, whenever they set their mind to, they're going to get done. And that's regardless if you agree with their ethics or not, but you definitely could agree that like these guys are going to go on places. There's a great story about Cheryl Sandberg and Facebook. I forget who told this story, but she goes, I was in a meeting with Cheryl and I, you know, I gave this presentation and then she walked to me outside and she said, during your presentation, it was great. But you kept saying like.
- Only stupid people say like and you're not stupid and then she walked away, right? And you can look at that and go, oh my god, I can't believe she did that. That's so mean. But the way she told it was like it was a kind of a backhanded compliment that told her something that was embarrassing. It's like saying like, hey, you have like, you know, you have lettuce in your teeth or whatever. You don't want to hear it. But like it's helpful. And I think I've been very bad at that kind of stuff. I think you need to give more firm feedback. That story is from Radik, Radik, Radikle, or whatever. Radikle, yeah, Radikle, Candor. It's a good one.
- As I was reading this guy, I'm like, man, in order to get into some of these deals, like Heinz, whatever, in order to attract these, I mean, basically, like, this guy and the folks who we talk about, and maybe, I think you as well, Andrew, that you're like uncommon amongst the uncommon, and you have to lead the killers. So like, you've got to be the killer amongst killers. And that is kind of like a fascinating thing to think about because to bring it back to what I originally said, when I got into business, I thought it was all about coming up with a trade of ideas.
- And it's like, no, I just got to be a leader of men and women. And that's really hard. So I've been studying how to do that. And I've been studying like war leaders, been studying, you know, who really is good at this, like celebrities, like Marilyn Monroe. It's like, it's basically kind of seduction a little bit. Um, and how do you just like get people under your spell and hopefully your spell is positive, but. I don't know. Yeah. I think like there's a, I think it sounds stressful though, like the idea of like, I'm going to be a killer and I'm going to, you know, do all this stuff and be Machiavellian. Like, I really don't, I don't like that feeling of like.
- feeling like I'm manipulating someone. What I like to think about more, what's been more instructive for me is just reading psychology, like Robert Chialdini and all that stuff, and figuring out incentives. And one of the things I've learned is that if somebody is incentivized to not work as hard as you or not care as much as you, they won't, right? So people do whatever, it's shocking, but they'll do whatever the financial or day-to-day lifestyle incentives where they can take the path of least resistance they will. And then they'll create their own narrative for why they.
- they're doing it, right? They might say, I'm not working hard because, you know, I don't like my work environment or whatever, or there's a problem with management or whatever it is, but often it's actually them just going, why would I work harder? I don't make more money, right? I don't get a bonus for working harder. I clock in my time or whatever. So I think a lot of the time this stuff is just an incentives problem and that's pervasive through everything. Going back to realtors, they have an incentive to just sell your house for the lowest price to get it done, to lock in their fee. They have an incentive against you. I agree with you that that is a portion of it. I would say that there's...
- but there's two portions, those are both them. But I think you're totally full of shit and that you don't care about this because you do. Your public image is, and I don't know if you mean to do this or not, but I'll tell you what your image is, is like you're like a cool guy. Like you dress nice, you've got slick back hair, you're good looking, you have these cool glasses, you're a designer. I mean, brother, look at like the website. What's the URL of Tiny? Tiny Capital? Tiny Capital. You use the same wonderful image, you use it.
- is like you have a brand and a brand is exactly this Machavellian thing that I'm describing of how to manipulate the feelings of emotion. I don't know. I think it's a word Machavellian, but you are manipulating people to feel a certain way. Oh, absolutely. No, no, no, absolutely. But it's a copy, right? Like knowing how to write good copy, what you're really doing is you're taking people along for an emotional journey by using various words, right? And there's two ways to look at it. One is, oh, it's who's super manipulative? Or the other is, no, you're trying to communicate and you're an effective comedian.
- And don't get me wrong, we definitely do like yuck up the kind of the softness of what we do. But it comes from like, you know, we dealt with Wall Street bankers, we dealt with people trying to acquire companies. They were shitty. So this is me going, oh, well, I hated that. How can I market to those people who have the same hatred that I did or whatever? But yes, there's definitely a lot of public, public image stuff that we think about. So we'll wrap up with this billy of the week segment. But what's your main takeaways from the
- this guy. And there's a book about him. It's called like greatness, I think. I couldn't find I only saw it in Portuguese. I don't know if there's an English version. Yeah, it's called. What is it? The dream big dream? Amazon. Yeah, it's quite good. I read it maybe four or five years ago. What's your main takeaways from this guy? Why? What can I learn from him? And what should I avoid? I think it's like you don't need to do something innovative and crazy, right? You don't need to be the next Elon Musk or start some crazy technology. You can just choose a traditional business that's very.
- poorly run and run it better. And I, you know, even better if it's a business that's low risk growing and kind of successful despite bad management or, you know, bloated cost structure or something. And you wrote something in here that was important, which is different than how I perceived you as doing, which was, um, you need to be comfort comfortable taking you on outside capital and having partners. Well, I think like for this exact structure, right? So what they do, they raise a lot of debt.
- And that allows them to have, you know, a lot of control because they have debt, but it's silence not involved in the operations. And that gives them the ability to just like, overrule and take over. And you got to raise a lot of money. I mean, if you're going to go buy Heinz ketchup, like that's not the kind of deal you can get like a crazy deal on. You're going to have to pay the highest market price for in order to do that. You're going to raise a lot of money. Compared to what we do, like we're not buying the Heinz ketchup. We're buying the like random local ketchup brand, right? It's like in the successful.
- a small niche, those deals you can find. Oh, and I want to ask one more question before we wrap up, actually. So I actually was thinking about this. So like, you're further along. You're a few years older than me, not only a couple years older, but in terms of career success, you're a fair bit ahead of me in terms of like, we're both going down the same path. And then one path in front of that, your friends with guys like Bill Ackman, these folks that are worth billions of dollars in that. And yeah, they're just doing shit.
- So like along this path, let's say, the spectrum of people doing stuff, it starts with like a scrappy internet nerd in their bedroom like you and I were. And then it comes to like, all right, you get a little bit of success like I have. And then it comes like, all right, you're starting to like move things a little bit, but even you said you're still a pit squeak compared to like, you know, an Ackman or whatever. What, how does this, this transition from going from like someone who's kind of interesting to like a mover and shaker on a global scale?
- How do you, does that kind of seem like a crazy transition to you? Because it's kind of like you're not far from that, it seems. Um, but like these guys like Bill Ackman, when they say something, they're in the news, when they say, um, when they like make a trades every once in a while, it can like impact millions of people. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I look, I just look and look up and see how far we have to go. I still feel really, really small. And you start, you know, like, you know, when you like you're running your company and you're like, you tell people like, Oh, we do a million dollars a year in profit. And to you, that's like a crazy amount of money. And then you realize, Oh my God, there's businesses out there that do 30.
- million or a hundred million or a billion dollars of profit every year. And the numbers just keep getting bigger. I just find as we get bigger, I just start talking to people who have businesses that are way bigger. And you know, it's funny, you mentioned Ackman. I mean, Ackman, I don't know what he's worth, probably like four or five, six billion dollars. But this Georgia polo guy, he's worth 25. Right? And so everyone's looking up at some person that they want to be and someone doing bigger stuff. I think it's kind of like the analogy I would use is if you're an athlete and you start out as just some casual high school athlete and then you end up in the Olympics and you just keep rising up and doing more.
- more and more stuff. And eventually you look around and go like, whoa, holy crap, I made it to the Olympics. This is crazy. But I don't necessarily think it buys you any happiness or a better life necessarily. And I think there's a really interesting decision of, well, do you wanna be a mover and shaker? Is it worth all the downsides? And I think there are quite a few. No shit, I agree. All right, let's talk about some ideas. What we're gonna talk about is not necessarily an idea, but something that you're working on right now, I wanna talk about Capital Daily, because I've seen this from the beginning and I'm getting up.
- And this latest update sounds pretty amazing. Yeah. So I mean, the last two years, actually, let me just zoom out and I'll say talk about what happened. So basically, I read the newspaper every day. I would read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and read all this incredible investigative reporting. And then I would pick up my local paper, which is called the Times Colonist here in Victoria, Canada. And it was just, there's nothing. It was like, they didn't have any journalists. They'd laid everyone off. And it was all just like AP wire service. So it was like international news.
- And I was like, how the hell do I figure out what's going on in my own city? And I realized there was a few people doing local reporting, but there's this gap there. And so I thought, okay, well, if I want this, I'm sure other people do. And I looked at buying the local paper, actually, but they wanted like a crazy amount of money. They had like printing presses, like, you know, unionized employees. It's like a cruise ship, not a speedboat. It would be a pain in the ass to buy it. And so I went to a friend who is a stay-at-home mom who had some experience doing a bunch of writing. And I said, hey, why don't we just start a MailChimp account?
- and we'll come up with a brand, we call it capital daily, and we'll send out a daily newsletter and we'll just summarize like, hey, here's like three or four stories of things that are happening in town. So we start doing this and I have a friend who runs a PPC agency and I get him to just go buy ads and I realize I can buy ads for like nothing. No one's advertising for local news. Break that down. So you're saying you had a friend that would buy advertising to get new users and you said, hey, could you see if you could run some ads to
- to get email subscribers to Capital Daily. Yeah, I was like, how do I get this to scale as quickly as possible? A, I saw an opportunity and B, I realized that in local news, usually there's one winner, right? So historically, there's usually been one big newspaper. And so I was like, how do I get this as big as possible as fast as possible? And I was also just impatient. I was like, I have money, I can afford to do it. I'm just gonna spend like 200 grand on ads. And so we spent, I don't know, 100, 200 grand. And very quickly, we got to like 25,000 subscribers.
- and I just started hiring journalists and built out a team and it was crazy. Like I would be in a cafe and people would stop me and be like, hey, are you the capital daily guy? Like, thank you so much. It's amazing. Like the first thing I do when I wake up and drink my coffee is read your newsletter. And that was an amazing feeling. Like I've got all these other businesses that are like big and I've never, ever, ever felt that sense of community and just like doing something important. And so I was having a lot of fun with it. But we started hiring a whole bunch of people and we realized like, hey, this is hard. Like the advertisers don't understand.
- understand it. Like people who buy newspaper ads, they're just stuck in their ways. They're old. They're like all boomers and stuff. And so we're having a really hard time selling ads. I also built this big news team and was like burning all this money. And I was kind of freaking out going like, I don't know if this is have I got myself into some trouble here. But a little over six months a year ago, I partnered with this guy Farhan and he had scaled the biggest local news site in Vancouver. And he took over as CEO and now he's monetized it. And I think we're going to break even very soon.
- on the local stuff in Victoria. We've started selling out ads and I think like on a unit economic basis where we look at Victoria, it's now profitable. And it can be very profitable if our membership model works and we've started expanding. So we've now got six or seven different newsletters in different areas, mostly here in Canada. And we're scaling. I'm super excited about it. So is that over story media group? Yeah. So go ahead. It's funny.
- We chose the name, I liked the name Overstory, but we got cute and we were like, oh, Overstory Media Group is OMG and that looks cool as a logo. And so we chose Overstory Media Group, but then now everyone calls at that and I hate that name. But I really like Overstory. Okay, Overstory. So Overstory is the parent company that owns Capital Daily. Yeah. Dude, it looks like you have like 50 people working there. Yeah, we've scaled a lot over the last little bit. Are these all cool? It's like a big bet. Yeah, these are all pretty much all full time people.
- How much did you invest to start this business? I think at this point I've probably spent just over $2 million, but you have to remember that probably the first 700k was just me not monetizing it soon enough and just focusing on building the audience first. So I think we probably spent 200, 250k in ads and then we probably burned in unnecessary 500k, like hiring the wrong people and kind of like experimenting.
- So really, like at this point, we have the biggest news business in my city for probably 750 to a million. And I think that business can probably at scale probably do 500 to a million in profit once we're actually like going. So I feel pretty good about it. But now we're taking this bigger bet that we can basically roll out local news across Canada. Farhan is your co is he's like the founder. Yeah, founder.
- Yeah. And so you attracted him because you go, I'll put up the money if you run it. Exactly. Like I said, look, I've already kind of got this thing. I've proven the model out and, uh, you know, he was looking for his next thing. And it was one of those things. You know, when you just meet someone and you go, Oh my God, I want to do business with this person and they just have the right background. Like he'd done, he'd spent like five, 10 years doing the exact thing that I needed. Um, so it was a total no-brainer. Dude, I feel like this is a much bigger deal than you're making it seem. Yeah, it's pretty crazy what it's become. And it's, you know, it goes back to
- I have in total, I spend a lot more time on this business than the others because it's like a passion project. And I'm a consumer of it, right? I read it every morning and I give them feedback. And I think I annoy Farhan with like daily texts about it. But I've only really spent a few, probably less than a week of time on this. And the key leverage point has just been bringing Farhan on board. Because when Farhan joined, it was just a single newsletter with like three employees. So now, I mean.
- He's gone out and Bisky said, look, like Axios down in the States is aggressively expanding their local. And I think that's because it's going to work and it can be profitable. Let's go do the exact same thing in Canada. And so you're going to hope, well, how's the story going to end, do you think? I don't know. I mean, I think that if it's true in Victoria, it's probably true in a lot of other places. The interesting thing is trying to figure out what topics people really want to do.
- want to hear and are they really variable city by city? Right? So for example, like we expanded into Langford, which is a suburb here, and it's more working class. And so it's figuring out, OK, what are those people want to hear versus somebody who lives in Victoria or in Vancouver? Do they want different topics? Like, just that kind of stuff, I think, is going to be really interesting to figure out. And what's your membership and your subscription going to be? We haven't announced it yet, but we're kind of thinking about, like,
- somewhere between $100 and $200 a year, getting local discounts, access to events, maybe like a member only newsletter and extra content and stuff. One of the things I really wanna do is start hosting events in person. Cause like as you know, it's one thing to see a number of like, oh, the hustle has a million subscribers, but when you meet up with people in person, it's crazy. So I'm really excited to like fill a room with all the subscribers and just see what that feels like. Yeah, me and Chana go in Miami, we just posted about it and we got like 300 people signed up.
- So yeah, wow, this is amazing. I can't believe you didn't ask me to be part of this dude. So frustrating. Maybe I will. I think this is. I have, it's all just my own money at this point. So if I decide I gotta go big, I'll definitely hit you up. I'm very interested. You gotta make me an advisor. I think this is gonna be sick. All right, you wanna talk about another idea? So we'll talk about the paper thing in a second. What's this, which one do you wanna move to? Let's do the pregnancy stuff. Okay, I think this is cool. What, you wanna move to? So this, yeah, go. This is like a business in a box. This is one of those things that I would do if I had time, but I do.
- I don't. I think it's a really good idea. So people love to spend money on their kids, making their kids better, smarter, feeling like good parents and stuff. There's all sorts of like, you know, baby emotes are, you know, different health things people do for their kids. But nobody really thinks about health during pregnancy. And I think this is something that's really important that's totally overlooked. My son was born early. He was born like three weeks early and low birth weight. And he's fine. Like we haven't had any health issues.
- or anything, but any parent who's gone through that knows, it's absolutely terrifying. And I started researching it a ton. And I realized that there's all sorts of things that you can proactively do to ensure that you have a really healthy pregnancy, but then also to basically optimize your kid. So if you think about it, your kid is growing a brain and a body, they get to do that once, right? Like this is the building, this is the foundation of your kid. And so I started researching all this stuff. I talked to a really smart friend, my friend, Dr. Anupatrik, and basically,
- I realize there's like all these studies that show that kids and mothers who have like fish and DHA Supplements B vitamins make sure they're not an e-mic and stuff it minimizes any risk of pregnancy and it also Maximizes IQ and general flourishing ADHD all this other stuff So there's this huge in marketing the most important thing is to have a hook and the hook can be fear Right. How do you avoid this terrible outcome? And one of the problems with doctors is when you talk to a doctor They just don't want to scare your wife during pregnancy
- And so they just say take vitamin D or do this thing. They don't explain why. And so I think explaining to mothers, here's why you wanna do this. Here's all the potential bad things you can avoid. And hey, you can make your kids smarter and better in the process. There's a huge opportunity to basically do like Roman or hymns, but from maternal health. So you do blood work, supplements, they get delivered on a schedule and it's about building like a super baby. And you said, you'd wanna invest your own money in this system.
- that you said here. Yeah, I would love if anyone wants to do this, I will 100% invest. So please email me. But this is one of those things where like every three months, I'm like, why the hell hasn't anyone done this yet? Well, there is a, but there's a reason why you shouldn't invest in this, which you've written here. Yeah, I think it's a, this is a great business for someone who's never done a business before, because it's a good like launchpad business. It's something that can make like, it could be big, but there's no competitive at barrier, right? You're going to do this. Then a bunch of people are going to copy.
- you and you can probably make a good living on this. I don't think it has like a moat necessarily except for maybe like a brand that mothers share or something. But I think there's something here. Have you heard of the there's this guy named, I forget his name Joel, maybe Joel on writing his blog and he says there's Ben and Jerry businesses and then there's Ben and Jerry's versus Amazon as what he says he goes with Ben and Jerry. It's like a unique interesting brand and
- and a person can go tie a stream five days a week and try all types of different stuff and everyone can survive. And the only thing that separates Ben and Jerry is just that it's slightly different, but there's enough for everyone to succeed. Like, you know, there's enough space, we can all win. And you can grow it pretty slowly for 100 years and it could probably last for 100 years and probably won't go away very easily. But then there's like in Amazon, which is you really are only gonna subscribe to one Amazon Prime. And once you give your credit card a...
- Amazon save it. You're probably just going to continue to use that. And so with the Ben and Jerry business, it's okay to go slow. It's no big deal. You don't have to raise a lot of money. You can grow slower. So long as you're willing to do it for 20, 30 years, it can get bit. You got to get huge really fast because everyone can copy you. It's kind of like Roams and hymns. There's a reason why like there was like five right away because someone saw it and they go, oh, copy it. You could spin this shit up in three weeks. But hymns, the only moat here is size. It's literally a form. If you think about what hymns is, the original website was a well-designed site.
- They put some like, they find some stock images that are hip of like pill bottles. They add their logo onto it. So it looks like it's a special thing. And then they literally have like a form you fill out and then a doctor just goes, yeah, rubber stamp. Okay, I'll do it. I'll send the prescription or whatever. And they've gotten way more sophisticated. But at the end of the day, there's no lock in other than the fact that I happen to subscribe with them. And so other people just go out and you end up basically competing into whatever the cost of the ads is. If it costs two bucks to convert someone.
- Then you can make five cents per right and that's what happens with these businesses But I think for a year or two you could probably make a lot of money We first started this I said we should break this up into two I actually think we should break it up and we should keep it as one and because you have to go at the at 10 minutes pass, right? Yeah, something or about about 115 so you have this thing called what is enough money? I want hundred percent want to talk about that. So let's talk about one more bit one more idea And then we can come at you and it has a huge list of ideas. We'll save these and
- do it for the next one. But what, um, which other idea do you want to go to? Yeah, this one's really, this is a really weird story, but so my whole life I could never burp. Um, so my brother would like burp in my face and I'd be like, what the hell, how do I do that? I just couldn't. It was really, really bizarre. And you know, I'd drink like pop and I'd feel bloated and crappy and I couldn't burp, but it wasn't a big deal. I didn't think much of it. And, uh, and then when I was about 23 or 24, I started getting this weird acid reflux. And I just get this shitty feeling of pressure.
- and then acid reflux. And it started happening day after day after day and it started driving me absolutely crazy. And so about seven or eight years ago, I started researching it and I knew nothing about health and knew nothing about diet. And I just basically had to figure everything out myself. And I tried everything. I tried drugs, supplements. I had like, you know, stuff, you know, surgeries where they stick stuff down your throat and put cameras down there. I had a wire put down my throat to check on my stomach acid. I did acupuncture, like everything.
- And nothing worked. And finally, after seven years of researching this, I was on Google and I thought about this burping thing, and I was like, oh, I wonder if it's that. And I found this Reddit community called No Burp. And there's this huge community of people who also camp burp, and on that community, there was somebody and they said, look, there's this doctor in Chicago, and he injects Botox into the crico-ferengial muscle in your throat, and it allows you to burp. And so basically, the reason why people can't burp is they have this weird muscle that's too tight.
- So I flew down Chicago about six months ago and I got this injection and now I can burp and I don't get acid reflux anymore And my life is literally like 25% better. I'm happier like this was Same what was your first burp like was it like have you seen how the colorblind people put these glasses on and they can see colors Are when it's on I actually put it on Twitter. I put it on Twitter I'll find it for you and we can share it on the show notes You like the video of me perfect it sounds insane too, right? Like I just like yeah It's like one of those videos where the dog gets home and hasn't seen the owner for four years Like I'm just like I'm very emotional, but it sounds F top now. I can burp like a normal person 35 years of gas built up
- Dude, literally, like, I didn't know what it was like to just feel like release, right? I just always had pressure. So anyway, so I would have spent a lot of money, a lot of money to figure this out. And I tried all sorts of stuff. I looked at like, can I go to the Mayo Clinic, like, whatever? And the problem is that the medical industry is just very fractured. So everyone does one very specific thing and there's no one that brings it all together. And most GPs, you know, they are primary physicians, they can help you, but they're not going to go deep on an issue.
- really spend time on this. And so I think there's an interesting business opportunity. I don't know how big it is, but this idea of a medical advocate. This is basically a project manager for your problem. So you'd say like, I have diabetes or I have a rare condition or I have this symptom and they're going to go to every doctor's appointment. They're going to get you into the best specialist. They're going to push the doctors to do testing. They're going to look at all the outcomes, all the data, read all the papers. Um, and I think this is the sort of thing that wealthy people specifically would pay a lot of money and especially if you could make an outcome based where you say, if I cure this for you, what's it worth?
- I think this could be actually a pretty big business. So two things. The first, have you heard of a concierge, Dr.? Yes. So I have basically, I pay of, and I have it because someone got it for me when I was really ill, this billionaire lady, it was a crazy story that I'll tell another time. But basically, I have this doctor named Dr. Horowitz, and I just text him, I go, hey, Dr. Horowitz, Mike Killie's really hurts me. Can you schedule an MRI for me or something like that? And he's like, yeah, I think an MRI would be good. I'll hook it up. So I pay an annual fee for it.
- for $25,000. And would that not be this? Well, I think that's very, I have that as well, but I think it's very driven by whatever you want, right? So you text them, you say you want an MRI. But if you say, hey, my back is hurting, the question is, is he gonna be able to have time to spend four hours a day researching your back specifically and figure that out for you? Is he gonna have time to go to all the doctors appointments and interact with all the specialists and negotiate with them and everything? That's what I'm looking for is like, so I'm gonna be in the room to solve problems.
- Because I think a lot of people have like a loved one gets cancer and they're like, well, how do I navigate this? Like what's the optimal treatment? What am I missing? Am I talking to the wrong doctor? Like what advice is bad, et cetera? Kind of like a health manager. Totally. And specifically around an issue or like you could do it around specific issues. But I think it's kind of like a weird niche. I recently heard about a business where all they did was negotiate bills for
- hospitals and it was like a very small number of people and this business made an absolute killing and that kind of turned me on to these niche medical areas. Did you look into the, there's this thing called a Mayo Clinic executive, what's it called? Mayo Clinic executive, I forget exactly what it's called, but have you seen this where you pay, executive health program? You pay $10,000 and you go to a Mayo Clinic and they have like five of them or six of them and you basically spend two days I think or three days and they
- I look at everything up your body and try to diagnose anything. I mean, have you seen this? Yeah, I looked at doing that. And why didn't you? Well, I started looking into it. And what I realized is that they would just going to recommend the same thing that I already looked at, right? When I talked to, I think I talked to a doctor and he said, oh yeah, you're probably going to have to have this special surgery, which is like they do like a surgery on your throat to close it off from acid. And I'm like, holy crap, thank God I didn't do that. That has like a million knock on effects and all sorts of issues.
- Why wouldn't this work? Well, I think the hard part would be, is it insured? Maybe not. So you're paying out of pocket. How many people really want this? Is this just something like some rich people want? Or is this a real opportunity? And then also, like, just how much can you charge for it? I think it could be a great business for one person. It could be a great business for 10 people. Maybe it can scale. I don't know. I like personally, I like the pregnancy health one more, but I think the other one is more just something that's
- that's needed, especially around if you specialized in like cancer or something. So it's like when your dad gets diagnosed with cancer, there's like a clear person to talk to who's like an advisor who's impartial. Can we, I'm just going through this. I think it's interesting. I think that this is, sometimes I'm partial these like rich people ideas, aren't you? Like I'm like, it's cool, but I don't know if I wanna do that. I think it's one of those things that is probably
- business, but it goes back to like, we have a warped view of it. And, you know, we'll talk about the enough money stuff later, but I think the interesting thing that seems to happen, the theme I see with people who make good amounts of money and become comfortable is they just make themselves uncomfortable again by obsessing over all the stuff that can go wrong, like getting, you know, health issues, car accidents, you know, how can it all get taken away exactly? Let's talk about that. So you wrote something here that immediately caught my eye, and it's something that I've been reading over and over.
- again is called what is enough money? And we, you and I talked about this recently. Basically, I told you the goal when I started the hustle was by around 30. I wanted to make enough money that right up front, like my nut, would very passively spit off $50,000 a month in perpetuity. So 50k or the equivalent with big including inflation every single month forever. And to do that you need
- need like you want like between two to 3% of your portfolio to be able to do that. So what's I don't know what whatever that do that math that that's that minimum but that was my goal and yeah I mean I did it. And you started talking to me about what is enough money so what were you gonna say here? Yeah I mean I loved you came back to me and you just said like to me enough money is like 25 to 50 km a month in perpetuity with very low. I said 50 and the reason I said 50 is I spent way less than that.
- but I want it to be incredibly conservative. Yeah, so you go on a vacation and be crazy and not worry about it. Yeah, or I think that's the right way to think about it. I think the problem is a lot of people go, I want to be a billionaire or whatever. And it's like, well, what do you really want? It's like, well, I really just want to be able to like do whatever I want every month. And let's be honest, 50K a month, even 25K a month is enough to do whatever you want for the rest of your life. And so people often will ask me like, oh, what do you aspire to be or who do you admire most? And...
- I think money is like, I used to, like the athlete thing, the example before of like Olympic athletes. I think like billionaires are like Olympic athletes, but let's be real, Olympic athletes, many of them have no personal life because all they do is train and they destroy their bodies by the time they're 45, right? And so the people I actually really admire, I admire those, sorry, I admire, I'm impressed by those people. I love their dedication. I love that they do that. But I don't know if I personally want to work that hard or become an Olympian.
- I think what I aspire to be is to be the casual tennis player who is always challenging themselves loves playing plays with friends all that kind of stuff and so if you think about it from that perspective The people I'm jealous of are the people who have 10 to 25 million dollars in a conservative passive Investment they've paid off their house and they're just set and they have a great balanced lifestyle I love that kind of stuff and I don't know if I'm I think I'm too much of a maniac I think like I'm too anxious and I always want to do more and more and more I have a lot of fun with that But so it's hard for me to stop but those are the people that I'm jealous
- There's a lot to impact there. First of all, if you're jealous, why don't you do that? That's a good question. I just don't think my personality is really suited for that. I always want, as soon as I have freedom, I fill myself up again. And I'm trying to crack that right now of what's driving that, is that fear, is it anxiety, is it just that I love doing this? I don't know. I mean, it's easy. I get the same thing. It's insecurity. Like, you want to, it's rooted in a fear of, am I good?
- enough to do like I want to come in as ego as well. I think it's it's I have to prove that I'm better than Bill Ackman or whoever it is like you're at the I don't I don't have that no I don't I don't feel that what I feel is like it's more it's more fun new things and what I've realized about COVID is like I hated working this year because all it was was the work what I actually love is just like meeting new people right it's like it's just an excuse to like meet new people and solve fun problems I know that sounds very kumbaya
- But for me is very true without all this work and all this more stuff is Meaningless to me if I'm not like hanging out with cool interesting people and learning new things and making new friends That's all I care about and so like starting the news business even like that was an opportunity for me to be like Oh, well who are journalists? I get to you know get to know journalists who live in this whole other world outside of business where they care about totally different Things and I can like nerd out on this new topic and make a whole group of new friends What would happen if you just turned off your phone or changed your phone number?
- and not opened your computer ever again and never read your email for like a year. What do you think would happen if you did that and you came back to Tiny? I think I'd be fine, right? We just did this a tiny, we changed. We don't get monthly reports anymore from the CEOs. So like there's businesses where I don't, I haven't even talked to the CEO for like three or four months. I don't even know what their numbers are. And what we've realized is that when you leave people alone and trust them, usually good things happen. And the more involved we get, the worse the businesses do. You have a cool quote here. Most successful people are just walking anxiety disorders harness for productivity. I completely agree. I think.
- There's this, I have, from a telling me about this book, I'm gonna read, but basically they said something like a lot of great leaders who we look up to have horrible personality disorders, you know, or horrible flaws. So for example, JFK was addicted to a pain killer because he had a lot of issues and he was addicted to drugs. Abe Lincoln, he tried to kill himself a couple times and he was very suicidal and he had horrible depression. Same with Theodore Roosevelt, horrible depression, his wife and his newborn daughter died on the same day. He had a,
- He was very sad, but these types of personalities are really good during wartime. They're good because it gives them, they're like a dog that has to chase a car and they feel comfortable in that mode. And when I see you saying that you have to do the next thing and also that successful people are walking anxiety disorder, I agree with you. I think that that is true. But then I also say to myself, then why would I feel bad about chasing things all the time?
- of time. Like, why would I say like, well, the most successful people are just have 10 to 20 years sitting and I should feel guilty about wanting to do shit all the time. I'm like, well, because I'm just a guy and I'm built to go and do this shit because of how my brain is built. And that is just who I am. And I will not feel guilty for that. You're like a golden retriever and you like to chase balls and nothing is going to change that in your brain unless maybe you take like some drug or something like that. Yeah. So I don't think it's I don't know if it's bad, but it's more like the, you know, I envy the people who could slow down, but I don't necessarily know that I
- want that. I don't know if I could deal with that, right? Like I love my ideal day is actually like meeting a whole bunch of people and looking at a bunch of problems and looking at a bunch of different businesses as well as family and friends and exercise. But if you take away the work part, I don't really do very well. I kind of need three, four hours of work every single day. And so I think there's just this natural yin and yang of like, you know, I over get overwhelmed and then I scale down and then I have white space and then I immediately scale back up because I'm like,
- like, ooh, I have white space, I can do more stuff. What about this photo booth business? So that I was going to talk about like someone who I really admire. And this is just, this is genius. So I met this guy probably five or six years ago, really interesting local serial entrepreneur. And he has this business that's a passport photo booth, right? And in Victoria, there's a passport office. It's in the mall. There's only one of them. He has the passport photo office right outside or sorry, the passport photo place right outside the Canadian passport thing.
- So as people walk in and they go, oh shit, I need a passport photo He's got the booth right there, right? And I was just like that is a freaking amazing business It's bits out like I don't know how much but you know a good life for him And it just creates this base for him and I was like that's the ultimate and this guy he has like three or four businesses But he also just like mountain bikes and surfs all the time and seems to like do whatever he wants This guy and he's always giving me shit being like dude come surfing with me like why aren't you out in?
- and stuff. And really, really interesting guy, but it's just an example of like the kind of people who I'm like, oh, you've like, you've hacked it. You've figured it out. You've got enough and you're always doing enough interesting stuff that you're active, but you also find time to do like whatever the hell you want for three, four hours a day. So why do you have a personal scorecard? But what is this? So Chris and I, like, I would say COVID like hit us super hard over the winter. We were so busy. We took that company public. Like, it was just an exhausting year. And we were like, we need a personal scorecard to do.
- We try and do this like once a month or so where we just sit down and ask ourselves these questions and if enough of them are Negative then we'll be like, okay. We got to change something. So some of them are like You know when you're with your kids are you present? Are you taking your kids out for one-on-ones at least twice a month? Have you had any calls in last week that you would just not want to do? Have you had more than two hours of calendar scheduled time per day or you reading interesting books? You proud of your body, you know, just like basic stuff that encompasses your life and It's been really really interesting and useful
- to just force yourself to ask those questions because so often the answers are no. Looking at this, so whenever you come on, you send me this huge document. This document, I contributed a little bit to it, but a lot of it's yours. It's 2,000 words. Did you write this? What the hell? Are you serious? It's 18. It's 18 or 19. Jesus, that's crazy. Did you write this? Yeah, yeah. I didn't write the research on the Billy the Week, but I wrote the rest. That's crazy. Yeah, so we're going to save this and we're going to have to come back and talk about it at all because we also asked people on Twitter, so we got a bunch of questions about Metalab.
- Billie and Metalab in India. Of course, we got tons of newsletter questions. We got tons of tax questions, which is kind of an interesting one. And then of course, we get the same question of like, what would you do if you started now? We'll actually answer them next time. So hopefully we can record on Tuesday. I don't know if you're available, but your episodes are some of the most popular. This month, we're gonna cross 600,000 downloads and you're a big part of that. Thank you. This is fun. I always love having you here because I feel like when we talk, I'm more of a fan than a co-host.
- Dude, I'm here. I just love coming on because it's not like you guys have such a unique format and it's so awesome to see you guys actually like getting huge, right? Like I feel like I remember listening to you guys like two years ago and you were like my only podcast subscription basically. So it's awesome to see you getting so big. It's wicked. Yeah. Last week we were ranked 14. The goal by the end of the year was top 10. I think that we're cracking the code. I think there's a world where when you think of like business podcasts.
- It'll be like of course like jocko because he's like up there It'll be Tim Ferris because he's been the best for a while and then there's guy razz He's been the best for a while, but I think there's a world where we're gonna be up there In a very short amount of time and I'm excited for that and you're part of it So like as we as our podcast gets bigger because you're the most popular guest. So are you? Awesome. No, I love doing these so fun Thank you. Well, let's do yeah next week. Let's do an AMA or whatever and yeah We should get Shawn on and do do a full on AMA We're gonna I'm gonna ask him his babies just now old enough for maybe
- Maybe he's he is having a do. He's getting his life back. Yeah, he's getting his life back. So we're going to do it. Sean and I are in Austin on June 3rd and then Miami June 4th. And then you want to come and travel and do some shit with them. Yeah, I just say the Canadian border. I've got a mandatory 14 day quarantine, but they're going to reopen soon. So once it's reopened, I'd love to do a live. Great. We already have it all lined up and Daddy HubSpot will foot the bill and we're going to go. Open bar. All right. Thank you, Andrew. This is awesome.

Angel Investing Advice and Tips From a Millionaire Investor (How to Guide) My First Million 06⧸09⧸2020 [gEaLP2RXSUc].txt

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- And what that means is that you need every company you invest in to be able to get to about 100 million a year in revenue. What's up guys? Sean here. Sam is out, so I am doing this episode solo and I'm going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to start by talking a little bit about some of the angel investments I've made. You know in our Facebook group I posted something about angel investing and a whole bunch of glad questions and
- And so I thought I would come on the podcast and actually talk a little bit about it. When I wanted to learn about angel investing, I would only ever read things from the people who had killed it usually over the last 10 years. You know, somebody like an Elad Gill, Jason Calcanis talks a lot about angel investing. And I would read their stuff and it was sort of like, I'm an angel investor. I've invested in 100 companies. Here's the five huge ones that you know about where I've made millions. Let me talk to you about what I look for in angel investing now.
- And that was cool, but it didn't actually tell me sort of their thought process at the beginning, how they decided to do it, how they got started, how much money it required, all those, just the actual tactical questions about doing it. I didn't hear a whole lot about that. I'm sure somebody has blogged somewhere about it, but that's what I want to talk about, because that's where I'm at. You know, when it comes to angel investing, I am by no means an expert. And I don't mean that just kind of in a, you know, sometimes you say something and you're like, you know, but I'm not a financial advisor. Don't listen to me. This is not that.
- Because when I say that that means hey, I really think this is true, but don't sue me This is I'm for real when I say I'm not an expert meaning. I'm actually kind of like a beginner I'm just one notch above a total beginner a total beginner hasn't even taken any action yet They don't know they don't even know which direction they're going. They're just lost in the middle of Disneyland So I'm one level above that where I've been on Space Mountain But I you know I just have a map in my hand. I'm just trying to figure it out. I'm still looking for a hot dog That Disney World analogy went pretty far
- So anyways, the point is I'm a beginner, I'm learning. As I learn, I say this stuff out loud. So this is me just learning in public. And if somebody out there is listening, because I know a bunch of people who listen to this, there are actual investors who have been doing this for a long time, feel free to correct me and say, hey, that thing you said made no sense. You should do it this way instead. Those are my favorite types of messages. So feel free to message me if that's the case. But all right, let's talk about angel investing. So my angel investing life started truly about six years ago, seven years ago, when I first moved to San Francisco.
- So I moved to San Francisco. I get a job as a product manager at an ideal lab called Monkey Inferno. So PM, kind of a boring job, PM, but not at a boring company. This was a very interesting company. It was a company that builds companies, an ideal lab. And I was the only product manager there. I was the only product guy. Everybody else was an engineer. And I make $120,000 a year. And so I don't think of myself like an investor, right? Money K, living in San Francisco, paying California taxes, you're not like rolling in money at all.
- I had a little bit of money saved up from my previous company, but again, I didn't think of myself as an investor. So the first lesson of angel investing was think of yourself as an investor because those first three or four years I was in San Francisco. I had the opportunity. I was doing mastermind dinners. I was organizing dinners and my friends were the founders of other companies. And if I had just stopped working on my company, if I had stopped, quit my job and all I did was just write 20k checks to all of those friends.
- It might have been I might have needed 250k, but I would have turned that into you know at least five million dollars Just off the success of those friends companies and I was helping them and I thought a lot of their ideas were good I thought a lot of them would succeed. I remember I talked to the founders of calm early on when calm was struggling They couldn't even raise their next round. You didn't know what was gonna happen. It was just kind of Alex toiling away And I remember thinking hey this guy's I've really committed to this and this guy's really creative and I think he's right about the world I think he's right that a lot of people will want this
- A lot of people will want to have more calm in their life and I think people more people will meditate and you know there was obviously it wasn't clear cut but I would have been on that company and I would have been on six or seven of those companies and several of them did really well. Calm now is a multi-billion dollar company so out of just that group of friends I think there were probably two or three companies that have reached over five hundred million dollars in valuation and I would have been investing when they were like under five. So the lesson I learned four years later was why the hell was I investing in these guys companies I believed in them.
- I had access to them. I just didn't think of myself and as an investor. The excuse I gave myself was I didn't have the capital But the reality was if you are creative enough if you're resourceful enough if you're persuasive enough if you're determined enough You can get capital you can get any resource you need and so that actually brings me to my first angel investment. So The next company I got really excited about fast forward four or five years I'm still don't you know have you know millions of dollars in the bank to go write these checks and
- And I see this company called Lambda School. And I had been thinking about a product like this or a project like this to go do myself. And when I saw it, I was like, whoa, this guy's doing a much better version of what I was thinking might work, what's something I thought about doing. So I started calling the guy, started talking to him, and I told him, I want to invest in your company, which was true, not a lie. I did want to invest in this company. But I didn't tell him, I've never invested in any company. So I definitely withheld that. And I said, tell me about your company, I want to invest. And he started sharing his slide deck, sharing the materials.
- And I'm like, you know, I have to find a way to invest in this company. I thought to myself, okay, I need to invest 25K in this company. Okay, no problem. I can sell a stock that I own or I can say I can just take some of my savings and do this. One company was never going to be a problem. But with angel investing, you need a portfolio of companies because you're investing in early stage startups. This is extremely high risk of failure. So in a portfolio of 10 companies, you would expect some kind of distribution where you're going to get four or five of the companies to go to zero, you know, two or three of the companies to return somewhere between one and three X.
- And then hopefully you end up with one or two companies that actually break out and do 10x+. Ideally, you get to something that does 1000x plus or 10000x plus. Those are the early investors in Uber, for example. Anyways, I always knew I could invest in one company, but I never, you need about 30 bets to really be an angel investor to have enough of a portfolio where you give yourself a chance to succeed. So you know, I was sitting there doing the math and I said, if I need to invest $25,000 and 30 companies, I need $750,000, I didn't have that. So that's why I didn't think of myself as an investor, but what I did was very smart.
- I got to get myself credit on this one. When I knew I wanted to invest in Lambda School, I said, okay, how do I get the money to invest in this? And so I talked to a friend and I said, who I knew invest in, I said, hey, this company that I think is really great, I want to introduce you to them. And in general, I see a bunch of companies that are really interesting and I know you like to invest. Do you want to do a deal where, you know, I can sort of be a scout. I can be a sort of venture partner and an entrepreneur who can help you with your investments.
- And we can set up a deal. So we here's what, you know, the first deal we set up was cool, any deal we invest in, I get 10% carry, meaning I don't have to put any capital in, I take zero financial risk and I get 10% of the upside after he's paid back his investment. So it's not huge returns, right? Like Sequoia Scouts, Sequoia is one of the biggest venture capital firms. They had a scout program and they gave 50% to their scouts. You know, they were extremely, extremely generous. 45%, something like that. So this wasn't that, but then again, Sequoia didn't pick me. They didn't even know who the hell I was. So I took what I could get. And I realized in order to get into good companies,
- If you talk to one company, they usually want to know what other companies have you invested in. And so I knew I needed to start building a portfolio of labels. So a bunch of logos that I could point to and say, yep, I invest in that company. I invest in that company and that company. You would be in good company if you were with those companies. Right. That's the core idea. So I said, let me start building this portfolio. This guy's willing to put up all the cash. I get a piece of the upside. Let's do it. So we wrote the check into Lambda School. And I'm very grateful to him for bankrolling me in that. And I think it was a fair enough deal. And so.
- We invested when it was still a pretty expensive deal because by the time I organized this, the valuation had gone up about 3x. So I lost a 3x return just in the time it took me to get a backer in on the deal if it was just my own money and I could have invested after that first phone call. But anyways, it's gone up about 10 times in value since then, since then, which is illiquid, but that's the sort of paper valuation of that company today. So that was the first dip in my feet in the water and I said, alright, that was good.
- And I made a deal with myself, which is cool. I'm going to try to invest in about five to 10 companies per year. This is what my goal was. I said, but I think five is the right sweet spot unless I'm, you know, if I have free time, I'll go do 10 a year. But I'll do five a year and whether it's my own money or other people's money, now I'm thinking of myself and as an investor. So that'd be the first thing I would say to you guys is if you ever want to invest, if you ever want to be an angel investor and play this extremely high risk high reward game of startup investing.
- The number one advice I would give to you is don't wait till you're rich to do it Because at that point, you know the financial returns. It'll just be a part of a broader portfolio It's not gonna be that exciting But if you really want to do this start thinking of your yourself as an investor from day one and find ways to access the capital There are a ton of people out there with capital myself included who? Would love for you to be bringing them deal flow and would happily give you carry on any deal that they invest in I Remember there was a guy named Sarush
- who was a 13 year old kid living in Canada and he used to use our product. We built this website called Blab, it's like kind of this zoom type of product. But he used to use Blab all the time and he was like, he came to me and he said, hey, I don't remember what our arrangement was. But basically I told him, I said, you want to learn about this stuff? I want you to go scout out three companies a week. Email me the best one, you know, the best one that you saw and why you think it would be a good investment, why you think it would be a bad investment and your kind of overall recommendation. And one of those companies, now several years later, he's I think 20 years old now, so seven years later, the very first company he sent me is a company called Applyboard that just raised money at a $1.1 billion valuation.
- He brought that email back up to me emailed me again being like hey, why didn't you invest in this thing? I told you about I was like, I don't know you're 13. I didn't believe you But yeah, there's a bunch of examples like that where you can bring deals to other people and if they invest you can get Carry and you could bring it to multiple people so you don't have to be exclusive with any one person You could say great these five people all agree that if I bring them a great deal They'll give me a slice of the upside Great, you could you could do that with five five different more established investors in a given time Okay enough on that
- So, since then I've invested in about, I've looked at about 50 companies, I've invested in about four or five. And some of the questions that came up when I posted about this were, you know, first question was, how do you approach these companies? Are they sending stuff to you? Do you go reach out to them? And I told, my answer to this is, if you looked at the quantity, I get more coming to me than I reach out to. But if you look at quality, the best stuff is me going direct to a founder or a, the maker of a product that I see that I love, and just saying, hey, I'm a big fan of what you're doing, like I love this, I think this could be really big, you know, would love to chat and potentially invest in the company.
- And then I get on a phone call and then I end up investing in their company and so That's one way another way is just your friends. So if now if I have a friend who's doing something My goal would be to be the first check-in to them. There are exceptions. Of course My buddy Tyler worked with me at Bebo before we got acquired and when we got acquired He didn't want to join us. He wanted to go do a startup. I said fantastic. What are you gonna do? And he said I'm working on this crazy robotic arm You robotic arm for amputees, you know if you have your arm amputated There's this amazing, you know, I don't even know what you'd call prosthetic. Yeah, it's sort of a robotic prosthetic arm That is basically, you know as close as you can get back to what a normal arm would be
- And I said, Tyler, that's amazing for the world. I won't invest in that because that sounds super hard. Sounds like it's a ton of risk, and I'm just not gonna do it. But most of the times, I would love to back my friends. And so that's the other way that I get deals. Okay, so now somebody else asked, what is the bank roll that you think is required to get started? I'll tell you what my answer is. My answer is, I think you're gonna need to get down 20 or 30 bets. So let's take 20 as the low end. And I think you wanna assume you're gonna invest $25,000 on average into the company.
- Typically, you can get away with a little bit less if you need. I've invested 10,000 into a company before, but 25,000 is sort of the realistic big buy-in that you would do for a startup. So I'd take that as the average. That means you need half a million bucks, but you don't need it all up front. So you might invest in those 20 companies over a three to four year time period. Let's take four years. And now you need $125,000 per year to put down. The number, if you need to make your check size go up or down, that's fine. If you need to do it over a slightly faster or longer time period, that's fine. The thing I wouldn't do less of is less total companies. So I wouldn't go below 20 bets.
- 20 different companies because at that point you're not letting variants work in your favor. In fact, Angelus did a study and basically found that the best angel investors or the best returns on average, just like in the stock market are essentially by indexing. So some individuals can beat indexing but not consistently over a long period of time. And the same is true of startups. If you could just invest in every credible startup, that would be the way to do it. Incredible being a keyword here.
- that is hard to define, but whatever. We don't need to go into that. Okay, somebody else asked, what do you look for when you talk to the founders? How do you make your decision if you're gonna make the investment or not? So here's what I said. I said, there's a million intangible signals that you're thinking about and going over, but really it boils down to the following. Does this person know what the hell they're talking about? When I talk to them, do I get this sense of confidence and certainty that's not about the style of speech?
- But that the things they're saying actually make sense and when you push and probe a little bit You can tell that they've already thought through those things They have a thoughtful answer about it and they know more about the subject They know about they know so much about the subject which is what you should expect from somebody who's building a company in a space The next thing I think about is are they an executor or just a talker? Of course you want an executor are they all in on this or are they doing this as a side project? Do they have a habit of quitting projects or habit of splitting focus like? You know, I don't want somebody investing to go have a podcast and go speak at conferences and do all this other shit
- And some people will get caught up in that. And there's a reason I started this podcast after I sold my company, not Dury. The last thing I really think about is, are they in touch with reality or they a delusional optimist? What I mean by that is, do they actually understand the main risk and challenge of their business? So like, have they correctly identified what the big challenge is to make their vision come true? And are they thinking about, have they appropriately assessed that risk? There's a lot of people who don't have what I'll call a credible view of reality. They're out of touch with reality.
- You know, you bring something up that's a risk. They just don't think it's a risk and I think that's it That can be a very very big problem And so you know the overwhelming feeling I get when I walk away from those conversations is either Wow, this person had a lot of clarity and quality of thought about their business or they don't and I basically just don't invest If they don't have clarity or quality of thinking around their business, you know the other thing that I sort of think about is You know, what have you done in your past? So a track record of doing interesting and unique stuff does tend to carry forward throughout your life
- And so sometimes somebody has zero experience in a given domain, but I look at their background and they also went into other things with zero experience and came out six months later as a winner, as it being a leader in a space. And so I think that looking at somebody's track record for success is obviously a good sign. Just because they don't have it doesn't mean it's a bad, it doesn't mean you eliminate them, but it is obviously a huge, huge factor if you can do it. The other thing is, you know, the question I got, no, this will be the last thing on Angel Investing.
- is what are the type of returns you're looking for? Some people think, and Sam often talks about, like, he loves great businesses that are like the hustle. So, this is actually a good example. So, when Sam started the hustle, I had an opportunity to invest, because Sam was a friend, and at that point I had learned, invest in your friends, think of yourself as an investor, but I went to the hustle's office, which was this like, you know, tiny, rinky, dink place, and they sat me down, they walked me through the vision, and I thought to myself, this is totally gonna work.
- And I totally don't want to invest. And my thinking was, I don't think this type of business would generate the type of returns I'm looking for. So what do I mean by that? Angel investing works best when you put small checks into many companies, and you're not looking for what the median return is, but you're looking for what the maximum return is. You basically need two or three winners in your portfolio to make everything else a rounding error.
- And what that means is that you need every company you invest in to be able to get to about 100 million a year in revenue. 100 million a year in revenue is a billion dollar company. And this isn't about greed, it's about the risk and reward profile. The risk is so high that you need winners to pay off so well to justify the risk that you're taking. Because you're taking both, you're taking risk and in liquidity, right? A startup that you invest in is probably not going to be liquid for seven to ten years. And so...
- If you have an illiquid investment that's extremely high risk, you need the payoff to be huge to make up for those two downsides. I'll give you an example. With Lambda School, I realized pretty quickly I was like, okay, so it sounds like the average student is worth, what, you know, $25,000 for you. Okay, so you need 4,000 students in a year to generate you about $100 million. Okay, 4,000 students. I believe you can get there. That's not a crazy number. That's not 400,000 students. That's not 4 million students.
- I think 400,000 students will take you up on this offer. At the time that I invested, I think Lambda School at that time had graduated maybe 81 people total. You know, there wasn't, 81 wasn't 4,000, but it was clear to me that 4,000 was an achievable number and that 4,000 would get them to the point where they're somewhere between $1,500 million revenue business, depending on what the value per student was, was gonna end up being. And so that was believable and that alone was enough justification to say write the check. In addition to Austin's and
- incredible founder. He spoke very clearly about what he was doing. There was clearly evidence that their approach was different than other people's approach and might get a different result than what other people, other companies in the space had gotten. For example, most of the coding boot camps were in person and Lambda school was online. Most of the coding boot camps were in a very short period, three to three months, and Lambda school was like a nine month program. And what ended up happening was that most online learning things had like a 95% dropout rate. People did not complete the course. And Lambda school had like, I don't know what the exact numbers were, but 80 to 90% of people finished the program and 80 to 90% of them got jobs, high paying jobs. And so I was like, well, they've, you know, those are amazing signals. And I believe that they can get to 4000 students.
- I believe they can give that experience to 4,000 students, which would give them into a hundred million dollar year range. So that's what type of returns you look for and so I assume that in a batch of 30 companies three of them will drive 95 to 99% of all the returns. I hope that in the end this nets out into, you know, I put in let's call it 500,000 and I I basically quadrupled to 5x my money over the seven-year period.
- And so, you know, 500,000 in and let's say I 5X it, that's 2.5 million out. And you know, this is not like the biggest, craziest life change ever, but there's a chance it's much more if you hit one of the real winners than, you know, I've seen a $25,000 check turn into 25 million. That can happen. But you know, I would say the average or the sort of expected return of what I would call the minimum bar of success is to 4 or 5X my money over a seven year period, which nets out, I think, to like, I don't know, like a 20% IRR or something like that.
- The last thing I would say is the reason to do angel investing is not to make money. I don't mean that in a kind of philosophical way. What I mean by that is there's much better ways to make money. There's ways where your money is liquid, there's ways where you have a greater chance of a greater certainty of success. But I do think angel investing gives you one thing. It gives you a front row seat on the future. In a way that owning a Boeing stock is never going to do for you. You can go own Apple and you can go make it.
- 10% of year return guaranteed and it can be liquid. Not guaranteed, but you know what I mean? Good chance of success compared to startup investing. But startup investing will teach you a lot about business. It'll teach you a lot about people because every decision is a judgment call about a person. And the last thing is it'll teach you a lot about the future. As you see what different startups are doing, each one of them is pitching you a thesis about how the future is different than the present. And I really value that education and I think it's a much better way to get an education. I'm getting an education from an expert.
- Who is somebody who has seen the future and is coming to me and telling me what it's going to be? I'm going to get to sit alongside every month and get their updates about how it's coming and The last thing is I've skinned the game So I have money invested in it if I'm correct and they're correct about what the future looks like we get paid If I'm not we get we lose money and that's a great way to learn. It's a great feedback loop for learning So that's everything about angel investing that I've I don't know learned or would want to share with you guys That went a lot longer than I thought

Answering Uncomfortable Questions About Our Biggest Regrets _ Failures [e9-z05ijZ7U].txt

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- So I haven't seen any of these questions. So it started out from a tweet where someone said, like, here's 10 questions to get to know people. Is that right? Yeah, listener of the pod. And I think your friend Blake, Blake Burge, I think, is his name. He had tweeted out a thing like, you know, whatever. There are many questions, but few will change your life. Here's 10 questions that will change your life. And, you know, thread goes viral. So, you know, normally it's kind of like, I roll. No, it's good. There's this thing, Ben, you'll have to look it up. Again, no research here. There's this thing I remember years ago. It was called, like, the New York Times, like, 21 questions.
- And it was like here, ask these 21 questions on a first date. Well, on a first date, I thought. And it was like, here's how you get intimate with people. And like as a single 21 year old, I read that. I was like, oh, like, here's so I can hook up with girls. And I remember those questions. And they're very similar to what these guys' questions are. But it was like, when did your father make you cry? Or like, it was like pretty deep questions like that. And so I'm done with these questions.
- So, so I actually read these questions and I was like, these are actually good questions, but the way he presented it, I think, you know, offenses, how most people do Twitter, it's like, here's some general advice or some general questions. What's interesting to me is not the like the question, but it's kind of seeing somebody's struggle with their their answer to that question. So for example, he would ask a question like, and I'll give you give you the first question, which is going to come out here in a second. So Ben read, read question number one. I'll explain how he tweeted it and how I think we should answer instead.
- I'm going to do a quick question. I'm going to do a quick question on what areas of my life am I settling? Okay. So what areas of my life am I settling? That's a powerful question. It's a good thought provoking question. Now his, the rest of his tweet was like, you know, just enough or just okay. It's not good enough. Identify the areas you like. You're just settling. So to me, that's the part where it was like, no, no, no, Blake, I want to hear your answer. Like you tell me, like if you're going to put out one of these bullshit ass threads, like, you know, generic, generic, generic thread to try to get likes. I think that the next level of this, like bullshit thread thing is people get a little more vulnerable. They're going to put their actual answers in the thread rather than general advice. Who's invented this, this theme I'm seeing? So like up worthy was like, here's 10 things. You're not going to believe number seven. This new one that I'm seeing on Twitter is there's 8,000 of this thing. Here's the four best.
- Eight billion humans on this earth not all of them are worth following. Here's my 11 friends that are worth Who created that? Did one of our bodies? I have no idea who started that but that's the formula that is the formula well Ben. All right. What's the first one? I just try to it's in what area of my life. It's you go first. Okay, so what areas of my life am I settling? And by the way, this is called the boys go to therapy because we got to open up a little bit We got a we got to see what that with this what the answer might be I would say to come to mind the first is fitness like
- I think I got kind of comfortable with my workout routine and diet and I was like, Oh, okay. Like not as fat as I was. I'm on my way to getting fit. And I just kind of got okay with like, I was kind of settling for like, wow, you're much better than before. But I'm writing that for like, you know, 12 months now. And now the before is the same as the current because it's like been a while, like six months of like the same. And so I just realized this recently and was like, why did I settle here? This isn't the destination. Like, I basically was on a road trip and I stopped at the gas station and then unpacked my bags instead of being like, no, no, no, this is not the destination. This is the pit stop. I got to get to the hotel. Why is my suitcase open? You made a lot of progress. So in a relatively short amount of time, you just kind of keep going.
- Yeah, so I would say I'm settling there. And the other one I'm settling, I think is me and my wife, like we have two little kids and there's like, you know, this feeling of like, you know what, like we put a lot into work. Okay, then you put, you're putting a lot into your fitness, you're putting a lot into your kids. And it's like, yeah, whatever's left over at the end of the day for each other, like, you know, we take what we can get as the scraps of it, of like, you know, the energy, the kind of like, just the effort we put into kind of your relationship. As I think we've both kind of settled on that, which is like, it's fine. They're not leaving. They're not going anywhere. It's fine. We can all see the way that the kids grow up. Is she gonna listen to this? No, that's the beauty of it. You should never listen to this. I think that that's good that you said that. Maybe that will make her like you more.
- Yeah, especially because I didn't say that she is doing all this Which is you know the key All right, what about you what areas of your life? Do you think you're settling? My a consistent diet needs to I think I could I like to improve that I looked at my goals over the last 10 years So I created a gold tracking thing 10 years ago when I was about 21 and I hit all of them Except for wanting to weigh 190 pounds. I've always struggled to lose 10 pounds And I just I've always wanted to do it. I've never done it and so I'm sucking at that the second thing career wise I've settled a bit so I purposely set up a period where I was like one year the sale and plus one year I'm gonna chill. I'm just gonna read I'm gonna learn and I still am not ready to like go all in on something I'm not there yet And so I'm kind of being a little bit lazy and I feel a little guilt around that and then I'll do a relationship one dude, I'm super dependent on Sarah like If someone like wants me to come speak somewhere I'll be like Sarah can you just like handle this or like do you want me to go speak here? Like let me know like I'm only gonna and oftentimes because I don't like to fly. I'll be like By the way, I'm only going if you're available Like if you don't go I don't want to go because I enjoy being around her And I think I should learn to do a few things by myself a little bit more than I have been lately I just tend to rely on her so freaking much that I need to I need to go do stuff by myself Give me one that's give me one that's a settle that I feel like all those settles maybe that both of us said are like
- Settles that we're kind of cool with. What's a settle you're not cool with? The weight thing, yeah, the weight thing, I'm not cool with that. Like I get up, like I'm pissed off. I'm like, why can't I just be consistent? If I was just consistent for like five months with an eight, a certain amount of calories, I'd be good. I would be good, I would hit it, but it is so freaking tempting and I just give into that shit and that pisses me off. What else? I don't know, what am I? I do think that, so tell me if this is a settling thing.
- I've created a couple little small products in my free time and I get so excited about making like $500, $100, $1000 a day. I get so much joy from that and I'm like, dude, I can crush this if I want to. I can build things that are huge. Why am I not? Why don't I have the motivation to do this? And so I feel like I feel soft and like I'm settling in that aspect. Yeah, I think one that I've seen in myself and by the way, I don't think that that was.
- Forgot what you said. You said, tell me what you think about this. Like I agree with you. So, so I think that was good. I'm thinking more and more that the the settling thing. The easiest way for me to pinpoint where I'm settling is when I see the contrast. When I see somebody who's not settled in this area and I'm like, oh, hmm, they, wow, they're really pushing it beyond beyond where I am right now in this. Like, and it doesn't mean I'm always going to just chase and do what others do necessarily. And I think that's what others do necessarily.
- But it kind of takes me seeing that for me to be like, oh word, like this isn't the kind of the spot to just settle down and dig my heels in. And so that's happened to me with money. Like for example, I've seen people's lifestyle or I've seen people's, just people talking about stuff. It's like somebody will be like, yeah, we picked up this project and then we, like a real estate deal. We picked up this deal and we're gonna flip it, basically four months later. And we should make one and a half million on that. And I'm just sort of like, oh, okay. So like they're normal, where they have settled for their normal is like,
- What would have been, let's say, an outstanding outcome for me, but to them that's the normal course of business. And then I just sort of check myself and I say, all right, do I care? And usually I do care. Usually I do care when I notice those things because that's why they stood out to me in the first place. And sometimes they don't stand out in this way that I'm saying where I'm saying it all calmly. I'm just sort of like, usually it's like I'm jealous of them or I find myself trying to come up with a reason why that's not good. And then I gotta hold, and I gotta pull myself back and be like, oh, or maybe instead of coming up with reasons why that's not good, I should just admit that it's probably good in something that I actually want for myself. And I'm just,
- Trying to kind of like mentally in my own justification tear their shit down a little bit to make myself feel okay But in reality, maybe I should just say oh cool. They should be something I want And maybe I've I've I've actually just kind of settled here But I could go further than I then I currently have do you a journal? Do you have a history of journaling? Or goal setting at least just like writing down like thoughts or targets that you want to achieve for different ages not ages But like do you like kind of have ideas in mind, but it's not it's not based on how old I am like I've done No, I don't mean like in the future what what I mean is like when you're 21 really like alright this year I want to accomplish this
- When I was 21 I did I said okay by 30 I used to say by 30 I want to have a million dollars in the bank and I had a couple of goofy ones It's like a million dollars in the bank I want to have gone on survivor and I want to like I had like two other like I don't remember what they were at this point And then like as I got older I was like oh well that number needs to be bigger and then the second one time isn't really a factor like oh I don't care about Forbes 30 into 30. That's actually all bullshit I'm like, you know, I kind of adjusted my like goals once I like wasn't 21 anymore Well, I think it's good to look at those things because I'll look at all my old journaling and writings And I'm like what what energy was I putting into there? What was I bummed about what was I excited about and then oftentimes I do one of two things I either tried to impress my past self or try to make my future self-pumped where I'm like what what what will I be really Excited that I did now In 10 years so there's this thing. I don't know if you've heard of it. So Chris Saka who is You know one of the kind of best investors of all time. He's one of the biggest investors in Twitter and Instagram
- and a couple other bad-ass companies. He had this thing which was like, he read out somewhere, I think it was like on the Tim Ferriss podcast or something, he like, he read out a note that he had written to himself, a note that he'd written to himself when he was 20 years old. And he goes, I actually, I just found it while we were talking here. So this is perfect, I found the transcript. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know what I'm about to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember it. I remember it. What did he say? I don't remember exactly what he said, but I remember this episode. He goes, he goes, something about, what do you want to be when you grow up? He goes, so here I am, I'm 20 years old, I'm living in Cork, Ireland. And we'd start the day drinking at 11.30, blah, blah, blah. And I'd never heard of an investment banker, I've never heard, at that point, I'd never heard of a venture capitalist. And so I just wrote in there, I don't know what the job is called, but I know it's gonna involve a lot of talking on the phone, a lot of negotiating, a lot of yelling at people, high risk, high reward, unbelievably high stakes. And I'm gonna do it part time from the mountains, part time from the beach. Whatever it does, whatever it is, I'm gonna be done with it before I'm 40.
- And then he's like, you know, fast forward. He, this was, you know, just, I think he was 40, 41. And it basically a, a call to someone's exactly that. Yeah. So he's like, he's now a billionaire who does exactly that makes deals. He didn't know what a VC was, but he became a VC, which is that deal. He has a house and truckie and, you know, another one on the beach. So he had the mountains in the beach thing. And it was like literally it all played out and he retired from the game. And he was like done with it. And he moved on with his life and he started doing other things. And so, um, so I always thought that was really cool. And I thought it was cool because it wasn't like.
- These fucking lame goals. It was a description of his life. It was like a painting of his life. It was like a movie scene of his life. And I've noticed that the people who kind of do this, like they kind of call their shot and they manifest it. They don't really call their shot with like some, like it doesn't feel like Excel. It feels like a movie. It's not like a bullet point analytical thing. It's like a vision for how their life is going to be and what life is going to feel like. And they don't even know the words to describe it or the route to get there. Like, but that's it. That thing at the end. That's how it's going to feel. That's what it's going to look like. That's what I'm going to do. I'm doing this tonight.
- I'm doing this is good. I I movie not excel. That's a good one if you were gonna do like let's do a kind of off-the-cuff Shitty version right again. We do it for the entertainment We do it for the people What do you think would go into that? What do you what's your for what comes to mind as your version of that? I like physical places as opposed to internet places So I like it would really I want to have a I really want to own I want to have some type of physical land or Buildings throughout the country that I can entertain all of my friends all at one time by the way for all of it I propose something here. Yeah, I propose we do a two-minute thing where we just jot down on our note here What we think it is and we'll just cut that out no because I'm not prepared. I'm not prepared Do it That's what I'm saying. We get we got to write it down. We got to figure it out. Okay, so I think I'm not ready All right
- Look at that reaction. This tells you that's what we call resistance when the boys go to therapy. That's This is like such a hard thing to do next question, man Look, okay, let me give you my let me give you my scene right now Okay, my scene that I have in my head is you're already living no dude My house is like this. I already know the house. It's this big-ass house of everything's fucking white inside Mike I'm at this. I have the same I have a chef like I have today But it's like on this like giant area There's people just coming in and out of my house because we're like the fucking lobby like my whole life and work is so Integrated that like my trainer showing up. They're having brunch with us and then the you know I'm having this meeting with this other person But they're also gonna work out with us and the whole thing is just integrated into one big-ass thing My mom's over my sister's over because we all live nearby because we all made it The second thing is I take a nap midday because with no guilt so zero guilt midday nap. I already know that that is like
- That is the that implies that the rest of the shit worked itself all out and then the last piece is all I get to do is just meet interesting people and be super curious about them and then I just Either I don't know record or type or something like kind of like what we're doing right now I just take the interesting bits. I put it out there and it's in millions It's in a million people's ears or eyes, you know the next day because they are following it They love the content like they love the content packages I put out and I never meet those people. I don't have to talk to them I'm not their consultant. I'm not their motivational speaker I just kind of I'm taking a little bits of what I'm curious about and I'm putting it into a million people's ears every morning I think you're almost I think you're practically there I don't know you got to get the house and the fancier chef dude. You can take a nap now. I'm sure
- The midday nap right now with kids that's indulgent if you take That's like that's I give in the middle finger to your spouse What's the next question by the way that that million people's ear things that was old I had said that before we started this podcast I had told Suley he was like what do you want to do next when I was selling the company and We were on like a fucking 10 mile walk We just kept walking in the middle of the night and he was like tell me more What are you what are you thinking? I said dude? I think what I want to do is I just want to have some way That I could just get my thoughts out there and it gets in a million people's I remember calling it earballs I said it's in a million people's earballs in the morning I said I just think that that would be so cool if I could just be already on people's ears while they're on their commute to work Or whatever else and that was before the podcast now the podcast is getting close to that. Yeah, you have that All right, next question to and but you can go out of order Ben pick pick the questions that are interesting to you Let's go with question 10
- You should choose your battles wisely. What battles do I choose? Oof. Dude, I choose so many petty battles. Like if I, when I'm driving and I see someone behind me and they're driving like an asshole and cutting other people off, I like go out of my way to slow down and purposely like block it. So I'm going just as fast as the fast lane so they can't get by me. Also, I, I apply. You're like, I go to their destination. Yeah, dude. I have to wear my own. I just, it pisses me off at someone's route. I also reply to the just so many comments that I shouldn't reply to. Where I think someone has said something and it's just kind of ridiculous. And I reply to it and there's no reason why I should be doing that. So I pick a lot of really, really, really dumb battles, your HOA battle that you had. I would die on that one. That would, that would not, that this would not stand. That's what I would, I mean, I would go hard on that one. What was the question though? What, what battles do you pick that you shouldn't? It's basically it says choose battles wisely. What battle do I choose? So which it really, which is saying, what battle do you want to be choosing? Another way of looking at it is what you said, which is, what are the shitty, what battles am I stupidly choosing right now that I need to not be choosing? Dude, I choose so much small stuff. Like I just for some reason I stay like hardcore in the dirt. Like for example, I'm out at my ranch and I've got people here like setting up my Airbnb and stuff and like people are like doing the stuff. But like I just have to be here and I'm like putting shit together. Or like, fuck it, I guess I'm going to go rent a car and go to Costco. It's like, no, we're already doing that. I choose the smallest stuff as opposed to leveraging my, my skill set. And so that is an unwise battle that I should not be picking instead.
- I need to be thinking about much bigger things and I just simply I simply don't I think having kids might change that I Think there's a world where that were I'm praying that having a child is gonna like somehow like show me the way You guys could tell me if I'm wrong, but dude. I picked the smallest I folks like tiny tiny tiny issues That's like I have a friend who the like they're a couple or they're like kind of going through problems right now as a relationship and then she said something she was like I Just feel like I need to have a kid and then that's gonna like help us and I was like oh my god Not the answer I understand why you do that but that will make this relationship better, but it is going to do the exact opposite I think it could be the answer to be honest Having a dog is like 2% of having a child not in the sense that I'm taking care of it But it's like I've got something that I need to protect and take care of and it makes me a little bit happier I imagine Properly having a human being where you're like oh I have to dedicate my my life to this person It's beyond me at this point I have a feeling that is that can be very inspiring And that's why I think a lot of like 35 and 40 year olds who are childless and are like getting messed up on Psychedelics all the time and feel depressed I'm like dude just fucking pop out some babies I bet like you won't be asking yourself. How do I find myself? You're gonna say how do I just like make this kid happy and like when you dedicate yourself to others? I think you're happier Can I read you something cool by the way that I just you disagree with that? No, I think you're right in that in two ways So I think you're right that having a kid definitely takes to focus off yourself So that that eliminates like a huge number of worries that you have but it replaces that with new worries if your habit is to worry Guess what whatever situation I put you in you're gonna find something to worry about It's just better to worry about other people though. It's it's more Improvement it is an improvement the other thing is that yeah some bullshit Just get thrown out the window because you don't have that bandwidth You don't have that extra time to think about stuff and do stuff and make that trip to Costco because it's just off the table You don't have the time and so so that's one thing But it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the problem the root cause of the problem Which would be you know like a focus on minor things because guess what then you're gonna start to focus on you know Why your kids? You know pinky toe is a little bit crooked and why they have this little rash on their knee and like why they're not Eat why didn't eat all you know a balanced lunch and like there's a million There's a zillion things you could worry about with a kid and you could even justify them further because it you're on a martyr I'm a great parent for doing so so you got to be careful with that I don't think it goes away, but I do think it like changes the problem a little bit
- So what's yours? Um, okay, I'll answer the question. I'm going to read you this thing. So the battles, um, the battles I should pick. I should pick the battles I want to choose are, um, health. So being in the best health that I can be and having a healthy lifestyle for me and the people around me. Is your wife healthy? Cause does she eat healthy? Yeah. She, she, uh, she's in and out. She, she can be when she's on it. She's super clean. She doesn't have the problem I have of discipline. Like once she flips the switch, she'll just never.
- eat bad again until she flips the switch off and then she'll eat Oreos all day and so it's like you know one or the other and So you but and same thing with working out. She's like hardcore intense about that and hardcore intense about her diet And like she doesn't waver at all so But it's just a matter of what mood she's in Like and the mood is like a year-long mood not like a daily daily fluctuation so I Think health is the first one because I've seen that once your health goes a little sideways Nothing else actually Matt none of the other battles have like any relevance anymore. I think the second one is
- Like, probably the second battle to choose is like, uh, I don't know, probably something around parenting, but I don't even know how to phrase it. Like, I don't know being, like not constantly, um, trying to like rush through parenting and like getting the job done. Uh, that's probably the second one is like the battle of enjoying being patient with my kids. Uh, and then the last one is probably like, I do too many projects. I have so many fucking projects at once.
- And they're all good projects, but they're probably collectively together a bad number of projects. And so that's probably the worst one. I know I always say it, but how many people criticize you about that? I don't know if my friends and people who actually care about me, like I don't know if the people who know me and care about me. They do. They do. They do. And the people who don't are like, oh, that's cool. You do so many things. And my friends are like, that's not cool. All these things could be cool, but you got to do them. You got to do them right. And if you're not going to do them, you got to figure out how to like hire somebody who's going to do that thing for you. Dude, I would if I was you, I would only do three things. I would do the podcast because that's not that hard. And it kind of drives the other thing. I would do milk road and I would do investing. Yeah, the problem is I'm too deep in on e-commerce. And so I got to like either hire my way out or sell this thing or I don't know what. I don't know what the other. You got to sell it. I think you sell it or something. I think that what everyone talks about hiring someone to run shit. They're still like involved somehow. Like you're not actually I think that's actually really hard to do. I don't know. When you did it for the hustle, you were pretty good about it, right? Yeah, but I thought about it all. I mean, I still felt like I was working there, but yeah, I didn't do other projects though.
- I want to read something to you real quick. There's a thing from Devolve that's, I don't know, you said something that reminded me of this. This little, I have a Slack channel called wisdom and this is in there. So he goes, he says, the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. It's the only true test of intelligence. If you're getting what you want out of life, it goes, there's two parts to this. One is, are you able to hack reality to get what you want? And the more important one was, were you smart enough to figure out what you should want in the first place? That's the hard part. That's the hard part, exactly. And like, you read this and you nod. And then it's like,
- Have I been smart enough to figure this out in the first one? What do I even want and then do I do I like both you and I we have developed the skills of hacking reality But we get a little Remembering what what we actually want and what doesn't matter what we don't care about and like remembering which game to actually play Yeah, Ben bending reality is in my opinion the easy part what knowing what you want is the way way harder. I don't know Part one of the part that I really like to go You live in a society which has a bunch of people in it So that will train you to play the bunch of people game the multiplayer game
- But only an individual only as an individual do you get to stumble on the hidden game the single-player game and that is the real game And he goes he says a couple things he goes He goes If you had no adversity it would be a very boring game So remember you got to play the game It's your game you get to design the board design the challenge you get to design the victory condition and that is the creativity That is like you know Sort of you get to decide the purpose of your own life and in the same way you get to decide what game you're gonna Play what the rules are and what the victory condition is and if you write this intentionally done that you're You know you're not you're not playing it. You know you haven't actually started playing that game consciously yet
- Where do you write that? I know he said this on like a Twitter spaces or something like that. This guy's Zach, Zach, Pogrob tweeted it out. I liked it. That's good. Ben, let's do another question. Let's do another one. All right. I think this is an interesting one. What are you letting in? So in other words, like he says, turn off the news. Don't read the comments. Quit interacting with negativity. Think of his mental fitness. Like what things are you letting in? What noise are you letting in that you shouldn't let in? Oh, that you shouldn't? I have a. Yeah. What are you letting through the window or the door that actually is?
- You know, you shouldn't be should be getting through the what are yours? Well, I had what you had written something on the dock that I think is interesting. It was about feedback. So let's just zoom it into feedback. What was your question around feedback? So I have a few ways that I go about doing this, but you could do this when building a product or when just asking people about your personality, which I think you should do it. Like, what do I suck? What do I rock? And what you'll notice, and it's very clear, I tweeted out, what do you like about the podcast? What do you want more of? What do you want less of? And for every person who says they want a longer podcast, there's an equal amount of people who say they want a shorter one. There are some people who say more guests. There are some people who say no guests. And that makes things really hard to figure out feedback. And so I was going to ask you, how do you decide which feedback to listen to and which to ignore? So I started off like,
- The way I used to think about this was, do feedback is the key. You need a feedback loop, you need to talk to your customers, you need to know your audience. And there was all these books written about how important that stuff is. And so I became fucking Mr. Feedback. I would, if I had a project idea, I'm taking the designs out to a mall and I'm stopping people and saying, hey, we give me feedback on this idea. And every coworker, I was like, hey, would love some feedback? What do you like about me? What do you hate about me? What's good about me to work with, et cetera? I was fucking Mr. Feedback. And then I started to get what you just described, which is information whiplash, which is it's like information overload, but it's not just an overload, it's the contour decree information. And so then I'm like, oh shit, what to do? So then I got paralyzed. So then I went to,
- Steve Jobs mode fuck feedback people don't know what they want Why would I ask them what they want? They don't they don't even know what they want for breakfast How can they tell me what they want out of this out of this app? They've never heard of how could they tell me how to be a better boss? But a lot people don't know what they want and I became mr. Steve Jobs in the turtleneck Then I sort of realized that's not good either right because now I've isolated myself from actually getting feedback So I have no signal to go off up and so now I've come up with a better balance I think between the two which is I seek out feedback
- from people who I think are going to give me relevant feedback. So I don't just ask everybody. And then the last piece is the feedback is not the answer. It's the question. So when I hear feedback, I'm not looking for the answer to what we should do more of what we should do less of, how I can be better, how I can be worse. I'm just looking for the feedback to just surface a couple of questions. So for example, if they, if the feedback said, you know, longer podcast, some people say, I want longer podcast. Some people said I want shorter podcasts. It's just a question that comes up, which is
- What do I think is the right length of the podcast? What podcasts are great when they're long? What podcasts are great when they're short? It would be a great short version of our podcast. So I use the feedback to ask myself a better question and then it's my job to come to the answer. It's their job to just give me their opinion, which gives me a question that that can ask. And so same thing with what goes with products, which is when I asked for feedback, we both like this book called the mom test and the central principle is, I only get to ask them about their problems. I don't get to ask them what solution they want.
- And so similarly, when I go ask for feedback now, I'm just looking for them to say things that's gonna get me to ask a better question that will get me to come up. And then it's my job to come up with the answer to that. That's the main principle. When in doubt, there's one final thing, which is at the end of the day, I gotta trust myself and I gotta know that ultimately, if I just do the thing I think is right over and over and over again, some people might not like it, but I will ultimately attract the people who love what I do. So that comes back to that saying my trainer gave me, which is, who are my customers, the people that love what I do.
- And it became that simple for me. So that's what I fall back to. So it's like, if it was like an if else statement, it's like if their feedback gives me a clear question and an answer that I know what to do with, great, I'll make an adjustment. But if not, then I'm just gonna do what I do. And I know that that will attract the type of person who loves what I do. I think that I think you can, I always call it like Excel sheet your way to creating a big business. So I think that like you can just say like, where's the opportunity based off of like traffic demand? And I just hired these people and you can create wealth that way. And I don't like when people say you have to be passionate. You don't really have to. You can just excel your way to this. But what I've learned throughout the years is like, it's a lot more fun just to do things that you think are cool.
- And typically I can that's more the feedback that I'll listen to is just like do I think this is cool? And the second thing when I get feedback is I don't actually care like you said what they're saying I Care more about why they're saying it and so for example when people say make the podcast Shorter, they're not saying make it shorter. They're saying it's not always that interesting And it's it's so the because if something's you know really long It doesn't matter as long as it's badass or if I did a made a three-hour movie about Sean your Sean's gonna watch it And so it's really not about
- listening to the actual feedback, but why do I think they're saying it? So that's what I listen to. All right, this one you guys get to talk about some other people. This one is, am I surrounding myself with the right people? Who are the five I want to spend time with? Ooh. Powerful question. That is a powerful question. So let's just, we'll make it, I think it's a heavy question, so let's make it like. So tell me right now, who are the five, if you just said, I spend my time the most with these five people, who are the five people you currently just spend the most time with?
- wife Sarah, yeah. Yeah. Uh, Neville, my best friend and lives next next door to me. Uh, Ramon, who you people out people know, Ramon vamir, and then, um, Jack Smith. That's four. You got one more? I wouldn't put anyone else in those categories. No, that's it. Well, you know, I like you guys kind of like, that's pretty in depth, but I would say that that's the, I would edit there. All right. So then let's let's just add one more who somebody you wish was in that five that is that you're not spending as much time as you like in an ideal world you would be.
- Steph Smith, I would add Steph Smith. Whoa. Yeah. Nice. I think Steph Smith is amazing. Just like what? I was like, just like our podcast listeners. They also want more Steph Smith. Every time I talk to her, I like, damn, she's brilliant. She's a very special person. So maybe her, anyone else like, sometimes I do wish like I had like some baller, baller, baller friends. A lot of my friends are like pretty great, but like fucking hanging out with like a Russian oligarch, just to see how like some of these crazy people think, who are like extreme. I would like, I like extreme people. So even though I may think they're a bad person, I would like to hang out with some of these extreme people who are just on extreme ends of success. Or it could even be an athlete. Like what's it like to hang out with like the person who holds the world record in the marathon? So it would be nice to be around more extreme people.
- That's a really good actually twist to this, which is I think a lot of people have heard this idea of you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And that's true. But there's two other groups of people that I think really matter. One is like the equivalent of a bender. It's like, you don't want to go on a bender every day or every weekend, but like twice a year, a bender is a lot of fun. And if you don't do a bender twice a year, if you're not really having one amazing party or just an all nighter or some kind of experience that's like a little out there, you kind of are leaving a little bit of life on the table.
- There's some people that are amazing in that capacity that you just you would never want in your Your every day, but they're amazing twice a year twice a year hangs with and I think there's some people that are like that the other one is Who have you just not even encountered yet? Like who's just outside of your bubble that it's like you don't even know what you don't know yet because you just don't hang out with anybody Like that and so you you have zero exposure and therefore, you know, it's just like it's not part of your worldview It's not part of your mental model yet. So I think that's another two categories
- Who are you or there those those to do to your category do the five and then the other all right So my five would be Sony or my wife and my kids. I'll just put it all together My mom is the next one so I spend my mom comes over one week out of every month she stays with us Ben who's kind of like my my right-hand man my business partner across no Road across In the fund he helps with the podcast. He does a bunch of things So I talked to Ben hours a day Andre who I don't think you've met Andre, right?
- No, no, Andre's like kind of like the new Ben. He's like the next Ben. So he's a new guy in the fold on that level and Andre is kind of amazing because Andre's got this story that he had some illness. He had something he caught some bugger. He got some infection that like he gave him like kind of like chronic fatigue syndrome or something like that. Like he basically like couldn't get out of bed for like, I don't know, like two years or something like that. Like he was in a wheelchair or something. And nobody nobody knew what it was. And it was just like, and then he kind of like recovered from it. But it was like this multi year thing. And so this motherfucker is the most like grateful person you'll ever meet because he's like, dude, I walked today and I'm like, you know, like it doesn't take much for Andre to be like high on life. And because Andre's around me all the time, I'm I get that secondary high. You know, the contact high off of Andre and like, you know, because he he kind of like was just battling and got out of it. And so now he's like every day he like.
- You could tell he's just savoring every day like as if you you haven't eaten in like two weeks and you're having your first meal That's how I'm like and so I love that And who are the other two? the other one is sully who's our mutual buddy and I don't hang out with him that much because he moved But he's a partner in one of my businesses and so I talked to him, you know Because that but the one downside is now that he's like an official business partner. We don't really just like Talk to shoot the shit anymore. It's like we kind of anytime I'm talking to him I'm sort of talking to him always as he's as if he's my investor or business partner instead of
- Just catching up, you know, so I guess that's probably the downside and then so those are the those are the five that I'm currently hanging out with The most I would put you next is we hang out, you know two three hours a week doing this So that's more than most people and then the one I wish I hung out with more was Ramon because Ramon is like the best human on earth So, you know the more Ramon in my life the better human I would be just you know by default. I completely agree when he teaches me a lot he He's a very thoughtful person. I learned a lot from him and then the the category though saying that people I have no exposure to is like I basically have no exposure anymore to people that are in high school in college
- Which is actually pretty important as an investor and like you know person of the world to know like What it's like oh, I forgot I used to think about these stupid things and they were the most important things in my life were like oh wow You know we didn't have phones so we couldn't do these things You know that they're doing now in high school or college, so I have like zero exposure to that You know like people in third world countries like you know when I went down to Mexico I was like oh wow like I kind of forgot like just how simple and like different life is for most people on earth And like you know I used to live in indonesian in China and stuff like that So like I definitely was in it every day, but now you know I'm just sitting in the burbs in California, so it's easy to forget that so I think I have a lot like my bubble is pretty tight Right now, I think I should pop that intentionally once a while
- Do you want to do one more question Ben? Yeah, we're doing five questions. Five questions. Seems like a nice round number. And you bet you can remix it because some of these are sort of the same. So you could just ask a different question. You're a good question. Ask her in general. I've been thinking about one of these. So let's go with this one. In what ways am I in my own way? I can say that one easy. I lose my temper and follow my I get very emotional where I'm like, no, fuck this. This is wrong. We have to do it this way. And I have lost a lot of money for doing that for like a let's just say like it's an employee who I think like has.
- maybe underperformed, even though they talk like they're hot shit, I would just fire them as opposed to like, well, we could definitely salvage this. Like there's lots of ways to salvage things and make things better. So it's a net positive, but more often than not, be like, well, no, I just, I'm out. I don't want to deal with the headache. I'm over it. Or, and that is a very emotional decision. I make so many emotional decisions. Sometimes it's, sometimes it's ego, oftentimes it's temper, but mostly if it's like, oh, I think this person is trying to get one over them on me. Like fuck them. I want to crush them. No, I'm not doing, you know what I mean? I make a ton. Yes. I make a ton of emotional decisions as opposed to practical decisions. That's interesting. All right. I got two. I have one that's real, but. But is that true? Have you seen that with me? Yeah, for sure. You've been mad at me sometimes enough, like, because you think I'm trying to like get one over on you and I'm like, did I? I'm really not. And then once you realize I'm not like your whole perspective changed right away. And I was like, oh, that's what you thought. Like, oh, I had no idea because I wouldn't like it's so different than the way I think. So I didn't, I just never, I couldn't understand it. Basically it was not like. We can give it. We can give it a real example. I got mad at you for being late. And I'm like, in my head, I'm like, you know, I don't care. He doesn't care about this. He thinks he's better. And it was reality was like, no, dude, my baby was sick or like, you know, like, she was in the bath and it took forever to get her out. And that's like a legitimately good excuse. Like, even the bad excuse, which was just like, dude, I just, I literally, like, I was sitting here. I just lost track of time. I'm not doing anything. I'm not more important. I'm not like a diva. I'm not trying to do that. Like I feel horrible every time I do. Like, I sometimes I literally don't even have a good excuse. But even that was fine with you. It was just like, as long as you know, no, I was sort of like.
- actively doing it, it didn't bother you. You know what I mean? No, I like to bother me. Or another thing that I do all the time, and I think everyone should learn from me, and I'm working hard at it, and I made this mistake, is replying really quickly to text-based messages. So whether that's an email, anything where it's like, dude, it's okay if you sit on this for an hour, or even a day, or even five days. Sometimes I'll get shit, like a text or an email, and I'm like, oh no, F-at, and I quickly reply, and I'm like, oh, I should've just sat on that for like three hours, what was I thinking? Yeah, that's actually a great one. That's a great answer for me too. I'm massively disorganized, which affects everything. So it's like replying. Like there are so many emails and text messages that like,
- People are either like offering me something. They're trying to help me and I'm just not replying and people take it very personally As you know, maybe I would too if I felt like I was getting blown off by this person or I'll just miss a deal that like It's just like a clear win for me because I just don't reply. Yeah, I forget to apply. I don't see it I would say fuck him, you know, I actually don't think you should I I've been struggling with that too I and lately I'm just like I'm just not gonna feel bad about replying to these people like and it is the But listen here's the most doucheous thing I could say but just subtract this by like a lot and that's the reality Imagine you're Justin Timberlake and people like are always presenting you with stuff. You're just like dude I don't care. I'm gonna do what I want to do. Of course We are not that big a deal But like a much much smaller version where there's like lots of opportunities and I'm just like I'm just gonna get door I don't expect JT to reply to a DM. Do I?
- Yeah, that's true, but I'm talking about like people who I'm doing business with her by there my friends or something like that Like those are people I do intend to be replying to or I've asked them for something and they give it to me I forget to do something with it. What do you think Joe's? What do you think is there like imagine Joe Rogan? How much is that I don't want to show the check on screen But this is a $13,000 check that's just been sitting here for like six months and then it expired And so now I just have to go like get a new check and then I got that This is the new check after the other one expired and I still haven't deposited this one another month That's gone by like that's how shitty I am and it's just sitting here because I'm just disorientated or the same thing with like my Company's book so here's the bad way it plays out which is
- I don't like I'm never hired a bookkeeper. And so I'm like, oh yeah, like I don't know, like aren't the transactions just like on the credit card? And they're gonna face the queue. They're gonna ask you stuff. At the end of the year, I'll just cram for my taxes final and just figure this out. And so now I'm like learning, oh, how do people do this? Oh, they hire bookkeepers and then they like, okay, gotcha. So like there was just things that are just messy in my world that's me getting in my own way. It cost me a lot of money to have messy books or not reply to certain emails. So I think that's me getting in my own way. The other one was just staying up late, which is again, this is so boring, cliche, almost embarrassed to even say it on the podcast. How late do you stay out? Nobody gives a fuck up. Like on average, I was staying up till two or three in the morning.
- and then I'd wake up at nine. And I just started like last week, I was just like, fuck it, I was just asleep early. And it solved like five of my biggest problems. It's like my diet cleaned up because I'd no longer late night snack or eat like junk, which is all I would do, right? If I had dinner at seven and now it's 1 a.m. and I'm hungry, like guess what? I'm not eating problems at midnight. Nothing good happens after midnight. It could be eating or it could be fighting. Yeah, exactly. My sleep was shitty. My work was shitty. I was editing the milk road at night. Now I just, I sleep at like 10, third or 11. I wake up at six.
- or your seven in the morning, I write the milk road and it's, I edit the milk road and it's done. And like, by the time the kids wake up, like I've already like finished my workday almost. And so I just cleaned that up and it cleaned up like five other things. But again, so fucking cliche to say sleeping early that I believe this whole thing out, make it mysterious instead. Remember how regimented Rob Deere-Dicwas about tracking his time and like waking up at 6 a.m. or 5 a.m. or whatever he did? I actually like, like, I, if that's what makes him happy, do it. And I also respect how crazy is about that. I think I like extreme people.
- Part of me was like, ugh, but that's like you don't need to do that. But then the other part is like, that would be kind of cool to do for like two or three weeks just to see what would happen. Just what would happen if you do get up at 6 a.m. and you are like, you have a very strict schedule. I actually do think that that sounds kind of fun to try it once in a while. What time do you sleep and wake up? Typically. Last night I couldn't go to bed. I went to bed at one or two and I got out of bed at seven. You'd normally always get out of bed at seven. I'm not productive though, usually. I'm not productive until about nine or ten.
- Yeah, so my baby wakes up at 6 in the morning usually, so that's when I'm up. And I try and go to bed around like 10, 10, 30, and then once or twice a month, I'll go to bed at like 3 a.m. because I need to get something done. That's not why you go to bed at 3 a.m. You're not like going on doing shit. Wait, do you drink or do drugs? No. It's usually like I... God, this is the lamest trio ever. And when I do how to take over the world episodes, I usually do a bunch of it in one sitting that I'll do from like 9 p.m. to like 3 or 4 a.m. I'll do that twice a month.
- Sean you so let me recap these five trunks or anything I drink if like the occasion calls for it, but not with any regularity now, but you get drunk I used to but no like last five years. I have not been getting drunk and do you do any drugs? No? That's crazy. What a bunch of prudes. Yeah, I just drink green smoothies, bro. I don't even drink coffee We are so lame. All right. Go ahead. All right, I'm gonna recap the five questions So the five questions were in what areas of my life am I settling right now? The next one was
- Am I surround? Oh, no, that's not it. Oh, yeah. Choose your battles wisely. What battles am I choosing right now? And what do I want to choose? So what areas in my life am I settling? Choose your battles wisely. What battles do you want to choose? Number three, what am I letting in that I need to shut out? That's noise and information and opinions from the outside world. And then am I surrounding myself with the right people who are the five people I want to spend the most time with? And what was the fifth one? Did we do five? Yeah, question five was in what ways am I in my own way? Oh, yeah. In what ways am I in my own way? What are the things you're doing that gets in your own way?
- Those are the five Ben, which one of those questions when we set them, did you go off on attention, think it for yourself, what your answer is? Which one shook you? One of these questions should shake. I, the first question shook me in what areas in my life am I settling? That, okay, so okay, you guys are looking at me. I thought maybe I'd get away with not actually giving you the answer because like that's like, that's one that penetrates your soul, but you both are just like, you're gonna answer right now. And like, for you, both of you talked about like health and fitness stuff. One area in which I settle a lot in my life is like,
- I get super concerned about environmental pollutants, especially plastics and microplastics and stuff like that. And I always feel like a psychopath when I talk about it, because everyone else is like, what, like plastics. And I feel crazy, because I'm like, no, actually like, this isn't a conspiracy theory. Like the research is out there that like all these microplastics are like crashing our testosterone levels and like disrupting our endocrine systems and stuff. Like I'm not crazy, but the fact that everyone else is like, whatever, makes me feel even crazier. And so a lot of it's a weird obsession. I just like settle, I compromise, and I'm like, look at my baby, like putting this plastic toy in her mouth and like a part of me dies. And I'm just like,
- whatever I settle I'm not gonna fight this fight right now but it is something that you have plastic Tupperware we have plastic Tupperware that I wish we would just like throw away so just do it dude that is not at all where I thought you were going with that answer when you first said it because you were like so it was like weighing so heavy on your heart and that's what it was. That's a lot of me Sean. Most fucking random answer. Our is is you is rubber is like a like a what they call like a binky what the pacifier thing the pacifier what is what is that rubber I don't even know that it is that plastic yeah so most of the time no they won't do plastic in pacifier so they'll either do silicone which is better or they'll do rubber yeah which is also better and rubber is okay right silicone I like have my doubts about but it does not have like the same proven track record of disrupting your endocrine systems the way plastics do
- Do you do you read water bottles? No, in fact, I try not to use disposable water bottles because a lot of times they leech What do I go watch or read that's gonna scare the shit out of me? There's a Joe Rogan episode that I'll link up in the show notes where he talks with she's a the Harvard researcher who Does a bunch of this stuff and she's really good And it will it will scare you a lot. Yeah, dude plastics pretty bad then like You don't know that Sean do you microwave plastic don't you?
- Yeah, I microwave everything and everything's in plastic in my house. So I'm like, oh shit, okay. So I've heard this, but I've like never, I never got shook yet where I'm like, oh, take action in this. But that's why I asked, what do I need to go watch that's going to trigger me, where I need to, I need to be like, I will go and, you know, make a like dramatic change in my house. Well, I'll link it up, but like the short of it is basically like our testosterone levels are decreasing at 1% per year. Fertility levels are just like crashing and it's not just people want to have children less. Like people who are trying to have children are able to have them at much lower rates than in the past to the point where it's like, and our plastic use is increasing so much that they're like in 50 years, we're not sure that anyone is going to be able to have unassisted children anymore.
- But how do they know plastics cause that versus just Because they do studies of with rats and they're able to demonstrate it the correlation good answer was a very good answer and What do you what's what's an example of something you swap out? That's like a big culprit for plastic like Most people are doing this, but if you swap this that solves like, you know, 20% right? Well, so the biggest thing that she said was Never heat plastic
- That is like if you can do one thing it's never heat up plastic. So like if you have a water bottle With water in it like yes, that will leach some plastic into your system is not great But if you leave it out in the Sun that heats up to 100 degrees You're gonna get like 10 times as much plastic. So it's it's not eating things hot from plastic But how do you reconcile the fact with the fact that you smoke you told me that you smoke a pack of cigarettes today? Yeah Yeah, noted chain smoker Ben Wilson. That's what people know me for. How do you do both? Well, and how do you how could you have how do you have 24 new ports a day?
- You know, it's just one of those mysteries Sam. I don't know how to explain it. And how do you can you test to see how much I don't know that's a good question. I would love to do it if you can. I don't know that you can I got a new business that we're gonna talk about on Monday. That's gonna address that by the way. I Was all prepared for today really It's called float Did you see it in the dock it's called float dot? What is it? What's the URL is it called float bend? Where's my fucking read? It's called No, it's called found Fount found sorry found that bio found it's basically a $5,000 a month concierge service where they test your blood and tell you all about your body
- It's very expensive. It sounds incredibly cool. $5,000 a month. You're touching my body well We'll see maybe for five that maybe it'll make women to actually want to touch your body Tested over here five grand a month what five grand a month that's such an absurd number you're doing this no I'm not doing it, but I think it's closed to beta Five grand a month what I do it. I would sign up for three months for sure I think you could do it in three month increments for $15,000. Yeah, I would try that Dude, I had a concierge doctor at one time for like a year when I was really sick and it was 25 grand for a year and it was mostly amazing
- Also, I understand why rich people and how rich people can get access to so many drugs. Because if I wanted to, I could just text the doctor and be like, hey, can you refill this Xanax for me? Or like, hey, I need some more oxy. And you're paying them so much money that it seems like they're willing to do that. It is kind of crazy. This took a turn. Hey, do we have to? We're way over time. Do I have time to ask you guys one more question? As long as it's five minutes or less. Okay, I think you mean five minutes or less. I'm just curious about this. I don't know why I just, I thought of this as we were asking the five questions.
- But if you were to like simulate your life a thousand times, what do you think the ceiling is and what do you think the floor is? In other words, like are there a few little things that if they broke in the wrong way, like Sam Parr is working at a McDonald's in Missouri right now? Or like a few breaks where if things had broken the wrong way, you would be like a worth a hundred billion dollars one of the richest men in the world. Like what do you think your floor is? What do you think your ceiling is? And do you think you ended up about what your average is?
- I think in my case, I could tell you, I think my floors. I think that's the ground rules. The ground rules are same genetics and same, like, not like I'm born in a different country. Like, yeah, it's just like a few little random variables get changed, you make a few different decisions as you go through life, but same family, same situation, same person. I think I was not far from being like homeless, alcoholic, drug addict. Like, I think that was actually potentially in the cards or just like in jail because I would con people and steal. I think a lot of people honestly could say that though. Like, if they like, if they like got it, if you ever like do certain drugs, like, oh man, like, it's actually, I could see myself living on the streets.
- The best of like the limit um Uh, I think like a really attainable thing is I could have not sold my company And I think it could have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars and I could have been worth many hundreds of millions of dollars But time I was 50. I Think that could have done that. I think I could have pulled that off if I was willing to put it in put the work in You'll probably end up there now. Anyways, you're 30 now. That's 20 more years Yeah, given where you're at now pretty likely that you end up over a hundred million dollars. It's very likely that I'll be worth 20 more years
- It's almost guaranteed. I'll be worth 90. It's almost certain. Yeah, so then Exactly You got one of the good good roles of the guys I don't think I mean obviously there's some scenarios where yeah, I end up, you know and jail drug addict whatever But I don't think that's like the realistic floor for me. I think the realistic floor for me is was probably like Working at twitch forever, you know, no, not even like you know working Working as a lab assistant at fucking, you know
- you know, Greenville University's like biology department or some shit like that. Like, you know, basically some some job that was like, I got on some track that didn't really have a merit based system. It was a time based system. So like, you know, you basically just get rewarded for how long you've been in the game and not like how much impact you've been able to make. And, and it might have been in a very kind of like complete. I was very close to a complete non business field right I was like.
- about to go to med school. So, you know, I was very likely gonna be in a different thing, but like, even if I hadn't done the med school path, you know, just being a engineer somewhere, or being a, you know, project manager somewhere was extremely likely for me, had I just made one or two different decisions, kind of at some point. The more interesting question is like, how far off the peak am I? And I think I'm pretty far off the peak, to be honest with you. And in fact, you know, Ben, you were there and we had David Freiberg on the podcast. And I told him, Sam, I was trying to butter him up. I was like, dude, so you've created.
- Not one, not two, but pretty much three billion dollar companies. If you create a climate, which is a billion dollar company, you create a Metro mile, which is basically a billion dollar company, and you created the production boards, a billion dollar company. And I said, you've done that. And if I went back to you at age kind of 18, 19, 20, you're in college, and I told you, hey man, this is how it all shakes out, you're gonna create three billion dollar companies, three separate billion dollar companies in this kind of space, science space. What would you have said? Would that have been unbelievable to you? Would you, could you have believed that? It is.
- I'd say I'd probably have been disappointed. I was like, why? Why? Because I think two things. Like one is he wasn't really, like money wasn't the like the driving force. And then the second piece is like, I don't think he feels like he's had a big impact on the world yet. Like a Metro mile exists and okay, climate exists. But like, you know, what he's trying to do now with like, can I know other stuff like trying to find like be like, the way we produce food is going to change or like the way we produce pharmaceuticals and chains. Like that's not now the like the type of swing he goes for, which is like the world used to produce things in factories and farming and blah, blah. And now we do it in a laboratory, blah, blah, blah. Like that he's trying to fundamentally change the means of production.
- And so I think that's what he meant, but I was kind of blown away by that answer. And that's the type of thing. Remember I said like you hang out with that X factor person who like just sort of like stuns you into a different, like what I said, when do I realize I'm settling? Is when a guy who's created $3 billion company says I probably would have been disappointed if I do this was the outcome. It makes me think, wait, what is this guy even going? What is this guy scoreboard? If he doesn't think this is a win. And then what does that make me think about my scoreboard? How could I update my scoreboard? Not to match his, but to like, let's definitely question it, right? Like let's not just get the same as it's been for 10 years.
- Is he a billionaire? I think he's personally a billionaire knows. Probably. But like in that ballpark, I think he said on the podcast that he hasn't hit a billion. So I think close by on the. Yeah. Isn't that funny how you can achieve just what most every single person on earth we consider like the top of the top of the top and you're like, yeah, that's funny. I googled my mentor and kind of piss my investors net worth. And I remember being like, and then I googled a whole bunch of celebrities like so I think I think at that time, like his his kind of like my ballpark approximate like my triangulated net worth for them was like seven hundred eight hundred million.
- And then I googled like Britney Spears. It was like 25 or 50 and then I was like great Brit. I was like he's like More than 10 times rich with a Britney Spears. I was like, okay, Alex Rodriguez I remember when he signed the biggest MLB contract ever was a 10 year $225 million contract or $250 million contract at that time and I remember being like, oh my god He's getting free he already has three times a routes contract and it just like I just googled every celebrity I could think of like more than all of them. Did you know that you're richer than Ryan Sheckler? I think I literally said that I was like you're 15,000 germane Dupree's Dude, he's probably even richer than Denzel Washington. This guy's amazing That's what I'm saying. Oh easily watch, you know Denzel Metworth But you Denzel's got to be worth a hundred at least Wow Piss poor 280. He's a double Denzel, you know like come on man. That's awesome

Ariel Helwani Is Building His Own ESPN. He Already Has 1m+ Followers. He Tells Us How. [FiQ2_vnVXRM].txt

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- I knew he wanted me out, he wanted me out from before I even got there. Like from the moment the news came out that I was signing, he was trying to get me to not even have day one at ESPN. And so just being 100% honest, I'm a petty guy that was a part of me that almost wanted to stay in spite of him. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to. I put my law in it like a day zone. In a row, let's travel never looking back. We're live now, so we always hit recording right away. Oh wow. Geez. So getting me with the, uh, the bloopers.
- line-sided live. I like it. That's how the real pros do it. I don't know how you guys do it on TV but the real pros just go live abruptly in mid-time. I love it. I love it. I'm always ready. So we do we got introduced to a friend our buddy John who's apparently your closest buddy and I like I don't know what you know about us and we could tell you about it in a minute but basically like we're pretty popular in the business world and let's start with that. Yeah. Pretty big deals. What's happening Anthony Pettis is a fan.
- I know that yes, but we're not nearly as big of a deal as you are in your world but like you know we're on the cusp of being pretty big and We've talked to a bunch of amazing people. We've talked to Titans of industry We've talked to billionaires. We've talked to people who have tens of thousands employees people who products you use whatever I have never been as starstruck or as nervous to talk to someone No, I swear to God Ariel. I've been listening to you for for maybe 10 years I've never been this nervous. Okay, and so for the audience at home The only reason why Sam is saying this right now is because I think you recorded this after the Explanation of what happened last time we were supposed to actually do this a month ago and he stood me up
- So he's trying to butter me up because he still feels bad. He was in some villa in Hawaii I'm on the east coast freezing my butt off here and he didn't wake up in time and now he's trying to tell me that he Is star struck in front of me get out of here with this? No, I I I I I I be as the kids say this is full cap right here. All right. There's no Kevin doesn't know he doesn't know cap. He doesn't know this sort of modern lingo Well, I'll be I'll be I've been dead honest like we've talked to a lot of a wonderful amazing people
- I've never been this nervous because you you're you don't take a lot of shit you You call people out. You know the whole thing with Brendan's job is amazing The whole heel wanny the whole thug knows I know about it all CEO PF Chang's That's amazing that is incredible like every one of your guests takes their interviews from the phone while driving I'm shocked. You're not doing that. I know no every time like they go to me, you know like is alright now So and so thank you for joining us blah blah blah and and then they go to the shot and they're in the car. I'm like ah for fuck
- sake, you're in the car, really? Why did you tell me that this was a good time if you're in the car? I don't know. There's just something less intimate about the car. And maybe for other people it's more intimate, but I don't know. When you're at home, you're comfortable, you've got your little water bottle or coffee next to you, it just seems like you're going to get better stuff. But all that aside, thank you for having me. In fact, a very good friend of mine, not named John Beer, named Kevin Wang of Montreal. Give him a shout out. He currently lives in New York as well. I've known him for quite some time when I think you sent out the initial tweet that I would be on. He, within seconds...
- Set me the screen grab it said this is my favorite podcast. I can't believe you're gonna be on it This is incredible. Tell me more all this stuff and more. So a lot of people are apparently excited I appreciate you guys having me no hard feelings. It took me a couple days to get over being stood up You know I had to rearrange my whole schedule and Cancel on some people and things like that, but with with great pleasure. I return to do this for real Good and and we're gonna do an intro ahead of this So we don't need to talk too much about your credentials, but basically for the people who aren't listening Ariel You've been you've been in this people who aren't listening. I don't think I don't think they care. Sorry See I told you I'm nervous Ariel
- For the people who who don't follow you you're basically you've been in the game since oh six you worked for Vox you've worked for ESPN you worked for a ton of different Amazing publications, but you you started as a reporter at this point I would say you're just as much of a character of the MMA scene UFC scene as Dana as some of the fighters Well, don't tell Dana that well I you're definitely you know you're as much of the story sometimes has a lot of the stuff going on Which is awesome and you've built this amazingly large and loyal audience We're a business podcast so we could talk a little bit
- about MMA, but what's interesting is that you've recently kind of gone semi-independent, so you work with BT sports, you work with Spotify, you work with sub-stack, although you don't work with them, but you don't, I mean, you have a sub-stack. And what you're doing with journalism and in terms of entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur, is pretty amazing. So you kind of like have this independent business where I think it's kind of interesting. And I think if you are a young person wanting to get into business journalism, business media, what you are doing, and also what some of the other guys are doing, biz-bing, chills, son, and I think that is the
- the perfect example of what you can become. So that's why we have to come on. Well, I appreciate that. And I can tell you how I arrived to this point in my life, if you'd like. I kind of feel like I'm an entrepreneur at heart, but I say that with the caveat that I'm a horrible business person, when I think of things like finances, stocks, investments, it truly makes my head hurt. My older brother Mark is someone who's very good at this stuff. My dad is very good at this stuff. My brother works in the financial industry and all this. I was always more of the sports fan, the creative, the dreamer, that type of person. However, I consider myself an entrepreneur in the sense that I have always tried to do things solo on my own, bet on myself.
- When I went to Syracuse University as a youngster, I was the only one of my friends who left Montreal to go study in the United States in Canada where I'm from in Montreal. No one leaves, they all just go to either McGill or Concordia. And so I felt like I was kind of building my own thing then. When I got there, I went to the traditional, so Syracuse University in case you don't know, is the number one school for, at least in my opinion, to develop sports broadcasters. And they've developed the likes of Bob Costas.
- there and Marv Albert and Mike Tareko. I mean the list is just incredible. The names of the people who you know went to study at Syracuse over the years and they all go to this one station, W-A-E-R, to hone their craft and develop a voice and all that stuff. And I went there and I noticed that everyone kind of wanted to be the same person and I never wanted to follow anyone. And so I left that station after one semester and I went to like the Rinky Dink third tier student station in the student center and I did my own combat sports show every Saturday morning over there. And so again I was kind of just doing things on my own and trying to build out my own thing. Fast forward a long time I get to Spike TV in 2007. I hate it after a week. I start my own website and that's how I get into MMA journalism.
- and I start interviewing fighters, and I get myself six months to get noticed. I don't get paid for any of this. I was just kind of using this as an opportunity to show people what I can do. Fast forward to now, and in February, I'm starting to realize that my time at ESPN is probably coming to an end, and I'm starting to think to myself, okay, what do I want to do? What would make me happy? What's the future here? And what I came to realize was, I can almost create this menu, this puzzle, as I called it, where I'm doing this here, this here, this here, that here. And I call myself independent, Hellwany, independent, and he'll want me. And yes, I'm working with other people, but I feel very independent because I was able to go out
- and carve up my duties. Some of it's my own, my own YouTube channel, the sub-stack things like that, and some of it is I consider partnering with other people. And it's been an incredible few months since I was able to leave. I was terrified of leaving it initially because ESPN was my dream. I actually had to talk to a therapist about that and we can get into that as well because I didn't feel I felt like a failure if I left after three years because this was my dream. This was the mountaintop but I was very unhappy and I realized that I had to go
- go back to that entrepreneurial spirit and start building out my own things and start doing what made me happy and be around people who make me happy and people who support you and don't want to stab you in the back and all this stuff. And so yeah, I'm very, very happy now. Now I'm working with Vox, my old friends at Vox Media with the Ringer Spotify, with Substack, with BT Sport. I did a thing for Showtime recently, BetMGM, and it's great. I've never been busier, but I've never been happier as well. And talk about that move. So you're at ESPN.
- dream is realized because you were kind of like, you're like me. I don't know if you remember, there was a show back in the day about becoming a sports center anchor. Do you ever watch this show? Oh, yeah. It was like, it was like a reality show and it was only on for like two seasons or something like that. But it was great. I think anybody who grew up kind of with sports center on loop, you know, there was something really aspirational about ESPN. You get there and was it that? So this can happen. It happens with all kinds of entrepreneurs. You'll sell your company and then you'll feel like kind of numb slash board, like, wait, was this it? This is the thing I was working for this whole time. So was it
- that the dream really wasn't a dream or was it that oh it came to an end and I got to figure out where to from here so what was the ESPN side like did the mountaintop feel like you thought it would feel or what was that like yeah so that's a great question I always wanted to work at ESPN that was sort of the end goal I remember being a young kid going on vacation to the United States with my family we'd get to the hotel my brothers and I would watch Sports Center on loop you remember in the mornings they would have like one episode that they would tape and they would just repeat it over and over again and I would repeat it and I was just so taken by the magic
- of sports television and the characters and the highlights and all this stuff. And I'll be honest, when I got there right off the bat, I was disappointed. The first few months at ESPN were very hard for me because I had this vision in my mind of what it would be like and the resources and the commitment to excellent content and coverage and attention to detail and all this stuff. And it honestly just wasn't what I expected. Now over time, we kind of found our groove and I got to do a lot of fun things and I'll be honest in the back.
- my mind, I was like, I don't know how long I'm going to last here, partly because of the fit, but also partly because of the relationship with the UFC and not being able to cover the sport the way I want to cover the sport. And I tried to check off as many boxes as possible. And so hosting a radio show, I wanted to do that. I checked that off. Doing an E60 profile on my good friend Daniel Cormier, I checked that off. Doing NBA sidelines, I checked that off. OTL, outside the lines, checked it off. Sports center, checked it off. I was trying to do it as much as possible because I knew it's
- At some point, I was not going to be a 25-year lifer. I came to that conclusion pretty early on, one of those guys who stays at ESPN for all those years. It was tough, and I'm going from doing a show in a beautiful studio that I helped design in New York City to a very small studio with not the same resources to then going to Bristol, Connecticut, twice a week driving four hours back and forth Mondays and Wednesdays. To Bristol, it's a four-hour-back and forth.
- So two hours and two hours on the same day, twice a week. And sometimes it's, you know, you're, I'm doing a show that's three, four hours long. I'm mentally tired after this show and I have to get back in my car and drive two hours. Often in the winter, it's pitch black. Like this wasn't very fun. And yet here I am, you know, it's the dream job at DSPN. And then on top of that, it's all the other drama that you have to deal with behind the scenes. So yeah, I mean, I came to the conclusion around a year ago, well, not a year ago now, like last summer. Okay, you know, what do you wanna do? What would make you happy?
- Would leaving be the right move would that make you happy and you know I there was a part of you know I knew honestly I knew there were people that probably wanted me to leave You know I'm talking about people in the UFC probably wanted me to leave I didn't if you're not listening basically you've had and you just actually did a wonderful YouTube yesterday where you explained the background But basically you've had an issue or Dana white the the president of UFC has had an issue with you for a variety of reasons Whether he claims you're too negative. He says
- you've leaked some information. There's always been some tension there. All of it's wrong. He couldn't be more wrong, but he has his business and his motives, and it would be great if we could meet in the middle, like we once did, but that's neither here nor there at this point. So yes, I knew he wanted me out. He wanted me out from before I even got there. Like from the moment the news came out that I was signing, he was trying to get me to not even have day one at ESPN. And so just being 100% honest, I'm a petty guy. There was a part of me that almost wanted to stay.
- in spite of him and I didn't want them to win. I didn't want them to win because I knew that they would celebrate if I left. In fact, when I announced that I was leaving ESPN, I got a text message from an unknown number that's not on my phone saying, I told you we'd get you out of ESPN, bye bye. Now I don't know who sent me that text message. I have my theories, but like I, so I needed to go talk to someone to figure out how to get over that, to not stay at a job in spite of someone, which is absolutely ludicrous, to do what makes me happy, to have fulfillment in my heart, to wake up.
- up and be excited to be around people that make you, you know, happy and support you and all that stuff. I had to get over that in my brain. And thankfully I did. And so it took it took some time. I don't have any regrets. Do you tell the therapist about petty jalwani about he'll want to do this? Is the therapist support all these characters that you have in your arsenal? Sometimes she's like, okay, what is the end goal here? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you bringing more stress? But she really helped me realize what is important and what makes me.
- me happy and not sticking around to stick it to people and things like that. As I said on my show on Wednesday, I don't know if I end up at this point if I don't talk to a therapist. I was always someone who was afraid of talking to a therapist because I thought that it made me weak. I thought that it would be a sign of weakness that I was needing help and all this stuff. Honestly, I'm so happy and thankful that I got to that point. It was a weird way to get there, but I'm happy that I was able to talk to someone who helped me figure things out. Therapies like exercise.
- I'm like look even if you look skinny you should still exercise You know even if you're like in an okay place you should still go and do stuff and particularly if you're fat You should exercise if you're in a bad mental spot. You should definitely go and do therapy Oh, yeah, I don't think you exercise up my peloton bike helped me a lot I got one of those I mean a lot of things helped me clear my head and I don't have any regrets. I don't even have one thing that I had to talk out was I didn't want to have ill feelings towards ESPN. I love sports. I was just watching my nicks beat the
- The Celtics in an incredible double overtime thriller last night on ESPN. I didn't want to be the guy who couldn't watch ESPN who couldn't go on the app who felt some sort of way about this company that meant so much to me and live with that animosity. And I was afraid that that would happen. I don't have any of it. I don't have any animosity towards them. The people there. I don't have any animosity towards anyone there, to be honest, because they kept their word. They paid me till the very end. They stayed true to the contract. They even offered me a new contract.
- Unlike what other people are trying to say about me being fired. I was never fired They offered me a contract and I turned it down and I met some legend Mike Breen Doris Burke I met absolute legends of the TV business there I will never forget my time and I'm very thankful for the time But three years was enough it was time to move on kit. Can I ask you? I want to ask you two questions the the second one is actually gonna be about Dana white and I want to ask you about What attributes do you think he he has that have made UFC wonderful and and and that's what I've asked People about you I asked John ago man Ariel's amazing what drives them so
- It's always fun to ask other people about the people they work with. But the first question is, the current setup right now with your business, what do you think is going to be the biggest revenue driver? Is Substack going to drive this paid newsletter business? Is that going to drive a significant amount? Do you think it's most going to come from BT Sport, from YouTube ads? How's your business setup and what's your head in terms of where the opportunity is? Right now, my biggest revenue driver, if you want to put in those terms, is Vox Media. They're paying me the most. And that was important to me because the MMA Hour was a show that I created.
- and put a lot of time and effort and you know just I mean everything I poured everything into that show from 2009 all the way to 2018 and it was heartbreaking to see it end even though I was going to my dream job that show just meant so much to me and I think it meant a lot to a lot of people and so that's the biggest one and that's a do you regard that as a YouTube channel or or is it YouTube and the and the podcast does very well it's on Apple it's on Spotify it's on Google it's on Stitcher all those places as well and you own it I do not own it no I don't own it they pay me to do that show and so that's what's interesting about my situation is like some of the stuff I own some of the stuff I don't own but everyone's playing nice
- together in the sandbox and I'm very appreciative. It took some time to kind of figure out all the pieces. That was the most interesting part of this. Like it back in in February, so when I came to the conclusion that I was going to go and leave the S.P.N. and try to do things here and there, obviously you have it. Oh, I'd like to do this and that like some people call it a Chinese menu, you know, you kind of build your out your own thing. But then the actual dance of getting everyone to play nice and be on board with all these little different things that I'm doing.
- was the most interesting part of the whole process. And I really lucked out and I found all these people, like people who are okay with me having my own YouTube channel that's completely mine and the sub stack, but also doing something for the Ring or Spotify and also doing something for Vox and B. So it's just been a really interesting exercise in, look, my friend Pat McAfee, here I am dropping names. He's like, oh, well, you're not totally independent. You don't own everything. I'm like, okay, fine. If you wanna get into the,
- that whole semantics game? Fine. I don't own everything. But there's an independent spirit to all of this where at the end of the day, I feel like I'm partnering with other people as opposed to being a full-time employee with anyone. I'm not. I have an LLC now and I'm able to pick and choose what I want to do. And so that's that's really important. But to answer your question, the biggest deal that I have at the moment is my deal with Vox Media. Do you think long term that stays true or do you think because some things are something to pay off better immediately and then some things you say, okay, if I build, I don't know, the newsletter, if I build the podcast or the ringer stuff, if I build that up, three years from now, this picture might look a little different. Or do you, you said you don't really think too much about business? Do you not even care about that? You just do your thing and see what happens. Are you trying to get me to reveal my five year plan, my business plan right here? Are you? Exactly what I'm trying to do.
- 2030 area. Where's 2030 area? Like who's the guy who started the ringer? What's his name again? Bill Simmons. Yeah, like, you know, he was in a similar position as you sold the ringer probably netted $150, $200,000,000 when he did that. I mean, is that gonna happen to you? That would be nice. I don't know. You know, right now, obviously, I'm very happy with the situation. I'm really excited and it's kind of the thing that's flying under the radar at the moment, which I'm totally okay with that. What I'm doing on my own YouTube channel is giving me, as I like to say, a lot of nachas. nachas is a Yiddish word, which means kind of like fulfillment and joy in my heart.
- because every week for now, every Thursday, I am posting an interview with someone outside of the MMA world because I've been itching for a very long time and that was part of the reason why I went to ESPN to show people that I'm more than just an MMA guy, that I can interview other athletes, authors, musicians, comedians, anyone. It doesn't matter if you're in the sports world, if you're an actor, if you're a Holocaust survivor, if you're interesting, I want to talk to you because the thing that I derive the most enjoyment from are the interviews. I love talking to people. I could
- I mean, I do a four hour show twice a week now, and I feel like I could do it every day. It's just a lot of fun for me. And so I started that around a month and a half or so ago, and it's just my own little thing. It's me and two producers, an audio guy, a video guy, and we're posting these interviews. And I don't honestly care at this moment if a million people watch these interviews or three people watch the interviews. For me now, I'm doing them to fulfill this little passion of mine, to talk to other people, to scratch that itch, but also,
- to eventually show people, the right kind of people, that I could do this, that I could be much more than just an MMA guy. And it's actually the exact same thought process that I had when I got into all of this back in 2007. In fact, this past Tuesday, October 19th, marked the 14 year anniversary of me launching my own site, jerrypark.com, it's still up. I was at Spike TV. In September of 2007, I got a job working at Spike TV and Spike TV was the home of the UFC. And I was working in TV production. I thought, okay, this is the best place for me. TV production, UFC, they're the home of the UFC. It's perfect. After a week there, I walked into my boss's office and I quit. And I said, I don't really think this is the right fit for me. I'm not, they didn't do anything creative. I'm a creative guy. I like to think of ideas, come up with things. And they were just kind of the middleman. The UFC was producing all the content. So I walked into his office. I said, I'm really sorry. Thank you for the opportunity. But I don't think.
- this is the right fit and I'm the kind of guy who when he's 85 years old I don't want to wake up and say I could have done this, I should have done this, I should have zigged when I zagged all that stuff. He was very upset, he said you're going to regret this for the rest of your life, this is unprofessional, no one's ever done this, blah blah blah blah. And they made me stick around for a month and a half in my cubicle until they found someone to replace me. And that was the crossroads of my life. In fact, our mutual friend John was a part of this process where we would go for lunch during this process, I'm not doing anything. And I'm telling him I'm going to start my own website and I'm going to start interviewing fighters because I really don't want to be a part of this process.
- I really want to go into MMA journalism. I really want to show people that I could be the Howard Co. Cell, the Max Kellerman, the whatever of MMA. And so I started to reach out to fighters via MySpace and every morning I would post an interview with a fighter and I didn't care if five people looked at the interviews or 500 people looked at the interviews or 500,000. I just wanted to use that to show people that I could do that. 14 years later, I'm doing the same thing on my YouTube page and now I want to build this and grow it and use it as an opportunity to show people but for now it's just like giving me so much joy to go back to those early days and just talk to people about things. And then last week I interviewed Marty Fish, the former tennis player who's been very open with his back.
- battles with anxiety and friends of mine who have never listened to my work, watched my work ever who don't care about MMA are like, wow, dude, you're a really good interviewer. I'm like, yeah, I've been doing this for 14 years at this point, but it's, it's opening me up to a whole new audience and I'm very excited about that. We have a couple of kind of like just go to phrases or principles when it comes to business. One of them is bet on yourself and, uh, at the, you know, so some people are like, you know, if some people listening to this, they're not super into MMA. I think one of the things they could pull out is your bet on yourself mentality, especially when it's not easy, right? Like, uh, betting on yourself, uh, some
- Sometimes it's an entrepreneur's kind of obvious. You don't really have a job. You know, by default, you bet on yourself. You had, quote unquote, good jobs at each of these stops. And then you said, look, this isn't it. I'm gonna bet on myself and I'm gonna go independent. I'm gonna do my thing. So you have a strong dose of bet on yourself. You have another one that Sam coined, which is niches get riches, which is that I know you're a basketball fan, but you didn't go into the more established field that one that had a career track that you could tell your mom, look, there's other people who have made it in this field. I could be the next.
- whatever in basketball you went for MMA, which is today, fringe, let alone back in, you know, 2006 or whatever, like nobody was really, there was no blueprint or there was no like success stories doing what you were doing. I don't think at that time, like you are the kind of the success story of that niche. And so I want to hear kind of how you decided to bet on that, even though you have other interests, you have other sports that you're interested in as well. And then the last one is, there's this great phrase, which is, you know,
- you want to do the work that looks like work to others, but it feels like play to you. So like if I was going to interview somebody four hours a day, I would be exhausted. And I think you get, you're pick up steam by energy, by your hour three, you're like, you're just hitting your groove and it gives you energy. So I think that's another example of where you kind of live one of these principles that we talked about. But tell me about the niche thing. Why is your bed on this? That spoke to my heart. That spoke to my heart. That's a great line. It just get richest because I couldn't agree with you more. When I got to Syracuse for the first time in my life, like when I went to Syracuse, I wanted to be the next costume.
- this Marv Albert basketball baseball football traditional guy. Hello welcome to ABC Sports on Mario, Hawaii World Series Super Bowl. And for the first time in my life I realized wow there's a lot of people in this world who are my age who have the exact same dream as me who are a little more polished, who have nicer hair, who don't have as big of a nose and maybe don't have such a foreign name. Their name is John Smith and they just kind of fit that Bob Costas mold. And I never like to follow the pack and so I remember telling my parents in September of 2001 there's
- this sport called mixed martial arts, there's this organization called the UFC. At this point, it's not even eight years old. And I think it's going to be mainstream. And I think in 10 years, there's going to be some executive in some office, some older guy who's like, what is this crazy cage fighting sport? I know nothing about it, but apparently it's very popular. Who's the guy? Who's the voice? Who's the Howard Co-Sell of MMA? And I want to be that guy. And amazingly, literally 10 years later, August of 2011, I was like, oh, I'm going to be like, I was hired by Fox. And that was like my...
- my first big mainstream gig. And so it kind of worked out in that regard. But I say this to young people all the time when they reach out to me. And they send me, oh, I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to be Stephen A. Smith and all this stuff. In this day and age, you don't want to be a generalist. You're a fan of the New York Knicks. You're a fan of the New York Knickerbockers. I'm not going to go tune in to the radio, ESPN radio now. I'm not going to go in my car, tune in, and say, oh, I hope you guys talk about the Knicks.
- Celtics game last night. I'm going to go on my podcast app and I'm going to go to the New York Knicks podcast as niche as it gets to hear an hour breakdown of last night's game. If I'm a big pro wrestling fan, I'm going to go to my pro wrestling podcast and listen, MMA podcast, business podcast, the days of sitting in your car and hoping that they talk about something or listening to people just talk about God knows what, those days are over. And so it is actually a lot better in my opinion to go into a niche, to be the niche guys opposed to being the generalist. Yeah, there's a couple guys who will make it Stephen A and those guys. But for the most part, in my world, it's way better.
- better to be the niche guy. And I try to explain that. And within the niche, have your own niche as well. And so like my thing, interviews, I tell the people like find your thing. There was a young guy always bring up Mike Bond. He works for MMA junkie. And he's a lot younger than I am. His niche that he used to get in the door were stats and factoids. So he would have all these stats about all the fighters. Great. These days, maybe it's betting. Betting is super hot right now. Use that as your niche to get in the door. So yes, I couldn't agree more with that mindset. And I would urge anyone in this day and day, this day and age of a la carte, you know, everything is out of a cart, right? Podcasts streaming, all that the more niche.
- the better. You'll have way more success rather than being just some guy like those days 50 years ago when you were a columnist for a newspaper those days are over. How um how what what what size or how big is your your audience? I mean I know the YouTube videos get like 30,000 to 100,000 per per clip per video. How what do you say the number is of your audience and what advice do you have? You can use us for an example. I mean we're smaller than you um of like of your tips for getting notice and being great at building this this empire. This is gonna sound uh don't tell me good content. No no no no no it's gonna
- It's gonna sound whack, but I really don't know the size. I mean, I see the numbers on YouTube. I never ask for the podcast numbers. I don't wanna know. And it's actually one thing that really bothered me at ESPN, like three weeks into my time there, we sat down and started breaking down the numbers and the listening rate and the completion rate and all this stuff. Like, I don't wanna know this. Like, it's hard enough. By the way, in the, what is it now? 12 years of me doing this, like hosting this type of weekly show and all this stuff shows, I've never had a person book the guests for me. I book every single guest, every single name.
- that you see on my show on Wednesday, Rose, and Jan Bachowich and Fedor. I book those people myself. I do not have a Booker. What do you just DM them on Twitter? I mean, how do you DM Fedor? Well, now I have, you know, I have their numbers, you know, and I know what everyone likes. Like, I know there's some people who respond quicker to DMs. There are some people who respond quicker to WhatsApp. There are some people who strong quicker to iMessage. I never email anyone. I mean, you email a fighter that's like throwing, you know, a toothpick into the ocean. There's no chance you're getting a message back. But, you know, I'm just, I'm kind of relentless like that, and I'm obsessive like that. And I think that I would drive someone crazy if I said, hey, I want to get Rose Namayunas on my show. And then I would probably ask them a million times, did she respond? Did she respond? Did she respond? Did she respond? Did she respond?
- be responsive. I'd rather just put that on myself. Now, it's probably the worst part of the job and it makes me very stressed out, but it's just the way I like to do things. So that brings enough stress now to know completion rate and downloads and subs. Yeah, but you must have an idea. You have a million followers on Twitter. I think BT Sport has 1.2 million subscribers on YouTube-ish, your videos, ballpark 50,000 to 100,000 views per maybe. I don't know what your podcast downloads are, but like, do you know like everyone? No one has talked to me now.
- Okay, I'll tell you like at ESPN, when my show with DC towards the end, we were getting, I think, on the podcast only. Now, this is one little sticking point that I have. So they would sit down and they'd be like, okay, the podcast with DC is getting around 90,000 downloads an episode. I'm like, all right, that's pretty good. 90,000 in episode, once a week, one hour a week. But here's the problem. They were comparing us to other podcast-only shows. Let's say the low post podcast, the basketball podcast hosted by the great Zach Lowe, but that's an audio-only podcast.
- we have the YouTube show as well. So our audience is splintered. So if you wanna know about our total audience, you gotta count those numbers as well. And in addition, you wanna get into the social. Dude, I've never listened to you every single time. I've never listened to you on the podcast app. It's multiple ways. So that's the thing. Like, and it would always annoy me that we were just, what about the YouTube numbers? Like to me, I'm more of a visual guy and I care more about that. Like the audio podcast is almost like gravy for me if you're in your car or whatever, but I'm more inclined to push the video. So I would guess if we're gonna use those numbers, that's from a few months ago and I don't feel like we've really missed a beat on.
- MMA fighting since I returned there from the video. You know, we're talking like 200, 250, but then there's the breakout stuff, right? Cause then each, each interview gets made into its own separate clip. So I don't know, man, why you're trying to stress me out here. I'm just trying to live my life and do interviews. No, you gave an answer. So you think a 200, 200- I think. In episode- I'll tell you why I think something like that matters. What are we at? 50 or 60,000 in episode? If you add the YouTube and the pod. So I think that's amazing. Like, like, I think I've been studying a bunch of different people from, you know, like there's, there's you in, let's say, MMA. And then there's, you know, I don't know if you follow cryptocurrency with this guy, Pomp, and he's like the Bitcoin guy. And then there's Tim Ferriss, and he's like,
- you know, the four hour work week guy. There's all these people who build their brands and they're what I call, you know, solo-preneurs or solo media people. And you can look at it, I did a comparison ones of Rogan's show versus, you know, the, like, the Tonight Show. And on every metric, it's like, you know. Not even close. You know, how many viewers do you get? How much money do you bring in? How many employees do you have? And on every metric, Rogan just like beats down the Tonight Show. And, but people would still sort of, from a prestige point of view, they think one is a television show where you wear a fancy suit and you have a monologue and a fake audience clapping.
- And the other one is like, you know, you just got down with the workout, you sit down in this little studio and you do a podcast, what the heck's the podcast? So people haven't really caught up on this model. Um, and then I sort of broke down the businesses of each. I said, Oh, okay, interesting. So what it looks like to me is you get this number that I call your true fans, which is basically like the number of people who really trust you. And like let's say that's like a quarter million people for you or something like that. Maybe it's 250,000 people that that really trust you. I'll follow you. I don't really care if you're on ESPN or am I fighting or you're with BT sport. I just know Ariel, who want to.
- and I'll just kind of follow you wherever you go. It's like a fan of LeBron James. They're not a Cleveland Cavs fan. They're a LeBron fan. And now they're all Lakers fans. And so then I sort of studied the model and I said, okay, it looks like between two to 4% of your audience will sort of buy anything you do. Like they'll pay for your paid newsletter, they'll buy your hoodies. You know, you tell them, hey, I'm Ariel. I'm in a raise of venture capital fund. I'm investing in startups now. They'll invest in your fund. They'll do everything. And so now there's all these new models. Before it used to be, you know, you get famous and you write a book. You spend a couple of years, you write a book and that's how you monetize your audience. And then people start to do in courses and other different things like that.
- And I've been studying all the different models. One of the guys I got friendly with was Matthew Barry at ESPN because he has a niche, which is fantasy football. And he was doing this, you know, before fantasy was sexy. And he was like convincing Yahoo and others. Hey, go into fantasy. I'm telling you, like guys are nuts about this. And he became the fantasy guy. And he's kind of like, he's got a little bit of a he's got a cushy gig with the ESPN, but he's got a bit of independence. He's got his own like text message, like list. And he's got his own fantasy football thing. What does he do that? I didn't know he I didn't know he he had. He's got a couple carve outs.
- I actually asked ESPN in our negotiations. I was like, well, what if I do this? Like if I just do the DC show and the channel show, but then I do this other stuff of my own. And I don't know. It just, it's not easy. I think he has a couple of carve-outs that work for him. He got it kind of grandfathered in basically. He's like, yeah, I get to keep this. I don't make too big of fuss. But if you go look at his Twitter bio, what does he link to? It's like, I think he links to one of his properties basically as like one of his things. So I've been studying this model. I would say for you, I think you're in a great spot. And if you just sort of think about the menu of which
- that how does somebody who's got a trusted loyal audience, they've built over 10 years monetize, there's all these creative ways beyond ads or sponsors on my show. I don't know if you care about that stuff, but I feel like there's a bunch of options. No, I do care about it. It's interesting, the sub stack thing is super interesting because I would say of the three main things that I do. Obviously there's video, audio, and writing. And there's different components, all of those, but those are obviously audio visual and writing. I feel very confident in my abilities as a video host and...
- and as an audio host. I don't feel as confident in my abilities as a writer. Now, people tell me I'm good, I just don't feel like I'm as good. And I try to be very genuine when I write. I try to be myself, not someone else. And I talk to a bunch of people about the writing component of my menu. And everyone wanted me to do stuff that I wasn't really down with. The guys at Substack, so I'm part of this like Substack Pro model. I don't know if you guys know about this. Okay, so. Talk to those guys, Hamish and all those guys. Yeah. We like them. Yeah, yeah. So there was a guy named Dan Stone. It was a great guy. He reached out to me and.
- and they basically like pitched me this thing where I could kind of do whatever I want and there's obviously this small component of it that's behind a paywall. I did not feel comfortable with the paywall. I'm just being honest, I said the same to him. I did not. I think most people are in the same boat as you who come from your background. I don't want to, look, I've always been free and that's a weird thing in its own, right? Because like 30, 40 years ago, you know, you're subscribing to Sports Illustrated, like none of it, we've programmed the audience to expect everything to be free when in reality, like this stuff does, you know, this stuff is worth something and technically shouldn't be free, but it's been that way and it's hard to go back. It's hard to put the two things in the back.
- pays back in the tube. And so I didn't feel comfortable doing that. And so the conclusion, but I really wanted to work with Substack. And so the conclusion that I came to was all the proceeds that I was getting from the subs, I'm donating to charity. So I want people to know I'm not profiting off of any of this. I don't feel comfortable. I don't feel comfortable. Dude, that's crazy. So my company, I just, so this, this podcast was owned by my company called the Hustle. We just sold it for a lot of money to this company called HubSpot. And before we sold it, thank you. And before we sold it.
- we had a daily email that reached around 2 million people a day and then we owned a subscription business called Trends that made many millions of dollars and we charged $300 a year. I think we undercharged what is going on. Like most creators feel exactly how you feel and I'm like, you're crazy. If you owned a restaurant and you were cooking every single day, grinding 8 hours a day, would you give that food away for free? I can't do it. I don't know why. Even stemming from like the shop stuff, this company breaking tea, who I think are fascinating, you guys should have those guys on. They basically react to, actually they made this sweatshirt. I don't even know. What's going on?
- So, breaking tea, breaking news, breaking... So they're like kind of quick on trends with the merch. Exactly. So, like, let's say, for example, I've topped my head, Jorge Mazzvidal, or Nick Diaz says, don't be scared at home, the next day, they have a T-shirt out, a really cool one, and they're selling it, but they have deals with MLBPA, NHLPA, so they're making stuff in real time. It's a fascinating business. And so, one of the guys there was a fan and made a heel-wanny shirt in the midst of my whole thing. I was like, oh, this is great. And we split the cost.
- All of that I'm donating to charity as well. I don't want it. I don't know. I do got this like The money is actually like you know That's crazy I love you Ariel, and I think you're totally wrong. I've listened to you enough said I know that you you know I married into a Jewish family you've got this very like stereotypical Jewish guilt about you of like your life and I think that's weird. I Think you I think you are totally downplay, you know It's funny. I watch you in the interviews and I could tell your
- nervous or you are having issues like realizing that you're the shit. And so as a fan I will say I think you're undervaluing yourself. What can I give you can I give you a free idea here for as a creator? No charge for your area. You're a friend of the house. So here's a free idea for you. Okay. One of the new little tools in the creator playbook of how to make a bunch of money. I don't know if you saw this but Mr. Beast who's one of the biggest YouTubers out there. Launch this pop-up restaurant. And celebrities doing restaurants kind of been a thing.
- But like back in the day was sort of like, you know, it was like Marco Ritaville or like Gordon Ramsay's Wolfgang Puck's Kitchen or whatever the hell these things are. But Mr. Beast came out with Mr. Beast Burger. And overnight he had 200 locations across the country. And you know, you think about that. Is this guy been pouring his, did that take years of preparation? No, what's happened is there's these companies like Breaking Tea that exists that will create a virtual restaurant brand. And what they do is they partner with like, let's say you did. I don't know, I don't know what your, maybe it's.
- Chinese food. I don't know what your thing would be. Let's just say for a second, it's pizza. Lots of all soup. Okay. You went niche again. I don't know how big the market is there, but let's say it was pizza just for ease here. There's a whole bunch of mom and pop pizza shops in every city. What this company does, they go partner with Juan and Phoenix and San Francisco and all these different cities. And they say, hey, we're going to send you some packaging that's custom, how wanny branded packaging. And only on, you know, Saturday nights when there's a UFC paper.
- does this restaurant go live and the menu is themed for, like it'll be like, you know, a Mazvidal pepperoni and like a, you know, a Diaz burger and whatever else. And you, or you know, you make up your own names and then basically your fans can kind of order with the pay-per-view. Now Mr. Beast, he did his little pop-up thing. So he didn't have to really lift a finger. He just kind of said, all right, when I'll give you some ideas on the branding of what the menu could look like, you know, and I approve it, yeah. I'll approve it and I'll put my name behind it. And then when the time comes, I'm gonna tweet out at, hey, this is happening and today you can go buy from my thing. And I think this thing is done about, over, somewhere between $50 and $100 million in revenue.
- off this thing. I think if you just sort of assume a 10% kickback royalty that he's getting on this, I'm pretty confident he's doing somewhere between three and six million a year of just recurring passive revenue from his little Mr. Beast Burger thing. Now, you're not Mr. Beast, but you could do something alongside the pay per views and that would just be for fun. That's fine. Your fans would feel like you're... I'm going to steal that idea. I can't either be stupid these guys. So you've done the boxing thing.
- know the one who wants to yes which I mean no money off of as well I know and I've followed that and I bought one oh yeah that was fun I don't think you understand like I'm a super fan I appreciate it and so I would what I would do is the you went to the new house where a boxers right now yeah I am I would go to the whole Hawaii school of journalism I mean I think that you guys be my agent I mean these are all great ideas I love this stuff I mean I just think that you could make like I would imagine you could profit a million dollars a year selling at five hundred thousand dollar whole new school of like you
- You never heard of me. You never heard of me before with this podcast. I did a course on writing, how to be a better writer. And again, I'm nobody. And I did, I think what did I do? 250K last month in this course. And so you sort of average that out across the year. I mean, these are like kind of like million dollar product lines that I create the course once. And then I just run, I just say, hey, the new batch is open next month. And then it runs again and people get great value. At the end of the thing, I say, hey, you paid whatever, $900, how much value do you think you got out of this for you and your business, your career? Right. And they're like, you know, on average, it's 10K basically is what they say. So they get 10X return on their money from.
- self-assessed on what they believe they got out of the course. So, you know, I could send a film crew to you right now, and we could film a course on how to break into journalism, how to make it as a journalist, and then screw Syracuse, the people who really want this. All you need is basically 1,000 people who really want this who pay you $1,000 for this. That's a million dollars a year of basically pure profit because the video production costs are very, very small for this. Wow, this is great stuff. Who would have thought I'd come on here and get all these ideas? I feel like my head is spinning right now. Thank you, Danny.
- Can you help us now? Please talk to me about audience building. I mean, you seem like a guy who, you don't do a significant amount of growth tactics. You just, I think you're talented and I think you have tenacity, so you've been doing it forever. But what have, for us and anyone listening who wants to break into to do what you've done, what advice do you have on audience building and getting, I mean, I know you're not a whore, like a view whore at all, but you know.
- It's still, you want people to like your stuff and you want a lot of people to like it. What do you have for that? So my mindset was always, okay, the first thing was, look at the landscape, look who's out there doing things. It's okay to derive some kind of inspiration from this person or that person, but at the end of the day, you need to develop a unique voice and give people a reason to tune into you, right? Don't be a copycat, don't just try to do something because someone else is doing it. And so that was my big thing. And that's why the interview lane, I was like, oh, no one is doing this in MMA. I should develop my own voice in this lane and be the guy, be the leader here. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is like it's exhausting. You have to work your ass off to build the audience, to put the content out, to make it as good as possible, be consistent, pick a day. If you're doing a podcast or something, like pick a day, Monday is your day, don't miss a Monday. Like people who do, oh, one here, two here, take a break here, it's very hard. You have to be consistent. You have to be reliable. You have to be relentless. You have to be professional. So my thing was,
- you know, reaching out to the fighters. And the fighters who I reached out to, I was very respectful towards, I was very professional towards, I didn't keep them for very long, I would keep them for like 20 minutes in hopes of getting them to come back the next time, right? Cause it's not just about this time, it's about the next time and the next time and it's the next time. And so I don't want them in the back of their mind to say like, oh, this guy kept me for an hour, what a pain in the ass, I'm not gonna, you know, do this again. And then afterwards, very thankful, very respectful, very professional. And then over time, you know, it was like, you know, developing these relationships, checking in with fighters, checking it, and it's not in my world, it's fighters, but it can be with anyone else, if you're an interviewer and you're interviewing tech people and things like that, like one big thing.
- is I don't just talk to fighters when I need something from them. I don't just reach out to Michael Bisping when I want him on my show. We talk about things all the time. In some respects, some of these guys have become friends of mine and they don't feel like they're being used. It's important to be a human being towards your guests, your sources, your things like that. Then when it is time to ask for something, they are more than happy to help you out because you've asked about their dog who passed away or their wife who had surgery or their son.
- who want a big thing in football or whatever. And so these are all kind of things that you develop, not with the, you know, it's, to me, it's always very genuine. I'm not doing that. I'm not checking in on the dog because I hope that in three weeks, it's gonna pay off and he has, you know, he's willing to come on my show. It's just being a human being about all this and working hard, working your ass off, trying to be different, putting the content out. Social media is a massive thing now, obviously. You can't do a show without having a social media presence and I don't care if you have one follower or a million followers.
- You got to put the clips out because it's so funny to me. I hear from people all the time like, oh, that thing that Rose said on your show was awesome. And then I'm back in my mind, I'm like, oh, that's the one clip that we chose from the interview. Did you watch the interview or did you just watch the clip on my Instagram? And oftentimes it's just the Instagram clip. And that's okay. It's just about being out there, getting the stuff out there, making it shareable. And then hopefully it attracts more people to check you out and check you out. But like, if this doesn't happen, you know, I started this particular part of my life in 2007. I graduated in 2004. It took me 14 years just to get to ESPN. And so a lot of people are in.
- patient and they want to see the results right away, it's just not going to be that way. How many people, first of all, I want to know how often are you working because UFC fights end on 1 a.m. at 1 a.m. in New York and you do a post, you do a recap show often, but how often are you working and also how many people does it take to run your content operation? So I feel honestly, I feel like I work every day. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's for the most part with pleasure. Like I don't ever feel like, oh man, I need a breath.
- I need a vacation, this and that. Now, part of going back to the therapist, I was terrified of leaving ESPN and then kind of disappearing. However, I then came to the conclusion, hey, you know what? Distance makes the heart grow fonder for me and for them. And so June 15th was my last day at ESPN, and I essentially disappeared until August 15th. I was still on social media, I was still doing stuff here and there, but I took a two month break and it was freaking awesome because I went home to Canada to see my parents for the first time in two years because of the pandemic. I just, I really needed that break. And I think...
- that that's important if you're doing something, you know, for, you know, for a very long time, I think it's important to give yourself, you know, that type of break as well. But for the most part now, I feel like I'm working every day, especially with all these different people and all these different projects. And there's travel and stuff like that. There is no real break. And I'm okay with that. You just kind of find your moments. I can be a lot better. I wish I could put the phone away a lot sooner at night. I wish I didn't wake up and check my phone right away. I wish I was a little more present at times. I'm working on that. But I got to tell you guys, like, I feel like I'm working every day, but I'm also in this state where I've never been happier. And the work.
- has been so fulfilling and it puts me in such a good mood to create this stuff and to be there for people like there is no greater compliment that I can get when someone writes me and said I had a horrible day and then I checked out your show and it made me forget about my day or during the pandemic I was so down and you and DC used to make me laugh and you know I just got a message from someone who's in Australia and it's been horrible there with the lockdowns and you you know I'm so happy your show is four hours again because you give me eight hours a week of stuff to think about outside of the lockdown.
- I can think about MMA and I have access to these fighters like like there is no greater joy than I get than that And so I don't mind it But also, you know, I haven't been to a UFC fight in a year and a half March of 2020 was my last UFC fight and partly because of the pandemic now partly because of my job and you asked me right now Big-time UFC fight Conor McGregor's return fight Las Vegas T-Mobile sold out crowd on a Saturday night in July The buzz the celebrities the atmosphere nothing better
- better, right? Or you ask me, do you want to go to your son's soccer game with 10 other parents there at the park nearby? I am choosing that soccer game without a shadow of a doubt in my mind. Like I get so much enjoyment at being at those games, being a parent, being with my kids, but then also doing the work that fulfills me and makes me happy. There was a time where I thought I had to be at every event, leave my family, travel every weekend because I needed to be omnipresent because Woody Allen once said 80% of success is just showing up. And that served me early in my life and career. It doesn't serve me anymore. And so now that I'm able to pick and choose what I want to do and work with people who I want to work with and do the kind of
- content that I want to do, but also be there for my family and my kids at this stage of their lives gives me a lot of joy. And so I never thought I would get to this point where, wow, I don't have to go to the events and I can still do great stuff and still be happy and still be followed and still produce amazing and still be there for my kids. In a weird word, I'm so thankful to the man above because I feel like it all kind of like fell into place at this point in my life. And send that clip to Connor, Ariel chooses soccer game.
- six year old soccer game for Converkegers return. It's the truth and I just use Converkegers because that's the biggest name possible. Obviously, he's been very good to me and it's been an absolute honor and I would love to go to events. Of course, like one a week or, sorry, one a year, two a year, three a year, four. Like I got to go to the Jake Paul thing. That was a great, great experience. I was just using the most crazy example possible, the biggest name possible. The point is I used to have FOMO. I used to feel sad and depressed when I wasn't at the events because.
- I felt like I was missing out, I was becoming irrelevant, and I don't feel that way anymore. I feel very confident in what I'm doing. And before we wrap up the content team, what's your team in process looking like? Oh, right, yes. So right now, it kind of, so the dream obviously is to like, I think, I don't know if you guys are fans of Pat McAfee, but I think that he is doing media in sports at least better than anyone right now. He is just doing an incredible job, and he has this group of like, I think eight or so guys doing work for him, and his social media is brilliant because they're often tweeting out things, and he's not even a part of it. It's just like a well-oiled machine, and then he's going to do SmackDown. He has his private plane. I mean, what a lot of people do.
- this guy looked. Now I am nowhere near that at the moment. I also didn't play in the NFL. But right now I have I would say three people who work with me. One person's social media, one person's video, one person's audio. And that's just me, you know, my LLC type of thing. And then I have people who are working on other projects, you know, the Vox stuff. They have people who work with me there, ringer, people, etc. But yeah, I would love to grow that out. But I think the three most
- important people to have right now. It doesn't have to be, I mean, like, all those interviews that you saw for me over the years, I only had one cameraman. I didn't have an audio person, I didn't have anything. I don't think you need a gigantic team of people to do stuff, but yes, it would be nice over time to have maybe two social media people and have this person who's thinking of this and someone who's managing, like, I was laughing because you said you had Ben who did the scheduling and I was like, man, I wish I had a Ben. I wish I had someone doing my scheduling. I wish I was in that position or I could even double.
- Some of that stuff, that's part, you know, my problem as well. I don't do well at delegating. But it will come, it will grow. And then eventually it'll be fun to have a store, a merch store, to do the stuff that you're talking about and maybe make money off of it and not feel bad about it. I mean, there's a lot more. I feel like I'm just, I'm 39. I've never been happier about, you know, like my age, my life. And I remember when I was a young kid and we went to Boston and my mom turned four
- and I remember she locked herself in the bathroom and she was crying because she was so sad that she turned 40 and I joke about This with her now as I'm about to turn 40. Thank God. She's still alive and well, and I'm like I'm so happy to be 40 I feel I'm way happier at 39 40 then I was at 1920 And I just can't wait to see how this all plays out last thing I wanted to ask you real quick you mentioned Jake Paul and You talked about audience building and all the good stuff Consistency quality hard work There's also controversy Jake Paul is the master of controversy Conor Gregor is a master of controversy and you have leaned into the controversy. I don't know if you've leaned in
- I don't know if it's a work, I don't know if you, if this is actually back in the way. But you are the number one MMA guy and your band for life from UFC, from UFC events because the president of the UFC has a feud with you. And Brendan Chob now has a little bit of feud with you. And it's highly entertaining. I click every single one of them because, you know, saying everybody loves drama, everybody loves the fight. You know, we all turn our heads and look, whenever there's a brawl that breaks out. I imagine your clip, it's called Ask the Nose.
- I believe it on the nose on the nose. Sorry and it's been all about lately his fight with other other folks It's great. So tell me about that leaning into that is that intentional is that good for business? You're having fun with it. You're actually angry. What's going on? Okay, well, I'll just say I am not banned for life. I was banned for 48 hours, but that was back in 2016 over time There's been some revisionist history where people think I'm still banned. I'm not bad I've been to a bunch of events since then But yes, of course there was that feud there that happened and all this stuff and and that's all well and good And now as I've come, you know
- into this new era and this persona, heel, wanny, thug, nose, El Natties, whatever you wanna call me. I've just enjoyed being able to respond to people. And I think part of this comes from the fact that when I was at ESPN, they kept telling me, take the high road, take the high road. Like a lot of people were taking shots at me and I had to take the high road, take the high road, muzzle, muzzle, muzzle, censor yourself. And then all of a sudden I become free and I think as a byproduct of being told to take the high road for the last three years.
- I just kind of snapped and exploded and I think people have enjoyed See look I'm not this wimp that people think I am. I don't have big muscles. I'm not a fighter I'm not this but I'm a crazy fiery Middle Eastern kid who grew up Getting into fights all the time while I was playing sports arguing like I'm not the you know I have glasses. I look nerdy whatever I'm and at times I've actually leaned into that because that's a good gimmick in this world Of you know big strength
- strong fighters, alpha males, I'm the beta, but I'm really not that guy. And the idea of letting people talk smack about me, walk all over me, disparage my name, lie about me, it's just not gonna happen anymore. And so I don't care, and it was funny, like Brendan was saying, like I wouldn't say this to his face, like did you guys forget that I stood in front of Rampage Jackson when he wanted to like bite my head off? Did you guys forget that Nick Diaz wanted to beat me up? Did you guys forget that, you know, Mayhem Miller trashed my studio and I just sat there like, and I would say anything to anyone.
- face. I'm not the guy who sits in front of a keyboard or a camera and says stuff that wouldn't, you know, that I wouldn't have the courage to say in front of anyone's sayings. And I don't think I'm disrespectful. I just, you know, I'm not that guy. And so I think he set a bunch of lies about me. And then I just kind of said something and people liked it. And then he kept doubling down. And so I didn't go into all of this saying, like, Oh, I'm going to come out and start wars with people and start all this beef. It's just like, now I don't have someone telling me to take the high road. And I'm a little older and I'm a little more confident and a little wiser. And people are enjoying, you know, I, yeah, I'll be honest, like I realized over time, you know, people want to know more about me. They want to see me talk about myself. It doesn't always have to be
- about the guests and all that stuff and that takes some time to get used to because it's taught very early on in your career. It's not about you, you're not the story. But yeah, now I'm just having fun with it and yeah, I'm a pro wrestling fan and I like the drama and all that stuff. You could say what you will about all of it. But at the end of the day, none of it is fake, none of it is a work. I'm not looking for any of this. I'm not trying to get paid off of any of this. I'm not trying to do it for the views and all that. I'm just tired of people talking shit about me and me having to eat it.
- So those days are over and I don't care who you are. I'm going to clap back as they say. And I think I'm pretty damn good at the promos and I may not be able to fight you and I have no interest in fighting you, but I think I could go toe to toe with you in a verbal war. And so, yeah, it feels good to stick up for yourself. And this is why I was nervous to talk to you is because I fully believe that. I first you you're sharp and you're not afraid. So we're at the top of the hour.
- I want to be respectful. Dude, this has been badass. I hope hopefully you don't talk too much about yourself as a guest and I hope you've enjoyed this because I think I love you more. I have enjoyed it. I hope you guys have enjoyed it. I hope you felt like this was worth your while. I appreciate all the questions about building the business and betting on yourself. And I'm learning a lot about that as well now, with all this LLC stuff that makes my head hurt talking to my accountant. But I would urge anyone out there who is passionate about what they do.
- who believes in what they do. I don't have a lot of confidence. Like if you and I, I bet you Sam, you and I go get a coffee right now nearby. You are a much more confident person than I am. You will walk up there and have your chest out and you're the end and you're probably because you just sold your company for a few million and you're loving life and life couldn't be better. I'm not, I'm actually a very shy person, a quiet person. I keep myself, I had horrible social anxiety. However, when it comes to this stuff, I believe in myself and I believe that no one could do it better than me. And that sounds cocky but it took me a long time to actually be able to.
- to say that. And so I'm really enjoying getting to do this stuff on my own and getting to do this stuff the way I want to do it without anyone telling me how to do it. And I appreciate your interest in my story and I appreciate you guys. It's been a therapy session for all of us maybe a little bit. Well Thursdays is my therapy day so I was gonna have actually my session I cancelled it for you guys. So I'm doubling down here because we were supposed to I don't know if you guys know this we were supposed to do this last month and you stood me up now I'm just joking I'm not gonna go back there.
- Well, as a therapist, we'll end with- Therapy, we call this letting go. Letting go of sense. I'm not the letting go type. I hold on to things forever. That's part of my home as well. I know. I know. I've listened to you long enough. I know this, but I love it. You've got to charge more. Don't feel guilty about that. That's what, as your therapist today, that's going to be my feedback. Because if you are the best, you deserve the best. Thank you. I appreciate that. In fact, I don't know when this is coming out, but I'll just say part of, you know, me trying to tinker with things. I'm doing a thing for founding members of my substact this evening.
- three more times over the course of the year, where it's just the founding members, the people who paid 180 to sign up. So the sub stack is $5 a month, 50 a year, or there's the founding member deal, which is 180. I picked 180 because the number 18 is a special number for Jewish people. And I'm doing a super secret VVIP one night only, no holds barred, a zoom chat with the people who signed up, where they can ask me whatever they want for an hour. You're gonna be there. Are you gonna be there? Yes. Well, I appreciate it.
- you signing up. Yes, I don't record this and take notes and post it to your millions of followers because it's supposed to be VVFP. I'm gonna spill all the tea, release all the dirt on all the bad people out there but it's just for us our little group and there's not I don't honestly I'm kind of nervous that no one's gonna show up so the it might just be me and you Sam just for the record. I would love that. Well thanks man this is badass hopefully you've enjoyed it. This is awesome. You got to come back again. I would be happy to. Just

Asking A $100M⧸Year Founder For Profitable Business Ideas (#413) [TihCw_faxp8].txt

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- I love how even though i tried to pick a non nerdy data one it actually underneath the hood was a nerdy data one you're like the you're a data hammer and the whole world is just little nails that you're just trying to hammer with your you know like. But dude the best business in the day to like a vacuum you're the data dyson that's just taking in this day from everywhere you can. Man founders are you like a lot of times not good at explaining what they do to idiots.
- So can I do it? So all right, I'm gonna make you look cool. I'm gonna be your wig man. All right, let me go. So you run a, I don't know if you call it software or a data business, but people pay subscriptions and your company CBN sites, you're now getting close to 100 million a year in revenue, which is like a huge accomplishment, hundreds of employees as well. And basically, and this is the part that's kind of hard to understand for someone like Sean and I, because we haven't run like really, really huge companies, but basically when a company that has 1000 people have to decide what software they have to buy, like let's say it's just like some customer support software or payroll or something, they need to do tons and tons of research to make sure that the business that they're gonna pick, the vendor they're gonna pick, like,
- We'll stay in business or we'll be around for 10 or 20 years things like that as well as a bunch of other information And you have crawled through what you call dirty data So all this data out there exists But you just put it in a bit of bits of software that make it really easy to digest and understand so a person can make a right and smart Decision and they pay you like 30 or 50 or 150 thousand dollars a year to access all that is that right sounds about right? Yeah, and more importantly Fan of the show and prolific idea guy before this episode before we do this episode he sent over a Google sheet that is
- 77 rows of random startup ideas, which just tells me you're one of us. And so this is great. You made our job really easy. We have a bunch of ideas we can go through. There's a few kind of interesting CV insight stories that you've logged out in the past. I want to talk about, but let's do those at the end because I think the ideas are going to be a lot more fun. Sam, you favor it. And by the way, Sean, one of the reasons why he's fun, you said that he's one of us because the idea thing, that's true. He's also fun because even though he comes off like this, like polite guy who's like introverted, he's a shithead. I'm not as a shithead. His Twitter is hilarious. He always, he writes this famous newsletter to like 500,000 people now and he signs it with like, I love you. And in his Twitter, the bio says, please buy a CB insight subscription. I owe people money. And like he always does like he kind of pokes a bear a bunch in his stuff. So he's got that he's got a really cool attitude. But hopefully we'll get that out of you.
- Yeah, yeah, exactly. My kids were excited that you called me a shithead, so I appreciate that one. You're welcome. All right, so here we go. Sam, you put your favorites on the sheet. I put my favorites. What's interesting to me is we have almost no overlap. You only maybe two out of the 10 that you put down there were my favorites. I had completely different ones. I'll tell you why. I say we take turns where we say, tell us about blah, blah, blah, blah. The little three-set three-word tagline, and he gets to pitch it and let's react. And let's try to get through a bunch of these. So we might go on random tangents or drill down, but let's in general try to go.
- You know an inch deep on each one of these for now You want me to go first? Yeah, you go so the reason why I highlight basically everything I highlighted So CB insights interests me because basically you're not coming up with any data You're just organizing data that already exists in really easy to understand ways And then you're selling it at high fees And I think that's like the greatest business model on earth And you've listed out a bunch of ideas including like six or seven that were more of these like data things So you had one in there called sawdust data and you have examples You're like you can look at what the government does like the government has all this data You can make that clear an easier to understand for people
- both the sawdust data as well as the government data products. What do you mean by all that? Yeah. So sawdust data is people create products and sometimes the residue of that product is actually really interesting data. That's the sawdust from the data. So it's basically taking that exhaust. I'll give you a couple of examples. You have, and I don't know if these are businesses already, but OpenTable and Rezi have all this reservation data. I wonder if you could take that data exhaust and sell it to real estate firms, right? And they'd be, you know, hey, like reservations are down. This area is not as hot. Maybe this retail space is going to be on the market soon because this restaurant looks like a dog, right? That might be one area. You know, I think I met somebody who has dog collars like a
- like a Fitbit for dogs, right? Five. Yeah, five, right. And so you could take that and probably sell that to pet insurance underwriters, right? So it's like, it's not your core business. It's this residue that comes off of your business that I think you could do interesting things with. It's another example, like procurement management system. So kind of this like esoteric enterprisey thing. But if you have all this spend going through this procurement management system at your company, could you go and sell that to hedge funds on like, hey, this company's average contract value is going down or it's getting a lot more seats sold this year, right? And so can you take, again, not your core business? And I don't think companies are really good at monetizing this on their own. So it's basically building this platform that goes to these companies and build these data products off of their sold.
- That makes sense. With the business that Sean and I are and we're in newsletter business, like people have all these questions, but it's kind of broken down into just a few things, which is just like figure out what content you can give people that they wanna read every single day and then figure out how to acquire users for profit, profitably, and that's basically the, that's 80% of the business. What's like the 80, 20 thing for these like data businesses? Is there, or rather the 80, 20 for making messy data, clean data and making their product that people like?
- The messy data to clean data thing, that's just like you have to have a pain tolerance. That's all that is, right? And so I think this is why, this is actually, I think why CBI has done well is like we've had a bunch of Valley companies come in and they want to splash machine learning on it. And like you just have to get into an Excel spreadsheet and clean the data. Like that's just it. And if you're not willing to do that nasty work, you're kind of dead. I'd say the businesses that work are, I think like I, my framework is variable skew, highly opaque high consideration. And so I'll break that down. So high consideration means
- Like somebody's taking risks or putting a lot of money out there, right? It's just like it's got there's some skin in the game opaque meaning. It's just hard to find You know, and I think if you go into slack groups and people are like hey, does anybody know X? That's usually an asset class. That's like opaque right? Does anybody know who a good vendor is for this or good software providers for this and then the last one is variable skew Which is like like a car is a high consideration software purchase, but it's not really variable Like it's got a set of features. You can compare them on a grid and so the internet's really good for that I like businesses where like the variability of the skew is Significant because you can't just put it into a table
- You can't like an iPhone's an iPhone is an iPhone, but like we are we want you hard stick like, you know I don't know radiology software that uses you know that AI reads radiology images like those are totally different and so right That's like the framework I use and so when it meets on those three, I think that's an interesting Messy hard business that's gonna be a lot of pain, but like you could build a moat around that All right, so I'm gonna do it. Oh, sorry you had one of your columns So I told you you have 77 rows So those are the different ideas, but then you had some columns one of them was frame frameworks or Inflections and that was your that was one of your your things opaque variable skew high consideration The other one you had was tiny but growing niches
- like, or like inflection, like it might be time for that to grow. Is that your other one that you look for in ideas? And we can give an example here of like, okay, let me grab one. Like you did this representation media. So you said extend the Rebel Girl's book for other communities. And then your framework was tiny, but growing these issues. So talk about that idea and explain it with that framework. Yeah, so Rebel Girls, if you're a parent of a daughter, you might be familiar with it. So we bought this book when my daughter was, you know, three, four. And it's just like one or two page stories of like famous women in history. So like Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie, Maya Angelou.
- And it's great. Like it's a really kind of inspiring book, really cool artwork. That book is sold, I think 5.5 million copies at like $20. So it's like $110 million. And that's probably dated, right? But I think there's like this idea of like what I call representation media, right? I bet you could extend that to, I don't know, like Hispanic entrepreneurs or like autistic scientists, right? People want to read about and see examples of success in their communities. And so I think you could extend rebel girls across a bunch of different things. And so that's the, I think that niche.
- is growing, right? Like people like you get these micro communities that actually are pretty large that would love to read about themselves and receive good representations of themselves. That's a great idea. I've had the I've had a similar idea because we get gifted some books that are like I don't know like Hindu religion book or like but it was like the kids version or something like that. It's like the like and it's like oh yeah if I'm gonna read whatever you know Clifford the big red dog you know like is there is there something that you know adds a little bit of something from our culture or religion like makes it easy for me as a parent to like give them you know something I want to give them while still being entertaining and accessible and there's actually just not much that's out there for that. So so I definitely think if you added up all those little all those little different issues that's that that could be quite big. Yeah I mean I think if you kind of on PC if you found a story where the protagonist was like a little white kid like make it a little brown kid make it a little black kid you know like modify the story a bit and like that's a winner right because like kids love seeing like oh that kid looks like me that's dope right and so like you're off to the right.
- I don't think it's that nothing's hard. It just takes some work. But yeah, dude, that's why my wife loves Kim Kardashian. She's like, sees them. She's like, Oh, hey, look, they got fatasses too. Dude, fat fat a good way, by the way. When I met the comedian Hassan Minhaj, he was like doing his live shows and I had told him, I was like, he asked me something and like, Oh, what would you do with my business if you were me? And I was like, dude, I would stop this like live touring thing that comedians do. Like this is so painful. You're on the road like, I don't know, 40 weeks out of 52 in a year. I wouldn't want to do that. I was like, you got to create a Broadway show. I was like, create like the next Hamilton. And then that goes on tour, right? Touring is a great business, but you just don't want to be the guy sitting on the stage. I was like, use your creative and comedic genius to do that. That was my kind of big idea for him. He said, all right, what's the show?
- And I was like, ah dude, I don't know now. Now I'm out of my life. And then the next, like a week later, I just sent him a voice note and I go, Aladdin, but Aladdin's black. And he's like, what? And that was my whole voice note. And then he goes, what are you talking about? I go, remember the Broadway show thing? I go, it's Aladdin, but it's not, like Jasmine can't marry Aladdin because he's like a poor guy. No, no, no, Jasmine can't marry him because he's black because like, you know.
- This her family doesn't approve and he's like okay, so it's just he's black instead of poor I was like hey look what you say that way doesn't sound that good But like I'm telling you there's something to this idea of he overcomes And they fall in love and the love wins and he's like alright. Yeah. Yeah. I'll add that one to the list Stick to podcasting Sean Well, yeah, I'm presentation media all right can I ask you about one this is actually really fascinating and actually I think could be a bigger business than then I don't know if you think but bigger business and a lot of people think a daily executive briefing email
- Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure how big this one could be. I think I don't know if I put it in the sheet, I say, I have like a dollar column, which is kind of like my indication of how big it is. I think this is like a great side hustle business right so I when I worked at American Express. Every morning our CEO would get like a briefing from his chief of staff right like, you know, here's what capital one did here's what city did yesterday here's what visa did whatever it was like basically that person's job to like scour the Internet. And like look at financials and product launches and all this stuff. And there was a company that's vision bought called bulletin intelligence, which I don't think I don't know how much they're doing with it but it was basically that idea it was going to be like your morning chief of staff email. And yeah, I think this is an awesome business that like somebody smart and industrious can build and you I think if you go niche meaning like go financial services because like if you get amics like the CEO of city group like cares about city bank cares about mostly the same company so you can reuse a lot of it and it's not just the CEO it's all like their division presidents and they're like geography like you know heads and all that stuff so. Yeah, I think this is like and you know I'm sure with generative AI and stuff you could like make this really like.
- efficient, but yeah, I think this is like tens of millions of dollars business. No, I think you're way off. So have you heard of, you guys know Politico, right? Yeah. It's like a Politico is like a news website for DC, all politics, but it's not from like a CNN, Fox News perspective. It's more so like people who work in politics, they read Politico. Whatever, that's not interesting. What's interesting is that they sold recently to Axel Springer for over a billion dollars and where they got roughly nine figures, so a hundred million plus of recurring revenue. What they had this, they have this service called Politico Pro. Have you guys heard of, and not have you heard of Politico Pro?
- I mean, I know that's a premium offer. I don't know what's in it. So basically I think it's like 1,000 a month I forget the pricing so someone's gonna like get on me, but they have this they're pricing But the it's basically it's for if you're a lawyer Or if you work in DC and you have to know what type of laws are happening at like a real rate like who you know Like hey, the Senate is thinking about changing this like because we heard the senators say this in the news yada yada Well anyway, they have these things called pro briefings and they send at least one a day But sometimes more than one a day and it's really fast short emails And that's your briefing of what's happening that day with with like a very very very niche thing So for example, they have a segment just for pharmaceutical Companies so if you're a pharmaceutical and you want to know right away what's happening with the new laws Or if you want to dive deeper and read about researchers or if you just want to have a conversation with an analyst You spend thousands of dollars a year tens of thousands
- it up tens of thousands a year and that's basically what you're getting is this briefing as well as a few other things they Scaled this business to north of a hundred million in recurring revenue and it's pretty fascinating And there's a few others doing that and so I think if you could actually pick the right thing whether that's pharma legal I don't know what else they would be All different types of finance. I think you could actually build a really interesting daily briefing business and you could even have a user Say which companies they want to spy on a little bit more than normal And I think you could charge tens of thousands of dollars a year for a subscription like that Yeah, you can charge a lot for this like these folks like as long as you deliver quality in the morning when they need it Like yeah, there's they have sort of massive budgets and I think bulletin had Bezos as a customer for a while
- So like he was reading the bulletin intelligence briefing every morning. So what's that company called bulletin? bulletin intelligence Cision bottom many years ago dude the reason why I like I like talking to you is like you and I are some of the few people that Nerd out on there's like all these data businesses out there So you and I for years have talked about there's like in forma which is like a ten billion dollar market cap basically data and trade show business Then there's you're a money which we've talked about another publicly traded company There's a decision which like is just kind of an older company that no it just they these companies are just huge And they're just not sexy so they're not talked about with our circle But they're crazy fascinating to like learn about these companies because their margins could be huge
- Yeah, it's a, I mean, it's a build once so multiple times kind of business, right? So like once you build that data asset or that info asset, like you can keep selling it. So yeah, they're great businesses. They're unsexy, which is always good because like then you don't get all the smart people kind of trying to come in and, you know, each or take your lunch money. So yeah, I like these businesses a lot. You had one on here also that was the pricing data. So it was like go extract the pricing data from every SaaS tool and go to their website, find the prices.
- Organize all that information for things where it requires a demo quote like I don't know send a You know five dollar an hour employee through that process collect the pricing data now you have it now you can make that visible where they are hiding it on their website and you basically have a giant what like a search engine or a database of Of okay if I want to use some email, you know send software Here's the here's how the prices compare across them is that what the idea would be the thing? The idea there is I think you start with public SaaS pages and you figure out a crawl um or just
- just M-Turkham or something. And then yeah, email service provider, what's the pricing, what are the features? I think the real killer there, which is maybe borderline is like, actually, cause a lot of enterprise companies don't put their pricing on their page. So you hire somebody who goes and pretends that they're a customer and gets the pricing. And then that's really, really valuable, right? Because like now, if I'm, cause pricing's like a dark art in B2B, you're like, yeah, sounds good, right? And like everybody's got opinions and nobody has data. So I think you could actually do something really interesting.
- like long term if you actually called companies and got that pricing or talk to their customers and you get their pricing, but. That's actually the tagline. It was the tagline on your website, which is without data, you're just another idiot with an opinion or something like that. I think. Dude, that's great. It was great, right? I don't know. Do you guys use that anymore? We don't use that anymore. I think we still use like in God, we trust all others, gotta bring data. Like, so we'll use that in some. Who comes up with this stuff? This is you and this is someone on your team who's like the witty copywriter? These are just stolen from other people who are. It's like a quote. The idiot wants a quote, I think, right? I think both of these are like, you know, somebody like some luminary and, you know, we, we footnote them in small print.
- give them credit. Do you think that you guys being kind of silly is a leg up or do people criticize you? Yeah, I mean, we get some criticism, but honestly, like B2B is so mind numbingly boring that like it's great as a way to stand out. But you know, I tell the team, like, you know, love us or hate us. You should have an opinion on us. And so that's the general theme, right? Because most of it's like pretty vanilla and, you know, just kind of like jargony. And so yeah, it's been, it's been, I'd say, a net positive for us. But we've lost some customers.
- over stuff we've said, offended them and what. Like what? You know, we did a ranking one of VCs once and we said a specific firm was losing in the ranking and it was just an objective thing. And they were like, we're canceling our subscription immediately, right? And I'm. What a loser move of them. Yeah. Just my point. Oh, you don't you don't want access to data now. You got your feelings hurt and you canceled your own your own data pipeline. You're like, you're down another peg. So we've had, you know, that and some people don't like, you know, I think when from hysteria was going, we'd like sometimes put an infographic with him in it and like we didn't have an opinion, but it was just like, you just him and Elon Musk, like if you mention them, it's just like lunatics come out, right? And so like, and so it's good for engagement, but it is definitely like a little bit.
- It can be odd, like you say something and people just like, you know, it's a cult and people go kind of crazy. Like you're a really good writer and or whoever's writing is really good. And you guys always use things like your headlines are really good, but then there's like just phrases all over like it's built into your culture. Like in your annual review, we're like, Hey, we did pretty good for a company that isn't lighting money on fire. Like the rest of the VC world are like just like little phrases like that. It just makes us stand out. And I think that that makes you have a voice. And you guys are actually pretty good at that. Yeah, and I appreciate that. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's partly for the external market. It's partly for the team, right? Like you're selling B2B software. And so sometimes that can be like, you know, if you're 22 out of school, it's like, hey, that's not super inspiring. And I don't know exactly what that looks like. And then once we can show them, we can have personality. We're in the tech economy, which is interesting. So yeah, it works. You know,
- We screw up a bunch of things, but that's been good for us. If I was going to go out there and do what you said of getting all the data and hiring people to call and actually get quotes, who would I sell that to? On the software pricing? Yeah. I think you go to product teams at software companies and say, or your chief revenue officers and say, hey, do you know how you came up with your pricing? And here's what your peers are pricing at and give them a snippet and give them a taste and be like, hey, we have all this other detail.
- behind. How much would you charge? I mean, I don't think you start anything with like CROs at big companies and like you start at you know, 20 to $50,000, right? Like it's easier to go low than to start low and go high. We just, you just handed someone listening a pretty solid idea, right? I think that I think the thing people do is they underprice. We did this in the beginning. Our first CBN says when it started was 395 a month.
- And what you actually got was a bunch of people who didn't know how to use data who are paying in the ads, right? And so it was like your worst nightmare was people who churned quickly who paid you little and who were blowing you up on chat all the time for support. And then I remember meeting a management consulting firm and they were like, hey, can you add a couple zeros to the price? Because like one, your price will look like a joke internally. And two, I don't want to wait behind the guy paying 395 a month for service. So like, price is a indicator of quality is an indicator of other things beyond just like the core value of the product. So that was like eye opening to me. Like I always always like, oh, you know,
- Price low and you know do all that and like you know now we're we're orders of magnitude higher than we used when we started That's awesome. Sean. What do you get? Let's do some non data nerd ideas. So I'm gonna pick a different one. Yeah, yeah, let's do the college rankings one. Did you call it broke and busted? Broke and busted college rankings. Okay, so what what's the what's the insight here? So I think us news and world report is sort of like the preeminent college rankings There's been plenty of coverage about how that's a basic con, right? And like
- universities do all this sort of finagling to try to get higher in that. You know, I look... How's that worked? Yeah, they pay or what is... No, I don't think it's that they paid. I think it's that like, you know, you've got these like subjective criteria, like, you know, student to teacher ratio, right? And so like universities will like massage that data so it looks good, right? And so like, you know, it's like a limited set of factors. And it's unclear how causal those factors are to actually getting a good education.
- right? And so I think you turned that on its head. Well, I think US News and World Report, you know, I think in like 2013, I was doing like 40 million in revenue. And now it has like, again, LinkedIn, 500 some odd employees. So I gotta believe it's doing 100 million plus in revenue. And I'm assuming college rankings is the number one thing. So I think the thing you do here is you actually go to graduates of the school and just ask them for their W twos. And you're like, how much are you making? Right, you just took on a bunch of debt. Like, does this place actually get you?
- a job that gets you paid or you like, you know, a server in a restaurant and you got like your $200,000 in debt. And so I think you reach out to alumni, go get their W twos and basically put a ranking together of, here's how much I paid and here's how much I make when I get out. And if I'm a parent, I'll care about that. I'll be like, I don't really want to send my kid to a school where their prospects for employment are garbage. And so I think it's like takes all of the, it's a very singular characteristic. So it doesn't take into consideration social life and all that other stuff. But it's like, I think it's pretty important, right, especially you got all these people like leaving school with, you know, tons of debt. So that's the way I would do it. And you'd have to probably pay those students or ex students a little bit. But I think it's pretty cheap. And you probably go like do like New York colleges to
- to start, like start niche, like don't try to be everywhere right out of the gate, like, you know, and then build out from like concentric circles from there. Do you wanna like, I don't know about you, Sean, but like what is, we're talking about some nerdy stuff here, but I find it like crazy fascinating because it's very clear to see the opportunity here. But what's shocking is like when you say, oh, I'm gonna go get the data, someone like me, I would be like, well, I gotta go like Google it and like find a database and you're like, no, I'll just like hire like, I'll use mechanical Turk, you said earlier or I'll just hire someone or I'll just like make a ton of phone calls and just doing that stuff, I can get interesting insights. Is that really how a lot of this works? And the beauty of that business is 99 people out of 100 won't do that work.
- So like once you build the data asset, like most people will think it's cool and they just won't do it. Like the other one that I like, which is I don't know if I put on the page is, you know, I was trying to get a pool bill at my mom's house. And like pool pricing is just like it's opaque, highly variable and high consideration. And like I have no idea what to pay for a pool. Like some kids should just go door to door at every person's house that has a pool and just be like, how much should you pay for your pool and like get the specs. And then go find out and then find out what do they pay for her months for cleaning and whatever I don't know what a pool requires and like literally build the database of like.
- That's a great idea. Pools in North Jersey. Here's what it costs. Yeah, because that's what people Google to, right? Like, you know, pool cost and then my city, right? That's a term that people will look for. Or even if they're just looking at pool costs, but you have their city in the headline, they're going to click that one over the next one. And then you go back to the pool people and you're like, hey, listen, I got this pricing. Next time you want to bid, you probably need to know what your competitors are bidding. So like, you can sell the data to both sides, right? Like, but it's definitely like, it's a perfect side hustle. Like, you know, it would be like a thing that, you know, I hope my kids will like just go do this, like door to door and go get data.
- I love how even though I tried to pick a non nerdy data one, it actually underneath the hood was a nerdy data one You're like that you're a data hammer and the whole world is just little nails that you're just trying to hammer with your you know Like but dude, this is the best business in the day to like a vacuum. You're the data Dyson That's just taking in this data from everywhere you can yeah I mean I love that business and actually think like not to get off on a digression But I think this whole at GPT thing is actually gonna make Private data like that much more valuable because like you know before it was like oh I'll give you my data and you'll just link to me and I'll get google but like
- Like that's all going away, I think. And so like having access to private data is gonna be really valuable. So I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm extra bullish. And do you look at like, for example, the, the pool one is a good one because it's probably not, the pricing's not probably changing all the time. Whereas maybe the college one, you got to redo the data collection every year in order for it to be accurate. Like for example, in the content game or the media game, which me and Sam think a lot more about is like, if anybody can do really well with evergreen content, that's so much better than somebody's doing what we were doing daily, daily emails where it's disposable and you got to recreate the product the next morning. Otherwise there is no product. And so do you think about that when it comes to data, like either the ease of collection or the longevity of the collection, like really makes the idea more valuable versus less?
- Yeah, I mean, I think you probably want data maybe counterintuitively that requires a lot of refresh, right? Because like, that's what keeps people subscribing, right? If I can get the data once and it's good for three years, it's like, all right, I'll get it, I'll churn, I'll come back to you in three years when it changes, when it's actually a little bit more, when there's a little more volatility to it, it's like, hey, I need to know what's going on because like my business might suffer or what have you. In the case of the pool, when the pool owner is only going to buy it once, right? But you know that, but that's okay, right? Because like you could sell those leads to pool people, you could sell that to pool cleaners, like you could do all sorts of interesting things.
- things with it, right? And so like, it doesn't have to be you're selling the data, you could build advertising and lead gen and other businesses off of it for sure. Okay, I got one that there's no way this can be a data one. A McCormick spice competitor. Yeah, I don't this one. I don't have a lot. This is, you know, I think I have a column called zone of excellence. And this one's out of my zone of excellence. But Cormax is like this multi billion dollar spice company. Oh, if you open up your spice, whatever cabinet, like there's probably like these spices with like a red top, right? Like that's all McCormick's right 24 billion dollar company.
- Wow in sales in sales market cat Wow Yeah, so it's just like like, you know, why isn't there like the I don't know the apple of black pepper Like I don't really know how to do this shit, right? But like like what's the what's like well? I think for this one. You're right. You can go either higher end or Yeah, just the more fun look at just branding packaging design and influencer most importantly so like who is the You know the whatever the Martha Stewart of YouTube that you can partner with that can be the face of a brand like this Right like who who has that kind of?
- brand and gravitas that can get into a target or the store shelves at supermarkets to compete with something like this. And I think that's the way I would go if I was going to do this. Yeah, 100%. I think the thing that's interesting about this, and I don't know anything about McCormick's, is the bundling. If you buy salt, you need pepper. If you need pepper, you might be needing oregano and you might need whatever flakes that they sell out there. And so, yeah, you could just keep stamping this out across every spice category. But yeah, this is not one that is outside of my zone of excellence. So I do win this one, but I like it. They own everything. I didn't realize this. Have you guys ever seen this protein bar at gas stations called Tiger's Milk?
- No. Have you ever seen? Yes, they own this bar. It's the worst, like it's basically a label. It looks like it was like drawn by Kenny Powers or like, it looks like if Power Rangers ate a protein bar, this is what they would eat. And it's just like, it's called Tiger Milk and it has a, it has a face of a tiger and it's like their protein bar. They own that. They own a bunch of different stuff. This is awesome. I, I, I totally should have, um, yeah, they own Frank's Red Hot. That's my favorite. So yeah, what a, what a company. I didn't realize that these guys were what they are. That's wild man. They're created in the 1800s.
- Yeah, I mean, yeah, they're just brand recognition and everybody knows. I mean, if you go to a spice aisle, it's all of that. Like they just own the whole thing, right? So you got to come up with a distribution hack here, but that's Sean, that's probably more your world than mine. But yeah, for sure. Can I ask you a quick question, different from ideas, but about money? So I'm not going to, you can say it if you want. I'm going to assume that you own a chunk that you are on paper worth, mid to high, low to low to high hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Have you taken any money out of your company or has your only income for the last, I think you said 10 years, you've been running this, just been like a normal mild salary? Yeah, so I didn't pay myself for the first four years. So when we raised money then, I basically took my back salary. And then since then, I've not, not taken any money off the table. So yeah, I'm foolishly long or brilliantly long CV insights. We'll see what we'll see how things play out. B.M., I'm all in.
- Were you wealthy before you started the company? Like did you have bank or wealth? Now I just You know, I got married right before I started the company I told my wife when we were dating that I don't want to work at a big company anymore and we're gonna like there's gonna be some lean times and so she was down and so I just saved Religiously like we didn't go on vacations with friends and just like you know and it was always like awkward So like oh do you want to go somewhere? I'm like oh, I'm super busy, but I just was like now. I don't have money. So yeah, I just saved like crazy I'm busy. I'm busy being poor right now So I can't go sorry. I'll take the calendar when I'm not poor. I'll start going Just saved a ton of money and then yeah for the first like two years of cbi I just paid for a small team out of my pocket and then we started generating revenue, but wait Why haven't you taken a few million bucks just off the table? Just to make your life a little bit better. It wouldn't it would have no material output Yeah, and by the way, just so we have numbers you basically have only made I imagine
- middle hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, I'm, I don't get paid like a fair CEO salary, right? So I'm not like, it's not like one of these big public company guys, but like, um, yeah, I think. I just, we've been really focused on the business and like, I just think it's a giant opportunity and candidly, part of the reason we didn't raise in the beginning was because I don't think I'm good at pitching. And I also worked in venture and I didn't like, want to work for my investor.
- That was always a very guiding principle of mind. I look at S1s of companies like Republic, and then the founder owns 5%. That's a backwards calculation. Yeah, probably should have taken money off over the course of time. Right now would not be a good time to do that, given where the markets are. So, I figure we'll just keep growing out of this current malaise that we're in, and then opportunities tend to present themselves. Even our fund raise was like a customer sent us a term sheet over email.
- I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sinks spreadsheets or doing databases. HubSpot grow better. Tell the story of the guy who offered you $100 million via DM. How did that go? I get some interesting DMs on Twitter, and so somebody offered $100 million. I think this guy was broke as a joke, but it was still funny. I said, you know, not interested, not looking to sell. And I think then the email chain kind of devolved from there where he was like, you know, I'm going to build a competitor and put you out of business. And yeah, it was good. But it's the same.
- I don't recall. I don't recall. It was like some. You blurt it out of the thing. I think I blurt it out, yeah. So he says this DM, you posted the DM screen shots. It starts like, hey, here's who I am, really interested, you know, in partnering or in acquisition. Let's talk, please call me. And then you're like, thanks. Not even thanks. THX, right? Just like the short thanks, not for sale. Nice. And then he goes, and then he goes, how about a partnership? And then he just keeps going. And he's like, here's, how about this? I'll give you $100 million for the business. You are now, if you produce your responsibilities, is you have to present this to your board, you know, you know that. Let's go. And then you go, you go, okay, interesting strategy. Best of luck. And he goes, so do you accept the offer? And then he then he devolves into, all right, then, I'm going to create a competitor. Have you seen this competitor launch? Is he in your lunch yet or what? Surprise, surprise. Yeah, we're tracking religiously to see when this launch. But yeah, not enough to do it. You should be able to back me like, hey, how's it going, man? You're about to launch details. Yeah, yeah. That was atypical. I think most of mine.
- my DMs are nice, but yeah, that one was a little out there. What would you do with the money now if you sold? Um, I mean, I think the thing I do is I want to build a school of entrepreneur. I think education is broken. And so I think kids should just learn how to build businesses and not go to college. And so that's what I do. And I think there's a bunch of colleges that are struggling that I could go buy like a lot and build like a dope campus for a bunch of like high achieving kids. And we'll just like.
- go figure how much would that take? I have no idea. I've no idea. This is like, you'll have it. This isn't my distant dream. But yeah, I think like, I just read a great book called the case against education that kind of breaks this down. And it's really interesting. And yeah, I think it's like, I think there's an interesting thing to be done there. And then yeah, I'd love to like do some stuff in India along that lines. But yeah, this will be my last true startup. I've looked into a bunch of, I have like, alerts set for colleges for sale because I had a similar dream and idea at one point in time. I now don't want to do this. But it's amazing. You can buy full college campuses.
- for sometimes single digit millions, sometimes just like 10 to $15 million. It's crazy, like which ones? It has to be less than the replacement cost of just the buildings and land in these places. So I am not sure why, and these are accredited universities. A lot of them are, they start as just like, they do one thing, it's like just cosmetology or just whatever, there's like those are really cheap. Those are like, you know, 1.5 million, you can have a university, a college that does that. All the way up to here's a campus in New York for this like small liberal arts college that's not doing so well. And like, you know, for $15 million, you could take the whole thing. And I'm like, wow. Is there like a marketplace for that? Is there a Zillow for bankrupt universities?
- There should be, but there's this one website called deal stream that happens to have most of them that I see so deal stream will send me emails of one like you know, multi campus beauty school here you go. You know that just got this email two days ago. What made you sour on this idea. Just like the lifestyle component I was like what I like what I want to actually if I was going to do this it was like okay I'm going to basically go be the dean of the school. And I'm going to like basically this will be my baby and I will make this great and I was like oh it's a lot easier to just like.
- Have a business I could just do on my phone and my laptop, you know four hours a day and not worry about this And just hang out with my kids and you know have fun and so I was like okay yet There's an all-in version of entrepreneurship that I'm no longer like super interested in because that would require You know same thing like I'd rather do this podcast Then go speak at events I think in the last three years got invited to speak at maybe a hundred and fifty events and I've said yes to two of them Right like you know, so it's like you could make good money and grow your audience doing this, but
- Ah, seems like a lot of work, you know, I think I'll try to just win the way I want. Sean, have you ever, um, have you read the blog post that Anand made years ago about, I think your father or someone in your family got sick and they couldn't run their factory in India anymore? And you had to go, did you have to run the factory? I have it right now. His dad. Yeah, my father passed away in April, 2017. And so he had a chemical business in India and, uh, yeah, you know, like he built it over many years and, and, and
- like I was like, I can't just let it go to zero. So I ran it while I was running CBI for about 18 months. The title of the blog post is how to manage and sell a company in an industry and a company in a country you don't know. And it's kind of great. It's like a full length sort of like here's the whole thing. Do you wanna tell like the short version of the story and then people can go read the blog? Yeah, I mean, so he died on April 17th, 2017. And as we're going to cremate him, we're Hindu and this worker from the factory comes up to me in Hindi. My Hindi is pretty weak, but I understand it. And the worker was basically like, in what's gonna happen to us, right? And I was like, I'm like a mess, but I was like,
- All right, I guess like there is this thing and my mom and him basically built this business over 20 years, you know kind of like a small chemical company like nothing. What's that mean gargantuan in terms of size? No or chemical. What's a chemical? Oh, it was like a it was um It was it's in a sector called fine chemicals. It was a raw material that goes into perfumes and like Flay flavors and fragrances, right? And so he built it one of three manufacturers in the world that could make this product is a really finicky product And like I'm like, all right I guess I gotta run this and like my dad was like a mad scientist like off the charts smart and I'm like I'm not that right and so So I'm like, okay What do I do here? Like I don't if something goes the wrong in the factory. I can't help
- So the only thing I can do is probably try to bring in more business. So I just went online and like cold called every large chemical company that's in this space. And I was like, Hey, we make this product. If you ever need it, like come, you know, come talk to us. So we had like our best couple of quarters ever when I was running it and love. Cause you were doing outbound and he wasn't doing any or he just wasn't doing it well. My dad was just like, he was a sign. He was like a product guy. So he's like the best product will win. Right. And like put this, put this picture up on the YouTube channel of the blog post where it's the side of the building it looks like. And it just says.
- On one side, good quality. And then there's the giant equal sign, and then it's just good business. And it looks like as the side of the building, as you approach to walk in, it's like, hey, remind her. I was entering the factory, yeah. Good quality equals good business. And like times the aroma and font. Oh my gosh, this is awesome. Yeah, I was just like, I can try to go sell, because I can't help on the technical side. The team he had assembled was awesome, so they kept the factory running, got good sales, people kept reaching out to buy it. A lot of them, like, once somebody, once the proprietor dies, a lot of bottom feeders show up. So I was just like, trying to make sure that these weren't, those people, because I wanted to make sure the team landed on their feet. And then, yeah, just navigated through it. I met a banker, was representing this buyer. They were above-board people. And yeah, after 18 months for a while, because I'm like insanely ambitious, I was like, oh, I'll have like, CBI as the dad of arm, and I'll have like this industrial arm, and we'll build that. And then like, you know. It'd be a fucking tycoon. Yeah, well, I mean, for, you know, and then I was like telling my wife, I was like, yo, we gotta have more kids, because like, we wanna build, you gotta like, you gotta have a lot of kids to like take this, take all these arms of this industrial conglomerate up. And she's like, you're insane. And then, yeah, like 10 weeks here, or six weeks here, 10 days in India, like, I mean, yeah, like that was brutal. So then I was just like, I gotta sell this. And then was fortunate to sell it, and the team's still all there.
- and yeah, everything worked out. What did you sell for? I can't disclose. A good, I mean, like a good amount? Yeah, it was, it was, you know, I wasn't optimizing for the dollars. I was optimizing for a clean deal to a person who would not fire everybody that my dad built the business with. So, you know, so I'm sure I could have gone to somebody else who'd have like torn it down and, you know, done other things with it, but I felt really good about these guys. So yeah, I think like it achieved non-financial objectives that I think were more important to my mom and to me than maybe the financial object.
- This is a really, really good blog post that you have. And it kind of got lost over the years. You guys got to share this again more. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was, yeah, it was, you know, the team at CVI, I got to give them credit. Like, I mean, I was kind of an absentee CEO for a little bit and they like kept trains running on time. So yeah, it was, it was a, it was a good, yeah, a good thing to accomplish. I was glad to get you. You had some like takeaways on the M and A process. I'm curious. I'll just read the headlines, but you could decide which one of these you think you have a strong point of view on or strong message to deliver here. So you said, should I have hired an investment bank? And you're like, I didn't have one. I represented myself. Maybe I should have. You said, don't let lawyers run the process. So lawyers are often trying to mitigate risk, but it's easy.
- to just like have everybody get entrenched in like, you know, risk management and not actually have the deal go through. Don't sweat the small stuff. Quote, the industry standard is a phrase to watch out for. So give me your thoughts on one of these. The industry standard one, I think, is like the one that like I hate because like people only use that when they can't justify the term. They just say like, Oh, no, no, but that's just industry standards. How we do things. We always do things that way. There's no such thing as industry standard, right? If it's, if it's good for you, then it's what you should aim for. And that, you know, it's somewhat, somewhat counter to the sweat, the small stuff thing. So you don't want to negotiate on every little thing. But when I hear it's industry standard, like my ears always perk up because it's like somebody's like trying to get one over on me on this, right? Or they're just trying to like make it the sweep this under the rug. So I think that's an important one. You know, sweat the small stuff. I think like put some stuff in that you want to negotiate on that you don't care about that you're just willing to give on, right? But like, you know, just don't make the, you know, don't make the negotiations.
- super painful in all regards. On bankers, I think for this deal, it didn't make sense to use a banker. And I have, I mean, with CVI, I have a bunch of data and what comps are and all that stuff. So I had, it was good enough. And it wasn't a big enough deal that I wanted to cut in somebody for five, seven percent. If CVI was doing a deal now, we'd absolutely have a banker because I've definitely seen the value of what a great banker offers. But yeah, I think the industry standard stuff is probably the thing. Anytime you hear that, I think it honestly.
- entrepreneurs should like just wonder like, okay, why are they just pushing for industry standard in this particular area? Because it usually, it's always industry standard to the benefit of the person across the table. It's never industry standard and good for you. And so that's one I would definitely push on. Can we, one thing happened over the weekend, Sean, that you and I had talked about, and I actually think it's a good time to talk about it now because I have a feeling that Anan's going to know a little bit about it. Do you remember probably two months ago, we talked about this guy named Gautam Adani, I think his name is. You know what I'm talking about?
- You were like, I mean, you're not to blame. We were just using the news and you were like, this guy's amazing. Look at what he's doing. He kind of looks like an Indian Mario guy and he's like doing all this cool stuff where he's like, doesn't really care about looking cool and he gives us money away. Yadda yadda yadda. And now he's like the third or first richest man in the world. The news was, I think he had gotten to second or third richest man in the world. And I didn't think most people knew his name. I says, hey, there's this guy at Donnie. Here's what he does. And I think we even said it. I don't remember really saying this, but a lot of people DM being like, you guys called it.
- Because news came out that there's like some fraud going on or whatever with their company And I guess we had said something that was like, you know, either this is just amazing or You know, you never know because of whatever I we have to go back and listen I'm not sure what the what the clip was but a lot of people you guys called that which yeah I get people were saying that too. I'm like I said thanks, but I don't actually remember I don't remember calling that I do remember when I was reading about it was a lot of people were like hey This is kind of a shell game like he's basically raising money He's raising money in one company using the like basically borrowing gets another company that he owns and that company's borrowed against another company That he owns and he had like so many entities that were each
- sort of like the justification for the next in terms of either the valuation or borrowing money or whatever it was. I mean, this is a couple of months ago. I don't even remember what the details were. But I think we just said that as a footnote. It's not like we were calling him out on anything. People are giving us a little more credit than we deserved on that one. So sorry to interrupt you, Sam. So that's a back that's a background. So I think on Friday, Hindenburg Research, I think they're a short seller. So they they short companies, but they produce scathing reports. And they've done this a dozen times. I can't. I'm sure a non-New
- I followed it a little bit. I mean, I like Hindenburg's. I think like there's like, we live in like the age of drifters. And so like you need people, and I don't know if Adani is, but I think like you need people like Hindenburg who like, you know, or coffeezilla or like Wendover productions or any of these folks are out there even on YouTube or trying to hold and at least shine a light on some of the griftiness that's out there. And so, you know, I like what they do in at a high level. I don't know if they're case with Adani's like a good one or a bad one, but yeah. Yeah, well, basically they said like the entire company, like there's a bunch of weird things going on with it.
- Of all the like he they list all these companies and each person that runs one of the companies is one of his like relatives or former executives so it's all like kind of like It's kind of like his cronies are kind of like running everything and yeah, he's like loaning money from other companies that he owns and he's making the valuations of each of those companies really high and so it turns out it's basically like a little FTX ask where of just like similar or entities that he owns loaning money to other entities with the collateral being
- a company that he values himself among other things. And so anyway, I thought you guys would have like an interesting take on this because, I don't know, yeah, you spent a little time in India, you're in the finance world. I wouldn't sure if you had an opinion there. Yeah, no, I don't have an opinion on that. I will say like when you see like org structures that are really convoluted like, you know, FTX, Sir Agani or Enron before that, like people always like in the moment or just like all these guys are geniuses, they figured out how to move stuff and do X, Y, and Z. And then when you look back, it's always like, no, it was just like a giant shell game, you know.
- Sean said, like that's an interesting lens, I think, to look at companies through. And it's like, innovation isn't the product. The innovation is like, cap structure or some weird thing. It's like, OK, that's a weird, that's a kind of a weird business to build, right? Where like, that's what you're innovating on. It's like companies that innovate in HR, right? Like I'm always like, you know, they're doing all these weird things. It's like, do you have to build a product? Like, why are you doing like 3.5 days of work and like, you know, all this weird shit? It's just like, why don't you just work and like build a product? So have you been able to capture or like catch any scams, just or like make any right predictions based off the data that you guys have?
- Yeah, I mean, we don't publish that stuff. We usually send it to media, right? Because we're not like a media outlet. But we'll find stuff where we're like, this company raised that I'm not going to name, but there was a company recently that raised like at a $4 billion valuation. And then when you looked at like the founders and you looked at like the number of employees and everything, it was like some things off here, right? And so, you know, and so like we would send it to somebody and say like, hey, like this looks odd. Like you should go do what journalists do and dig into it. So we'll find stuff that's a little...
- odd at times. And then, you know, I think the more interesting thing sometimes is like, you'll dig into filings of companies after they've been acquired by a public company. And you see, it's not, this isn't like a scam or anything, but you see like, you know, hot company that says they got acquired. And then you actually see how much the public company paid for them. And it's like, you know, one eighth of what they raised, right? And so like you just sort of get, it shines a light on like, what was a real success versus what isn't. I think that's probably what we tend to see more, you know, people who are want to do fraud or like, if they're good, they're hard to catch period, right? Like, it's just not something that is not what we spend our time.
- And also some of these things, like the same exact signal that later you look at and you say, oh man, we should have known something was off. Like you said, at the beginning, it's a sign of the genius of the of what's going on. Like, I know with FTX, there was a bunch of things that now people are like, wow, this is, you know, those should have been red flags. But at the same time, those are the things that in stories they were saying were like kind of the remarkable things about them. Like, you know, for example, the
- you know like oh the you know the they they all sleep in the same house and on beanbags and whatever and now it's like oh they had this weird like inappropriate you know like sort of like group dating thing going on but it's like uh before that it was like these are just 20 something year olds that you know are all like you know living in this hacker house that are making it happen it's like no if on one hand it's one thing and then then like you know after it's exposed it becomes labeled as another and i've seen this with i've seen this many times where it's like oh you know same thing sandbank but free does this uh sort of like this this
- this quirky genius, and then he turns out to be this sort of like this drugged up liar. It's like the same thing he was doing before, where he's taken whatever Adderall or whatever the hell he's taken in order to stay up and trade. It was like, yeah, these guys are fueled by Red Bull and whatever, and they're just working, they're geniuses that are outsmarting everybody in the market to their gamblers who were reckless and we're not making good decisions because of their lifestyle and what they were choosing to do. I've seen this happen before. I remember with Tesla, there was a point in time where I think Tesla had had like
- 10 or 15 different CFOs. And my friend had told me that because I was like, you know, I'm reading a lot of stuff online about how like, there's might just be like some, you know, there's a lot of smoke. I don't know if there's a fire, but there's a lot of smoke about Tesla not being in good financial shape. What do you guys think? You know, what do you think about this? Am I overreacting to these like conspiracy theorists on Reddit and Twitter? And he's like, well, he's like, I noticed something interesting to you. I always have this phrase, follow the CFOs. Like, the CFOs know the health of the business. And what you never want to see was what was happening with Tesla, which was like a rotating door of CFOs that would come in for three to six months and then leave.
- And secondly, like the new CFO, it's like the shy 24 year old or 26 year old that's, you know, now Tesla CFO. Wow. He's amazing. The same thing happened at FDX. I remember when we did, we were, they were sponsoring us for something. And the guy who was paying us was their head of strategy. And we, you know, I didn't go on the call, but I asked by later. I was like, so was he like, you know, super sharp? What was that guy's story? He goes, yeah, he's 24. He's 23 years old or 24 years old. And he started as whatever. And now he's promoted. He's like the, he's the head of strategy for all of FDX.
- And again, it was like, wow, that's crazy. I guess they're just a real meritocracy around there. And they just, you know, land of equal opportunity. And this guy just proved his worth or it's like, no, this is his college buddy. He's not going to ask too many questions and he could just trust him to do whatever and say whatever. Right? Like these things from the outside. I remember reading articles about this wonder kid. And then later it's like a bad thing. And you were right about the CFO thing with Tesla at that time, weren't they on the brink? Well, people don't talk about that much now, but it did seem like they were on the brink or, you know,
- just narrowly survived either either properly or improperly. I'm not sure. But like later, I remember one one interview Elon Finally admitted it. He he was like we were six weeks away from like, you know the show being over for Tesla with when they were having the model three production ramp and And he had said something in a separate interview that alarmed me as well, which was about There was like some what's that famous a green at a clean energy thing that Obama funded like like the green new deal or something No, it was like six hundred million dollars to soy vera soy lent soy whatever I don't know some council soy legend. I don't know what it was some company that got a bunch of money And it failed and like up until the day they declared bankruptcy. It was like we're we're good I don't know what you guys are talking about and
- That's exactly right. And they asked Elon about that, like, you know, just clean energy, get a bad rap because of the, you know, the problems of Cylendra and others. People say it's hard to make new tech work and all this stuff. And he said something in a separate interview where he was like, what are they supposed to say as soon as they if they ever admitted any weakness, the stock would tank and it would guarantee their demise. Like, they have to say it's all good. You guys are nuts. Whether they are or aren't because the other one is, is it?
- it will tank their stock and they will die for sure. It'll accelerate their death. So then I was like, well, you can't believe anything. This guy says about how Tesla's do it. If that's his mentality when they're, you know, I'm reading these things about how they might be on the brink. He's saying they're all fine, but he even says that that's the CEO's job in this situation. So now, you know, what to do. And that's a long story short about why I sold my Tesla stock too early. I do think like there's the signal that I look for. It's not in the data is like the narrative when it's like a crazy founder narrative. Like, like they were in Southeast Asia, living in a monastery and they talk about like their clothing choices. Like that's always a weird one, right? When it's like, we're not going to talk about the business. We're going to talk about like where some like mole skin t-shirt made from like, you know. But it worked with Zuck.
- Yeah, but he wasn't like he built the product to start he wasn't known for his like weird. I think it's the key thing when you can't see the product or the or the financials right like like for a lot of these things were it's like is the product legit and is are the financials like visible right but but even then you can't like you know FTX was a like a real product that that people used and the financials made sense at the time that like they were obviously they're making money on every trade rights people doing a lot of crypto trading how can they not make money you know it seemed like it would work in both cases
- Another example on the FTX side, they had 25 engineers. And I remember reading stories about how he was just like, yeah, we're not like these Silicon Valley companies with all this bloat. Coinbase has like thousands of employees. We have a whole engineering team of 25 and we do more volume than them because we hire 10x engineers and we go for extreme operational leverage. And later it was like, of course these guys had like terrible security practices and all the stuff. Like they didn't even have, they refused to even invest in engineering, right? It's like the same story, the two sides of the same story once you know the result. Yeah.
- I do think there's signals when I don't think fraud, but there's signals right now that companies are not doing well. So you'll see companies raise a billion dollar valuation. And when we dig in, we see the liquidation preferences 3x. But that stuff doesn't get reported, right? Or you see the CRO or the CMO leaves every six months, kind of the Sean's point on the CFO. That indicates there's problems. It's not fraud. It's just like, hey, this company's not killing it the way outsiders might look at it. I think fraud's a tough one. I think underperformance.
- and companies that are not doing well, that's a lot easier for us to figure out. What's a company that's impressed you that we, most people don't talk about, because you guys see a bunch of companies that are interesting. What's a company that kind of flies out of the radar but kind of secretly crushes it? I'm like a dad. It's probably going to end up in the data world. So let me think about that. I don't know if anybody, I will say like the area that I like right now and I don't think these are great businesses but I think like I think are interesting is like the
- the folks that are analyzing the grifters, right? Like I really like love this space because I think there's something to be built here. Like they're more media companies than they are great big tech companies. But there was like, there's a couple that like are digging into like pastors and like the whole like evangelical pastor world and like it's phenomenal. Like the stuff that they do. So like that's probably the area I go down a lot more in and then like looking at the businesses of folks like Andrew Schultz.
- and folks like that. Like, you know, because I think there's a lot to learn from how they do marketing and how they build audience. So I tend to look at businesses that I think we can learn from versus like just like random sort of businesses that are out there. What can a boring company like yours learn from Andrew Schultz? So the thing that, so I think the thing that he's done really, I was purposely insulting you in order to make, make the average listener be like, Oh yeah, I'm, I'm not that cool. I think the thing that he does really well is he doesn't just interview other comedians.
- right? I think he like he interviews other people who are kind of adjacent to him, right? And so what he does then is he keeps expanding his audience. And I think most other folks like, you know, like I like Theo Vaughn and Theo Vaughn's like interviewing other comedians, right? But like he interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I bet you that brought him a whole bunch of new people, right? And so I think it was very funny. Yeah, it was awesome. And so this sort of like, short strategy of like adjacent folks, I think is really smart to bring in like the Venn diagram is not as heavily overlapped. And I think like he keeps building that way, which I think is really interesting. And so for us, like it's always like, who has an audience that's not exactly our audience, but that has maybe a slight overlap. And but with those people kind of like us, if they knew about us, right? And so it's kind of like thinking about partnerships there, whether it's newsletter partnerships or whether it's, you know, research that we do, whatever it might be. So yeah, I think like looking at what's happening in the consumer side of media is always interesting, because that's where like the innovation tends to happen. It doesn't usually tend to happen in B2B.
- Well, dude, I appreciate you doing this. You're fun to talk to. Sean, what do you think? We only got through maybe half of the short list ideas. So if people like this, we should do a part two and do more. Do more of the ideas. Thanks for coming on, man. This is fun. And I appreciate that you've been, I feel like I've seen you tweet about the show for a while now. So that's a really, I appreciate that. That's one of the cool moments of this doing this for us is that people, we respect if they like our stuff too. That gives you a little extra juice, a little extra wind in your sails to go out and keep going. Because it's different than just, oh, the numbers are going up. But numbers don't have that same kind of like,
- Pull as you know somebody who you think is cool, you know liking your stuff and by the way, I'm not it's your fault It's kind of my fault. It's most it's part your fault basically I Get like lots of messages a day, but like five of them a day It's usually a young man in his 20s and he'll just message me and he'll say let's fuck That's all I get and the reason being one time I was either on my way home or in route to the airport and I was I hate flying So I take a lot of Xanax and so that's the only time I'm ever in the abbreviated and I was very high and I messaged you and I said I'm in your hood. Let's fuck and you replied like
- I'm down like here's a restaurant meet me there something like that and I told that story and Now because of that I get a bunch of men messaging me that The dream Sam you live in the dream someone's dream someone's dream not my dream, but someone's dream I'm living on person's dream So you're gonna play for that, but I appreciate you coming on and this is fun. We'll talk soon

Asking A Billionaire Investor How To Prepare For The Economic Collapse (#371) [hbIgmVWZTgM].txt

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- I'm mostly holding cash and waiting for winter to come, and I'm going to buy businesses personally as well. That's the end of the day. I just want businesses. You don't own any vanguard index fund shit. You just are literally sitting on, I imagine, tens of millions of dollars of treasury bills. Yeah. All right. On today's episode, we got Andrew Wilkinson joining. If you don't know, you got to know Andrew is the creator of tiny, tiny owns like 20, 30 businesses at this point. They own dribble, they own arrow press. Basically he buys and sells businesses of total value, maybe over a billion dollars at this point.
- Definitely over a hundred million in revenue. And he's sort of known as the Warren Buffett of the internet, or that's the model that he chose to create. So he didn't do the startup path. He creates one genius idea. He didn't do the investor path where he's just putting small checks into these companies. Instead, he was finding these little gems of business buying them. And he's been doing this for like, you know, I don't know, 10, 15 years now. And Andrew's become a good friend. He's a friend of the pot. He listens to the pot. So he knows the vibe. He's probably the most well-liked guest that we have. So we're always happy to have back in this episode. We talk about preparing for winter. So how, what moves he's making or has made in order to prepare for like, you know, what's going on in the economy? So what he's doing in his business, what he's investing in, that sort of thing. We talked about a couple of his new ideas or businesses that he started. One like negotiating as a service or procurement, as I'm told, or this other company called
- Actually, I don't want to give it all away, but he talks about a couple of the ideas that he's working on and then we go on Some tangents about why you should only rent your house and not buy houses. We talked about You know different ways that he gets together with other entrepreneurs and groups. It's a good episode So about an hour and a half. I think you'll like it. All right. Enjoy this episode Dude wait hold on Sean. I haven't seen you in a minute. Where you good? Oh, dude I've been literally sitting at Tesla charging stations for like the last year of my life. It feels like I Made a horrific mistake of renting a
- Tesla for a road trip. Where'd you go? I just from here to LA from the from the beta LA and I thought, okay, that's cool. Might have to stop once or twice. It has stopped five times. Basically every 90 minutes. I had to stop for 30 minutes. It was awful. How fast were you going? Were you going above 80? No, nothing not fast. Two kids in the back and a bunch of, you know, snacks like this was not like some. This is not me. It was you. That's how I felt. That's how I felt towards the car. I was like, apparently this isn't what most Teslas would be like, but the Tesla I had rented, you know, was, was not the greatest. And which kind of suck because this was my sell my wife on
- Tesla is the next car trip and had the opposite effect. You know what's interesting is like I bought a Tesla like maybe eight or nine years ago and it was insane. It felt like, you know, going to the future or whatever. And I just bought the new BMW Ix which is like their electric SUV. And you realize that the main feature of the Tesla is how quiet and fast it accelerates. And instead of being a Tesla feature, you realize, oh, that's just an electric car feature. And then as soon as I get in my BMW, I plug in CarPlay. So it's like the Apple interface. And you realize like at the end of the day, these electric cars, like there's really not any competitive advantage. You know, and Tesla, frankly, the interior is so much worse than BMW and all these.
- German and American manufacturers. So like I'm really curious to see how it all plays out now. Yeah, they've done such a good job of rebranding fake leather to vegan interior. And that's what they say. They say it's vegan friendly interior. I'm like, oh, you're just low quality, like the fake leather. And whenever I sit in them, they feel like plastic. I'm not a Tesla fan. I also think that they're like super not sexy. Yeah, like the Model X looks like a weird big toe or something. I mean, I think like it's they're great. They're great cars. Like I really like them, but I just think that everyone overestimated their competitive advantage. And then at the end of the day, you've got all these legacy manufacturers. And you know, ultimately, if Apple and Google are providing the interface that most people use, it barely matters, right? It's just like a platform with an electric motor that takes you from A to B. And then, you know, does it work with your iPhone or your Android? And if you look at the Tesla interface, it's like really bad. You can't sync your maps up on the screen or anything like that. It's not great.
- So Sean, you're not getting one. Actually, I still probably will get one, but yeah, I got to do research and shit now. Like I joined the subreddit for Tesla fans. It's so crazy. By the way, how many products are just for Tesla owners? Because you basically have, I don't know how many million, but like in the subreddit alone, there's two million members. And that's Reddit. Reddit's like the niche part of it, right? So like, I don't know exactly how many cars Tesla has sold now, but somebody can grab that. I think they're doing, they did like a million this quarter delivered to something like that.
- like that, something crazy, like a huge, huge jump. But let's say that there's 5 million Teslas out there. Those are 5 million high net worth people who can be targeted with specific products. And I've seen some people do this. One guy had this thing called Tesla, I forgot what it's called, like Tesla camper or some shit like that. And it basically would turn the trunk of your Tesla. If you fold down the back seat and you open up the trunk of it, it would turn it into like a sleeper van. And it was just like a bed that goes in the back of a Tesla. It's perfectly made to fit the back of a Tesla. It looks sleek like a Tesla thing. And it was like...
- And they were doing like, you know, they're doing pretty well. These guys would do seven figures on just, just as one product with very minimal ad spend because they can go highly targeted with content, Instagram and stuff like that to, to reach Tesla owners. And then same thing, people selling these adapters that let you charge everywhere or there's an app because I was like trying to plan the road trip and I just typed in the destination and like, you know, it gives you a suggestion on where to stop to charge, but it wasn't great. That's why I stopped five times. I was like, there had to be a better, more optimal route than this. And there's some old ass app called a better route planner or something like that. A B R P and it's like.
- the number one ranked thing, the interface looks like it's, you know, from the 90s and it just does a slightly better job at like giving you some custom control over what what charging stations you should hit on a trip and I just realized like wow there's this is like a It's like Rolex owners or things like that like these high net worth Communities that are super passionate and they're locked into that ecosystem You know Apple being the biggest example of this like the big The Apple blogs that's that were out early on right image over time This is like there's the same opportunity with Tesla and other products like that
- That's awesome. Yeah, maybe maybe I'll be getting one too, but we'll see So we should so we should reintroduce Andrew so Andrew will get his back definitely the the number one guest of the pod both in our hearts and the fans hearts so And I don't know why we don't schedule more These cuz like we should but every quarter or so and you just text us. He's like hey I want to come on. I got stuff and we're like great pick a pick a day. Let's do this and so he's back. He's the
- founder CEO of Tiny and they buy beautiful internet businesses. He's got a bunch of pods with us in the past explaining that stuff. But he's also, he also, he still listens to the pod regularly. I know you used to listen to the song at night. Yeah, all the time. I take little breaks cause I get too pumped up sometimes when I listen, like. In the song. I listen in the shower of the song. Usually. All right. That's more than four hours. I'm always fully, I'm always fully nude when I listen. Yeah. Would it make you feel comfortable now if we turn the cameras off and take off our clothes? That would be ideal. So you had a bunch of ideas or topics.
- Sam, you want to go to? Yeah, so you have a bunch of good shit. So we're going to talk about what you're doing for winter, meaning what you're doing, which are personal and business finances, given that the economy may not be going well. We're going to talk about different ideas that you have. I want to talk about the anonymized workers. So you've been hiring some anonymous folks. And then you also have five or six companies that you've started, and we're going to do a post-mortem on them and say, what went well and what didn't go well. So Sean, you're hiring a big talk. Yeah, all right, great. I was going to say, you drive, Sean, because Andrew already told me a lot of his stuff. So I want you to tell me what's most interesting. Yeah, let's start with winter. So Andrew, maybe tee it off, which is, I think there is a consensus now that we're either in a recession or going to be in a recession and that this is not going to end soon.
- Give me your take on what your view is of the market and then what are you doing to prepare for that situation? Yeah, so I mean, there's this great quote by Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. So ultimately, none of us know what's going to happen, right? We could have a rebound. I was super terrified when COVID hit. I thought the world was going to fall apart and it didn't. But what I do when something like this happens is I stress test my business. So if you think about it like if you're about to drive your family in a minivan across a large bridge that's like, you know, a kilometer in the sky and there's a one in 20 chance that bridge can't take the weight of your car, you don't want to drive across, right? It doesn't matter if you're probably going to be fine. You just don't want to go across. And so.
- I think you want to stress test and over-engineer your business for all the worst case scenarios. So effectively, that's what I've been thinking about a lot. And I think what people miss is there's two ways that something like this can go bad, right? The worst way it can go bad is total loss, right? You go bankrupt, your business fails, you're embarrassed, it's terrible. I think that's the worst. But the less bad option that no one really talks about is missing opportunity. So you get presented with something incredible and you're illiquid, you can't take advantage of it. So for example, let's say you're an e-commerce company and suddenly ad rates drop 5x and you could go out and take the market and sell shitloads of your product. You can't do that because you're illiquid or you're just barely holding on, you don't have any cash reserves. Maybe there's an amazing acquisition. You can merge or take over a competitor or something, but you can't do that. So instead of errors of omission, you get errors of commission, you're not able to actually execute on those opportunities. And so I've been thinking a lot about this over the last couple months. And generally we operate quite conservatively. Our goal is like any debt we have, we want to be able to pay it off pretty much at any time. We try and keep as much cash as we can ahead of office. But there's a couple specific things that we're doing that I figured I'd share that could be useful. So number one is what is a stress test? So that sounds cool. I want to stress test my business is great. I sit down today. What the heck am I doing to do that?
- Okay, so you would say, okay, what happens if revenue drops 50% in this business, right? Are you able to lay people off? Is that a possibility? Are you stuck in a bunch of long-term contracts and leases that you can't get out of? Do you have a lot of debt that you can't pay? You're really modeling out, like what I'll do is just do a simple spreadsheet and say, like, okay, if revenue goes up by 20%, here's what it looks like. If it goes down by 20%, if it goes down by 50%, if it goes down by 70%, or for example, one thing that often happens is you still have customers, but in many businesses they have accounts receivable and people stop paying. So people, they're going to pay you, but they might just pay you late maybe in 90 days or 120 days. And so what happens if no one pays you for two or three months? Do you have enough money in the bank? Do you have credit lines, et cetera? Nope.
- I think it's really wise to kind of do that shadow boxing and imagine a bunch of nightmare scenarios so that you can sleep at night. Great. And then we'll actually continue where we're going and then I'm going to ask you a question. Yeah. Okay. So I'll talk a little bit about like what we're specifically doing. So everyone always says, you know, the best companies get started by a risk and during a recession, which is absolutely true. But at the end of the day, I am not going to be putting a lot of money into crazy venture bets. And what I mean by that is I'm not going to be taking like a lot of risk, right? So I'm not going to go and invest in the e-commerce company with 500k of revenue at a $12 million valuation. I'll still keep betting on new companies.
- But I'm doing it in a much more conservative way. So for example, we have an angelist rolling fund we invest about 12 million dollars a year there and I'm pivoting it to totally focus on secondary and minority buyouts So for example a founder who gets cold feet or wants to buy out their business partner something like that I'll do non binary deals. So what I mean by that is like if Revenue and earnings get to where they say they're gonna be the valuation is one thing If they don't the valuation is another so kind of our investors win in either scenario And then the other one is like structured deals So for example saying to someone look I'll give you a five million dollar valuation, but I want to guaranteed 15% return
- in the case of liquidation or dividends and that kind of stuff. And then also, I mean, you guys have talked about this a lot, but the idea of default alive. I wanna be investing in businesses where if they can't raise the next round, they're not going out of business. And then the other thing with venture is like, we've realized too, we can do venture internally by incubating businesses with low downside. So for example, like turning our P&L expenses into businesses in and of themselves. So for example, like we want better procurement internally, we wanna negotiate rates and get our P&L under control. And so we started a business to do that. We want to get better credit across all of our businesses. We started another business to do that. So that's the kind of stuff we're doing with venture.
- We just we just talked all about that the other day. And what was your take Sam? Uh, on what? Oh, what he just said. You're like, I think it's I should do that. I am doing that or I'm doing something different. Uh, part of me thinks that like that's a little well, I personally wouldn't do that because I'm like, man, when chicken's bad, I get afraid and I just want to focus focus focus. And when I think of like you starting something new, I'm like, whoa, aren't you going to have to like allocate like another $500,000 to this salary for buyer.co and like, uh, or, you know, like however many of the salaries and however much is going to cost to do a new website. And so I get, I get nervous about that. So are you not, are you baking those into like new expenses? Are you saying like,
- Look, I could just go and cut costs and save a little bit of money, or I could go spend a little bit more money and build a company around it. Well, I'm looking at businesses. There's been businesses where, okay, here's an example. So when we started buyer, which is our negotiation service for software that we launched two years ago and we ended up selling it to Ramp, so I think we started that business for 50k. At the end of the day, we were looking at it and going, this is a very low risk bet where we're basically finding someone who they want to start a company. We're giving them all the tools to do it and we're going to partner with them, provide all the capital. But at the end of the day, we're looking at really, really simple capital-like businesses that can get revenue within two or three months. I don't want something. I mean, I can talk about this later, but I've done businesses where we go for 10 years and are never profitable and we're just pouring good money after bad. I don't do that anymore. What are you doing with your personal portfolio at the moment? What's that? What's those percentages look like where each thing is?
- So, basically it's cash. So I have treasury bills and then I also have a, the only stock I hold right now is Pershing Square Holdings. And the reason I really like that is A, it's trading for far less than the value of the underlying assets. So it's a holding company that owns a bunch of blue chip stocks and it's trading at about 66% of the net asset value. So if there's $100 of stocks, you're paying 66 cents. And then they also are, but that's my design. Highly, don't most of these, don't most of these kind of like holding company types traded a discount anyways.
- Not to this degree, right? At the end of the day, like this is why is it why is it why is it? It is. Well, I think there's a variety of different reasons. I mean, it's illiquid. It's traded in Europe. It's run by Bill Ackman, who has had, you know, a few blowups and people associate him with blowups. If you actually look at his record, he's killed it. And the other thing I liked about that business, by the way, is that they own a very large position in interest rate swappions. So as interest rates go up, the fund actually does better. So over the last, if you look at the net asset value over the last four weeks, it's barely moved while the larger market has gone down significantly. But anyway, I'm mostly holding cash and waiting for winter to come. And I'm going to buy businesses personally as well. That's the end of the day. I just want, I want businesses. You don't own any like Vanguard index fund shit. You just are literally sitting on, I imagine, tens of millions of dollars of
- treasury bills. Yeah. And that's wild. What do you do? I guess where's your main focus with your balance sheet? Like how much of your worth is in your personal accounts versus let's say, if you think about, okay, my net worth, how much of it is associated inside tiny and you need to be smart about what you're doing inside tiny versus under personal. Because I think for most entrepreneurs, most of their net worth is in their business and then their personal kind of checking accounts, savings accounts, stock trading accounts are much smaller in comparison.
- Yeah, I'm like 90% in tiny, but what I have done is I've had liquidity and other things outside of tiny. Tiny is a holding company that I co-own with Chris, and there's been other assets like legacy assets that have sold or cash flowed. And so I've taken that money and compounded it and done stuff with it personally. And the way I look at the personal money is if everything goes pear-shaped with tiny, I still want to make sure that I can retire and be free and have enough money to do stuff. So it's a little bit more conventional, but what's funny is you're like, oh, you don't have ETFs and stuff. As far as I'm concerned, I do have an ETF because Pershing Square Holdings owns 10 positions.
- So it's a diversified stock portfolio and it just happens to be managed by Bill. What percentage of your net worth, sorry, if you have one number in treasury bills, how's that compared to the other number in Pershing Swares? Pershing Sware. I think it's 50-50 right now. And one thing that I've been following basically like two years ago, so a year ago, you own or your major, I actually don't know what your percentage is. I think it's in the end or report, but you own WeCommerce.
- which is a collection of Shopify plugins, as well as a few other products. That's like a really, really good business. I forget what it said in the annual report, but it's publicly traded. It's like 50 or $60 million a year in annual revenue. And it's peak stock was like $600 million. It was crushing it. Now, like the rest of tech, it's just been decimated to like, what is it today? I think it's like 80 million or something. So how does it feel like you're the only person I know who's like this wealthy? Well, I know we talked into our mesh. Our mesh was like, yeah, I lost like $300 million today. How's like, what's it feel like? What's it, where's your perspective and where's your emotions? When you're seeing this thing, destroy it and be amazing at 600 million all the way down to 80. Like how do you feel about that? So I think if I was just like a pure, one of the interesting phenomenons I've seen is people who are great entrepreneurs often are just great entrepreneurs. They don't become investors. They don't like thinking about the stock market and finance and stuff. I actually really enjoy that side. And so I've spent the last 10 years learning about investing and reading about Warren Buffett. And Warren Buffett's mentor Benjamin Graham has this whole idea of Mr. Market, right? So the stock market is like this moody person. It goes up and down. At the end of the day, if you know what your business is worth, it's irrelevant what the stock market says it's worth. So personally,
- I mean, yeah, like sure, there's a little bit of an ego hit seeing your net worth have some zeros pulled off of it. But at the end of the day, I know that number is made up anyway. So for me, it really doesn't affect me day to day. I just go, do I still own a great business? Why? And you're personally, you're fine. Like you've got liquidity and you've all these other things going on. But like, I imagine. Let me put it. Let me put it this way. There's a great Buffett story and he says, you know, Sam, let's say you own a farm and it makes you a million dollars a year of profit, right? And some yokel walks up and goes, Hey, Sam, I'll give you $50,000 for that farm. You just go go away like no, I'm not going to sell. And then someone else one day comes along and says, Hey, I'll give you $20 million. Maybe you consider that. But the idea is that at the end of the day, these yokels will yell numbers at you and you don't have to sell, right? Unless you sell, that's when it matters, right? If you sold for 50 grand because you're panicked because you're going, Oh, the economy is in a recession. Maybe my farm will crumble and you sell for 50 grand. Yeah, that sucks. But if you ignore the yokels, it's irrelevant. And in the same vein.
- We all own houses and the houses the values fluctuate constantly We don't feel that right because you don't see a ticker or if you own the hustle There was times where if the hustle had been publicly traded It would have been worth next to nothing and then there are other times where it would be worth crazy numbers Right and and you at the end of the day, you know your business. You know what it's worth Yeah, Dharmesh said this thing he goes Valuation oscillates around value and I just had this image So you know so imagine you're creating value in this business the line is going up
- It's pretty steady. It's really, it's quite hard actually to have like dramatic jumps in the value of your business or dramatic downs and then dramatic highs again. It's like, that's not really how value is created in most businesses. And he's like, but then value is this like crazy moody line that's swinging up and down on like higher and lower than the value at any given time. And if you have to be able to differentiate between the value of a business and the valuation of a business, and that's, I think, what you're, what you're talking about. Totally. You want to talk about some of these, uh,
- What do you want to go to now Sean? Well, I was gonna say I have the opposite strategy as Andrew as I often tend to do with most of my friends I have the the opposite strategy not by design. I Wish that was not true, but Like for example right now, I'm doing more I'm putting more attention and energy and doing more deals in venture than I did And the past year because it past two years really because your personal money Well, though the fun money But I'm you know, I'm the steward of that capital right so and it's and the the returns of that I have personal money in there as well But like the returns of that I think are gonna be pretty meaningful personally
- But this amazing thing has happened, which is that all the founders have just read bad news for like six months straight. And this has done two things. One, a bunch of like, not a bunch of people who would have quit later, quit now, which is fantastic because picking is really hard in startups. And so like, you know, thanks for making it easy. We're like, you meet a founder who's just sort of like, yeah, so what? Like, okay, okay, you know, who cares about what's going on in the world? I'm still gonna do this thing. I was obsessed with it before, just because there's a war in Ukraine and a pandemic and the stock market's down and crypto is down, doesn't change my interest in this like niche thing. So you see that person, you're like, okay, great. They're in it for the long haul. You see other people who are pivoting like crazy and you're like, okay, they're not really in it for the long haul.
- The second thing is that they've cut all their valuations by like 40 to 60 percent. Or more. The same deal, yeah, one more. So the same deal you could get, you know, for 10 million, you're now getting for four or five million, right? 20 million, you're now getting for 10 million. And so, but the reality is that the, that same business was going to exit seven to 10 years from now where like the market, like they're reacting, they're changing their valuation based on today's data, but they're, you're going to get paid out. So you get to buy cheaper, but you get to sell seven to 10 years from now when the market conditions are going to be dramatically different than today and likely a lot better than whatever this next, you know, kind of down cycle of the market looks like over this year, next year, whatever, however long it lasts. My worry is anchor bias, right? So I mean, if you think about it, everyone was saying venture valuations were crazy in 2019, right? Let's say the average seed in, you know, or sorry, angel valuation was say five million in 2019, which was much higher than it was in 2016 and 2016. I'd see deals for one to three million. So then it goes to five and then in 2020, 2021, let's say it goes to 20 million, right? And then it comes back down to five and we all go, Oh, wow, it's a crazy deal, right? So my worry is that these businesses should actually be valued at one to three million because if anyone came to me with most of these businesses, you know, as a, as a cash flow real world investor, it just looks insane. Yeah, but you said that. Only way to get your money back is to have a massive exit. Right. But that's always been true for venture, right? Venture deal will look horrible to any private equity type of buyer. And in the same way, a private equity deal to a venture capitalist will look also horrible because they're, they're criteria and their lens and their model.
- They're based on fundamentally, like, totally different factors. Andrew, on this pod you said- You're the two of you both. You said I didn't invest in Slack when I had the opportunity. I didn't invest in this or that or this. And you've made dozens or maybe even hundreds of investments. So you walked the walk as well, but you said, I wish I could have done this. I wish I would have done that. I made a huge mistake to do that. And exercise that I do all the time, that I try to do all the time, is I try to ask myself what, like, you know, like we constantly say, like, oh, I wish I would have known that this company was gonna be as big as it was, and I wish I would have pounced it on that. And I had that opportunity.
- or there was this opportunity that I had and I missed it. And I always ask myself, what is happening this second, this week, this month, where I'm going to look back and there's a chance that it's going to say, I really just screwed that up. Like that was like, oh, like, for example, for me, it was when I was running the hustle, Facebook ads, I could buy users for a dollar and they were worth $10 to me. So like I knew at the present, this is a good deal and I didn't go harder on that and I missed that opportunity. And so right now I am wondering, you know, about eight months ago, Sean and I were like, dude, we're never going to make money on angel investing because like the valuations are $20 million when the company should be $5 million. And like this whole, this whole like idea of like a Tim Fares investing $15,000 into Uber and making $50 million, that can never happen with us. The numbers just don't work. Now I'm seeing these numbers and I'm like,
- Is that happening right now? Is this opportunity? Does this exist the second? I would say you guys have a very unique opportunity because of your profile now, right? I think like Tim Ferriss was able to get into the best deals because people wanted him in them and you guys are gonna have that same opportunity, but I guess the question is Are you playing Are you playing roulette or you playing poker? I play poker, right? I want to play with very good odds in my favor and I want to know the odds I don't want to play roulette where it's almost totally random
- I still think ventures totally random. I do it for fun off the side of my desk. And don't get me wrong, when I see I look back and go, I could have predicted maybe not slack, but certainly there's some of the businesses where I could see. It was quite obvious that they were going to be winners. And I could have pushed harder to invest in them. But I still look at that as kind of random, because I've had that feeling on businesses where I've lost everything. So for me, what I'm saying is you're about to enter an environment where anyone with cash, who has a large sum of cash, is going to be able to buy a business at, say, a 20% or a 30% earnings yield, meaning,
- You can buy a business and pay yourself back in two or three years, maybe five years, and you can buy good businesses, right? Because everyone's gonna be panicking and wanting to sell. There's gonna be great opportunities. To me, I'd just rather play that poker game than venture right now. And I'm focused on it. It's not say I'm not gonna do venture long-term. And if a friend of mine who's amazing comes to me and says hey, I need a hundred thousand dollars for my company, I will invest all day still. I'm just saying I'm not focusing any energy there right now. What's an example of a company that you tried to buy recently and they wouldn't sell? Or an example of a company that you can reveal now and it's no big deal because it just it won't happen. But is there any companies that are good examples of this?
- Well, there's one really weird one, bridgebase.com. I started playing bridge like five years ago and it's kind of like chess.com. There's all these nerds that play. The website isn't particularly good, but I was quite impressed by all the numbers behind it. I think it ended up selling to someone else. We looked at chess.com. That ended up obviously blowing up with everything that happened with Queens Gambit. I mean, there's all sorts of businesses. I won't be kiss and tell because we still might look at some of them. But we've looked at a lot of off the beaten path, interesting businesses like that, where you find a nerdy cohort of people that have a dedicated place where they all gather. How much do you think bridgebase.com sold for? I'm looking at it now. It looks like it has like...
- I don't know. Eight million monthly unique visitors. It's pretty huge. Yeah, I think my mom uses this. By the way, that little kiss and tell line, I have this sheet on my phone where I just save little throwaway lines that like, I call them get out of jail free phrases or it's basically like, how do you use a phrase in certain specific situations? I'll give you another example. So Andrew just did one where it's like, you get kind of put on the spot and you don't really want to share. So you have a phrase that gets you out of it smoothly, safely, securely and like, no damage done.
- versus, you know, what, there were many other things that he could have said in response that just would have been like sort of awkward. And another one, my uncle told me this once he goes, he was like trying to do this deal and it wasn't really working. And I kind of, we all kind of felt like, I feel like this deal is doable, but we're just not there yet. And like maybe we just need to like, you know, if you just mind dying this guy a little bit, like I think it would happen. But you can't just tell somebody I'd like to, you know, one in dying, you know, that doesn't really work. He's just like, you know, my mentor told me, you got to meet someone, belly to belly if you're really ever going to do a deal with them. And like whether it happens or not, you never regret meeting another man, belly to belly. They got laughs. He says, okay, yeah, sure. And I use that as the, to get what he wanted, which is I'd like to meet you in person in a kind of informal way. And I have no agenda, like, I can't come up with a new agenda to do it. I'm just telling you that this is something I believe fundamentally that the two people need to be belly belly if they want to, if they ever want to do it. You have an entire folder dedicated to these phrases. What other folders do you have? And what other words are in that folder? Like you use one all the time, like don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. You know, like, it's a, how do I, how do I get my point across, you know, with a little bit of humor, a little bit of showmanship, and a little bit of like,
- ambiguity versus just speaking so fucking like, because I have this problem, I'm really direct. So I kind of needed these tools in order to do stuff. And I stole this actually from Neville. Neville, in his copywriting course, when I was creating my copywriting course, I had taken other people's to see what do they know that I don't know, what are some useful things they've taught. And one of the things he teaches in there is he goes, what does he call it? He's like transition, he has this long list of like transition phrases. And it's like, he calls it like slippery transitions or something like that. And basically it's like, we all know that you should kind of start with Smalltalk and then get to the meat. If you just go straight to the meat, it's a little bit like aggressive and upfront. But also it's hard to be like, you know, Smalltalk, Smalltalk, Smalltalk.
- So, Amy who, do you want to do that? Would you like to buy my product? And it's like, oh damn, awkward. And so he has this long list of his little connector phrases. And I was like, oh, that's really useful actually. This is a useful thing to get out of a course. So when I created my course, I started creating these banks of phrases, headline formulas, transition words, different things. I'm like, this is your go-to when you need to sign off or say hello in a fun way. Sign off in a fun way. Give a transition or give somebody something that's direct. And so I started creating those for myself. Dude, belly to belly is a good one. Yeah, it's a good one. Face to face doesn't have the same touch. Belly to belly gets a chuckle and you're like, okay, I understand what you're trying to do.
- Andrew, are you doing any writing at the moment? You've always been a great writer, but it doesn't seem like you're really producing a lot. Are you writing for your companies or anything? Yeah, I'm working on a book, actually. What? Really? Yeah. Just about the story of building our business and just, yeah, like the experience that I've had over the last 15 years. What's it going to be called? I don't know yet. I'm still figuring it out. I just signed a book agent and I think I sold it. But yeah, we'll see. It's fun. It goes back to like...
- I think I've spent so many years frantically writing like Twitter threads that disappeared to the ether. And I love the idea of actually building a narrative story and writing something more substantial. And I'm really enjoying that process. And it's just a new thing, right? It's a totally new thing to learn. I'll share some stuff with you guys too. Let me tell you a little book story that will give you. So somebody, when you tweeted out, you're coming on, you're like, oh, what should we talk about? There's a bunch of questions, a bunch of good ones, honestly. But one that stood out to me was this guy goes, give this, can you guys each tell us like an example of a butterfly effect moment in your life? Meaning a chance encounter you had with somebody or somebody or something that just like nudges you in a different trajectory that kind of changed your thinking. At the time, it didn't seem like this monumental decision or event. It just seemed like this kind of harmless chance encounter. And your book thing reminded me of my answer to that, which is that.
- Once upon a time, my dad was supposed to come to this meeting and he's like, he was ago this meeting in San Diego. He's like, oh, he should come with me. I was a college kid at the time. I think a junior or senior in college. And he said, come with me. And I was like, okay, I guess, like I'll just tag along. I'll shatter you for this. I'd never done that before. So it's kind of a random thing that my dad tried to do. And then my dad's flight gets canceled by dad's coming from Indonesia at the time. So his flight gets canceled. And I'm like, oh, shoot, I'm already at my connecting stop. Like, I'm like wherever Kansas City and like, should I, what should I do? He's like, oh, just go. Do the meeting. And I'm like, I don't even know the context. Like, I don't even know what you do for a living. How am I going to talk to this guy? He's like, don't worry. This guy's great. And I told him you'll be there. And he just said, come hang out with me.
- So I go to San Diego, I meet this guy and the guy comes in as like a ball of energy and he's got Neil Centuria. He comes in as this ball of energy, kabrizma. He's immediately cracking jokes. He's telling me a story. He walks in and he's late, like 25 minutes late. I'm just sitting in this room and he goes, he goes, ah, man, I'm sorry. I just got off the phone with, whoever Comcast. He's like, let me tell you one thing. You got a pen? Get out of Japan. Write this down. And I'm like, I just met this guy. He hasn't even said hello yet. He doesn't even know my name. My pen, because I'm the little bitch that I am. And he's like, um...
- He's like, write this down. If you have great customer service, you can run the world. You hear me? Run the world. And so he's like this character, and it turns out this guy had this crazy career where he built like skyscraper in San Diego because he's like, oh, real estate is where I'm going to make my money. Then he's like, he got into Hollywood. He wrote two scripts for films or something like that. He was a showrunner for a bit. And so he thought that's how we would make it. Then he started tech companies with the internet boom. And then he married the woman who started 1,800 flowers. And he's like, just had this crazy career. He bumped into a guy in an elevator and invested his company and it ended up becoming like Chag or something like that, like this big multi-billion dollar thing. So he had this crazy, like he's just wowing me with all this like, this like afternoon, basically. He takes me to this restaurant to go eat. They have a special table for him. And the tablecloth is all made out of paper. It's a high-end restaurant, but his was made out of paper like a kids table. And they had crayons and he would just draw diagrams and like cut deals at this table. And he never had to order. They would just bring out loads of food. And then he'd walk away at the end like an Uber. He never had to pay. He never had to pay.
- I don't know who this guy is, but like that's what I want to be in life I want to be this ball of energy who's just cutting deals drawn on tables and like you know Has had five different arcs of his career in these different spaces and he's still like I don't know this guy's like 65 70 years old He still seems to have all the energy in the world. So and then I just like went back to school And like but if I hadn't had that I don't think I would have had this blueprint that like being a entrepreneur could be cool And it could have like more variety and I didn't have to like choose one thing I like I just saw this one example for one day and it was like a dream basically then it was done I never taught this guy now. He's still there He's still in San Diego And he's like guest teaches at some school there and he's got this man mega mansion on the top of the hill and That's still what he does
- That's awesome. I love that was a good story, but oh sorry the book part on the way out He's like so I'm with this guy for two and a half hours and then I'm just like whoa I don't know what the hell I just saw I'm 21 years old and never I've never like in college don't meet people like this I didn't at least so this is the first time I ever met somebody like dynamic like this and somebody who had made their own path and didn't just like follow their major into some career and On the way out. He just shoves a book in my hand and it's his book and it's called I'm there for your baby and if you want to read this guy's book it never sold a lot of copies I don't think but he wrote a wrote a note to me in it handed me this book and on my plane right out of there Sure enough read the book cover to cover and by that I liked the guy by the time I was done with the book I loved the guy and so I always I remember that because I was like oh I've always thought of books in one way as this like
- I don't know, mass market, you're trying to become a best seller or something like that. And then I realized a book is just a tool that like anybody can use, like some people use their book to get public speaking gigs. But this guy used it for a different thing, which was he could turn a like it into a love it just by handing this book. It's like, cool, I met you for two hours or an hour. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. But this book will sell you on me and like what I'm all about through entertaining stories and whatever. And I was just remember thinking, oh, that's a great idea to do so that every person you meet for the rest of your life, you can convert them into being a believer and a buyer and a fan of what you do. And that's actually how I want to use my book when I write a book.
- I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sinks spreadsheets or doing databases. HubSpot grow better. I did this personal values exercise like six months ago or so, and when I thought about what do I actually want, what do I actually like, why do I do business? I want to meet interesting people. One of the great things about being on Twitter or coming on this podcast is that I'll randomly bump into people in a coffee shop, so I'll be sitting there and some guy will walk up and say, hey, I heard you on my first million. I want to tell you about my business, and I end up making all these new friends. I've probably made 20 new friends from this podcast. I've had random lunches with people, literally I've been in line for lunch and someone's been like, hey, want to have lunch, and I have. And so...
- The next level of that is yeah, like a book you get to exist in some range in line for lunch like you can't say no Yeah, I know you It is great the guy with the guy was super interesting he had like an airplane leasing business It was it was crazy, but um, but I think a book you get to exist in someone's brain for like 20 25 hours And it's exactly that right you can actually get someone to truly understand who you are and then when you meet them You don't have to do your preamble. You don't have to your pitch You don't have to do what that guy did with you. You don't have to sell you can just be yourself and they already know the deal And I think there's something really cool about that So speaking of meeting interesting people let me ask you guys if you would do this So I was talking to Nathan Barry the other day Nathan Barry, you know, he owns convert kit or he owns the most all of it He's probably worth two or three hundred million dollars He's worth a lot and he told me how when he travels sometimes he'll organize like he'll stay Like if he wants to go somewhere for seven days he'll play in an eighth day that's dedicated to work And what he'll do is he'll do like a Six-hour meeting where he'll let like 20 or 30 people all come and hang out with him, but he charges them And it's almost like a very miniature conference and I could maybe I'm butchering a little bit about what he does But basically he's like I got the inspiration because base camp Jason freed in those guys used to do these things where they would charge 200 to 2,000 dollars and um You can come and hang out at their office and I thought Uh, you know, I should do this when I travel and it will pay for my trip and also I can meet interesting people And I thought about this and the cons are it could feel like sleazy and weird to like well Charging money for my time, but I think he actually said andro he went to one of your things and you gave the money away I think like you yeah, and I was like yeah, that is the sleazy part, but
- It is kind of a cool way to like meet people that cross a certain threshold and it could if it could like pay for your trip and even though it's like, well, I don't I don't I have enough money to pay for my trip. There's something about it that I find so intoxicating to do this. Have you ever thought about every? Yeah, I really would you do this Sean and Andrew what yeah, what are you gonna say? I was gonna say really struggle with this. So like you guys are I think one of you guys is on intro. I'm on intro. It's because I listen, I'm friend to the founder on intro. Listen, listen. I first of all, I don't even have any I don't even think I have. Well, I don't have that many dates available, but my friend started it and he's like, hey, use this. I was like fine. I started using it. Then he puts my ad everywhere on on Facebook and so I only make like an hour to available a month and it's just crazy. My intro is just a service that lets you meet Sam Parr. I'm pretty sure that's what intro is based on the ads that I've seen. That's what I've seen. Oh my God. They are killing me with all these ads.
- Well, it's a terrible way to use your time, right? Like what we did, we did a charity ask me anything. So we were like, okay, anyone who pays, whatever you donate, we'll double it. And I think we like suggested the donation or whatever, but with Nathan and about 20 other entrepreneurs, we did like a Zoom, spent two or three hours answering all their questions. I think we raised like 50 grand for a charity, which was pretty cool. But I really struggle with this kind of stuff because the end of the day you're selling your hours and I don't want to be in that business. It's a fun way to do it. And, but I feel like it compromises the
- Like people expect value, right? So if you're on day eight of your trip and you're exhausted, you know how to dial it up. Like that guy that met you in San Diego, you have to be like histrionic, you have to wear a mask, you have to like pump yourself up. And I find that one of the things I've realized is I'm very capable of doing that. Like I can, I can be miserable and I can pump myself up. Like Tony Robbins style, like jump on the trampoline and all that crap, but it makes me miserable. And so I just don't wanna do that. What'd you do it, Sean? I would not charge for that. Mostly because if I'm doing that, it's because I want to meet interesting people. So I'd rather say,
- It's filtered or I have the right to just stop talking to your boot you out and like the next fight Like I can make these meetings ten minutes, right? So Brad fell did this in Brad fields of VC and Boulder He's probably like one of the main what most well-known venture capitalist in Boulder, Colorado And he used to have this one day on his calendar every month called the random random day or something like that He would just let you book a 15 or 20 minute meeting with him He'd just sit in the coffee shop and he'd sit there for four or five hours and And he just tried to meet as many people as he could and he had no filter there He's like you don't need a warm intro. You don't need this. You don't need that and first that was great branding for him I'm like, I'm a man of the people, you know, it's like when Gary Vee does these TikToks and it's like
- It's just some you know somebody who comes up to him and they look like you know They're like haggard and they're like Gary. Can I just get a minute of your time? He's like of course I'm anything for my my fans and he's like it Gary, you know, how do I? Want enough money for dinner? He's like here's what you're gonna do You're gonna take that guy's dinner and sell it now you got two dinners give him back one and you got one for yourself It's like he gives him this like pump up thing and the guys like thank you so much and they hug and they embrace And I'm like wow I don't want to touch anyone who listens to the podcast You know, it's like here's a rule. We're not touching This is not a thing but he does it gives a brand vibe of like there is one of the people he's a man I'm a man of the fans and so similarly Brad would do this and I thought there was immense Brand value for him doing this and then the second thing was I'm sure there is some when I met him I was like why do you do these because I went to one and he goes
- You know, you have to create a landing spot for luck. And other people call this a surface area for serendipity, but like you want to give in your schedule someplace. First of all, those phrases, Sean, gold, a landing area for luck and surface area for serendipity. Sorry, go ahead. Those are both beautiful. Yeah, future book titles. So basically you wanna create, like intentionally create space because the more successful you get, the busier you typically will get by default. And the less space goes on your calendar. Buff it and others like, you know, Andrew, you do this too, or you just carve out space. I'm gonna think, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna walk. I don't need to have meetings after meetings after meetings because guess what? If I let that happen, that's exactly what's gonna happen to my calendar. And what this guy did, I thought was interesting was, cool, if I just stay in my bubble and I only admit people who on the surface, like are worthy of my time or whatever, then I'm just gonna miss out on a whole bunch of other things. And so how do I carve out, you know, what's the 1% of my time, or 2% of my time that I'm willing to allocate towards randomness, lux, serendipity, just so I can like have that in my mix.
- It's amazing how that goes away. I remember when people would email me early in my career, I would be so flattered. They would write me four paragraphs and I'd write them a really thoughtful response and get on the phone with them. And then you just get more and more of those and you waste your time. They're only interesting maybe one out of five times and the rest of the time you want to off yourself. And so I basically stopped and then it was like, oh shit, how do I get that serendipity? And to be honest, going on here is a great form of serendipity because of those random meetings and introductions and stuff. But most of the time if someone emails me, I honestly, I delete it. Unless it's like one line and super clear, if it's a pitch or anything, I just delete it. I found my most nevallism, nevall thing that I kept my original nevall quote where I realized like the point of this podcast is not to be well known. Point of creating content is not to be well known, meaning known by like a lot of people, but rather to be known well.
- So like what's happening now is in my inbox or my DMS people are sending me stuff that is so interesting to me Or they're making intros that are so on point and the reason they can do that is because if they listen to the podcast They know exactly the type of shit I'm into and that Sam's into and so we get this like amazing inflow of just dope stuff that we didn't have the eyes and ears out there to go see and That's when you know it's working like if for anyone out there wants to create content Don't make your goal well known make it known well and you'll know It's working because you'll start getting more than your you're being asked for in these emails or DMS and Andrew I'm sure you get the same which is like people send you either interesting companies or deals or they want to come You know work for you in this they want to help you solve specific problems because they know you well They know what you're what you're interested in what you're what you're looking for more of dude I had a guy just recently Send me so he goes Hey, my website does this much revenue and this much profit and he told me all about it And I didn't reply and he goes what you don't believe me and he sent me a Google Drive with his tax returns
- like had his social and everything. And it was 100% his tax return. I mean, I guess it could have been photoshopped, but it goes, and then he was, I was like, see told you. That is very small boy stuff. That is absolutely small boy stuff. The tax returns, it was like $17 million of income. And he sent me multiple years. And it was hilarious. It was one of the best things. And I was like, you know, instead of like Casey and I set and Dave Portenoy used to do these awesome videos where they would unbox all the fan mail that they got. And it was actually really fun content. I'm like, we need to have like an unboxing or inbox. No, no, we should unbox your tax returns. People just send us their tax returns and we open it up and we react. We create a YouTube reaction channel just to your income and your business, to your P&L. Is that guy want to, does he want to sell or get you to invest or what was it? He wants to be friends. He was just wanting to be friends. He just wanted to be friends. You know, Joe Rogan has this like famous YouTube clip where he's read some quote from some guy which is like most, someone famous, but it's like most men lead lives of, you know, quiet despair or something like that. And he's like, it's so true. Most of you walking around, they just have this sadness in them.
- And there's a version of that for rich people, which is if you are rich but unacknowledged, there's something in you that just kills you. And I mean, we get this a lot for the podcast. So much. Where people are just like, hey, I just need to, like, it's like you go park at a mall or whatever. You're like, can you validate my parking? That's how I feel. It's like, can you validate my wealth? Can you validate my career? It's like, yep, here, let me give you the punch hole. Like this is amazing. You're way wealthier than me. You're way more successful to me. You're probably smarter than me. But they haven't, they don't have the platform or the audience where they get that sort of congratulatory thing. Like maybe the people in their life, they can't brag, do they can't tell their employees how well they're doing? You know, there's no need to go do a press tour about it. So it's like, that would be uncomfortable. But so then they just sort of like, damn, nobody, I won the game and nobody knows. Dude, we've had so many people, Sean, who we've mentioned and they've reached out to me. And I noticed that that, just that mention, it's they now view themselves as like a public figure. They start creating content and things like that. And I want to tell them like, hey, just so you know, you've already won and you're killing it.
- They start doing that. Everybody's asking me about my skincare routine. And it's like, oh, it's like, they get that little taste of that, that fame, that hit those likes. And they're like, I guess I should abandon this working formula that's generating mounds of wealth in order to write some threads, baby. And they start wanting to start. What's that? What's that quote? It's like, would you rather be the world's greatest lover and have nobody know or be the world's worst lover, but have everyone think you're the world's greatest lover? Right? I mean, these world's greatest lovers walking around. Dude, speaking of being a lover, Andrew.
- You have like a little bit of a five o'clock shadow right now and you've your jaws looking chiseled you look this is the best I've ever seen You look what's going on have you been good to work down what's going on here? Yeah, extensive facial reconstruction. No, I've just been powerlifting for the last six or eight months It's working They're coming through the riverside to Sam right now anyone who power lifts is just like automatically turned Sam on I'm not the I'm not the Sam Parr shirtless photos on Instagram level, but I'm getting there Okay, so that's another example. That's if you get there. Let's say let's say when you get there
- And you're just you're so proud of yourself, but now nobody knows everyone still thinks you're just a normal looking dude But now you know the truth are you gonna get your parking validated? Are you gonna post something? But maybe like you know You got to like you know do the fake fake like humble thing where it's like, you know I gotta be honest. I was so proud of myself I was really depressed about my body and nobody talks about this. So that's why I'm coming forward with these selfies Just I needed to be vulnerable here guys check this out Who's the who's the guy he was on Silicon Valley the Indian guy and he got Jack what's the man on Johnny the comedian? Yeah, like like think about that experience for him, right because he had the biggest version of that Yeah, I don't I've done that I've I personally have like progress photos and stuff and I showed my friends, but I would never I don't think I would ever Post I've seen them online. I can't do it. I think they look great. I've seen them Are you more or less less ripped than? Chamath who's you're he's an investor in your thing, right? Do you guys exchange, you know, I definitely am less definitely less ripped in Chamath No, no, no, no, I don't think so you guys are you guys are right around the same area He's just dark. So, you know darker always looks more cut, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, my problem is I've got a hardcore farmer's tan so my arms get dark and then my entire body is basically translucent You can see my heart beating through my best. So it's not the best for a six pack That's amazing. Yeah, you're like what white privilege have you ever seen? Alright, let's do some more I wanted to say one thing real quick you had said something that I thought was I want to say this because This is one of the most interesting observations I had about my own like investing misses That I like made a firm note to change So you talked about creating businesses off your off your P&L so you look at your expenses and you say oh We spend money, you know on sass fees. What if we could create a business is it by the way? Is the new one called buyer or is it called something else now?
- No, we actually started one con deal maker and because buyer did software, we sold it to ramp. They're doing that. We have to do something different. Right? So basically the story there was we, Chris and I were maniacal about negotiation in the early days, right? When you're the owner of a business, say you save 30 bucks, that's 30 bucks in your pocket directly. And what we noticed was as we, as we got bigger and bigger and bigger, we had managers and CEOs writing the businesses, they're comp based on hitting a very large number. And so, you know, 30 grand or 30 bucks doesn't really matter anymore. But to us, the owners, that really matters. And so we were like, okay, how can we make this easy for the CEO? Because nobody likes the discomfort of negotiating. I hate it. And so the idea, it's very uncomfortable. I don't like it either, right? I know all the tricks have done it. Now I just don't enjoy doing it. But if I can outsource it to some scrappy person who loves to negotiate a car or a house or a lease or whatever it is, I'll do that all day long. And so we created this business called deal maker, dealmaker.co. And instead of doing software, we're doing like office leases, furniture, insurance, like all the random stuff in your P and L and basically just CC them and they take a cut of whatever the savings are. And I just, this is the thing I wanted myself because I was going, oh my God, like I had the experience of, you know, when you're rich or people know you're rich, they will rip you off if they can, right? So a recent example is I got Wi-Fi installed in my house and they had to wire the house and do some stuff. It was tens of thousands of dollars. And I was like, holy shit, it's too late now. I could have just had like an Eero installed in a mesh network or whatever. But instead I did like the, you know, rich fancy thing and got it all custom wired, right? Another one is in our office, we got drapes and we got a quote and it was $20,000 for some white drapes. I looked at Ikea, we could buy them for like $2,000, right? So I'm just realizing that we have a target on our back. I think anyone who runs a business does, especially when times are good. And so I think having someone to negotiate on your behalf is a very good idea. How did you, how much did you fund this business with it? It looks cool. The site looks good.
- Yeah, I think it may be like 50k. Like I said, we don't put large sums of money into this stuff. We basically find really scrappy operators where we can basically say, look, we've got all the back office, all the structuring legal. It's ready to go. We'll build the website for you. You just need to take it and run with it. And we go typically like 50 50 or 70 30 depending on the amount of capital we have. Is it working? Yeah, so far. I mean, I think it's profitable at this point. You said you just need much to be possible. You just see deal makers. So you're like, when you're talking to your vendors or whatever, you just see see deal maker deal maker in. And it's like basically like, Hey, you know, here's my brother is going to beat you up.
- It's like think of it as like procurement department, right? So like if you go to Walmart, like we used to work with Walmart at Metalab and it would be like, okay here here's what we want We'd say like this is the number and then they send you to procurement and procurement is a guy who's literally a professional Negotiator who crushes you and they crush you in so many different ways, right? It's like your hourly rate is too high your payment terms, you know, you said 15 days We want 45 and so it's just about getting the most in my head I'm just imagining like a bunch of like young guys like like shaking in their boots like oh, we gotta meet mr Brook here, and he's like this scary guy and he walked it and it's just like Dork with like a horrible like half beard with like mustard on his white shirt that short sleeve and butt up like like a like Dwight and it just like the nerdiest guy ever and just like starts rubbing his nipples like thinking about a good deal Great, there's a great book called I will teach you to be rich by Rami It's Sethi and I read it like 15 years ago And he makes a really good point he goes look you not you don't get rich by paying attention to like lattes And like building budgets and like not buying lunch out you get rich by paying attention to these macro Big things in your life. So for example when you buy a house There's a massive difference between getting a 3% interest rate and a 2% interest rate But no one thinks like that and so this is the stuff you want to outsource to someone else and have them do it You know you buy your car you buy your house you get it on How does this this is by $20,000 a furniture? How are you actually pulling this off like how how what's the what's the what's the work Behind the scenes to do this deal?
- It's literally an army of guys who love to negotiate and we train them up. We give them all the books that we read and we have a process and they get C-seed and they go for it and they basically say, look, your first quote was X, we saved you Y, give us a cut of the savings and go for it. In some instances, they'll retain us. So, for example, let's say there's a company and they're like, we want to do a super thorough review of everything, then they might pay a retainer or something. But usually it's just being C-seed. My dad should work for you. My dad is incredible at this. He will like, but he's very unorthodox. He can't train this. Well, it takes time. Here's the thing is like you and I, like if we go to, I remember I walked into a car dealership and I go to the guy and I say, I have two hours. And if you can get me the car in two hours, I will just sign whatever you want, but I need it in two hours, right? That's the worst possible negotiating thing, but I value my time and I don't want to sign documents. I have a friend who will literally go to five of the same dealerships, gets quote from all them, name drop them to one another, walk out five times, do like 10 test drives, show the guy how rich he is in a variety of ways to know. So he knows he's serious. And then finally his he'll save, you know, $10,000, right? I'm just too lazy, but there's other people that where it's totally worth it. And the numbers are huge. He picks up the phone. Oh, yeah, Derek, I'll be there shortly. I'm just finishing up here. I don't think I'm getting what I want here. So I might go over there. Oh, you have it ready for.
- Well, that's great. I'm just gonna hang out here for 10 more minutes in case something changes. Like my dad will be on the phone with some company. But he does it for petty shit. Like he'll just try to get like, you know, like, you know, when you, like, like, you can negotiate with the grocery store. Yeah, no, literally. He'll call like the airline and just be like, you know, why is it? Why did you charge me for my seat? They're like, that's how planes work. And he's like, and then he'll be like, you know, I've been a customer for a long time. And they're like, and then he'll just pause and he'll just, most people will just bail because it's too awkward. He'll just sit in that shit. And he'll just be like, and then they'll be like, oh, that's, you know, we've loved having you certain. And he'll be like.
- long time. And then he's like, they're like, where are you going with this? This has nothing to do with the conversation about this. And he'd be like, yeah, this is just very nasty behavior. And he's like, whoa, nasty behavior. What are you talking about? Like nothing is happening. We just did the normal thing here. We just charged you for the product. And he's like, yeah, this is, it's just upsetting. And then like, okay, we got to go now. We need like a, I want a text folder of all these phrases. Just long time. Like you're a trunk. Trump will be like, you know, people are saying, people are saying it's great. They said it's great. You know, they're saying that. They're saying that. And he's just like keeps going with the statement is my dad. Dude, instead of. Well, so often it's just silence. Just being silent saying me. Like you said, throwing out one of those open ended statements and then just staying silent and holding the discomfort. And then often they will start to, you know, give on the price or whatever. And you just realize like most people will just avoid social awkwardness. Dude, you need instead of deal maker, you need to have like comp maker or salary maker. So many people, myself include news for salary when I was negotiating my salary for HubSpot when we sold the company. They, I remember my wife was in the room, but she was like on the other side of the computer screen so they couldn't see. And they're like, tell me a number. And they told me a number and I was like, yeah, whatever, you know, whatever, whatever's cool. My wife was on the other end like, what the fuck? Shut up. Don't you think it's all good during. That's actually a really good business idea. Maybe we should have a coach where it's like a coach. So it like, you know, you don't, because it'd be weird if it was like third party. I'm doing a comp review. This is Jerry from my procurement team. Well, here's how you get. But if you had that guy telling you like, do this, do this, do this. Dude, listen, here's why it could be cool is because I remember I got a speeding ticket recently during the pandemic in like rural Kansas from a driving cross country and they were doing zoom things. So like zoom, and I was like, oh, I'll fight the ticket because I actually think it's nonsense. And so I had a lawyer. I don't know if I'm breaking any laws here, but I had a friend lawyer and I would be like, Hey, I'm going to put you on speakerphone so you could hear what they're saying. And then just text me what you think I should say in court so I could fight this ticket and try to get off of it. And she was on the phone like listening to like, all right, ask them this. And I asked them this. So then ask them this. And the lawyer or the judge was like, wow, you really know what you're talking about. I was like, Oh, yeah, you know, like I just, I really didn't think I did anything wrong. And you really just need that for like when someone's just CC all emails, part of the salary negotiation or have them there like.
- listening to the zoom and like, all right, not say this, not say this. And then just give me half of the earnings that you just got gone up by. When I was at Twitch, they were like, yeah, the salary is this. And I was like, oh, and I just let them sit in it. And I was like, and they're like, they were like, sorry, did you say something? And I was like, no, just lower than I thought. And it was just like, I don't know, buying time. And they're like, well, you know, as I can you explain how the process works? I just, so instead of like saying, I want more or here's a different number, I was like, can you explain how you guys get to a number like this? Where does this number come from?
- And like, you know, where do babies come from? And they're like, oh, they don't know. And then they're like, and then they said the magic word. They're like, there's a, we have these bands, which is like a band is like code for like a range, which is code for like, we're trying to see how much of a sucker you really are. Like basically I was like, oh, so you're telling me for my role, there is a specific minimum and a maximum band of compensation that I could get. And you're offering me anything but the absolute top of the band or hey, better yet, have you ever gone out of band and gone higher? What situations would cause that to occur? They're like, well, somebody needs to vouch for it. Like they have to go to bat, they have to write a memo. I'm like.
- Cool. All right. Now I know what I'm going to go ask for and I basically just like work through the system But what you realize that these are all a negotiable and be like there's actually it's like playing a Robot, you know like that can only make certain moves on the board and you're like oh you can only go forward and backwards Oh great So I'm just gonna go around you over here because you're bound by these rules of like this is how the process has to work and And so you know at most companies you can get a lot more than you're currently getting what have you guys ever like thought About this wouldn't like you know my wife works at a big company She's been offered jobs at other big ten thousand twenty thousand person companies fit a hundred thousand person companies And I'm like Sarah what would happen if you just told the interviewer like hey look like Let's let's screw this place a little like just tell me the most amount that you can give me Yeah, no, I mean not really screws with like what like what's stopping you? They're like look I don't give a fuck. It's not my money. Yeah, let's just like let's let's let's let's let's rob this place If we can so let's just like I'm just gonna tell you like slide and I am across the table. Yeah, write down a number here
- that you wouldn't get fired for giving me. Why is this like 100,000th person employee who has the power to allocate certain dollars? Like they don't care. You know, it's not the company's money. And I've just always shocked me that the culture is such that like they are actually being honest in many cases to the employer when they could be like, look, I like you, you like me, here's the rules. I need you to tell me this and I can then give you this. You know what I mean? Well, they don't have an incentive. They're not your friend. They don't care.
- They're incentives to just do the basement and cover their ass. Like most people in big companies. Let's do, can we do one other topic? Yeah. And you pick the one that you had prepped that you're like, you'd feel like, oh, man, we need to get to that. So pick that one and let's do that. Okay. Well, let me do one that's applicable. We were talking about winter coming and I had a story I wanted to tell. So one of the other things, you know, obviously we're like.
- You know stress testing all the businesses were dialing in our P&L's were pulling excess cash into head office We're you know loading the elephant gun so to say we want to get ready for a big acquisition and winter and Two two like kind of interesting things. We're doing one You know this is very obvious if you have debt, you know lock in right even at a higher rate I think a lot of people are doing this thing where they're going well It was you know interest rates were at 3% I could have locked and then now they're at you know 5% I don't want to lock in and they're kind of anchored to that 3% thing to me It's about certainty I want to know that when I build a model when I stress test the business that I know that my interest is gonna be at 5% or whatever even if you know they go up or down or whatever. I just want that certainty
- The other weird thing we're doing, we've done this once before, is we're buying options on the stock market. This is kind of speculative, but I look at it as an insurance policy. So here's an example of what we did in 2020. We started freaking out about COVID. We're a little bit early on it. Chris and I locked down late January or early February. If you remember, everyone was kind of saying, oh, this might be a bit of a nothing burger up until March 1st or 2nd or 3rd, kind of in that zone. And so what we ended up doing is we're doing these stress tests and we're looking across all of our businesses. And at the time, a lot of our revenue came from our agency businesses.
- And we had these large Fortune 500 customers, but we were going, okay, what's the first thing all the Fortune 500s do? They pay everyone late. And so we're looking at, okay, we're gonna get some late payments that's gonna cause cash flow issues. We might also have some of our startup clients go out of business and they may just not pay us. And so we started looking at what is the number there that we wanna ensure? And it was like five or 10 million bucks where we were like, okay, these are all companies that may just not pay us. We might lose that revenue. And if that's the case, we're gonna have a bad year. We're not gonna have liquidity. And so what we did is we basically said, okay, in late February, we said, okay, if the S&P 500, the index of the 500 largest companies in America goes down by 20%, we will get a big payout. And so we bought for $500,000, put options that went out about a year. So if any time in the next year, the market dropped that much, we would get a large payout. And the idea is it's kind of like buying an insurance policy on your house, right? You pay this premium?
- You put the money out and you hope that you just pay that premium and nothing bad happens But if your house burns down they'll give you five million dollars to rebuild it And so what ended up happening is we bought these put options They went from being worth five hundred thousand dollars to seven million dollars all the sudden and Chris and I are like laughing Our asses off never had you know never bought put options never been through this or whatever So they go to seven million dollars and we're like holy shit. This is amazing Let's sell them right and so we sell them we cash in we take seven million dollars onto our balance sheet And then we look at each other and we go well this could be the worst recession of all time You know are we are we the guys who just sold our insurance policy like should we keep holding this? You know what if what if this is 1929 and the stock markets could really gonna go down 50% and the whole point of this is to have this insurance policy and sleep all at night now We don't have it and so we take all the money except for 500 grand We we took 500 grand out we took all the money and we rebed it
- and we lost everything. Because the Fed came in and the markets rebounded. Now there's two ways to look at that story. One is we got hit with Gambler's fallacy. Let's go in and we'll do one last roll at the roulette table. The way that I think about it is I go, I lost my premium, right? I paid for insurance and the bad thing didn't happen. Therefore I didn't deserve to get the $7 million payout. And the fact that we sold it is just a, yeah, it sucks that we had that money in our bank account for five days or whatever, but it really is irrelevant. And so the way to think about this, let's say that you own a SaaS business.
- And your entire net worth is in the SaaS business. And you currently, you've raised money at 20 times revenue or something. You might wanna find a SaaS business that's publicly traded that is a comp to you. And you might wanna buy out of the money, put options or buy a basket of those. And basically say, if the market gets crushed, that's probably an indication that the larger economy got crushed to or my part of the world got crushed. And businesses like mine are doing badly. And so it's kind of an interesting way to buy an insurance policy. It is certainly a little bit gambling, right? But it is an interesting way to sleep with that. Where'd you come up with the math of like, all right, 500k? Well, you can model these out. There's a website called Options Profit Calculator. And you basically say, this is the stock and it'll show you in a variety of scenarios. And so for example, on that one, I just said, okay, in previous recessions, a recession is defined as what more than- Like four quarters. 15% draw down over two quarters. Or whatever. I just said, look, if that happens over the next year, I will get a payout and I could look at the different payouts based on where it went. Are you buying any real estate right now?
- No, I hate real estate. Are you Sean? I'm real estate. No, not at the moment. I hate real estate so much that I don't build equity in my own houses. So I do interest only mortgages because I want everything in businesses because businesses, a business can earn a million dollars of revenue and then the next year do a hundred million dollars using creativity. There's no apartment building you can buy that'll do a million dollars of revenue and do a hundred million dollars next year. That's just not how do you qualify for an interest only loan? You just got to make a lot of money? I think you can do it via most banks. It might be the sort of thing where you have to have some sort of collateral or other assets or be at a larger scale. Are you fixed or you're just a little bit of a...
- Yeah, I'm fixed. Yeah, so then you got locked in at what rate? Like when it was back at 2%? I think I locked in at 5, right? I'm one of those people where I was like, you know, hey, let's lock in at 3, didn't do it, let it go too long, ended up locking at 5, but it goes back to I want to sleep at night. It's possible interest rates go back down to 2% and I feel like an idiot, but I want to sleep at night. I just want if interest rates go to 8%, 10%, which is maybe not high probability, but it's certainly possible historically. I don't want to deal with that. Sean, are you buying a house now?
- No, I just rented this place. So it's like a two year, three year rental. Yeah, I like renting. I like renting the place I live. Me too. I love it. For multiple reasons. But like basically buying your buying the house you own is not a great investment. Doesn't like there's no yield, right? You're you are the tenant. So so it's not like I think people can play those two things. Like if you buy property that pays you, okay, that's an asset. If you buy property, you live in and it costs you money. That's the liability, in my opinion. So so I think that's the first piece. Second piece is
- picking the place you like to live is not always the best investment. Like what are the odds that the best investment of a pretty significant amount of capital is the place my wife really likes the countertops. Like it's just like there's not going to be the place. Like that's not where the value is. And also you trust me. Yeah, you have people that put like 50 or even 90% of their personal net worth into a single investment, which is a house. And then they go, oh, it doubled in value over 15 years. And you're going, yeah, if you just bought an ETF, you would have had the same result. And if you bought an individual stock, you probably could have done way, way better. So to me, it's like if someone's completely, if they're not an investor at all, then sure, go buy a house all day, whatever the same is a reasonably okay investment. But if you're even remotely smart and you know how to read and you go and read investing books and stuff, I think it's crazy. I mean, I would just rent a house all day and put everything into equities and businesses.
- We're renting it too. I own a house in Austin because I wanted that to be my residence and whatever we did and I actually rent that house out now and I'm not there. I would much rather in the future for like the next 10 years, Sarah and I, even when we have kids, we're renting for sure. And I want to go a step further. I want to rent all my furniture too. So there's a company called Feather. Have you guys heard of Feather? You can rent furniture on that website, but it's only in certain cities and I intend to rent a place and I'll get a nice place and it'll cost me 10 to 15 grand a month and then I'll spend another two to $3,000 a month and rent all my furniture. I want to own nothing. I love that. It feels so much better not owning stuff. I was I'm on my way back now Austin and I was in Brooklyn for four months and I rented a furnished place and it was sick. It made me so much happier.
- I'm realizing like so over the last couple years like I bought like I have a house at a lake locally. I've got a place in Vancouver. I've got a house here and then the stuff and the management like just I have to have a staff that now manage all the houses right and I own them. I do this interest only thing but I do own them and I am responsible for them and it's just constant stuff breaking new furniture, hiring designers, doing renos, all this stuff. And so you realize pretty quickly like everyone thinks they want to have 10 palatial estates all over the world. But no like you're running it becomes yet another business to manage yet another P&L yet another group of people who you have to give opportunity to and have HR around and everything. It's you know don't cry any tears for me but yeah it's really annoying. Yeah I think everybody ends up a prisoner of a prison of their own making and so you know you want to design that prison to be what are you going to be a prisoner to is it your stuff?
- Is it your properties? Right? Like if I bought a fancy car and I live in San Francisco, I just be stressed all the time that it's going to get scratched or it's going to get broken into. And like, you know, it would net make me less happy and less free. And so it's like, where do I want to like optimize for? Is like more free and more happy? And so, you know, cool. I need to do some things to make that happen. Like maybe exercise as part of the prison I want to design, right? It's like, cool. I know that if I do this all the time and I make this a part of my routine and it's important to me and I don't miss it and I make time for it all the time. It costs me money and it's like hard, it's hard effort, but it has this payoff of how I get to feel at the end, how much more healthy I can be, how much more mobile I can be, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think it's not, people think like, you have to choose what you want or you got to choose what you want to do. I think it's also, you got to choose the like, you know, choose the constraints you're going to put on your body and your time and your, your self and your psyche, because you will have some and like, whether you chose them or not, that's up to you.
- Totally. I mean, you look at like any of these, there's all those sayings around if it floats or flies or other things, you know, rent it. And I think that should be applied to most things, frankly. And it's just a matter of, can you get the things you want? For the issue for me is being in Canada in a small city, we don't have furniture rental. There's not a lot of great high-end rental homes and stuff, but I'd be all over that if I could. Well, dude, thank you. This is awesome. I loved seeing you. I love seeing your face again. It's not like being belly to belly. I'll tell you that. It's not like being belly to belly, but dude, his face, your face has become a better face than the last six months. Your face is good looking. You're looking full, thick, tight, strong. Thanks, guys. Yeah. What's going on? You guys talked about, I know you did Camp MFM or whatever. Are you going to do more of that? Dude, you're really regret not going to that. You got the invite. You blew it, bro. I know. I know. I hate basketball. Dude, it was like Sean was the best player there, which we weren't. No one was that amazing. That's punching air right now. Yeah. No, Ben on the pod was like dunking on people. Nick Huber was great. Sean's really, really good, but besides that, we were all just like a bunch of war. I'm not throwing a vent at something I suck at. Sam's Camp MFM is going to be like running the 200 meter sprint. It's like, oh, I just happened to be amazing at this. Oh, you know, guys, there's a track on the street.
- Oh look, a squat rack. Andrew, what would be the version of that that you would do where it's like, the two staples are you're trying to have great interesting people that are curious to set of people coming. But the other is we're not just sitting in a room, looking at a whiteboard or a presentation, it's not a conference. So it's like doing something that's a passion that we like. And then the networking fills in the gaps in between that. The ins and outs, the bus ride there, the food, the whatever, but the focus is on some activity. What would yours be that you're like really interested in doing?
- I don't honestly, I'm not a big hobby person. I mean, like most entrepreneurs, I get obsessed with business and stuff and it's been a real challenge for me to find those things. I just did like, I do these forum groups where I've been in some of these groups for like 10 years, five or six guys, we go into a room once a month, talk about everything that's going on in our business. Who runs it? I do. I used to be an EO and then I just started doing it myself and we just did a forum retreat and we went to Whistler. So beautiful mountain and we all went hiking. We'd go hiking all day, go do cold plunges, exercise during the day. So there's activities and there's something about being in a group specifically with other dudes where your sweating and your heart rate is going and you're talking about what's going on in life that feels really good. Did you do your day when would you? Did you do your day when would you? I was like, actually, yes. Yes, someone actually did his ass whip. We went to a spa and someone got an ass whip. Yeah, but they did. But we did this thing where we would do dinners and we'd have this pack of cards and we would just pull random cards and be really fucked up questions. Like what's a rude word your parents would use to describe you or how have you let someone down in life and...
- I just love that kind of stuff right so for me it's about how do you create things that facilitate deep interesting conversations? Ideally with people you have something in common with so there's a shared bond, but did you like I mean I'd be down a little car Or whatever you're decking you're like alright guys. I have a question Should we kiss right now? Oh my god The deck said it That retreat sounds like that was too easy sorry I'm working on my dad humor

Asking Colin _ Samir How To Make $1,000,000 On YouTube [PHYMQINvvmE].txt

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- You just explained that like you're a machine learning thing tagging it like extremely visually compelling. Yes. Yeah. Hi Engagement to the end like I've seen I've seen too many videos at this point. I have to put them in the buckets Colin and Samir do you guys know what you're getting into do you know what this is at all I? Thought this was a podcast about your curt pro curment. Oh All right
- Yeah, not that office supplies. I don't even know how to say the word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Once you get once you get around us, you know, that word becomes a problem. Right. And Ben is the systems integration guy, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I got it. Yeah. And so give a give y'all story. So I kind of know a little bit of it, but let's assume people listen to this. Don't know it, which is my way of saying I kind of only have no it. But give it. Give me all story. Yeah. So I'm Samir, by the way. This is my voice, if you're listening. I graduated college in 2011 and I went to school to study film and digital media. And I grew up in LA. So I was like really into the film business. I wanted to be a storyteller. I wanted to find a way to become a filmmaker. And that was a really challenging thing. You look in the song. So so how did you how did you swing this? I'm going to be a filmmaker. Well, he's good looking though, too. I mean, he looks like an LA person. I know, but parents don't care about that. No, you're right. I mean, I remember the moment when I called my mom and I was like, I'm not going to.
- Be a business major. I'm gonna be a film major and it was a scary moment. I think for them But I was a bad high school student. I was not good in high school. I was just not good in college I didn't do homework. I was not someone who Really lived up to the standard of what it was to be an Indian kid whereas my brother was student body president He became a lawyer like he he followed more of a traditional path I think they had noticed that I was so unconventional that it was like all right at this point do whatever But my dad's also really unconventional. He's an entrepreneur. He's a fashion designer like he's he's different So I think there was a bit of like okay. I mean you seem confident figure it out
- And so for me, when I graduated school, I had an issue with being someone who wasn't good in school. I wasn't great at being an employee. That was really hard for me. I worked as an editor on a film called Ides of March in Hollywood. And I just didn't like it. I didn't like doing a single task. I didn't like doing one thing. And I had become aware of YouTube primarily because I was up in Northern California in college and was really fascinated by it. So I felt like I had all the tools to just upload a video and just make something.
- And the subject matter that I picked was the community that I was a part of when I grew up. I grew up playing the sport of lacrosse. I played lacrosse in college and I decided to spin up a YouTube channel called the Lacrosse Network. And that is the origin of my first upload onto YouTube really outside of like student films. And at the same time, Colin was uploading a series or to upload a trailer for a series about the Colorado club lacrosse team. I'll let him pick up from there. But this is this is in 2011 just for frame of reference. Let me jump in with one thing. I've seen a video where you said something dope. Colin, you go, my first video only had I don't know if you said like a hundred views or a thousand views. You're like, but Samir was one of them. And that one view changed my life because then you guys ended up joining forces. You guys do a bunch of cool shit fast forward till today. You guys got this like.
- Pretty ball or YouTube channel and this is like you get to do the thing you want to do you get to like I don't know If I could do anything I'd probably be like a professional basketball player That'd be like the the the peak of like getting to play and like be super successful at the same time but I feel like the second best thing might be being a youtuber and And so like you know, that's I love that idea though that like Okay, I only had a hundred views or only had a thousand views But like that one view changed that one of those views changed my life. I thought that was like an amazing
- little like nugget. Yeah, I think for me, it was a real lesson in community, probably unlike Samir, you know, I actually was a really dedicated student, almost probably to a fault. And so when I finally had this experience in college of, you know, buying a camera and being a little bit more of a creative, you know, putting out my first video, which was about the lacrosse team, having it not necessarily be a huge success, but you know, it did connect me with all these like-minded people, one of which was Samir. He sent me an email that day.
- Basically saying if you're going to be making these videos, even though you just started, why don't you put them out on my network because I'm trying to aggregate tons of people who are fans of the sport. So, you know, from that point on, I was like, I don't even care about my past education. I am so interested now in just telling stories and having it connect with people. But that didn't, the lacrosse network, that was kind of a failure, right? Like, it got you to like a certain point and then you're like, shit, this isn't going to pay the bills. Is it because people, right? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think it didn't, it didn't, it definitely didn't pay our bills in the first three years, right? It was something that was not a failure, but you know.
- Yeah, I mean, like long story short, we sold the company in 2014, which was really positive. So that was a success for us. But like the pathway to get there was really challenging because there's no business model really surrounding YouTube in 2011, 2012. When we tried to get advertisers, no one even understood that spending money on YouTube was a reasonable thing to do. That was like the only way people could understand us was a video production company. So what we did to make money is we did creative jobs for people like service jobs. Okay, yeah, well, you've seen that we can make pretty good videos online. We can make you a video or we even did even more creative jobs. We made websites for people. We designed stickers for one company. It was just kind of like, oh, these guys are like creative internet people. So if we have a creative internet task, we'll ask them to do it. And then what was beneficial to us was that YouTube, the company was very interested in what we were doing. And they basically came to me and they said, if you can secure live rights, we'll really get behind you because we're trying to explore live sports on YouTube.
- And that's what I did. I got rights to high school games first, then college games, then we eventually distributed pro games and figured out how to acquire live rights and get YouTube behind us and that kind of grew our profile and got us to the point where we got acquired by a sports media company. And a lot of that, you know, I would say it was an aqua hire to be very clear. Like the benefit of that was that, you know, there was cash exchange for our company, but really the majority was in, you know, we had salaries and stock and
- we got to actually have like very comfortable stable jobs pursuing YouTube and exploring not only It's a company called whistle. Yeah So by the way, I want to say something here YouTube started in like what 2005 something like that Yeah, and you guys are saying it was 2010 2011 and you're like it really wasn't like Yeah, well a well trodden path of like be a youtuber make money doing this This can be like a business and this can be the platform versus the way you guys use it What's kind of like it's kind of our portfolio and we'll get some clients on this and it'll be a launch pad Maybe maybe we'll get picked up by somebody else bigger like real traditional media that will pay us That's kind of crazy right? That's like six years into the game and that's why like right just a bigger point about like let's say crypto right now It's like these things take a long time before they become a thing before it's like what YouTube is today Where it's like obvious now that you could be a youtuber you can make a bunch of money You could be mr. Beast whatever it's it's still not even obvious if you don't think it's that obvious Yeah, I don't think it's that obvious. There's examples now But like I watch YouTube on my Apple TV and that's TV to me most people only only Only teens do that and like I'm the old guy most people I don't think do it like that, but I think like so I think it's still pretty like
- Not a thing yet. I do think if you take a step back and look at it, it operates exactly like most media companies. And that's like, if you just take business models from the past, like how the radio operated or even how, you know, television operated, like any media company, a magazine, like that's how YouTube operates too. There's a really unique version of advertising when it comes to YouTube in that we are uploading and the platform will actually pay us without us having to interface with clients, without us having to build a media kit, without us having to pitch anyone, which I think causes creators to not fully understand the business they're in because they don't have to pick up the phone and sell their audience to someone or sell what they're doing to a client if they're primarily based on the ad sense that YouTube's giving you. When we were first starting out,
- AdSense was absolutely insignificant because our audience was extremely niche. It was small and YouTube was not that developed. There were people making good money from AdSense checks on YouTube, which is, again, the money that YouTube will pay you part of their partner program. But that's never been that significant of a check for us because we've always been very niche. So we've had to learn the business of media and apply that to what we're doing with YouTube. And I think that maturity is starting to catch up right now in this space and why a lot of creators are able to build businesses today and why there are roadmaps.
- And fast forward to now you have the La Crosse networks, no longer the focus, it's the Colin Simir Show, and it's basically this, it's a YouTube channel, you have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and you kind of talk about like creator economy stuff, but I think that's a little bit niche, but it's like it's a little bit more than that, but you've got these like really highly produced interviews that you do with people, but then you also have all these like clips and you do this thing where you're sitting in your car and you like give analysis of like different videos of either going viral, but it seems like you do a little bit more than that, I watch it all the time. And so is that, how big is that business at this point just to give the audience like a little, who don't know you like to a little sense of how legit you are?
- Sure. Yeah. So yeah, as you mentioned, we were, you know, we're on our way to to million subscribers where we have 800 and I think 13 as of this recording. The business is myself calling and we have four full-time team members who work on the actual channel. That's myself calling. We have three editors as well as a production manager and then a data and insights person who works and looks at like kind of how everything's tracking from an analytical perspective. And then we also have a
- a newsletter and there's a team of three that works on that. Two people, one general manager of the newsletter, one more in business development and sales, and then a writer who's on staff for the newsletter. So the total like people who work in the college in the ecosystem is 10 and it's split across two media properties, one being the YouTube channel and one being the newsletter. I don't know if you guys know this. And I would say, I would say too, we're primarily supported with advertising, advertising based business. Our biggest clients are Samsung, Shopify, Jelly's Mac and other creator economy companies. What's the revenue now? Can you reveal or no?
- Yeah, we're, I would say we haven't been super 100% transparent with like exact numbers, but we're a seven figure business. Are you getting close to eight? No, no. Do you guys think this like gets there? Like basically sometimes you get in a business and it's what got us here won't get us there. And sometimes we just got to keep on keeping on. And so, so from a business model point of view, is it, if we just keep, okay, we're at 813,000 subscribers today, we're probably tracking to 2 million next year or whatever it is. And the ads will just keep scaling and this will keep going. This will be the business forever or is it like we're going to have to come up with a second act at some point.
- So I think there's decisions you can make as a creator to get there. Like we are friends with a lot of creators who are pushing towards that eight-figure business mark, right? And a lot of that is at just ad-supported business. There's other creators who have launched course companies or education, Directed Super Content, Patreon, right? Subscription platforms. And you can absolutely get there. It's just honestly, I think it's based on there's this moment as an artist or filmmaker, or someone who wants to express something where you go from, like I mentioned, I studied film. I was very interested in being a filmmaker, but you go from being a filmmaker to a media maker. And I think that those are two different things and you have to decide, like Colin and I have to decide what we want the lifestyle to look like. I think you guys mentioned, I think it was your mother-in-law Sam who said, I like taking Tuesdays and Thursdays off.
- I think that's a really important thing for all creators and all entrepreneurs to look at and be like what what's enough For me like what what is what you know what I want to do and I think Colin and I this is like a relatively recent Success that we're having with this channel and we're trying to constantly evaluate Which parts of this are really enjoyable and which parts of this start to feel like okay now? We're just making stuff to make stuff and I think we have to find that balance of How to scale what we're doing but also recognize like we got into this because we we wanted to make something and I think it's okay To lean in to be like maybe there's part of this That's like we just want to tell the stories that we're excited about and yes There's a ton of opportunity, but it might not match what the lifestyle that that we eventually want
- Who is crushing it? So like you mentioned some creators do XYZ like what's his name? Ali Ali Abdullah. He's coming on on the pod soon. Oh, I think I think he reveals his numbers where it's like, okay, my My course business is gonna do like two million dollars this year or something like that Yeah, where he basically is like, you know become a youtuber or some shit like that. It's like it's a course That's around it's a six million. I think he's tracking to six million this year. Okay, amazing youtuber Academy I signed up for a time of you to Academy. So that's the so that's the course he does and so that's an example of like Somebody's crushing it and the course model then Sam you've talked about the guy who does like bring a trailer Or which one was it the car one? Ductomoro You guys have ductomoro so we bought a car from Carson bids for one of our two
- Me too amazing great. So he is a car guy with at this point two or three million subscribers and he has a In auction website for cars that could potentially be a nine figure company. I actually think and Sam Was that launched off the channel or before the yeah? No, he had the channel for five years maybe many years I Think the unique thing that we're experiencing right like this is Entrepreneurship the difference is we build an audience first and then solve how to you know monetize that audience through products Services subscriptions whatever right? Whereas a lot of traditional entrepreneurship is build the business first and then try and find customers or audience second And so I think that's when you look at like creators how big this can become It's really like how for a lot of creators who built successful audiences and niche audiences It's like how big you you want it to become the thing that's holding back the creator space right now I think is is operators like really good business operators to surround creators because
- To make, you know, like to make on a consistent cycle when you are the subject of your videos It doesn't really allow you to operate as you know the the the business admin the operator the person who's pushing Cars and bids the the website and and that business while you're making the content at the same time Ask your question again Sean Yeah, so what are some other example? So let's take those two so I'll have doll with the courses Doug tomorrow with you know has a car channel then launches a car auction site Who else has done something cool? What are some other cool stories of people crushing it that I like put started with content started with audience and then have done Have created a cool business off their YouTube channel that that's impressive because I don't particularly want that that like are not Mr Beast the ones that you know we all know about yeah Yeah, I would say an interesting one that keeps coming up is Cassie Ho she started blog a lot ease so Like fitness yoga instruction on YouTube and now she has two separate product companies that are both eight figure Companies write some air. Yep. Yeah, there's one. That's like an apparel company for athleisure and then one that's like yoga mats And like shit. I think like that's that is another yoga creator called yoga with Adrian who started teaching you love for you She's so great, but her subscription platforms amazing, right? Like she's awesome man. I'm a customer Yeah, have you seen this one Shawn? Her name is yoga with Adrian She's got like the girl next door look where she's like not intimidating, but she's definitely beautiful And she's based out of audit Austin and she does yoga with her dog and she's very calming She's the best man. I love you. I see this
- There's another creator named Amanda Rachley, and she started creating content with bullet journals So she was showing like how she was setting up her bullet journals how she was organizing her days And then she's launched a line of stationery and of journals and that's become her primary engine of business And like I think those are a few specifics. I think yes theory when it comes to merchandise and apparel I think they've done an incredible job with seek discomfort And building a brand that can stand alone outside of the videos
- And I believe they also just went into the fulfillment business. So they not only have their own merch line, they also do the printing, the warehouse of a payback for other creators too, right? That's right. I think it's really smart when creators start businesses like that where they say, okay, if we're going to solve all these problems independently and not go with a partner, then we can work with other creators to do the same. You want to think people should be doing that you don't see. So I have a couple ideas. If you don't have one, I'll throw a couple of lecture. You could tell me if they're why people are not doing them. Maybe they're bad ideas. But what do you think creators should be doing that they haven't yet gone into that realm yet? It's not common. So I actually have a perspective that I think.
- I think I'm curious why we haven't seen creators band together, especially like let's imagine the e-commerce space Like why have we not seen 10 creators come together and launch an e-commerce retail store? like that to me where they can bring a ton of traffic to it and and Pair together and all their audiences are maybe on one brand Yeah, I think that's exactly what I was gonna say Discovery store type of thing 100% or even like one singular brand it's happening with this brand called cloak in in like kind of the gaming world But like why not just if if every creator had a piece of this one apparel brand like couldn't you make the next big? Apparel brand or could you make the next urban outfitters if if you know Emma Chamberlain plus five creators came together and made a retail store I feel like specifically in beauty and fashion and cosmetics Like there's such an opportunity to band together and have one brand because there are so many like standalone cosmetic brands for a singular creator
- But it can really happen in any like in gaming. This was I always thought this should happen in gaming. So my company got acquired by Twitch. So when I was there, I was looking at like, okay, what are these creators doing? One brand that stood out was there's a brand called G Fuel. I don't know if you guys have heard of it. It's very like gaming niche, but like basically Sam, I don't know if you've heard of this. It's like, I don't know what you it's like a Red Bull. It's like it's sort of like an energy drink, but a G fuel is in gamer fuel. So it's like, oh, this will be, you know, give you energy, help you stay focused when you're going to have those long gaming sessions or whatever.
- And it looks like a Gatorade who knows what's in it. And the guy who started it, he's like this absolute like 50 year old bro, like he's like 55 and just like jacked to the gills and you're like, oh wow, this is like, I don't know what's happening in this company, but I don't wanna drink this. But like what would happen is they would go to, they were like, oh dude, these Twitch stars have influence but the traditional brands aren't going to them. They're going to Instagram and YouTubers first. So he went to them and he was like, hey, I'll make a flavor for Dr. Disrespect. I'll make a flavor for Ninjal, make a flavor for each one of these. And you'll have your own shaker that you'll like kind of promote that has like your brand on it. And like he had these like, he got like nine of them to be like the sponsored athletes basically. And they grew pretty big. I don't know what they were doing exactly. If I remember correctly, it was definitely over 20 million. It might be over 50 million in sales that they were doing just off of like kind of this one real niche channel. And what I thought about was like, and then each of the individual creators was doing their own thing. Like Ninja made a mouse, a gaming mouse. And then somebody else made another like a coffee or a stimulant or whatever. And I was thinking the same thing. If these guys just got together and the 10 big ones got together.
- And they just launched a gaming accessories thing like the best keyboard the best mouse the best whatever Like they would be selling hundreds of millions a year if they like put their powers together captain planet style I think that goes back to like the lack of operators in the space right now And I think it's starting to catch up But I do think that you know There's a lot of short-term revenue to be had and that's really exciting and there's a lot of right There's a like quick cash to be made in our space that I think now It's probably just happening where you're starting to look at these longer term and there like you said there's more roadmaps You know of course, you know, Mr.. Beast is in my opinion singular like it's he's not you can't there's not gonna be more Of him, but you can look at some of the stuff he's doing with oh Feastables is interesting or even Logan Paul and oh they made prime instead of partnering like that's interesting and they how's that going together?
- I'm not positive. I would, I guess from what they say, it's going well. So that's, that I think that's all we know. I'm not positive. I will say it tastes great. We bought it here and it's like a fantastic drink, but I have absolutely no idea how the business is going. I would say too, it seems like he's following the Beats by Dre trajectory of making sure to get it in the hands of celebrities and famous people with his podcast. Anytime he has someone on, they have prime in their hand or they try it and they like it. It's like a good strategy. When you guys got to, how long did it take to get to 800,000?
- I think at least four years, right, Carl? It was four or five years. Probably four years to get to 200 and then one year to get to 800. Yeah, so let's take this journey. One second, I have a question on this. So if we strip away hard work and talent, because let's say those are like core ingredients that you guys have, but like every journey has like inflection points, like something where something just broke your way or you realized something before others did or like the one thing went viral and that kind of helped step you up to another level. Because like if I go to the channel today, I see the top thing is like a video with Mr. Beast has 10 million views, right? And I'm like, how the hell did they get Mr. Beast? Like that's a big poll. Yeah, that was a great interview.
- So what was the things that were like besides hard work and consistency and talent? What made you guys grow and what made it work? How do you get to a million subscribers and Mr. Beast doing a interview? My first answer is time and market I think like we've been in this market for 10 years and that has introduced us to a lot of people that have created Opportunity for us as we started to grow right like Jimmy shot us a message Jimmy as Mr. Beast He shot us a message when we made a video a couple years ago and he was like that was a cool video and we struck up a relationship And we started talking about YouTube because we were both really into it and authentically into it and that created a situation that you know when we got to a point where we had an interview show or a talk show We had a relationship with him such that we could fly out get access in North Carolina to his new facility And like he was excited to be on our platform and we had that relationship And I think even when I think about an inflection point for our business prior to that was when we you know really were weren't
- catching that much traction from a sponsorship perspective. But we had made some connections to the point that Samsung was looking for creators to partner with on like year-long, ambassador ship deals. And our names were up there because of the relationships we had created in the market. So I would say the fact that we just stuck in it for 10 years has introduced us to people that created opportunity as, I would say we are late learners and we've like figuring out YouTube took a really long time for us. But as we figured it out, we were in a position where we had enough relationship that our first couple interviews are like Marques Brownlee, Mr. Beast. Like we were able to have these creators on who we had developed relationships with prior that now fit into a format that we had landed on. And collaboration on YouTube is like, that's how you grow.
- You know, put time in market. Time and market is an awesome way. That's an awesome phrase. I've actually never heard that before. Time and market is a great way just because typically we would, Charlie and I would just say like, well, I'm just like in the mix. And I was just like, I've been doing it for a while. Yeah. Time and market is a far more like formula. People use it for investing, right? Like a buffet, I think said, you know, instead of timing the market, what matters is time and market. And it sounds pretty similar for what you guys are talking about. I would add too that it's time in underserved market. Because, you know, the reason that Jimmy or Mr. Beast even reached out to us is because no one was really talking about creators or about the YouTube space for a long period of time. And we continued to talk about it while no one really was giving it the time of day. So I feel like it's not that we were just in the market. It's that we picked an underserved community. And so we happened to be that place where creators could turn.
- That's so In crypto that's happening right now like I created this crypto media company not long ago called the milk road and It's doing really well, but we're so new and crypto is now cool So you don't get credit for being there when it's cool. There's a guy There's a show called up only that's on YouTube. That's started by this this guy Kobe and Ledger or whatever in it. They've been doing it for a long time back when like there wasn't a lot of heat in crypto They were still just every week going on and is talking about whatever shooting the shit talking about crypto And so now when
- famous people want to go hit the circuit. They're like, well, we gotta go there because they have the respect of people because they were hanging out here before the tourists arrived. And you can't beat that. No, I agree with that. I think like, we watched the people go from being not interested in what we were doing on YouTube to extremely interested. And then a lot of those people who are interested in the creator economy, I think, shifted over to web three. And so like, I think you'd like time and market when you're just like, actually, like this is the, this is the career we've chosen. Like we're gonna be in this. We enjoy this. This is what we wanna do. This is what brings us fulfillment. Then, you know, wherever this goes, the ups and downs of it, we're just here, right? And so like, I think that is, that is an important thing as you're going on your entrepreneurial journey.
- So right now Sean and I have a really like our our podcast is doing great We're not we're a pot. We're like a podcast that sometimes it's posted on YouTube and and so podcast numbers are first but we've each toyed around the idea of like maybe we should give this YouTube thing a try like maybe like separately like in our own like our like, you know, like we'll pick a niche and go at it and I've thought about it, but I'm like, you know, I'm not ready to go whenever I'm gonna do it I'm gonna go all in on it and like maybe hire someone to help me do it Can you give me and Shawn some advice on like look here's like the here's like the table stakes in order to get to a hundred or 200,000 subscribers inside six or twelve months here's like the the absolute minimum and Keep in mind like assume that budget. This isn't for most people assume that budget is no big deal Like we're willing to spend money. Yeah
- So here's something that I think is really important is like you're creating a video podcast. So in your mind, the thought is there's not much marginal cost in posting this video to YouTube. You're already we're producing a video and audio right now. There is not marginal production cost. There is marginal distribution cost. You're going to have to spend time thinking about how to distribute this show on YouTube and how that differs from audio. Yeah. Think beyond. So think of it. It's like Sean does. You're a fitnesser. Okay. Okay. You got it. Sam, but John has one on anything building houses. I don't know.
- Yeah, I think like you do need to go all in. You need to understand the audience that you're serving. And most importantly, you need to understand packaging and what works on YouTube from a search perspective and what works on YouTube from a click-through rate perspective. All of YouTube is click-through rates and then retention. Right? Tell me what works. Yeah. What works? No, I mean, you're saying understand. What are like, what are you getting at? What's the niche that you would want to tackle, entrepreneurship?
- Let's say I'm just going to make, let's say I bought a bunch of, I'm buying Airbnb's, let's just use that for an example. So I'm buying Airbnb's, yeah, short term rentals. Yeah, so I think like you would want to go long from a packaging perspective on basically how to make money through Airbnb rentals, right? So maybe you would create a series that's like zero to a million dollars in revenue on Airbnb rentals, episode one, right? And it's, and I wouldn't title it like that. It's like, call, I don't know if you have ideas on titles, but I think brainstorming titles would be our first step from an audience perspective. Because you're trying to transform people to understand how they can do the same thing, correct?
- Yes, that would be my assumption. Yeah, so call. I guess let's spitball back and forth titles on something like that. Well, even that first thing you said, that's a story frame, right? Like zero to a million in rental income. So you set the stakes already. Like the whole man on this mission, which I think is not what most people would just naturally think to do. But for you guys, it's like, well, if you have a mission, people are gonna wanna see if you can do it or not and how to do it. They might want that too. Yeah, I think for that example too, people are doing that and that's not a problem that actually can be to your advantage. A lot of times we tell creators, if there's something you wanna talk about, search it into YouTube, sort by most viewed and see what are the videos that are getting a million views. There are definitely videos about the business of Airbnb's, buying Airbnb's that have over a million views. So I think that's a good place to start in your journey is like, what's currently working? And then what are those videos about? Like I think the key for you would be, how can I actually make sure that when I get this title thumbnail that's pretty sensational about making a certain amount of money or converting some house or something like that, how can my video actually meet the expectation of the person who clicks?
- You know that it's not maybe you just sitting down talking about it retroactively, but you know Maybe it is a video that took you two months to make or three months Who knows you know, but it's got to match that expectation and be actually impressive. I Think probably packaging it around like I made a million dollars on Airbnb In 30 let's say let's cut the stakes to 30 days and basically over the next 30 days You're gonna track how you went from not making any money on Airbnb to even like how do you make money on Airbnb? So I think that's that's the packaging you'd have to to fall into and then you'd have to meet that expectation
- You'd actually have to do that. And then I would think about like, where are people currently getting Airbnb education outside of YouTube? Are there places that are actually really popular where those communities already hang out? Where if you made your video, you could seed it to them. Or it would be a success if they started talking about it and sharing it organically. What would your early team be? Like thinking about where on the internet do they exist? What would your early team be? Would you have just an editor, someone filming you? Would you have a thumbnail maker? What would your skeleton bare bones team be?
- For you, I think if you said that money's no option, right? That's not really true. Yeah, just for the sake of argument, yes. Yeah, I would hire a thumbnail designer who is part YouTube strategist. Most thumbnail designers have a lot of YouTube strategy in them as well because they're so linked. So yeah, I would recommend trying to find someone who really deeply understands packaging and has seen things that work. I'm going to read some titles and maybe you guys can guess the viewership in this exact category.
- How to make your first million on Airbnb? I mean, I would think that's over a million. Yeah. 900 views. Oh, 900. Yeah. You can make a million dollars per year on Airbnb in 2022 with the you and all caps. Oh, I hate that that probably has views. I'm gonna say low. I'm gonna hope and pray it's low. Is it low? 18,000. Okay. How much money in my Airbnb?
- I would say that's medium. How much money my Airbnb made in its first month? Hi. That one crushed it. That's probably Shelby Church. Is that Shelby Church? That's Shelby Church, 235. I love her. So I think already through that exercise, you're starting to understand- I watched that video, by the way. That's how I know. She's awesome. She's awesome. I love her. Do you know who Shelby is, Sean? No. She's amazing. She's great. Yeah. She's amazing. Shelby Church's amazing. That's where do that exercise in packaging. Like just go through all those. And then the ones that are not working, upgrade the titles yourself. Be like, what was wrong with that title? What was wrong with that framing? Did that not match the expectation? And then for Shelby, like what was right about that? That framing is really great. How much money my Airbnb made in its first month? Great. Me and Sean talked to this woman named Rebecca. Sean, what was her last name? Rebecca Z. She's got a- This is Zemarolo.
- something like that. She's got like across all of her things, maybe 10 or 15 million subscribers. She makes content for like 12 year olds, not like little kids, but 10 and 12 year olds where it's like plays and stuff. And she was, I was asking her and I was like, man, she was like, yeah, like I, we got to like a million subscribers pretty quickly. I think like within a year or two years. And I was like, that's amazing. How'd you, you know, what was the thing? And she was explaining it to me and I was like, okay, so basically what you're telling me is that you just like quit your job and like you just made this like your nine to five and you just focused on it. And she was like, yeah, like no one else treated this like a job and this was like, I'm at the office at nine. I'm working until six, seven, eight, nine, 10 sometimes, but I'm showing up every single day. And I'm just like, I'm working. And versus most people, they're just kind of like dicking around. It's like, oh, I'll get to it when I get to it.
- Yeah, and I think studying as well, like really being a student of the platform, like that's it. That took five minutes to look at some of the top performing in that category and dissect what you thought was good, bad, what worked, what didn't work. You know, I think you have to do that first. It's like market research. I can find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform. So it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sinks spreadsheets or doing databases. HubSpot grow better. Is there a good tool that shows you search volumes on YouTube? So like, you know, you could do this with Google search. You can figure out how many people are searching for these keywords. Can you do that within YouTube?
- Yeah, there's a tool called vidIQ that you can use. There's, we do it on Google a lot because again, like Google and YouTube are obviously connected, right? So it's like, if the Google is searching enough, like Google trends, Google trends. Google trends, that's all you use. Yeah, yeah, we'll use Google trends to track like, okay, it's this keyword better than this keyword or people searching this more than this. But on YouTube specifically, we do use vidIQ sometimes. And tell you like how competitive maybe that keyword is. Is there a lot of search traffic on YouTube for that? And it'll also show you the top videos for that keyword.
- So if you go into vidIQ and you type in Airbnb, you're gonna start to see like, okay, what are the trending videos in this category? What's working? What's not working? What are the thumbnails that are working? So yeah. And do you guys like vidIQ is a great example of, as you guys try to be successful on YouTube, you're like, ah, this is so, I wish it was easier to do this type of research and not just see what's popular, but how competitive it is. And just quickly show me the top videos in that thing, right? So vidIQ becomes this piece of software that you guys might pay for, you know, is useful to you guys. What are some business, what are some tools or things you guys wish existed? I know that's a little bit of a hard question, but like, there's, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who listen to this that will like hear that be like, oh, I could build that. I could build something like that where you guys aren't gonna have the time to build it necessarily. But what are some opportunities you see that could serve YouTube creators? The two things I wish existed when we first started and that I still think there's opportunities for our legal zoom for creators and TurboTax for creators.
- creators. And I know those two things exist for entrepreneurs, but something with a more creator lens. And I know there's people starting these now, but I think those are really helpful, especially on the tax side. I think a lot of creators, like, because they're, you just have this influx of freelancers, essentially, who are now starting to like, they, it goes really fast from, okay, I made a little bit of money on YouTube to, okay, wait a second, what do I, what do I do now? I just made a ton of money on YouTube. So I think some of that would be really helpful of, you know, the, the backend business side is what you need the most help with. If you're into it, like, if you go nine to five into YouTube, you're going to figure it out. If you're really into it, you're going to figure out your niche, your category, how to find audience time and market, baby, time and market, like, you're going to figure it out. You might have to head your bets and have another job while you figure it out, or have another source of income. But if you're really into it, you're going to figure it out. It's, it's the back end of, you know, the, the younger, like, being 21 and, and all of a sudden landing, figuring it out really quickly and then being like, what do I do now? So I think some of that business ops, that business admin stuff would be really helpful.
- to help with creators, to make sure things are like clean and growing right. You were talking about like partnering or like, I mean, what you were saying was about operators, creators need more operators. And in my head, I'm like, oh, that's cool. You just like someone like me who knows how to operate a business, I just partner with someone like you who's like famous and we do like a 50, 50 split and I build a business that you just keep getting famous. And I agree that that's a great business. But in that example, as well as the example in your guys' partnership and as well as just like a normal person who just wants to bail, what happens if one of you guys dies or you get in a fight or you want to quit? Is your business just going to die? You know, are you going to be done? Do you think about this? I know Jenna Marbles, I think is huge on YouTube. I'm pretty sure she just bounced. Like she just said, I'm out. Same with Casey Neisett, he goes, I don't feel like making videos. So just your money just go away.
- I think creators are a lot like athletes. Like I think the term creators and athletes are kind of like, you can think of them in similar ways. So it's kind of like, if we stop playing, like yeah, your income from playing is gone. I think it's about figuring out that the businesses that can support you outside of creating videos. Cause the reality is like, you can't sell Colin and Samir and expect someone else to operate it. If one of us is gone, this version of Colin and Samir is done. That's the reality. But the things we build, it's a lot of why we built a newsletter. Cause like we were like, okay, that follows the similar value prop. It's similar in creating content. I'd say Sam, like inspired by a lot of what you did. And you know, like, hey, we're educating people about this space. We think we could do it in this way. We can hire writers, we can scale our voice and our thoughts. And if we're gone, that thing can operate. It's not called the Colin and Samir newsletter. You know, it's called the published press for a reason. With that goal in mind that it truly can scale beyond us. But what we do is unscalable beyond us. And I think we're okay with that.
- So if we were to separate in that hypothetical, something were to happen, I would hope that like, let's say I'm no longer around, I think Samir could continue the interview show that we're currently doing and serve the brand partners that we have if he wanted to do that. That sounds like Colin's thought about it. Yeah, that sounds like I'm thought about it too much. Whereas in the past we had to format. We had like a really high-lived format for creation that just wouldn't have worked. Like if one of us was gone, it wouldn't have worked. But right now we have an interview show, we have a talk show.
- What it wouldn't be the same but like you could carry it on what creators surprise you have you come What have you guys interviewed anyone or come across a channel? We're like dude this fishing channel that just as fly fishing is making a million dollars a month or Like has there's ever been anything like there's a guy I saw who has a channel just on Breaking into locks and it's got like it's a huge channel. There's another channel that where they just smash stuff It's like a it's like a press I forget what you call it Yeah, but hydraulic press was there any channel that you come across and you're like man He says they're killing it. No one knows about it or at least mainstream doesn't know about it man I want to I want to pull up the exact name, but it's a barbecue channel. There's like there's a whole barbecue genre on YouTube that's massive and they do huge partnerships with like brands that you know Colin and I would never interact with right like sweet baby rays or stubs or and they're like starting to sell their own rubs right like spice rubs and those are really high margin and like That genre to me is really interesting and people who are into barbecue are really into barbecue So I love that genre. I think that's like they're very good businesses there when it comes to selling spice rubs And and barbecue accessories, I guess
- I'm always amazed by channels like the slow mo guys where there's literally no need for language. It's just the visual of something happening in slow motion. And the viewership is so high because those videos can be watched again and again and again all over the world, no matter what language you speak, that YouTube can place ads globally in every market. And so just the revenue that they get from YouTube, the platform is out of control. That to me is a fascinating business where it's just let's film something in slow motion and rake in massive advertising dollars. You guys want to hear something fucked up? So there's this channel that I follow and it has a huge following and no one talks about it because it's really embarrassing.
- So there's a group of people, I'm one of them, that we like popping zits. But to take it a step further, there's one where people love seeing Dandruff come off people's head. And so because when you have Dandruff, you like scratch, you're like, I need to get this out, it's killing me. And sometimes you can't do it. So when you watch other people, at least for me, when I watch other people do it, I'm like, oh, I feel the relief. Like it feels relieving for me to see that. And there's this guy, I think it's just called like the Indian.
- Dandruff barber and he takes guys with dandruff and he shaves their head and you could see it all like you can see like his scalp Get like cleaned and I was with my friend Neville recently and I went to his house and I turned on his YouTube And I go hey, let me show you this video. It's hilarious, but don't laugh at me I think I'm a creep Eddie if I should went to that video and it was purple he had already clicked on it And I was like dude you fucking guy you want this day And it's there's like this whole genre of people if you watch if you do like if you type in like dandruff removal There's so many videos of people who just love watching or another one is like Like seeing sis you know what a sis is like a lump in a body seeing those get removed. I fucking love those videos You guys don't watch that don't we feel like a freak no no listen listen when if I come across a good pimple popping video I'm diving in like I'm not I don't shy away from that and I've seen the Indian dandruff guy I don't think I haven't seen that I also there's one account that I like got really weirdly into which was the folding lady on TikTok She just folds clothes in different ways and that's it and like organizes them in her drawers and my drawers are a disaster So it's like this for me. It's like this aspirational account that I can watch where she organizes stuff. Well, there's a lot of weird stuff out there
- And how do you guys look at TikTok? Because TikTok is this younger, sexier version of YouTube. It's like, you're the 37 year old actress, and now you see this 21 year old come under the scene and you're like, oh no, what's happening over here? What's the perspective on TikTok from your guys' point of view? I see TikTok as a bit of a content accelerator that I give you're new to content creation and you wanna find out what works faster.
- then go to TikTok because it's a low barrier to entry to post and If something doesn't get viewership No one really sees it like there's not much weight on it because of the 4u page, which is like this Talent show style format. It's like if it's good. It'll find people if it's not whatever It doesn't feel like with YouTube, you know when you start a YouTube channel. It feels like a statement you're like I'm here to make my own version of some big media company and You know that is there for all of time every time you pivot every time you make a bad video It's just sitting there on your library. Whereas TikTok. It's like
- It's not as much weight on it. So just move fast, put something out. And I think it's a great place to find audience. I don't know if it's a great place to monetize that audience though, I would say. I think a big reason for that is because it's like the closest thing to a lean back experience, right? Like you just turn it on and you say, whatever's on the free page, like, it's really good at finding content that's good for me. I might not go in there and search for a creator. That's like not really a behavior that I think a lot of people do. It's just like, you feed me whatever's good here. So let's say you take out the top creators on TikTok, like the absolute top creators, all of our TikTok experience wouldn't be changed that much. Like it would still find content that's interesting to us. So it's actually not a great place for creators. It's a great place for content. It's not a great place for creators to build relationships with their fans. So my most TikTok creators move to YouTube to build that. They can build like longer lasting, more depth with their audience. They can build a library of content that, you know, crews viewership over time. It's where like you would, if you're serious about the career, I think you'd move to YouTube. TikTok, you're there. Like TikTok is the creator. You're putting content into their system. So I think that's an important distinction between the two. What sounds like you guys are not as bullish on TikTok? Like I've kind of thought about like, I'll give you an example.
- I put out a tweet the other day Sam. I don't know if you saw that you did you did see it You called the guy an idiot and you're like this guy's an idiot you should hire up This I put it to his crazy I'm gonna hire a great content creator cuz we talking about the milkman. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay I saw it so this guy I tweeted out this thing saying I'm hard content creator You just gotta be great at content and we will we have distribution will help you accelerate here and for the milk Road and we I get this tweet back yesterday. That's like For those who haven't seen it's on my Twitter you can go find it But it's this I don't know call it you tell me I thought it was amazing But maybe it's just cuz it's about our thing was it amazing to you guys and was to me. I think it's an extremely visual compelling piece of content with In a format where I have to watch to the end you get to see him struggle You just try and finish that gallon of milk You just explained that like you're a machine learning thing tagging it like extremely visually compelling. Yes I Engagement to the end like I've seen I've seen too many videos at this point I have to put them in the buckets summarize the video Sean so the guy is basically like hey
- You know, you're hiring, I saw your tweet, you're hiring a content creator, and he like, he used our joke from my first million. I've moved straight to the end. He's like, so I've moved straight to the end. Here I am, I've got a gallon of milk. I'm gonna drink this to show my commitment. I don't even know what his premise was, but he's basically gonna chug a gallon of milk in order to show how bad he wants this job. And he made a funny TikTok out of it with the editing. And he's like, asking people, hey, can you hold this camera and need to drink this milk? He's like in a car mechanics place. They're like, no. So he puts it on the ground and he just takes it off a shirt and he just starts chugging this milk and it's just awful. And then he's like, has little cuts in between where he's like, what couldn't they have called it the Juice Road? Cause he's like, having to drink milk. And like, you know, just little funny bits like that. And he, whenever he finishes it, he celebrates, he pours the milk all over his head at the end and he's like, whatever, he sends it over. So I hired him. So I tweeted it out, I was like, this is amazing. You're hired. I just talked to him on the phone before this. And he's like, all right, like, what's the game plan? And I was like, well,
- I think the first thing we got to do is we got to pick the channel we want to be on because I think the platform will dictate what content works on that platform. And so like, like I have a buddy Steve, Steve Bartlett who says this, which is like, you need to hack the algorithm. Like you need to understand how the what the algorithm wants and then you have to be able to serve it to them. If you want to grow like faster than normal. And so, and so we were debating like should we start on YouTube or should we start on TikTok. And in my head, I'm like, I use both. I love both products. But TikTok does definitely feel like a.
- I don't know. It just feels like the growing wave compared to where YouTube is. And so I'm like, I guess if you're starting fresh, you would just start on the platform that's like more of a growing wave and like try to make it happen over there. But that was the downside is even if we get viral growth from it, like those people may never see us or hear from us again because it's just the way that tiktok works. So that's why I was like, I don't know. I'm not sure about this bet here. I'm sure which one should we go for? Your guys perspective sounds like it lean more towards YouTube. Is that right? Well, well, I actually don't. I would say the opposite. Yeah, I would say the opposite.
- Go ahead, go. Yeah, I was gonna say, I don't think you have to pick and choose necessarily because let's say you're gonna commit to short form vertical content, which obviously you would put on TikTok. Right. Short. You could post that. Yeah, you could post the same thing on YouTube shorts as well as on reels maybe and like, you know, keep that up for a certain amount of time and see what takes off because you may find yourself in a situation where YouTube shorts takes off and all of a sudden people are subscribing to your YouTube channel for shorts. And then if you wanted to transition to a long form video, you have a home for it.
- And that's a place where you could build a deeper connection on TikTok. You don't really have that option right now a Long form YouTube video. I would say like that's the highest barrier to entry when it comes to content So I think short form vertical is the lowest is a lower barrier to entry not the lowest like a tweet is probably the lowest barrier to entry But like that is you want to take more shots to figure out your format your style It might take a hundred videos to be like actually that's our format that one works Or maybe you figured it out and this guy's just got a chug milk every day until you guys, you know get enough users But like I think that's what it is It's format development and you need a lot of shots on goal to Catch my first assignment. I gave him
- Yeah, sure. I was like, all right. Here's the first first thing. Man on the street style interview, you know, you go like you see this on late night shows, you go and you just stop somebody in Times Square, you're like, Hey, Bo, do you know about this? And then they give you some goofy answer. You cut them together. I said, go outside of a strip club and ask strippers if we're in a recession. And like ask strippers how the economy is going. And basically that's what he's going to do. He's going to go man on the street style outside of a strip club. And when the strippers come out, he's going to ask him, how's the economy doing? Because they are the front lines. They feel it first, you know, they see what, you know, it's the coach from all the, from all the drunk hedge fund guy. Yeah, they get the, they get all the scoop and they see the tips, how they're, how they're changing cash, you know, you know, in real time. So that's going to be the first piece of content.
- Sure. Yeah, I mean I think that can work I think that's a very specific audience and and it'll work for that audience, right? So yeah, dude What happened? So the point I was gonna make a point where so our podcast gets one or two million Podcasts downloads a month and compared to like a lot like a website that gets 10 million I'm like I think we're we have a bigger of big We don't have a bigger but we have a far more loyal following because people listen to us for an hour at a time with YouTube They watch you for 10 20 30 minutes at a time and I was gonna say I would have thought that you guys had one or two million Ish downloads a month views a month. I'm looking at your stats on social blade You were at like a million a month every month 800 400 500 and then all of a sudden you got to like 27 28 42 million a month. What the hell happened? Is that from shorts? That's a lot from shorts, but shorts propelled the other content like Basically the way we view shorts like a lot of people had a lot of problem with like Oh, you can't monetize shorts And I was like but if I told you as a as any business that I had a way that was lower lift to get you in front of Way more people to get your brand exposure to millions of people Wouldn't you take it? And that's what we did like right when shorts kind of emerged We're like okay, we can make a short in a day Whereas it takes us a very like a week to two weeks to make a full long-form YouTube video We can make a short in a day And so let's just try it and as we started to try it like we had shorts that pushed
- 10 million views, 20 million views, 7 million views, 8 million views. And those people were subscribing and then there was concern like, are those people gonna watch the other content? But because the shorts were, you know, directly connected to the longer form content, we were just aggregating more people who then watched our library of content. So it worked for us. And that has fluctuated too. I think we're back to, like right now, I think we're in like the nine 10 million views a month range on the channel. And shorts are not like as big of a factor. We're not putting out as many shorts, but a lot more people are watching our library now.
- And that is what YouTube is. Like you're building a library of content that our Mr. Beast interview, for example, you mentioned it, it's pushing 11 million views right now, but in the first month, it did a million views. So you look at now, it'll be a year in September, it'll probably have 12, 13 million views. So it's about this library, building a piece of content that can be viewed over the next year, two years, five years. And when you do that, it does have this compounding effect, especially when shorts are added to the equation as an accelerant.
- We have a we had a short go viral recently and it's Sean explaining who like One of the ball brothers is and I have I don't pay attention any that any sports And they're in all the guys I just randomly clicked on the comments and they're all like these fucking guys are idiots like He has a dough anything about Lamar ball. I forget who it is Sean Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you're like explaining this and people are just ripping us Short comments or maybe I think you know you went viral really yeah Yeah, whenever any of our videos hit that mass scale. That's when the comments sort of turn and it's just it's kind of a good sign in a way It's just just what happens. Yeah, there's one that there's one so we did this clip contest for the podcast so we're like hey will Take any of our content you own a channel so you make your own tiktok channel your own shorts channel and Cut these clips and basically we just want our clips out there So we're kind of doing it different than most where you guys want to you guys want to build your specific channels We're like you can call your thing my first million clips or whatever and go ham with the content you own that We just want distribution and we give out a prize for whoever like does the best job each month of cutting it And people of like what so the first first winner they had a few million views on their like tiktok channel Whatever and we paid them the five grand, you know prize for our thing But they've actually turned that into a business for other podcasts and that business will do like a million dollars It revenue this year as like a you know pretty young kid then With this one just yesterday somebody said oh here's the clip that's gone I got 1.2 million views and it's this clip from an interview We did with this guy Neil Patel and he's talking about how he spends like 180 grand a month That's his like monthly lifestyle burn rate and and the title of it is like Billionaire like billionaire explains how he spends 180 grand a month
- And like the guy's not a billionaire, but like doesn't matter. Like the kid who's running this channel is probably like, okay, that's gonna do better. The top comments are like, oh, like that's Neil Patel. He's not a billionaire. And then like this guy's like egging it on. He's like question mark, question mark, question mark. And this is the only response instead of being like, oh yeah, sorry, that's a mistake. And then somebody else says, who is this guy? And he writes the founder of Google, question mark? And then there's a hundred comments being like, that's not the founder of Google. And I was like, who is this genius that's hacking the engagement by putting dumb comments as the creator just to get people riled up. So that this, you know, the algorithm sees that this video has a ton of engagement on it. I mean, we've played around with that a bit. That's definitely something that creators do. We've misspelled words sometimes in our subtitles. We've...
- We had a short where we interviewed the Chief Business Officer of YouTube, Robert Kinsell, and the short begins like we interviewed the, we were wanted to say we interviewed the head of business at YouTube. We said we interviewed the head of YouTube at business and just kept moving on and like people rewatched it so many times to be like, wait, what did they say? So like I think there's a lot of fun ways to play with that and play with the audience. And you know, we would never do that being Sam would not like do that. Now we wouldn't do that, but this person who's doing this has nothing to lose. So there of course going to like just crank the dial up to level 12 of like spamming this because they're like, well, who cares? It's not my brain. It's not my contact. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
- Short like that that piece. There's definitely a short there right like that was really fascinating You could tell that in a really concise, you know like one clip a bit like that was really interesting that you guys What what you guys talked about and I think like that was one of your better thumbnails too I would say that came across my Recommended like but the challenge there is that your timestamp at 100 or sorry an hour 24 I think like anyone's expectation might be like wait Is that an hour 24 on Drake and and and steak And then you know there might be an opportunity to just say hey Can we just clip out the part that was about that? And then you know lead people to watch the full tank or listen to the full thing on right on audio feeds I the guys who edit the podcast. I think they also edit the YouTube. So hey guys you hear that do it, please Yeah, I think that's your opportunity is like hey It's actually eight minutes on on the Drake steak situation, right? And that that was your best thumbnail. I think like that that caught my attention that made me curious
- So yeah. Well, dudes, thanks for coming on. This is sick. I've been listening to you or watching you guys for a while. It's really awesome that you came on and it's awesome that you knew about the pod. So that was really cool and we appreciate it. This is great. And of course, yeah, thanks for having me. And Sean, we both run, run or ran newsletter companies. So you've been helpful with us for new videos. If you ever want to shoot the shit about newsletters, we got you. Man, that'd be awesome. Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. We definitely want to learn. Right on, guys.

Asking The Founder Of Grammarly How He Built A $13 Billion Company [9uRFMpV4KzI].txt

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- So basically, I'm we were Facebook friends out, so we talked a little bit there. But I first met you at Hustle Khan. I think this event that I hosted in 2019, if you're one of the best people we've ever had, we've had hundreds of people. And I'll tell you why. Two things. The first. I think you spoke right when, so this is Max. He started Grammarly. We'll do an intro in a second. But I think you spoke when you guys had just raised maybe $100 million at a billion valuation or something like that. Is that right? Yeah, that was 120. We didn't disclose valuation at the time. But if I had to get, yeah, you didn't. But I think I'd heard rumors and like I just am guessing it was like in that range. And it doesn't matter. But basically, I made a comment to you. I'm like, that's pretty cool, right? And you kind of.
- kind of replied back, you weren't cocky, but you were very confident in still humble, but you kind of had a grin. And I forget exactly what you said, but it was something like, yeah, it's going to get much bigger too. And I loved that like subtle confidence. And then at the event, what you talked about, I don't even remember the title, but the idea was basically like you're an engineer, but you've done a really good job of like evolving past just engineering. And you like said, this is how like I engineer like good products. And this is how like everything you looked at was from an engineer like about reverse engineering different stuff. And I thought that was incredibly fascinating. Do you remember what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, I remember that. I actually use it mantra a lot inside a company as well when we look at different markets and where to go next. And it's just a universally good framework that works for me. Things. Yeah, just kind of looking at things narrowly, identifying the sweet spot and then just going broader from there. This is Max Litvin. Litvin, he started this company called Grammarly. Before Grammarly, you had another company called Blackboard, I think, right? That was not my company. That was a company that bought my company. So my company was my Dropbox, not to be confused with Dropbox. It was a plagiarism detection company. And it was bought by Blackboard in 2007. And then they spent two years with Blackboard kind of a part or now part just being there. And that was like a compared to Grammarly, a mild success, right? Like it was it was financially good, but it wasn't like this huge, huge multi-billion dollar company. Oh yeah, that was just a start. It could have grown big, but education was at that point a relatively difficult market to be in and wasn't as big of a market. Plus, our product was fairly narrow. It was just doing one thing for one group of people.
- So we saw that it can grow to this point, but further it's going to be very slow and very difficult. So that's why we decided to sell. Plus we had bigger ideas. And you started Grammarly and at this point, can you reveal how big it is? Because it's shockingly large. Yeah. So we raised that 13 billion valuation and we disclosed that valuation. I still think it's a conservative one. Why? Because Grammarly is a very non-standard company and very non-standard product. It's easy to see it for the last one it is. And that's kind of reflected often in perceptions of everyone, if investors, of sometimes even potential team members, we have to explain why it's big. And you know, but that also helps with the last competition. Well, and by the way, you guys bootstrapped for a long time. So like you and your co-founder, it's not like you own like 4% of this company. You guys probably own like a very substantial amount. So like actually, so you're on paper. You're probably a multi-billionaire at this point. It depends on whom you believe there is some information that's not fully accurate. But yeah, we managed to keep significant portion of the company with the founders and employees. And please only actually quite a lot. Dude, when I heard about Grammarly, the reason why I wanted you to come on to the podcast and at HustleCon is because I think my reaction is the same reaction most people in business had, which is like, A, this is just a chrome plug-in. B, this is just spell check. Like, there's no way that either of those things are interesting. And then I learned about it and I was like, oh, this is like way bigger than it just looks like that. It's way more than that. Did most people were like, there's, were most people dismissive of like it just being a chrome plug-in? Some people are dismissive quite a lot. And I wouldn't say dismissive, it's not like completely, oh, there's nothing. But underestimate the impact and importance of it. And that's an interesting conversation always, always very similar because they kind of think, oh, this is a good product, this is a cool product, but not for me because I know what I'm doing. And then they try it and it helps, it helps the material ways and especially when you measure results. Because you know, when you don't measure things and just, you know, typing away, it saves you from an embarrassment or helps you raise something more clearly. Kind of, yeah, that's cool, but what's the impact of that? And it showed me the money. But when it's done on the business scale and it's measured and it's kind of assessed, you can see like percentages, improvements in different metrics, productivity, satisfaction, so on. And that is up. That is a people. We bought it at the hustle. So I had it for the whole company. I don't remember what it costs, but I remember seeing the bill every month, hundreds of dollars a month, and everyone loved it and I love it. I still use it. So like I totally, I totally buy it. I totally, once I started using it, I was like, oh my God, I get it. But one thing that I've always been fascinated with is just plugins as a business, particularly two types of plugins WordPress plugins. There's a bunch of guys that have like some substantially sized substantial sized businesses selling WordPress plugins, you know, like 25, $50 million a year and then Chrome plugins, which do you, I don't know if you like describe yourself as a chrome plugin as a business. I don't think you are, but like it's definitely like the one of the main ways in which most people interact with you, right? For now, yes, we just recently switched over to our flagship product being operating system level integration. So it works similarly to Chrome plugin, except if it integrates with all the apps, not just web apps. So that was a big switchover that happened in December, so just about a month ago. So that expands the surface area for Grammarly. Now it's in Microsoft PowerPoint and Oracle applications and wherever you want. Did you watch your higher CEO? When did you do that? It's kind of jumping topics, but yeah, we brought in CEO, I think in 2011. And one reason, one big reason for that was that both Alex, my founder and I, we have a philosophy that everybody should be doing should be in their zone or genius doing what they like and what they're good at. And nobody know one of us was really experienced or even that passion about scaling organizations. And that's what we were kind of the biggest thing we were looking for from CEO teaching us and doing that, basically scaling the company because we realized that to do what we need to do, we need a lot of people. We need a big company. It's kind of a number of people and size is not a kind of a desired outcome in itself. It is a necessity because the goals are so big that you can do it with 20 people or 30. How many employees did you have when you hired Brad? I think 20 something. Oh, wow. Nothing. I mean, small. Small. Yeah. Yeah, we're fairly small. We were we were making good revenue and being profitable at the time already. But the company was still very small. And that's that's kind of a. That that realization.
- we need to the opportunities big and we need to scale that pushed us to look for kind of external expertise How did you because at that point you I guess you didn't raise money so you and your partner like Oh, it was like your business. It was your company and like your money. How did you? How did you not micromanage Brad? because I did the same thing and Not micromanaging is tough because you're like oh my god if you make a mistake you're gonna lose money and that's like my money And so it's like really stressful to like let someone fail sometimes and learn Were you micromanaging or were you pretty emotionally healthy about it? I'd like to think we were emotionally healthy. Maybe Brad would disagree. I don't know. I wish I actually will ask him but I think part of it was out of necessity There was just so much to do that if you micromanage you get stuck You don't you not make progress. So there was just no time or resources or energy to micromanage anybody We had to divide and conquer to to actually keep making progress Because that's a lot of work. So just just from the volume of things to do Everybody had to do their own thing. So that that happened naturally and part of it is a philosophy that again Alex and I share that basically if you bring in smart people on board Like not listening to them or not letting them think independently is a waste basically There is no point in bringing smart people on board So that's that's that made it easy to kind of a give freedom and give space to to Brad and other Leadership team members. What were your girls goals early on like when you started the business for like man I think this can make ten million dollars a year and provide a good lifestyle or like I think this could or was it like I think this could be like a multi-billion dollar thing like what were your girls goals early on? I think we decided that it could be a multi-billion dollar business During our conversations was Brad partially So kind of Alex and I we we we hoped it could be but then once we started talking with Brad about valuation plans and all that When he was thinking about joining then it become pretty clear that yes, there is a multi-billion dollar market out there Are we gonna capture it or not to be just to be determined but at that point but There is definitely an opportunity. So the size of opportunity became clear fairly early but Pass there that that took years. What was the vision? That may or what what did you see that made you feel that it could be a multi-billion dollar opportunity? And what was the vision and were there any was there any numbers that you saw? Early on that would said like oh my gosh, there's something here Yeah, so I think the breakthrough moment was when we saw that it is possible to help not just professional writers people who write for a living every day, but also help casual writers or people who write as Part of their job or part of their life, but not like a key part So writing is not their like main product They're no no like novellous or researchers who are published and so on So when we saw that it's possible to make a product that's useful for everybody else Then it clicked in the very simple formula if you look at Amount of time we spent communicating creating knowledge As a humanity as all people in the world it is a huge percentage of our time And it's increasing because we spend less time doing things with our hands manufacturing is being automated It's not like we were doing it manually anymore as much So if you take this time that we spend communicating and creating knowledge and make it even 1% more effective The impact is in trillions not even billions So can we do something that makes communication 1% more effective on average for everybody? That doesn't sound impossible. That sounds like something's doable. That's doable. So so we had that same insight except I Did it in such a horrible worse way. So basically I learned how to be a copywriter So like I read books on copywriting and like on persuasive writing and my theory was like oh my gosh Like with texting or like online dating. I was single at the time and in 21 so it was all about like dating I'm like oh man if I weren't learned how to write better in my messages to girls who I match with like my life is gonna Be better and then I was like wait a minute if I learned how to write better I could sell more stuff if I learned how to write better I can make people feel emotions about like this cause that I want them I'm like just writing better like it changes it makes it life more practical, but also it it Makes you think better so like if you can if you have an idea for something And you're forced to write it out you'll see all the holes in idea and you'll and you'll force yourself to like lay Out and so I was like oh, I'll teach people how to write better And so I created a course on how to write better of course like obviously creating a software product It was out of my league, but like that was clearly the better move to do but the same insight was like Everything that we do is via a text whether it's a text message or an email or a website And even if it's via like the spoken word I have to write that anyway So like writing is like the the most important thing that you can master I just wish I would have approached it in a software way as opposed to just selling a $300 course Yeah software is more scalable. That's true and And actually we would you said about writing it also applies to speech We when we do use a research we noticed that People who use grammarly repeatedly adopt patterns of communication more effective patterns of communication and translated to Non-written communication as well. So for example if gramley keeps suggesting that you don't use kind of a Worthy or wave or weak sentence structures you stop or reduce use of them in speech as well So I so kind of good habits rub off and and translate to other modes of communication Here's my opinion. So have you ever heard of copy work? No, so in like the 1700s 1800s and up until like 1910 One of the ways in America that we would teach children how to write well It's the same way that we would teach them how to play an instrument So if I wanted to teach you how to play the piano, I'm not gonna say like go ahead like write go write a piano song I would say well, let's play jingle bells. Let's learn how to play happy birthday Then after that we can move to like some more pop songs that you really like and then you do that for like two years And you like see patterns and you like understand you just copy other people's music and in doing that you see
- patterns and then eventually you're like, oh, I know the rules to the game now. Now I can decide to follow them to break them, but I can make my own. And it's the same thing with writing. But we don't do that. And so what that means is I think one of the easiest ways to learn is you find great writing that you really like and you just literally copy it by hand. And in doing that, you like see the patterns and that's called copy work. It's not a very popular way to learn how to write now. But in my opinion, it's one of the most powerful. I would say Grammarly in a sense is doing that because in real time you're learning, but it's far better than just saying like go and write like just like spend a lot of time writing your own stuff. I think copying other people is far better. Anyway, it's something I've been playing with. I'm not a lot of people have heard of copy work. I thought maybe you would have, but it's like not very well known. No, I haven't heard about but I've seen and done in many, many fields. Like at one point, I was passionate about photography. And same there, you just basically try different, try to basically copy different photographs and recreate them. And then this way you learn the language of that art. So yeah, that applies to many, many areas. How technical were you and your co-founder? Were you technical enough to build the first handful of iterations? So I was very technical. So for example, the previous plagiarism detection company, I wrote the core algorithm and most of the code originally, most of the kind of back-end code, not the front-end. But when we were working on Grammarly, I don't think I did any production code. I coded some of the experiments, landing pages, payment, checkout process. Something you don't even need to code anymore today if you didn't want to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I coded some of that, but I didn't code like a real production grade stuff. Mostly because I'm not a formerly a software engineer. I'm a self-trained coder, but building a real complex software is not my thing. Plus, I had to manage the business full-time. So when we started out, I was responsible for finance, marketing, pretty much lots of things. Basically, everybody has to wear a lot of hats in a small company. So the branding of the business occupied pretty much my whole time, so it was no time for it. So you just hired?
- is just self-funded and hired a couple of people to help build the first version? We hired quite a significant number of people. We also had a technical co-founder on board, Demon Eater, who helped build out the technical team. So he was responsible for the technical side initially. But yeah, because of our previous exit, we had some savings that we could put into Grammarly, some substantial savings we could put into Grammarly. So basically we were both founders and the first investors. How much did you spend to make it work until it was a sellable product? I don't remember. Like a million or 10,000,000, do you remember? I think it was close to a million. But it was a product that worked only for very small audience, very small use case. And it was not real time. So basically what happened was you write a book, a chapter of a book, because it couldn't check the whole book at once. Or you write a research paper, you submit it to the initial, the old Grammarly, and then you go make a cup of coffee, and then you drink the cup of coffee, and then you wait a little bit more. And then it spits out the result. And the result was probably half of it was real issues, and half of it was false positives. But at the time, the audience, the target market was fine with that, because if you spend two months writing a book, like what's extra half an hour to review all the potential issues, right? Even if they're not real. But that won't fly with business writers, for example. If you're writing a business email that you need to send in 20 seconds, you're not going to deal with false positives. And did that version get you to profitability? Shit. What'd you charge for? $100 a year? We charged, I think, $90 a year, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, or $100. Yeah, I think $95 a year. How did the people hear about it? The first users? So that was interesting, because we launched two parallel streams. One to consumers, and one to businesses, educational institutions, publishers, basically companies, consulting companies, and the consumer channel, TwoCough.
- like it grew exponentially from basically week one. And enterprise or B2B, it took a longer to build. So once we kind of pushed both of them in parallel for about half a year, we saw that well, kind of makes sense to focus on consumer for now because it's just growing like wildfire, but B2B requires much more pushing, much more hiring, more people intensive because you need sales, steam and all that. So we kind of decided to slow roll it a little bit and focus on consumer for first few years. And do you want to pay marketing or organic? We did everything. We tried all the channels available to us and obviously different channels have different benefits. At a time, social was also easier to get free promotion from. Right now, obviously kind of Facebook and others just want to capture all the value they create. But back then, it was easier to get stuff viral and social and just get free promotion from that. SEO was easier as well. So many things were just like many channels were quite easier to do. But we relied on paid early on quite a bit because it's a very quick feedback loop. You design an ad, you send it or kind of put it in the system and then you get back, resolve like within hours. And it tells you if the message resonates, if there is a market for that, if you're finding that market correctly, you know that within like hours. It's in more traditional world. It's a weeks of- hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, so that was kind of why we were so bullish on paid from early on, even though it costs a lot of money. What companies, are you guys trying to buy companies? Not specifically, I mean, we were open to-
- that. But we're not like hunting to is there a problem that you need to be solved? And you saw that this other company was solving that problem that you'd buy it. So like, let me give you an example, the founder of jet, you know, jet.com. They sold the Walmart for some billions of dollars. And he's like, man, if Walmart, if we could figure out a way how to reduce returns by helping people pick the right sizes, we would buy that company for a lot of money. Is there anything inside of Gramerly? We're like, man, we haven't figured out blank yet. But if someone did figure out blank, that's a cool company we would buy. That's a cool problem solved that we would buy. Yeah, there are many things like things around doing more on device, like doing more and more processing on device. I think that that would be very interesting to us because it enables better user experience, lower lag,
- potentially higher performance. It also helps alleviate some potential privacy concerns. So kind of a no-brainer to do more stuff on device and it's cheaper for us to process. Sorry, what does that mean? You mean, like, instead of you paying for all this cloud space for everything for the... Yeah, calculating suggestions on device. So basically, whenever we say, oh, this needs to be shorter or rephrase it, like that making that determination on your phone or on your laptop rather than sending it to cloud and having our servers crunch numbers. So that's kind of a... That has number of benefits for both us and you... Actually, I don't know what those costs are. So how much does it cost to... Like, what percentage of your revenue do you spend on? Or maybe like, how does the payroll compare... The payroll cost compared to like your hosting costs? I would say it's comparable. Hosting costs are... Like, even though we don't host much of the data, like we're not like Dropbox where we store files, but the processing, the processing is quite expensive, especially if you consider that we have tens of millions of free users who are not paying us anything. And we don't monetize them in any way at all because we don't sell user data, we don't show ads, we don't do any of that.
- So basically all the free users are not monetized until they subscribe. So that makes us be conscious of processing costs, especially for regions where not many people can upgrade to premium, like developing countries. How many employees do you have? I don't recall exactly, but I would say somewhere around eight. Damn. So then you're paying a shit ton for that hosting. Yeah, I would say it could be less than a pair of white. I don't remember exactly, but yeah, it is a significant amount. I mean, that many you supporting that many users and providing a reliable service. It does. Who do you pay?
- So it's mostly Amazon. It's not crazy, man. Like it just runs the internet. It's crazy. Well, yeah, we evaluate from time to time, bringing some things in-house. And actually, some things we do have in-house, not necessarily the hosting infrastructure, but some model training and all the stuff we do in-house. But so we look into that. So it's not like we are just Amazon and forget it. But it is, in effect, a way to skill business. It is an effective way to run it. Yeah. It's just like crazy that it always freaks me out a little bit that we use CloudFlare. And I remember one time CloudFlare went out. And our website was dead, and so was like a quarter of the internet. Yeah. Yeah, it is this concentration. It is kind of scary. Yeah. It freaks me out a little bit. Yeah. It has its benefits, but it is. A lot of places have a single point of failure for significant portions of our infrastructure. Are you a, and we'll wrap up here in a second, but I asked you about Hemingway earlier. Do you view them as competitors at all? Not really, no. They do something that's similar and something that's basically part of what we do. And a number of people use both products simultaneously. So we don't view them as a competitor because they don't take business from us. So yeah, so it's not like. Who do you view as a competitor? Who do we view as a competitor?
- use a competitor, well, the biggest one is complacency. Just people not realizing that they can benefit from this. I think that that's the biggest thing that, by far, bigger than any other competitor. But other than that, once you get to a certain size, everybody becomes a potential competitor, because when you look at big tech companies, they all compete in some ways and all do some things that are similar or the same. So that's kind of the mindset that basically at any point anybody can become a company. Yeah, but are there any, I've never seen any like upstarts or any small companies try to compete with you guys? Is there a map? Is there many? There are some, but most are focusing on either niche, like a primarily for a specific market. And I think that's a good way to start. And obviously, we're watching them and seeing what they're doing right, what they're doing wrong and so on. There are similar products. Microsoft, I think, has a similar product, but again, it only does part of what we do. So it doesn't take away much business from us. So if any, so, yeah, so I wouldn't say that there are any kind of direct competitors at this point. And I'm not too worried about competition, frankly, because it's just such a new field that most of the market is just untouched by anybody. Cool. Well, thanks for coming on. I'm going to, we're going to wrap up now. And I'm going to let you know when this is live, it should be live in like a week, I think. But I appreciate you coming on. It means a lot. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Balaji_s Prediction： Bitcoin Is Going From $26k To $1M in 90 Days (#434 Pt.1) [kAeU1qYV-XY].txt

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- So biology comes out and he says, I will take that bet. You buy one Bitcoin and I'll send $1 million to an escrow. To be clear, this is 40 to one odds. So he's basically saying not only is this unlikely to happen, like if this was even odds, it would have been like, dang, biology is gonna lose a million dollars because Bitcoin's not likely to be worth a million dollars. Then he added in 90 days, which is already a radical move. Then he said, and by the way, the million dollars won Bitcoin. Bitcoin's currently at 26,000 at the time you've made the spend. He goes, that's 40 to one odds that I'm laying you.
- All right, we got an episode here with Tom Anthony Pompleano, who you may know as the Bitcoin guy. He's huge all over YouTube, Twitter, everywhere else. He came on. We're actually going to do this as a two part episode because at the beginning, it was all business. We were business in the front. We were talking about this crazy million dollar ballergy bet where he's betting that Bitcoin is going to a million dollars in the next 90 days. We talk about that. Why ballergy thinks it? What we think about the bet and Pomp does a, you know, I don't know, econ 101 where he explains what's going on with the banking system from his perspective. That was good. But here's the thing though, in that episode, the whole episode is about something that's going to happen inside the next 90 days. So if you're going to like, it is a little fearful listening to it. And so actually listen to the whole thing because and do it now because we're talking about something that's happening in 90 days. And then go ahead. The second episode was way more fun and.
- It was pretty wild. Go ahead. We talk about his business empire, you know, what he's building and why he's building it that way, why he gave back all the money from his fund and shut that down, why he's- It's huge. Turned off all his advertisers, millions of dollars of advertisers, what he's doing instead. So we talked about that and then we talked about it, then it went off the wall and the pod got a little crazy, but in a great way. I think people are going to, you're going to love part two. He broke down like all of his businesses and how they work. It's very impressive. It was pretty wild. And it was, he's impressive. He's significantly more impressive than a lot of people think, I think, because there's way more time to scenes. Pretty funny stories, which pop is usually, he's pretty buttoned up on his, on his main channel because he's talking finance, he's talking serious, but he tells him pretty funny story. So the second part two is the more fun episode. Part one is the more serious episode. I think you'll like them both.
- And we have to remind you guys that our episodes we work really really hard and unlike every other Type of podcasts out there our stuff's not free, but you don't pay with money All you have to do is go to our YouTube page. We call this the gentleman's agreement What is it the ladies understanding ladies? You go to our YouTube page and the reason it's called that is because it's an understanding It's an agreement. We can't be there behind your screen to check this otherwise we would but everyone's doing it So just go ahead and do it and click subscribe on YouTube and then just go ahead and do that on Spotify and iTunes because
- The more you do that the more our volume goes up and we get more Downloaded and we could do keep doing this type of stuff Pop ain't gonna come on to episodes like this if we don't have a big listener ship same with all the other guests All right enjoy Pomp we're live by the way. We always just jump right into this thing. No small talk Let's go. What do you guys want to talk about dude? I'm so glad you're here. You are You are the Ryan secrets of the industry you are the hardest working man and content entertainment I'm so glad you're not doing your like 5 a.m.
- show anymore. I'm sure you're also pretty glad you're not doing that every morning. How does it feel to get some sleep? I've always slept pretty well, but the content stuff is, it's the best way in the world to learn. You put information ideas out there and the people who agree or have like things to add, they're super constructive and they respond to emails, they tweet at you, they do all that stuff. And then the people who vehemently disagree, they make their voice heard, you know, very well. And so you like quickly figure out like good ideas, bad ideas. And then you also get all these rabbit holes to go down.
- And I think that probably the reason why you know you too myself and many of the other people that we all know and spend a lot of Time talking to we enjoy it Like the internet is this amazing thing that we all get to use on a daily basis And so creating content I found it's just this great way to to elicit like-minded people and to learn so I was Pump I we have a lot to talk about and we'll do like a proper intro to second But I was talking to my friend Jason Janowitz who you guys used to work together He worked for you now He has his own company and Jason works pretty hard. He told me that you were the hardest working person. Jason Janowitz used to work for you
- He, he, uh, him and his partner, Mikey Polito, they were, uh, the two guys who helped me start the podcast initially. They, uh, they tricked me. They literally came to me and they were like, uh, hey, you should have a podcast. And I was like, what's a podcast? And they were like, you know, like all these other examples. And then I was like, uh, I don't know how to do that. They're like, well, we do. And little did I know they had no clue what they were doing. They instead convinced me to do a podcast. And then they DM'd. I'm pretty sure Gary Vaynerchuk's like podcast guy. And I was like, Hey, we're going to start a podcast. Like what equipment do we need? It's like, who knows? So those guys, that was pretty good hustle. And now they have a media company that does tens of millions of dollars, whatever. It worked out and Jason works pretty hard. Um, Jason told me that you're the hardest working person he's ever been with. He said that they used to work at your office seven days a week and that you just were nonstop. But then when I went off the dinner with you recently, you told me your schedule. It didn't sound very hard. It sounded just normal. So which is it? Well, which is true.
- I think it's probably both. So one of the things I always use as a framework is there's kind of gas and breaks in life. And so at certain points, you need to hit the gas and other times you can kind of like let your foot off the gas coast as the car. And then other times you need to hit the brake and knowing when to hit the gas when to hit the brake is pretty important actually. You don't want to kind of be hitting the gas when there's a wall in front of you. Like you want to make sure you are able to kind of go all in when when it's necessary. But the second thing is you got to last, right? You can't just sprint all the time. No matter how athletic you are, you got to have some level of endurance. And so that's probably one of the things that I've really learned to do over the years. I wasn't great at it at the beginning now. I'm probably pretty good at it. But you know, we're recording this on Monday yesterday was Sunday. I record a podcast Sunday morning at 11 o'clock in the morning after I did a two hour meeting with a friend at 9 a.m. And a lot of people were like, that sounds crazy. But I'm like, no, what did you do? You like went and did all your hobbies. I have no hobbies. I literally hang out with my family and I work, but I do it because I enjoy it. And so if you enjoy doing it, like this isn't hard. I'm like looking forward to today talking to you two. Because I'm like, you know what? They're probably going to be ridiculous. Probably going to have a lot of fun. And we're going to learn something from each other. Like how lucky are the three of us?
- two out of three eight bad. So let's we got to get to this crazy ball of you bet. And then I'm going to ask you what you're doing with your life after that because I think you need a little empire. You have to set the stage for who he is, right? Who pop is? I guess let's start with who pop is. So I think you're known as like the Bitcoin guy, I would say that's the kind of how you built your brand. You've obviously done a lot more than that before that. I think you worked at Facebook and even Snapchat for a little quick.
- lunch. And so you worked in tech, you started to build a big following on Twitter around crypto and Bitcoin, built one of the bigger newsletters and brands in that space. And since then launched a bunch of businesses around it. So you had a VC, you sort of had your own VC fund or you worked on VC fund and then launched your own, you have kind of like a crypto jobs company, you have a bunch of things in that ecosystem. Since then, I think you've made some changes now. I want to hear about those in a bit. But then we have this biology bet and pop, why don't you.
- Just give us the quick 60 seconds on who biology is and then we'll frame what this what this crazy bet is And then I have some insight info all right, so I don't want to be a spokesperson for Bellagie So everything I said is my opinion. This is my description of him. This is my description of the bet But Bellagie Shrinivasan is probably best known now For being one of the more kind of public figures to have predicted a lot of what happened for COVID He was very early calling out. Hey, this is a risk if this risk becomes a reality Here's how bad it could get and you know again as with predictions a lot of it was right some of it was wrong But generally I think people point back and they're like man We should have listened to that guy he then went on like a two or three year heater Where he kept making predictions and kept being right about a lot of things and so the internet kind of Rallyed around this idea of like the worst words to ever hear was Bellagie was right And so when you build that type of kind of following and that type of Reputation now people put a lot of weight when you say something and so his latest thing is Bitcoin is going to hit a million dollars in the next 90 days Which sounds absolutely insane bitcoins trading at 27 000 dollars It's like you know where 40x from here and to do it in 90 days like we've never seen an asset really ever do that before
- Now, I don't agree that that is highly likely. I would put it at like maybe, I don't know, 5% chance, which is actually much higher than probably most people would put it. But to me, the most interesting part is like the reasoning behind why he's saying this. And I think it's important to call out the Belaji's bet is like the best meme of 2023. He was able to essentially create a meme that has caused millions of people to now talk about this idea of hyperinflation, bank failures, and Bitcoin. And I think that's ultimately what he was trying to do. So if you asked him in a private room like, hey, do you really think Bitcoin's going to be a million dollars in 90 days? He's putting $2 million on the line. So like, he definitely thinks there's a chance.
- But I don't know if he's at like 99.999% likely or if he's what's what's what's two million to him. Is that a big deal or no? It's hard to tell. So Blaji before he became known as the like Blaji was right guy. He built and sold a number of companies. I think at least two that I know have had nine figure exits like he's like real, right? He's a great entrepreneur. He worked at Andreessen Horowitz for a while. He was that Coinbase as the CTO like he's a very real entrepreneur and investor. So he's done well for himself financially. But like I don't care how rich you are like you don't go publicly bet people $2 million on Twitter unless you have some degree of confidence. Because in some way like 2 million may or may not be a big number. But like your personal reputation is you know, quote unquote priceless. And so like that's basically what he's staking here is he's using the money to draw attention to what he's saying. But really he's staking his reputation on something that a lot of people think is absolutely insane at the moment.
- And the bet started because this guy met Locke. I actually don't know who I forget his first name But he basically tweeted something and said like hyper inflation is not going to happen and then Biology replied and said I actually think it will happen and in fact I'll bet I'll take your million dollar bet that hyper inflation is going to happen in the next 90 days And this is related to the Bitcoin or that's another bet on top of the Bitcoin one Then you won't wrote this post and you had one line and you had a couple lines in there that I hated in my hated I mean It was like it stung me One of them was you quoted Lenin, you know One of the folks who ran the Soviet Union you said there are decades where nothing happens And then there are weeks where decades happen You said that and then you had a few other lines and I started reading this and I got scared I like I was legitimately scared and I texted you and I was like is this real and you're like Maybe maybe not I forget exactly what you said, but you wrote this in such a way that I was I was fearful
- Yeah, so I definitely don't want to fear monger, but I do think that there have been two points now in the last three years where it's like kind of a shake people and wake them up and be like, hey, pay attention right now. The first was during March of 2020. I wrote a couple of different pieces. People had similar reactions to it. And you know, one of the pieces was like, I basically was arguing that unemployment was going to be double digits and millions and millions of people were going to lose their jobs. And I had people like privately emailing, be like, you are insane, please stop fear mongering like this is crazy. And then the next week, 6.6 million people filed unemployment claims, right? And so like if Balaji is like a plus, I'm like D minus maybe in the analyzing some of this stuff. But at least what I want to do is call attention to like, hey, this is serious and like you should pay attention. Because if this goes the wrong way, it could be catastrophic. Not only for people with the personal finances, but also like as a nation. And I think it's also important to call out that like, yes, it is important, but I don't think most people want this stuff to happen. Right? Like the United States of America is this amazing place. There's millions of people around the world that try to come to this country. And it's because we have democracy and capitalism and stability and like all the things that we know make.
- this country great. If we were to lose some of that stuff, like this isn't about a financial product or an asset going up or down in price. It's like, if there is complete chaos in a country, people don't care about what currency they're holding. Like they want guns, right? And like, that's not a world we want to live in. And so I think it's less about kind of finance and kind of investing. And it's much more about like, pay attention to this serious situation that's playing. I think it's with Blodgy's doing with his bet. That's why I tried to get across with the piece that I wrote last week. You also had this other line where you said, bodies keep floating or you said a friend yesterday told me bodies keep floating to the surface, meaning the Silicon Valley bank, that's just one body and we're going to keep seeing more bodies. And so you like used a language that I'm fairly on. I mean, I have a high level understanding of this stuff. So nowhere close to a lot of smart people, but you use language that that's stung me. And when I see people who like you who write like that, it's almost like this is how I describe Malcolm Gladwell. When I read his books.
- They're so convincing. Tucker Maxx is not the guy who does this. He's, they're so convincing because they're such good writers and they're so, so good at just explaining their points that I have to remember that when like a Malcolm Gladwell book, it's like, dude, this is all just a, a theory. And I could probably find lots of examples of why he's wrong, but he's so good and you are so good at writing about it that I, I begin to believe you. And I have to like pinch myself sometimes. I'm like, wait, this is just his opinion. And there's actually people that are probably equally smart and equally experienced to have a different opinion. And I find that to be that whole thing though, I find to be very confusing and I, and unsettling.
- It's this viewpoint that like you want to argue ferociously one point of view so that the response, both the critiques and the support is as ferocious back. Right, if you write a piece and if people are just like, eh, whatever, like, you know, I've heard this a hundred times, like nobody even takes the time to respond. But on the internet, like you kind of have to go all in and really argue a point. But if you are intelligent, hopefully if you get new information or you see a critique that you're like, oh, that's actually a great point. And you're willing to change your mind. Then you can very quickly iterate your way closer to the truth. It's hard to always get to the truth. But I think that's kind of why I write that way is just argue ferociously and then you'll get the ferocious response and that will help you get to the truth faster.
- What's the best, let me ask one more question about this Sean, really quick. What's the best argument as well as the best person that you like to read that takes the opposite stance of you that you can see that you can, you would say, if I'm wrong, I think this could be true. Like who do you, who do you like to read that thinks you're wrong and they could be right? So it's different on every topic obviously and even in individual situations. I have friends who I agree on 95% of stuff with and then there's that one thing that they like vehemently disagree with me on and I actually pay attention more when they disagree than to the person who disagrees with everything.
- Right? It's like once somebody has shown that they're a clear thinker and somebody's able to actually think through individual ideas and they don't just succumb to like, oh, Sam and I are friends, we always agree on everything. So like on this new topic, I should just agree with them. Actually I want to surround myself with people who they are very clear when they agree and they're very clear when they disagree. And what you want to look for is like volatility in agreement. So the more that somebody agrees with you, you pay attention and put weight on when they disagree. And then the more that somebody disagrees with you, that you want to pay attention when they actually agree. So it's that volatility or that kind of reversion away from the mean that ends up being important to pay attention to.
- But who are those people in this case? Is there anyone? Right now, I would say, so it's less about individuals. I think there's a whole cohort of people. Everyone has kind of a little bit different view, but let me explain first kind of what's happening and then it'll help me explain why I think that there could be a counter-argument to it as well. So the main argument is that if you go back to the beginning of 2020, the economic and financial system was like pretty good, right? Unemployment was pretty low, inflation was under 2%. Like we were kind of chugging along, we had been in a decades-long bull market, everything seemed fine, if not good. Obviously COVID happens and the first kind of big shock to the system was all the government lockdowns, right? So across the world, people said, hey, go sit in your homes. When you do that, what's called the velocity of money or the amount of commerce goes down. So if you used to go to the bar, if you used to go and buy stuff at the store, like you're just locked in your house now, you're not spending as much money. So when velocity of money goes down, people get scared. And when they get scared and they're fearful, there ends up being something called a liquidity crisis. And the best way to think of a liquidity crisis is just like, you look at your portfolio of assets and you're like, I want dollars, I want safety. And so you just sell everything that you can to try to get dollars. So people didn't care if it was stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, if they had liquid, real estate assets, they could sell commodities, anything. They just sell everything and they want dollars. And so if you go back and look in March of 2020- Literally meaning cash in a checking or savings account. So that's like step one. And then if you remember during March and April of 2020, people didn't know what's going on. Like I went to the ATM and I pulled out a bunch of cash. People were literally pulling physical cash out. And they're like, well, just in case, right? Like who knows what's going to happen? They also were like buying toilet paper and doing all like the crazy stuff. Cause fear takes over.
- And so when these liquidity crisis happened, all assets go down and the dollar becomes stronger. And central banks and governments have to make a decision. They can say, hey, we believe in the free market and we're just gonna let this play out. Yeah, it'll be painful in the short term, but the free market will kind of figure it out over time. Or they can, what they normally do, say, we are gonna intervene. We're gonna step in, we can't let our people suffer. And so of course, politicians and central bankers, they're very short term optimized because there's pain that millions of people experience on a day to day basis. And it's hard to sit by and watch people suffer. So it makes sense from a human viewpoint as to why they would step in, although I disagree that many times they probably should not step
- And so that's what they did. They stepped in, they basically dropped interest rates to 0%, which just made it incredibly attractive to borrow money, right? If people are borrowing money, that means they're going and they're spending it. They're buying houses, they're buying all this kind of different stuff. And then they also pumped between the central bank and the politicians trillions of dollars into the economy. One key thing that a lot of people missed, including myself initially, is that regardless of how the money got into the system, the money ended up in the banks. So if they gave $1,200 checks to individuals, whether they bailed out the airline industry, whether they created all sorts of stimulus packages, whatever, when people received the money, whether they spent it or they held it, someone, an individual or a company put that money in the bank.
- And so the deposits of these banks exploded. Silicon Valley Bank is a great example. They had about $60 billion of deposits to start. They ended up having about $190 billion of deposits. So kind of three X growth, $130 billion or so. But what does the bank do when all of a sudden people show up and like, here's $190 billion. They're in the business of making money. And so in a zero interest rate environment, they can't buy short term debt, right? All that means is like they're buying treasuries that are three months, six month, nine month, 12 month, two years, whatever. But all of that basically has no return because interest rates are at zero. So instead what Silicon Valley Bank did is they went
- And they bought 10 year bonds, meaning that they're going to buy a bond today. If they hold it for 10 years, they'll get back their principal plus whatever the return on the bond is. Now that bond that they were buying had about a 1.5% return, right? So you buy it today, you hold it for 10 years, you're getting your principal plus the 1.5% type return over that 10 year period. Which is a conservative play? Super safe, super conservative, backed by the US government. Like everyone looks at treasuries and like that's the safest thing to buy, right?
- Now, that is all good and fine if the environment continues how it is. What ended up happening is that all that money got pumped into the system, inflation exploded, we had the highest inflation in 40 years, and so now all of a sudden, inflation's at 9 plus percent, and the central bank's like, oh boy, this is not good. We have to bring inflation down because inflation actually doesn't hurt rich people. Rich people make money on inflation because they own assets. It's the poor people, the bottom 50 percent. They're the ones who get hurt by inflation. So let's try to get inflation under control. And so the way they did this is they jacked up interest rates from 0 percent to about 4.5 percent.
- And then they started selling assets off their balance sheet. They sold about a trillion dollars of assets When they do that basically they are tightening financial conditions making it harder and less attractive to borrow what what spend money What do they sell? What do they sell the central bank? This is actually a crazy statistic. They had about a nine hundred billion dollar Balance sheet coming out of the global financial crisis. They tend bagged it They literally went from nine hundred billion to nine trillion between the global financial crisis in 2022 Right so they expanded by buying all sorts of debt and treasuries and and various assets And that's how they get money into the system Is they exchange the dollars for these assets and then when they contract or they try to make tighter financial conditions They sell all of those assets right or a good portion of it to kind of get to pull liquidity out of the system
- But when they did this, the banks are basically left holding the bag. And what I mean by that is the banks took that Silicon Valley bank, $130 billion, $80 billion of it, they bought these bonds that earn 1.5%, which is great in the 0% interest rate environment. When they've now increased interest rates to 4.5%, that bond that you bought previously is no longer good. It's actually cheap. And so it trades lower. So if you spent $100 on the bond, now if you were to sell it to someone, maybe you could sell it for 80 cents. So you'd lose 20% on that bond.
- The reason why that doesn't matter historically is because the banks actually get special accounting treatment. So let's say that Sean has a portfolio and in one of them he bought a stock and he spent $100 a share, right? So he bought a stock for $100. If he goes to the bank and now the stock is trading at $80 and he wants to use that stock share as collateral, they don't give him credit for spending $100. They're like, hey, moron, it's worth $80. Like, you get credit for $80, not $100.
- But the banks have a special accounting treatment where they can actually take some of the assets on their balance sheet and they can put it in a special area and they call it hold to maturity. Hold to maturity basically means we get to count what we bought it for, not what it's worth today. And the reason why they're allowed to do this is because they can hold the bond until the maturity, the 10 year period, and they'll get the principal plus the return. So as long as they don't sell it before it matures, then it ends up being worth what they paid for it.
- The only time that this does not work is if all of the depositors want their money back at the same time. Because now the banks have to sell all those assets and take that money to give back to depositors. And that's what happened to Silicon Valley Bank is basically there was a bank run when the bank run caused the bank to sell assets. They lost billions of dollars, which then scared more depositors. So then they went and said, Hey, give me my money back. And it just became this reinforcing cycle. And in 24 hours, $42 billion was drained out of the bank, which caused them to eventually be insolvent and the government took it over.
- And ultimately, great explanation. That was awesome. You killed it there. Biology and a few other people are betting that that's going to happen to other more consumer based banks in the next 90 days. Is that right? So it's already happened. Like this isn't just a Silicon Valley bank thing. Like a lot of the politicians, this was like a softball served up to them down, you know, right down the plate. They were like, oh, great. The crypto and tech companies are a bank customer. It must be their fault. Like Silvergate bank, Silicon Valley bank, Signature bank, now credit suites. But these are not crypto banks or just tech banks. This is a complete global financial system issue. And now there's reports coming out that hundreds of banks are actually underwater in terms of holding these assets. And so that's why you've seen the central bank and the governments around the world step in and say we will backstop a lot of these deposits because they don't want people to be so scared that they go when they try to take their money out of the banks. Because if everyone goes to do that, that then basically creates a cascade of bank runs. And so Belaji's argument and why he's making this bet is that when the government steps in to protect the depositors, that is an inflationary pressure. And it's going to take trillions and trillions of dollars to do it. And so at the same time you're getting trillions of dollars of inflationary pressure, you also are getting this psychological awakening. And people are saying wait a second.
- Maybe the dollar isn't as strong as we thought it was, I should look for an alternative. And when those two things happen, hyperinflation can occur, doesn't guarantee it, but it can occur. And I think really, if you kind of boil down this entire argument and why he's created this essentially meme with the bit signal, is that people in the United States, we've never worried about this. But this is not new, globally. There are people listening to this podcast right now, they'll tweet at us afterwards. They'll be like, dude, I live in Argentina. Like inflation's like 70, 80% year over year. I live in Venezuela, I live in Zimbabwe, I live in all these countries where they live with hyperinflation on a day to day basis.
- It's just that in the US, we've never thought about it. And then two is like you add complexity because the United States dollars the global reserve currency. So if we screw this up so bad that we hyper inflate the dollar, I don't even understand. I don't think a lot of people understand like what happens globally when the global reserve currency hits high inflation or hyper inflation. So again, it goes back to like, we don't want this to happen. But damn, people should be paying attention right now to make sure that they understand what's occurring and kind of how to prepare for it. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sync spreadsheets or doing databases. HubSpot grow better.
- So let me add a little color on what you just said. So there was a biology tweet of this out, which is a memo or a note from the Kansas City Office of the Federal Reserve. And they had said there's kind of this like one section that he highlighted, which it said, a year end 2021, so basically two years ago, only four community banks were below the kind of 5% ratio of their assets that they had available. So they were basically only four, four banks would be at the threshold that we would be worried about.
- Fast forward to today, that's now 333 community banks in the United States. So 333 community banks are essentially insolvent is what this means and could be if there was a bank run on any one of these, we would have the same problem that we had first at Silicon Valley Bank and then what was about to happen on last Monday or whatever where everybody was going to go to, I know here in California, first Republic Bank was like, you know, the domino that was ready to fall before they came in and said, no, no, no, everything's everything's safe. All your deposits are guaranteed. Don't worry to try to stop that from happening because there are 333 banks just in the United States. They say are below that ratio. Now what that would do to the next year, who knows, and also overseas because the dollar is the reserve currency overseas, there's a bunch of banks that hold dollars and they're worried about what if there's a bank run on us.
- And so like, you know, just last night overnight on a Sunday night, you know, it's bad when they're sort of working on a Sunday night and, you know, making these announcements where they're like, oh, we're establishing this like swap line. And it's like, what's the swap line? Swap line is basically, hey, we'll bail you out too. So if you need dollars, the central bank of the United States will give it to you to European central bank and all these other places. And they basically established this overnight back channel, which said, if you need dollars because you're going to get hit with a run, we don't want you to fall over and cause this cascade of fear and panic and withdrawals. So we will also backstop you just like we backstop, you know, the community banks in the United States.
- To to biology's credit. I think he's correctly identified just like he did with coronavirus that hey This might be a lot worse than you think If there's actually data to support that the conditions are worse than you think now what's funny is Volergy actually did this twice so you had like a V1 of trying to spread the word same I don't know if you saw this one so the first V1 was he goes the bit signal He goes how do you raise ring the fire alarm on the internet? How do you show? It's not a false alarm. I'm putting up the bit signal. He goes. I'll put a million dollars in Bitcoin to alert people about this stealth financial crisis
- I'll give $1,000 to the best thousand tweets that show a reply with a graph, a stat, a meme that will bring attention to what's happening because the central bank and the banks and the bank regulators have bankrupted us. They're trying to hide the insolvency of the banks to you, the depositor. Which is a weird thing to do, right? That's like, it's helpful that he's trying to help, but sometimes that doesn't help, right? So this was a pure giveaway, right? That's not a bet. He said, I'm giving away a million dollars to the, I'll give $1,000 to the thousand best tweets that will spread the word.
- This tweet did pretty good, 13,000 likes. And he tried, but then he hit you with just like a bunch of like, you know, things that topology is like light reading. But to the rest of us is like, oh man, like, I gotta, you know, I gotta hook up to an oxygen tank just to intake this amount of information. So it's like this, this crazy thing. So he'll tweet this table of like, you know, 45 currencies that have done hyperinflation. He'll tweet out a thing that basically shows some random meeting minutes from the Fed in 2022 that showed that they knew something, right? Like all these data points, but it wasn't really going viral until this guy James Medlock comes out and he goes, I'll bet anyone a million dollars the US does not enter hyperinflation. And James Medlock, by the way. I think, by the way, he had it. It was even scarier. I think he said,
- Everything that we're talking about by the way, it's in within 90 days of like last week, right? No No, first it was general just said I'll bet anyone high one million dollars hyperflesh. It doesn't happen Okay, that was just that was that guy sweet apology just takes this brand. I interrupt to do say who he is say who he is I don't know who this guy is His bio says social democrat markets Market socialist of the sheets. I don't let this guy's talking about this guy's like it's a meme account. It looks like so You know, he's got a picture that I know this is mean $1 million bets
- Yeah, exactly. His email is at mastodon.lol. Okay, so let's be real, what's going on there? So biology comes out and he says, I will take that bet. You buy one Bitcoin and I'll send $1 million to an escrow. To be clear, this is 40 to one odds. So he's basically saying not only is this unlikely to happen, if this was even odds, it would have been like, dang, biology is going to lose a million dollars because Bitcoin is not likely to be worth a million dollars. Then he added in 90 days, which is already a radical move. Then he said,
- And by the way, the million dollars versus one Bitcoin Bitcoin's currently at 26,000 at this time He made the spend he goes that's 40 to one odds that I'm laying you and he says all we gotta do is find so You know, I mutually agreed on like escrow or custodian And he again, he tweets out this bit signal graph and so he's like, you know, I'm doing this again Now this this tweet goes viral this one gets 11 million views because it's more provocative It's it lets anybody in a first the wave of tweets myself included was like Apologies nuts. He's gone crazy. Like this doesn't make any sense and And so, you know, because it was like not only was the bet unlikely to prove in his favor
- It was a perfect bet for mr. Yeah, James medlock over here the social the Democrat in the streets and the socialist in the sheets All he had to do was buy two Bitcoin Right he could buy one that he's putting up for the bet and if he's wrong and big and the dollar does hyperinflate Bitcoin Becomes with a million dollars all he had to do was buy a second one So if he could for fifty two thousand dollars you could guarantee himself a million dollar payday So it was like an absolute no-brainer and you know the poker player in me was like, well, what are you doing? You've given this guy like a you know a no-lose bet and so I messaged him and I was like, you know, hey Ballage this is crazy. What are you what are you thinking and here's what he here's what he replied? I think I could share this because it's not not anything that he's not tweeting out. He's tweeting all this stuff out Anyways, so it's not it's not overly crazy, but here's what he said
- So he goes, he just replies, all the banks are insolvent. That was the first reply. He goes, have you seen the big short where one guy figured something out early and everybody else thinks he's crazy? That's what's happening here. He goes, people think this was a single bank issue, like Silicon Valley bank. It was a central bank issue. All the banks are dead. 10 days ago, there were no dead banks. Today there are five. If people realize this and they'll start to pull their money out, they'll realize that the banks don't have it.
- It's uncle Sam Bankman free not uncle Sam Which is what basically what happened with FTX people realize the money's not in the the money's not in the in the bank with with FTX And then that caused you know the extreme crash And then he tweeted out a bunch of stuff and he goes He goes I'm not doing he goes yes I'm not doing this to make money because I pointed out that the guy could just hedge and win the bat he goes Yes, I'm not doing this to make money goes if I had the beliefs that I do and I was just purely selfish I would simply just take the million dollars and buy 40 Bitcoin. I would take you know another million dollars buy another 40 Bitcoin
- And I do it quietly because I believe that the million dollars is gonna be worth zero in 90 days I'm doing this to alert innocent people and to send a message get to the exits And so I want to bring up a couple of like cases here. So that that's the bad Really really really quick. There was also this other thing apparently right around this time There's a picture of him. So this guy biology. He's like has this like On the YouTube video got a throw the picture So he's got this stereotype of being like, you know, like the forgetful scientist of like He's just this guy who only cares about being brilliant and oftentimes he's right and he's eloquent whatever
- There's a picture of him. It looks like he's giving a seminar at like a university and the someone tweeted he goes biology's saying get the F out of the US and it's and it's very scary and he's sitting there giving this presentation in front of like a class and he's wearing pajamas like a pajama looking hoodie basketball shorts and Nike Air Jordan flip-flops with his laptop sitting on top of like two cardboard boxes And so if you needed like this this
- Any more of the stereotype of this like brilliant, like, you know, of this, the image that we have of Mark Zuckerberg, you know, just sitting in the hoodie, coding, eating pizza and drinking Red Bull. Biology's going all in on that image. And it almost makes it worse when I see this picture. But I think a lot of why he has so much credibility is that he has been able to identify a number of these like exponential situations. And if you really think about what he's saying here, it's almost an exact overlay to COVID, right? He saw very early on a couple of data points and he was able to extrapolate from a couple of those data points. Hey, this isn't a linear line. Like, this is literally an exponential curve. And the top of the exponential curve is really scary. Like, let me go yell scream and like call attention to it.
- He's doing the exact same thing here. And I think that's what Sean was reading about like, hey, 10 days ago there was no dead banks. Now there's five. Like he's just trying to put a couple of data points and be like, if this goes exponential, like this is really bad. And I think that one of the components that's important to call out is like, I don't know what the percentage is of Americans, but most Americans don't know that if you go and you deposit your money in the bank, it's not your money anymore. Right, like just that alone, like the lack of financial education of the average American is astonishing.
- And so yes, there's FDIC insurance that covers up to 250k. Like there's all these different things. But if you go look right now, like the FDIC does not have enough money to backstop every bank in America. I think they used 20% of it was used to help Silicon Valley bank. Yeah, Silicon Valley bank is like the 20th largest bank in America. So it's like not very big compared to the big, big ones. One other thing that I think is important to understand about these situations is this idea of like a digital catastrophe. And this is a concept that Frank guys struggled a little bit to come up with like a good name for it. But I think digital catastrophe kind of really articulates it as best as I can. Which is you need to understand this concept because it is going to become very, very common in our lives over the next 20, 30, 40 years. But the way that I define a digital catastrophe is it's an event that occurs that is negative. Usually plays out in the analog world, kind of the real world. But it is drastically accelerated by the speed of communication and action online. And so Silicon Valley bank is like the prime example, right? If you think about what happened there.
- On Wednesday afternoon, they made an announcement. By Thursday morning, people were scared. By Thursday afternoon, $42 billion had been withdrawn from the bank and by Friday morning, the bank was dead. Right? So like in 48 hours, it was the second largest banking failure in the United States history. But in the old days, what you would have to do in order to have a bank run is like, Sean would walk over to Sam's house and be like, yo, Sam, did you hear like, the bank's probably not doing so hot? And then like, Sam would be like, huh, that's kind of crazy. And you would walk, ride your horse, maybe get in a car, and like show up to the bank physically, wait in line and be like, when you get to the teller window, can I have my money back?
- That takes a lot of time, effort, energy, all that type of stuff. Now you can literally open a new tab on your browser, click a couple buttons, and move your money. And so when the speed of information occurs that it does on the internet, millions of people, whether you're a customer Silicon Valley bank or not, like Twitter knew that the bank was insolvent by like noon on Thursday. Right? And so if that happens, that's how you get $42 billion withdrawn from a bank. That is a digital catastrophe. It's the speed of information, the speed of action online has real world consequences. And so another way to think about it is like the internet was weaponized to create the second largest bank failure in history.
- But it was in response to the knowledge of an insolvent bank that was caused by a fractional reserve banking system and an increasing of interest rates that basically left the bag holders as the banks. And so people were just operating out of personal incentive to get out of the way. Yeah, there's a, there's a, it was kind of amazing. Like a Thursday morning, I remember waking up in an our group chat, Sam, there was like somebody posted Silicon Valley bank stock was going down.
- I was down like 30 or 40%. I was like, oh, wow, I must have had a bad earnings call, right? Or, you know, that was kind of my assumption. It wasn't anything too, too bad. Uh, you know, by 11 or noon, I'm scrolling Twitter and I start to see, you know, if you scroll, this is just a general truism. If you scroll social media and you see four or five different sources talking about the same thing, your brain is just like wired to be like, this is now a bit, this is a big deal. Topic X is a big deal. Markers use this to their advantage when they want you to like. Bunko by a product or know about a movie that's coming out or whatever. They do the same thing. That's why they get why influencer marketing is a big deal, but it also works just organically. Five people say the same thing on in one Twitter scroll. I know that something's up. And so I remember being on the phone and basically in the manner of like 15 minutes, it was like, I'm on the phone. We're not even really sure what to do is like, uh, let's just be safe. Take it out.
- Sent an email, you know, sent an email saying, hey, we're taking it out. Opened up a new tab, clicked wire the money, took a screenshot of the wire, sent it back into six group chats, then went ahead and tweeted out a thing. It's like, wow, like in 15 minutes, I just like propagated this more than I could have done if I, if it had been my full-time job, you know, 20 years ago, which is kind of what, to your point. And, and the funny thing is people are mad that like, they're like, well, if there wasn't a bank run, there would have never been a problem.
- And it's sort of like, they use this example of like, what's it called, like Screaming Fire in a movie theater or something like that. It's like then everybody runs the exits. Well, the reality is if there's no fire in the theater, everybody run into the exits and getting stuck there then, you know, trying to get out, like it's not that big of a deal. There was actually a fire. And so, like, you know, I don't know how the blame gets shifted to the people who successfully got out of the fire versus pointing out that, hey, somebody caused this thing to catch fire, which is kind of Baldgy's point. Baldgy tweets out this graph of
- The like the balance sheet or whatever it's basically like goes up up up up up Which is like during the money printing era then the last year year or so It's been trying to tighten so it's been going down So contracting and then like overnight it just goes straight up vertical like no graph You've ever seen because it's two trillion dollars was basically of liquidity was added to the market now some people say No, it wasn't really Certainly put into the supply like pop you might have an idea about this some people say well that two trillion dollars is not really being Given out it's not going into the supply. It's kind of just there as a borrowing Facility in case the banks need it in order to like prevent any panic and other people say
- Money per to go birth. It's the same thing. So, you know, what are you talking about here? I don't know Do you have an opinion on that? you know when you're in like high school and There's the like but actually kid in class who like sits there in the corner and no matter what anyone says like But actually and they try to tell you about something they read or this or that or whatever. It's actually called Barcelona Oh, you mean Biscetta? I mean, Bresheta care Like that is those people on the Internet right these people who they're the same people during COVID that were like But actually and then they would go on some ranch Right like no the government locked us in our homes and literally printed trillions of dollars and created 40 year high inflation and absolutely screwed millions of people I don't care what but actually you have to say and then you look at the same situation is like they're like But actually inflation will be transitory and it will come back down right and then you're like no That's not how this works and so ultimately what you end up having which makes markets so that this is a part of capitalism
- is you have theory, meet reality. Sometimes theory is a great primer and overlay on reality, and other times it's not. And what I've learned over time is that the more complex the system, the less likely it is that the theory overlays perfectly on reality. And like, there is no more complex system than the economic system of America, let alone the world. And so all these people who are like, oh, inflation will come down because the Fed will do this or that. Well, like, the Fed isn't the only thing that contributes to inflation. There's supply chain disruptions, there's geopolitical war, there's like all these different components to it.
- And so I think that you've got to be very careful just looking at theory and trying to impose theory onto reality. But the other thing that I would say throughout this entire cycle or kind of news development, man, are we lucky we have the internet. Like the internet is the greatest place in the world. And like Sean did a great job explaining, you can propagate some of this information. But imagine being in the 1950s or 60s and like you basically could read the newspaper and maybe you watch like the nighttime news.
- And you have to listen to the talking points from the like public narrative or like the, you know, the government or the Fed or whatever. On a daily basis, there are things that are said by those who kind of set the public narrative and within seconds people on the internet destroy the narrative. And they're like, no, that's not true. Here's these five points. And like, I don't care necessarily who's right or wrong every single time as much as it's like, I want both sides. I want what the people in charge are saying. And then I want the people who like think the people in charge or idiots are saying. And then I'll kind of like think for myself, but the internet is what has empowered that. And so like, wow, what an amazing time for us to be alive to have that ability because literally two generations ago, they didn't have a, what are you going to do? Go to the encyclopedia and look up like, what is a bank run, right? Or like, how does central banking work? It's just amazing that we now have this capability.
- So I think we should wrap this segment up and I want to wrap it up by each of you in just a couple sentences Saying what do you think is gonna happen in the next 90 days and what are you are you guys doing anything? Sean you go first Okay, so I'm gonna say two things I think in the next 90 days I basically I think biology is actually correct on everything except for his 90-day point Because I think that's too hard to know and He might end up being correct that it something happens in the next 90 days or it might take 900 days And I think either way the important part is he was right. It's just the time fact the time window I think makes things impossible, but the good news is you don't actually need to know the time window to act accordingly
- I've said this for a very long time, and I think what biology saying is a much louder, better version of that, which is for a long time, people thought, if you're buying Bitcoin, you're trying to make a buck. And from the beginning, once I started to understand what is this, I was like, oh, this is not about making money. It's about saving money. It's a savings technology, which is basically to say, even when inflation was only two or three percent, if you just look at two or three percent over a 40 or 50 year period, the money that you have in the bank will still, if you put $100,000 in the bank, it'll still look like $100,000.
- But it will only have the buying power of something that's $60,000, for example. And so why would you ever save your money and something that is designed to lose purchasing power? You wouldn't do that. And so I don't think that it's a... So I've always thought Bitcoin's the core value of it is it's a savings technology. It's a currency whose one big feature is it doesn't inflate. And so, you know, if you wanted to save your money, you would rather save your money and something that doesn't inflate, cannot inflate, versus something that either inflate slowly or quickly. Right? Low inflation or high inflation. I don't want any inflation if I'm saving my money. And so anyways, I think that he is correct about if you're going to save money, you should do it in a hard currency that's not going to inflate. I've already been on this bandwagon, obviously been the kind of crypto person that's, you know, obviously a believer in crypto, created the milk road because I believe in crypto, still believe in crypto. And so nothing has really changed there. In the next 90 days, I would guess that biology looks like a fool because people are going to point out that it didn't happen in that time period. But in the next 900 days, I think that he will be proven correct.
- 30 seconds, pop, what do you think? Or 60 seconds? I think that Bellagie is correct, similar to Sean. The timeline is hard to get there. I will put a higher probability on the 90-day timeline than most because I do think that there's tail risk. And mainly it's because when hyperinflation happens, it happens very fast. Like in episodes of hyperinflation, everything's fine. 90 days later, there is hyperinflation. So it's less about has this ever happened and it's more about is it going to happen? Again, I'm like maybe 5% because I do think there's very systematic problems and issues currently in the global financial system. I do think that the banks or the central banks when faced with save the bank, save the dollar, will save the banks, which will lead to inflationary pressures. But I would not bet a million dollars that Bitcoin will be a million dollars in 90.
- days. Whoo! Are you guys hyped up or what? I'm ready to go get a fight. We should say one thing, which is the other take that people have on this, which is that if biology has like a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin, he doesn't need to be right for this to be a profitable bet for him. So if he's got a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin already, Bitcoin's up like 20% last week or something like that, but it's up like, you know, four or five percent right now. You know, he basically would only need to move it by like three percent or it only need to move up by three percent in order for him to be profitable losing two million USD if he's got a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin, which I suspect that he does have a hundred million dollars of Bitcoin.
- I think he now has moved 90. I think he said this. He's moved 99% of his net worth into crypto And so so I don't think I think he can be directionally I think he can lose the bet and still make money and be doing the thing that's you know To his beliefs the right thing to do which is alert people that the that the banking system is is currently broken and You know he is the Michael Burry of of our industry. So we'll see if he's correct Dude, I just feel like I drink just drink like a leader of Mountain Dew. I'm just like drinking buckets of do I'm just like people want another Sam now when palm tweeted out that he's coming on people wanted to know
- How you gonna sit in a room with the two of us and still Be sitting there in cash ETFs and not own any crypto at the end of this segment. Well, hold on It's a hell are you in on are you gonna go buy Bitcoin or what I own Bitcoin? I own I own it from 2015 I've made purchases and I Don't have cash I have real estate and I have but here's the thing though Which is in hyperinflation periods I own equities those also go up that I don't you know to get to a million dollars Bitcoin right now is that 27,000, you know, that's like Uh, what's that like 50x or something? I don't know if equities will 50x but I I mean they will go up
- Yeah, maybe but also all those businesses running dollars and all their earnings are in dollars if dollars are not useful anymore Right like the whole system that's that's the thing I'm a Bitcoin bull and you don't want to see this happen because the world will be chaotic Absolutely chaotic. It will be bad for a lot of people. I think everybody even who's the biggest Bitcoin bulls You said this would be yourself pump You're not rooting for it to happen this way a slow transition It's really the only thing you want a fast transition would create a lot of damage and so you don't really want that to happen

Behind The Scenes Of $1,000,000⧸Year Online Courses [lhWNCv9NhFg].txt

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- I have this student, her name is Deneera, and she lives in LA, single mom, three kids, really small house, not enough rooms for everybody. Like she is definitely doing it herself. She was working two jobs and she was baking and people would come to her house, they'd pick up a birthday cake or a celebration cake or whatever, and that's how one way she was making money. Long story short, cut to creating a digital course, and she became really good at caramel candy apples. So how to create caramel candy apples. And the thing is, the caramel was store bought. It wasn't like her special recipe, just people didn't know what store to go to or what to buy. And so she started to create these and sell a digital course. Now, a lot of my students, many of them have made seven figures and beyond, but I wanna talk about her because she's a woman who made, never made over $100,000 a year, and now in one digital course launch, she made $260,000 selling how to create caramel candy apples. And she literally was just doing live videos in a private Facebook.
- group. And I always tell that story because a lot of people listening have never created anything in their life online and they would never even they're like my idea can't be good enough or it's not original enough or whatever. And then I think a denier a single mom living in LA making $260,000 on the first time she launched anything. Now she's making way more money than that. But that's the kind of stuff that I live for because it has to start somewhat. Amy what's going on? Amy Portafield you're part of the HubSpot podcast network you're a new ish edition right? Once you join. Right. Yeah just about two months.
- And so what would you say you do? I mean, you do, I've read your blog for years and years and years, but we had John Lee Dumas on the other day and I was like, I actually don't know how to describe him. And he's like, do I just call him a podcaster? Is he, he's a blogger? I'm not actually sure what, how I would, like, cause you kind of do a bunch of stuff. How would you describe? You sound like my mom and dad who have no clue what I do 13 years in. So I totally get it. I always say that I am an internet marketing expert and I help entrepreneurs still build businesses online. And my expertise is to take your knowledge and know how and turn that into a profitable digital.
- course. So digital courses are my area of expertise online. Okay, amazing. What kind of digital courses do you have your own course about courses? I do, which is so meta. I know. So basically, here's the thing. 13 years ago, I worked in corporate. I worked for Tony Robbins and I was the director of content development, got to travel the world and work on content that Tony did on stage at like unleash the power within and date with destiny and all those cool events. And I was in a meeting and I was called so humbling. I was called into this meeting to take notes.
- And I walk into this meeting in this big San Diego corporate office and I walk in and it's a bunch of internet marketers Now in my world these are like the grandfather of internet marketers Although that sounds very rude to to call them grandfathers, but they're like the macdaddies like so it's like Frank Kern Brendan Brouchard Evan pagan Jeff Walker like big name internet marketers that are still doing really big things But they were the leaders in the industry I had no idea who these guys were and here I am at a side table taking notes and Tony's going around asking them about their businesses and what do they do and how are they making money online and All I heard was freedom like these guys were running their own businesses creating digital courses about tons of different topics and I wanted a piece of that so that was like my first entry into this world I knew nothing about and about six months later or so I had left my corporate job and
- and started creating my own digital courses. So yeah, I've got digital courses teaching people how to grow email lists, how to create digital courses, but ultimately my mission is to help people leave their nine to five jobs, start their own online businesses, and I believe digital courses is a way to do that. So that's their vehicle. Shawn, you have something to say? Cause I got it. I was gonna say, forget courses. Let's talk about Tony Robbins. I was gonna say that exact same thing. I was gonna say, I was gonna ask you about a couple of the people you mentioned, including Tony. And I was like, how much does this empire bring anything? Does this guy just knock it out the park or what?
- I mean, it's seriously, what I always say about Tony is, how have you guys ever been to one of his events before have you ever seen him on stage? I've been to two, actually I've been to, yeah I've been to two unleashed the power with things. Okay, cool. And I'm a Kool-Aid drinker, I love Tony Robbins. Absolutely. Yeah, so I'm a fan, but I'm also super curious because I don't know the guy or know much about him. So I'm still a fan after all these years and how he is on stage, like that huge personality, all the energy, super intense, like how he is on stage is exactly how he is behind stage as well. I often joke that I might have lost a few years off my life because that was the most intense job I ever had, but I wouldn't change it for the world because I literally got to learn from the master. Give me an intensity story. Tony Robbins intensity, what you got.
- So the thing is when before Tony go to the beans wait what you got to spill the beans you got it Well, here's why it's intense before he goes on stage. He literally preps for Unleash the power within like it's the first time he ever stepped on stage I've never seen anyone prep for anything and be prepared more in my entire life And so we have to write these like stage signs of everything that like he's gonna talk about and the stories he's gonna touch on and they're all Handwritten I don't know why we would hand write these things
- every time, but they're handwritten. He goes over all of them. And then he gets on this rebounder and he's jumping on the rebounder behind stage, getting all the energy in his body. The music's super loud. What's a rebounder? It's like a trampoline. Like a trampoline, that's a stiff. Yeah, yeah. And it kind of gets the energy going in your body. And he's reading your stage sign and making sure he's got everything going. And then he just throws the stage sign and he runs on stage and he does his thing. But the intense part is when he gets off, he looks at whoever in his proximity and he's like, all right, let's download. He downloads every single time he comes off stage, what worked, what didn't, what we can make better, what he liked, what he didn't like. He wants feedback from everyone. And it's like you are on the entire time. I still, I'm nervous talking about it. Yeah, he sounds like it. So he's been doing this for like 40 years. That's crazy to me because I went to the two things and he does the same exact thing. He does pretty much the same script. So I would assume he's like, you know,
- Knows it by the back of his hand or whatever by now. So it's probably not the material that he's like trying to remember. It's like he's just getting himself into that state. What about? Exactly. What about besides the performances? I think performing is definitely like a high intensity thing. What about just like work like the office or are you not around for that part? Meaning Tony in the office? Yeah, just like on a normal day non-performance. So on a normal day non-performance Tony's not in the office. He was at his house. He did all the stuff from his house.
- his own house, but he's always on. So I think one thing I took what I learned from Tony and I brought into my own business is that one, always be prepared, over-prepared, care deeply about what you're creating. He cares deeply about his content, so that's why he's always getting it in his body, even though he's done it a hundred times. And when he's not in the office, he's still always, always learning, always meeting with people, learning new things like that, meeting that we had. He just wanted to know how they were selling their digital courses online, because he was gonna start doing that in a bigger way. So he's always pulling from different places. It was an incredible experience.
- what about up so Sean I've told you about this guy before his name is Evan pagan and we talked we're Sean and I am your good friends with Craig Clemens and he was a copywriter and when we had John Lee Dumas on the other day I was like John tell me about some of these marketers they're so fascinating to me and you just named a bunch of them and I'm gonna ask you I want to ask you about them but Evan pagans the most interesting so basically for the listeners Evan pagan I knew him as David D'Angelo when I was 14 years old I was a nerd I wanted to learn how to meet girls he had an ebook called double your dating and what he would do if I remember correctly and you could correct me I think he would send these really long emails like it felt like 10,000 word text-based emails about how to meet women
- And then at the end, you could buy like a $14 book. And I think Craig told us that he was selling like $30 million a year of this book called W.R. Dating. Have you heard about this? Yo, absolutely, I've heard about it. And I know he's a legend in that area. And when he came to the table, I think he had moved on from that part of his business, but that's how he was put on the map. The one thing that I learned from Evan really early on is he teaches the strategy that you've got to coin your own content.
- Like, you've got to name it, you've got to put a title to it, you've got to own it. So one of the things that I've always done when I've created content in my own business is like, I've got the Porterfield process for outlining your digital course and the sweet spot for finding what topic to create for your course. I name everything and own it and it sets you up as an expert and that absolutely came from Evan. That's like, so me and Sam both teach courses on Maven and Wes who runs the course platform for Mavenchee.
- She has one that she calls she's like you need your spiky point of view It's like what what's your spiky point of view? And she's like it's your point of view that stands out that not everybody would agree with it It's like it'll poke some people the wrong way Because it's different than you know everything that they've heard before and so you know that was like the core of when she's like If you're gonna teach a course you got to have a spiky point of view Otherwise like your course doesn't really have a sort of angle to it or a hook to it That other people are gonna attach with Yeah, I love that do you um The other day Sean and I were talking about this guy named Sam ovens cuz he had this YouTube video called consult He has a business called consulting calm and he revealed all of his numbers and he was like we got to 30 million in revenue and then we
- decided to just be really profitable, and we do 10 million in sales with 5 million in profit with like a team of four people. And we were just fascinated because that's just like a great, great business to own that. What are some other people who you've worked with or that you know of that are like shockingly, that you would tell people and you're like, I can, you would not believe what this person does. You would not believe how much revenue they make or that they sell a course in this space. Are there any shocking ones like that? So one of the ones that always has shocked me, I have this student.
- Her name is Deneera and she lives in LA, single mom, three kids, really small house, not enough rooms for everybody. She is definitely doing it herself. She was working two jobs and she was baking and people would come to her house, they'd pick up a birthday cake or a celebration cake or whatever and that's how one way she was making money. Long story short, cut to creating a digital course and she became really good at Caramel Candy Apples. So how to create Caramel Candy Apples. The thing is the Caramel was store bought. It wasn't like her special recipe. Just people didn't know what store to go to or what to buy. And so she started to create these and sell a digital course. Now, a lot of my students, many of them have made seven figures and beyond, but I want to talk about her because she's a woman who made never made over $100,000 a year and now in one digital course launch, she made $260,000 selling how to create Caramel Candy Apples. And she literally was just doing live videos in a private Facebook.
- group. And I always tell that story because a lot of people listening have never created anything in their life online and they would never even, they're like, my idea can't be good enough. It's not original enough or whatever. And then I think a De Nira, a single mom living in LA making $260,000 on the first time she launched anything. Now she's making way more money than that. But that's the kind of stuff that I live for because it has to start somewhere. What's her core? Same. How do I Google her? I see if you Google De Nira, Caramel Candy Apples, you will absolutely find her. So how's about De Nira?
- D-A-N-I-R-A. We call her the Caramel Candy Apple Queen. She's got tons of press written up about her. Like she's a big deal. How did she get her customers? So who bought this course? How did she go sell? How much is the course? I can't remember. A couple hundred dollars. And the way she got her customers, this is what's cool. She made a lot of videos. She did a lot of social media where she'd show in her tiny little kitchen with not a fancy camera or lighting like what she was doing. And the thing is, so if you own a bakery, a Caramel Candy Apple is like 10 bucks or more to sell, which is really good profit for a bakery.
- And these bakers wanted to find more ways to make more money. So she she appealed to the Small business owners who had bakeries or sweets to sell but she also appealed to a lot of hobbyists A lot of people are like I just want to do that. That's cool So she had a mesh of two different audiences, but her she basically just made free content and then Lots of videos. Yep. Wow and then the way I teach people how to sell courses is with webinars So she she started to do webinars and webinars were a way
- a new vehicle to sell more, so she's gone on to do even more launches. You would do a webinar for a three or two hundred dollar thing? Absolutely. So, back in the day, my very first successful course was called FB Influence. I did it with Lewis House and together we created this course and launched it. It was $97 and I probably did 200 webinars to sell a $97 course and it was a huge success because we had tons of affiliates but I would do a webinar even for a $97 course. Amongst these internet marketers who...
- What's the largest course, I don't know, a course info product? What's the largest business you've ever heard of? Oh, geez, the largest business I've ever heard of. I don't know, I feel like people. Yeah, who crushes it the most? That's a different way to math. Well, my girl Marie Forleo, do you guys know Marie Forleo? She has a program called B School. She's been crushing it for 10 years. Here's what's unique about her course. She's had the same course, obviously she makes a...
- it a little bit better every year, makes the marketing better. But it's literally the same course that she has sold for I think 13 years now. Once a year she sells this course, $2,000 now it's 2,500. But she's been in the game for 13 years with the same course. That to me is badass because she's probably made like $3 million a year in profit for like 10 years. Would you think that's crazy? Yes, I do. She's very quiet about her dollar. So I don't know exactly. But seeing the numbers, the affiliates, I've been an affiliate for a really long time. Absolutely.
- she's crushing it and the thing is and what I learned from Tony Robbins is you do not always want to reinvent the wheel. Find something that works double down on it and stop starting from scratch all the time and that's literally what Marie has mastered. So she's someone that I've always followed from the get-go. Is anyone else? I'm trying to think it's just that here's the thing. Sometimes I don't think people are totally forthcoming with their numbers. I've been in the internet marketing space for a long time and sometimes I trust you know what I hear and sometimes I don't and sometimes people throw out numbers and I'm like yeah but what's the profit margin on that? So I always am a little bit unsure about what the numbers really are. The affiliate strategy.
- So what because I think most people if they're like, oh, I'm gonna create my own first my first course They wouldn't think that oh, I should be using affiliate strategy to explain what that works and how big of a Tool that is for you and you're like marketing. Do you use that even do you even use that Sean? Do you know affiliates? No, so I have made millions in my own business being affiliate for other people But I've also had affiliates sell my own courses and to me I think it's one of the most powerful ways to build a business at least supplement your income if you have courses and memberships of your
- own. So for I think number one, I think 5050 is what people should be offering. I've seen a trend recently that it's gone down to like 30%, maybe 40%, 4060. I'm old-school so I really do believe the 5050 model is the way to go. And I think that if you find a course that either you've taken or you know your students will get massive value from it but you don't offer something like that, I think absolutely adding an affiliate offer to the mix can supplement your revenue. Like I have different streams of revenue, one of my second biggest streams of revenue is being
- affiliate for other people. Who's your biggest affiliate? So I, the most money I've made in this affiliate is through Marie Forleo's Beast Gold. That's why I'm really close to it. And then Jenna Kutcher and Gabby Bernstein are huge, and Stu McLaren, all three are huge affiliates for my program Digital Course Academy. They do really, really, really well. I think we need to do that, Sean, huh? It makes a huge difference. It's like a whole other streamer revenue. How many people work at your company?
- So we've got 20 full-time employees and then some contractors on the side. Everyone's virtual, we do a four-day work week and so we work Monday through Thursday. And I feel like a big team. I feel like that's a lot of people, but I know it's such a small business still. Yeah, I think that's a lot. Why do you need so many people? So we do, so I have three digital courses, one membership, and then we do a lot of affiliate marketing. And so everybody is just stays in their lane.
- And like I've got one person that's 100% focused on my podcast. So that's all she does. She podcasts producer, Kylie, you might talk to her, your team talk to her. And so we have a lot of people in specialized roles. Are you running the company and being the front person or do you have someone help them run the company while you're focusing content? Great question. So for seven years I've had a sidekick helping me run the company. She's a CMO and recently transitioned out as a contractor. So I'm running it more than I normally do. And she's running marketing. I don't have my hands in all of that. That's a lot of work. God damn it. Right now it feels like a lot of work, but it won't. It doesn't always feel that way. And what's the name of your podcast? So
- who are listening, can go check it out. My podcast is online marketing made easy. How big are you guys? We've been, we've been, we're getting in a pissing contest, contest with John Lee Dumas. I'm a little, like, I'm jealous a little bit with Jenna. Jenna Kutcher's totally magic. Like she's got an amazing podcast. How many downloads total do you guys have? I think in December on the podcast platform, we had 1.3 or 1.3, maybe million on the podcast platform. And then like another 400 on YouTube, 400,000 on YouTube.
- Just for the month. Yeah. Okay, well that's huge. We had a million in January. That was our recent, was a million in January. So we've had, oh, about. Just on podcast players? Or like, yes. Yes, yes. That's huge, that's huge. So we feel good about it. We've had 35 million downloads. I used to not download twice a week. Changing to twice a week has changed things for us, for sure. I do a 15 minute one on Tuesday and a longer one on Thursday. And that changed the game for us. Oh, so, so you're at this once.
- Was that once a week before that or once a week before December? I think it was that we made the change so then you have way more downloads per rep So we get between 50 to 100,000 probably average. We we we have three episodes a week sometimes So we're doing wait now. That's awesome. I think we even we have four sometimes So our so our episodes like that the episode the downloads per episode is the more important metric I think that's the real metric It's not the one you yeah, you brag about but it's only if you actually want to grow that's the one you care about It sounds like yours is really big That's how you are also moving up in the charts. I mean, I know that there's like
- You can't know everything about that algorithm. But one thing I've studied enough and I'm competitive enough to know that I'm not moving up in the charts unless my week of downloads are strong. And so you guys are doing better than I am because you're always above me in the charts. I pay attention to those things. Anyone who says they don't, I think they're lying. Oh, we totally do. I take a lot of pride in the chartable numbers. But it sounds like you get more downloads per episode than us for sure. Maybe in my back catalog. We do a lot of promoting to our own community about our podcast. Like we embed it in a lot of things.
- So we did something really cool in January where we had a quiz and Basically you take a quiz to figure out where you are in your entrepreneurial journey And then we gave you ten episodes that are gonna help you along that journey and that blew up Okay, you're smart and you do smart things and then you get good results. I understand now. This is the secret Yeah, we We'll wrap up a second the best promotion we did recently was we just announced that we're gonna give five thousand dollars to some person who Takes our clips and terms have been to tiktok videos and gets popular in tiktok and we got I think 30 million impressions on tiktok in like 20 days
- That is incredible that is super smart. That was the only smart thing we've ever done. It was idea was that one not In fact, I literally called it a dumbass idea and on air That's been just pop down this is my chance to come back into the episode. Yes, it was my idea Shout out to MFM cuts who is killing it and there's many others I follow the ball now on TikTok my TikTok feed is now just clips of myself and Sam You know over and over again. It's great. That's awesome Check that out. Wait, how do I find it? Yeah, so here's what we did. But we screwed up or I screwed up So it's what was the hashtag bend?
- MFM shorts. MFM. All right, so if you go on TikTok and you search MFM clips with an S, you'll find it. But you'll also find because I read the, when we were announcing it, I accidentally, one time I said clips with an S and then I said clip without an S. So if you search both of those words, you'll find different ones. And also if you just Google MFM clip, you're gonna get porn because it stands for male, female, male. And so you'll get a whole different set of clips if you go to Google. So that you know, it's, there's something for everybody over here, we're very inclusive.
- When I was just starting out my name, I think it was my maiden name that I think about it It was a porn star but I'm starting out a ballad So I think it was someone named Amy Ballard was a porn star when I like 13 years ago or something And I was like mortified every time I searched my name there she was No comment then say no comment I see yeah, that's crazy
- Yeah, that sucks. Yeah, definitely sucks. It's not gonna be true anymore. I've got a new last name. I used to file this guy in Twitter named Jeff Epstein. And so it could be worse. No, I tweeted at that guy. I was like, oh, brutal name. And then he got so mad at me. I was like, you can't be, I can't be the first person to point this out to you. Like, talk about it me. I didn't do it to you. Oh my gosh. Well, thanks for coming on, Amy. This is awesome. Yeah, thanks guys so much. It's nice to talk to you. And I know you guys are coming on to my podcast. So I'm looking forward to chatting with you too. Sounds good. Take care. All right, bye guys. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Behind The Scenes Of The Billionaires_ Mastermind (TIGER 21) ｜ Michael Sonnenfeldt Interview [_FczUETbksU].txt

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- What was the original fee? And what was the requirements? The original organization 20 years ago started with people who had created net worths of between 10 million and 100 million. And very quickly, the top end exploded with success. So it grew to a billion dollars. And more recently, we've realized that our focus is on members between 20 million and a billion. And what I was going to say is the main difference between VISTAGE and YPO and Tiger 21 is the average net worth of VISTAGE and YPO members is probably maybe a tenth of that or fifth of that of Tiger R.
- How long ago did you start the company? About 21 or 22 years ago at this point. What was the original idea? It's really a simple idea. If you're an incredibly successful entrepreneur, could be building a business for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and then you sell the business, you think that it's the magic moment when you sell it. But actually what happens is the day after you sell it, you have a lot of money, but you might be alone. You might have an assistant, but you don't have a thousand employees. You don't have anybody laughing at your jokes anymore. You might even have to get your own coffee. And everybody around you thinks that you're wealthy and successful, but you've lost the platform that allowed you to feel successful. And all of a sudden you're back at a new point. And the number one challenge that you have is to be a wealth preserver so you don't lose what you've made except that you don't know anything about preserving wealth. What you are is a great entrepreneur or a great leader or a great manager and you're good at inspiring troops, but you don't have any troops anymore. So you have this dramatic shift.
- And it turns out that what it takes to be a great entrepreneur might qualify you to be a mediocre investor. When you're an entrepreneur, you focus on a single opportunity, you're highly emotional about it. You give it everything you can. When you're an investor, you have to be more dispassionate. You have to have a diversified portfolio and you have to be unemotional about it. So the sum of it all is that there's a little understood transition which a few very lucky, very successful people get to go through. And we wanted to study that, which is what we've done over the last 21 years to help people in that transition get through it and want to a better place.
- When you originally started the business, what was the product? Was it like YPO where it was a monthly group meetup? What was it? Sure. So you mentioned YPO, which is a fantastic organization. There's another similar organization called VISTAGE, and they both are for CEOs. And if those are the great colleges, we're the one great graduate school. And so we have a lot of YPO members that graduate into Tiger 21 and a lot of VISTAGE members that graduate into Tiger 21. And just to give you an idea, the last time I looked, both VISTAGE and YPO have about 50,000 members globally. It might be 60 now. Wait, VISTAGE has 50,000 members? And YPO, each. Oh, oh, oh. Okay. So 30,000 each, I think, could be a little more. I haven't looked at it a couple years. Oh, these are huge businesses, sure. VISTAGE charges like 50 grand a year, right? Or five grand a year? I think VISTAGE is around 15,000 or 18. I don't have the exact number. Could be 20. YPO doesn't have a single price because depending on whether you go on the trips and there's different people pay different amounts. The big difference between those two, which are great organizations, is YPO is self-facilitated by its members, whereas VISTAGE and also Tiger 21, our groups are led by professionals. We have over 100 groups around the globe now. And so we have a cadre of over 40 professional chairs, might be 60, excuse me, 60 professional chairs that we've trained exquisitely to lead these incredible groups. But the bottom line is that
- Those are the two great organizations for CEOs and business owners. When you decide as a rule for life that you want to get off of the merry-go-round, for whatever reason, the next decision point is best focused on with peers that you'll find in Tiger 21. So basically, the original premise, and you could tell me if that's still the premise, you have a small group of peers. I don't know how big the group is, you could tell me. Twelve to fifteen people. So twelve to fifteen people and you meet of some type of cadence, like four or some weeks. Monthly, full-day month. And you have a coach, or what do you call your coaches? Facilitators. You have a facilitator. They're the chair. You have a chair who leads these discussions. And what was the original fee?
- And what was the requirements? The original organization 20 years ago started with people who had created net worth of between 10 million and 100 million and very quickly the top end exploded with success. So it grew to a billion dollars and more recently we've realized that our focus is on members between 20 million and a billion. And what I was going to say is the main difference between VISTAGE and YPO and Tiger 21 is the average net worth of VISTAGE and YPO members is probably maybe a tenth of that or fifth of that of Tiger R. If you do the math, we have 140 billion dollars under management. We don't manage it. Our members manage it by themselves. They're not a money manager, but collectively we have about a little under 1200 members. So it's a little over a hundred million dollars per member.
- That's crazy. And what's the price now? The membership is about $33,000 a year. That's that's we we try and have a kind of one price So the only thing you pay is a single membership fee Unless you come to the annual meeting there's lots of other events that are included But because there's hotels and all that kind of stuff if you come to the annual meeting There's an additional charge of a couple grand So I I can't do the math in my head, but like that's like over a hundred million in revenues These are like no no no no no no. So it's about a thousand It's very it's a very simple business model It's about twelve hundred people that are paying a little more than thirty thousand dollars So it's about thirty five or forty million dollars. Oh, I think it's twelve thousand My 1200 and and that's what it costs to run
- That's crazy. And what's crazy is 20, 10 million today is a significant amount of money. 20 years ago, 10 million was obviously a significant more than it is now. How did you find your first folks? So I was in a VISTAGE group, which had about 15 members, and in a dramatically weird coincidence in 1998, six of us sold five or six of us sold our businesses. We were all in that VISTAGE group because we were business owners trying to be better managers, owners, CEOs.
- and we loved the group. And so after our businesses were sold, we didn't wanna leave the group, but we found over about a six month period, we were going to meetings trying to figure out how to make your CFO and your sales team and your production more efficient, but we didn't have that anymore. We were just business, we had sold our businesses. So I frankly said, wow, I'd like to be spending time with peers, but what I wanna be learning is how they're going through this transition of becoming a wealth manager and how they can help each other be more successful managing through that transition. And that was the roots of Tiger 21. What was your first business?
- My first business? The one or the one that you sold? The first business that I sold, I developed something called the Harborside Financial Center with a partner. We were 50-50 partners. I was 25. He was 57. It was the largest commercial renovation in the country at the time. We bought a rundown warehouse that had been the largest building in the world in 1929 when it was built, eclipsed a few years later by the Pentagon. But it was an industrial warehouse on the waterfront in Jersey City, directly across from the World Trade Center. And I had the idea literally when I was 17, because I worked there when I was 17, that it was just 3,000 feet from Wall Street. And what was happening is that was in the age of large computer centers. And so you had all the downtown Wall Street firms building computer centers. And if they didn't want to be in Manhattan.
- They would go to a faraway campus on a suburban, you know, somewhere in suburbia and people felt like they weren't in suburbia. They felt they were in Siberia. It was too far from the mothership. And I had the idea that if you could put some of those computer centers into this huge industrial warehouse, it would be five minutes from the parent under the Hudson through the path train. And in three minutes, you could get back to whatever the parent company's parent was. And that was sort of the original insight that this old industrial building.
- had floor loads and ceiling heights that would accommodate raised floors for computer centers and the weights that you needed, the weight loads, the floor loads. And that was basically the idea. And that's the thing that you sold before. But that was- Yeah, I sold that when I was 30, then I did another business that was basically a real estate merchant bank that acquired a lot of distressed real estate when the real estate market crashed in the late 80s. I don't know if you remember that, the stock market crashed in 87, the real estate market followed. And so I was able to acquire a couple hundred properties from banks that had gone under and the federal government had taken it over. And when I sold that business in 1998, I said, I don't wanna have to go back to work. I wanna know how to preserve money, how to have people who've sold their business, how do they think about what they're gonna do so that they don't take stupid risks and find out they've lost it all? Has building Tiger 21, was Tiger 21 supposed to be a business early on? No, it's actually, it's been a labor of love for me. But-
- you know, oddly, was it able to create more wealth than the other things? No, it hasn't at all. Basically, for 20 years, I put every penny back into Tiger of revenue because I wanted to hire some of the best people in the world and the best teams and get it right. But there's a lot of inherent value in it. There's no question because we have extraordinary members and the value of our franchise has to do with our members. And the team we've put together was incredible. But I realized that in order to scale the business to fulfill its potential, I needed more senior help. And in order to attract that senior help, I needed people who were interested in equity. So having a private equity partner made it easier to attract world-class talent who would own part of the equity.
- You're in an interesting position, which is like you know or you work with a significant amount of wealthy people. And you have some interesting insights. What have you seen are the levels of wealth that someone where they see changes in their life? Like so many things I could give you one number or another, but it's really a state of mind. You have people who
- are retired and they get X dollars and then you have other people who are retired and they get 10 X dollars and yet the one who's achieving or receiving the lower amount might be more evolved and emotionally balanced because of meditation or work they've done. You know the most interesting thing is there's endless studies that show that up to
- that whether you ask people were who earn seventy thousand seven hundred thousand or seven million dollars a year how much more do you have to earn to be happy and the number is something like twenty percent no matter where you are the average person just needs just a little more to be happy which tells you about the unfilled nature of human ambition. I've read a bunch of stuff like that and if the one that I remembered it and I could be wrong it was like 2x so it was like it was for net worth so like if your net worth is a million you're like well I would feel a lot better if it were to. But then they talk to people who was a hundred and most people would say like man if you have a hundred liquid like it's going to be a little bit hard to screw up but even they were like yeah but if I had two hundred I think I would finally feel more comfortable. You know the fact is that wherever you are.
- You have the illusion that if you had a little more it would make your life a little easier, but sometimes if you have a little more it's a burden because now you have to manage it. And when you say it's a burden what i mean is intellectually you have to work harder to make sense of it. And in that sense it is a burden it's like a job it's just it's just in the nature of things that the grass always seems greener on the other side. And that's part of why i say a lot of this is just a mindset and there's another part which is really important as well. You know it doesn't matter whether we're talking about three million or thirty million.
- If you take somebody, if you take two people who've worth three or 30 million and one had been worth 50 million and lost 20 and now they're worth 30 and another had been worth 20 million and made 10 and is now worth 30. Those two people are worth 30 million. You could use the example with 3 million as well, but the person who got to 30 million by losing 20 feels absolutely devastated and the person who got to 30 million by making another 10 feels generally quite positive or proud of themselves. It's the same 30 million. So, it's a lot of things that are specific to the individual that generates the psychology.
- there was that one article that came out, that's total nonsense, it came out years ago, it said like, you don't get significantly happier after a certain amount, and the amount they said was crazy, it was $70,000 a year, but of course this was like 15 years ago. And I thought that was crazy, I'm like, I don't think that's true, but, or I was like, I do think there is like a number where it's like, all right, maybe like, there's like a threshold here where you could definitely continue to get happy, but like, there's a baseline. And,
- I always thought, I'm like, I think you will always want more money, but today, maybe like, if you're in like the 10 or 15 range liquid, I'm like, maybe there's like, all right, maybe life won't change significantly more after that, because like, you know, you could screw that up, but like, you got to kind of screw up majorly, but I don't know. That's kind of what I always thought. Well, the 70,000 is a number that shows up in literature, meaning below 70,000, every increment that you get closer to it. If you were earning 30,000 and you get to 50, 50 to 60, anything up to 70,000 increments have dramatic increases, because it's just kind of obvious. It's basic needs. You need to put a roof over your head. You need to put square meals on the table. You might need a car and at 70,000, you can pretty much afford most of those things, not in the lap of luxury, but you can afford those things below it. It's really, really tough. So that's kind of it might be 90,000 today with inflation, but it's somewhere in that I don't mean to trivialize the difference between 70 and 90, but everything above that, you know, for every level that you have, you can just spend more and create the same sense of being overextended if you're not disciplined. And it's the rare person who generates excess capital and doesn't change their lifestyle. So no matter how much they have, they keep spending more. Because if you can keep that gap of not needing what you have, that gives you a cushion that's rare and really something remarkable for those who have it. Have you met people who have done that, who have been, let's say, worth hundreds of millions of dollars but still live like, don't even live nearly like that? Well, you know, the most classic example would be Warren Buffett, who still lives in a 30 or 50 or $100,000 home that he bought in the Midwest where he lives in Omaha. And
- You know it's really hard to have one person comment on another person's health. You wonder what's all that money for but now he's given half of it or something to charity and there's tremendous benefit gained from the money he's given to charity. But you know it's one thing to live within your means that's responsible. It's another thing to be so disconnected between your wealth and what you're living that there's something going on inside and you know I'll leave it to the shrinks to figure it out. But it's kind of hard to understand why a person who might be working 60, 70, 80 hours a week as if there's no tomorrow and then they might be worth a certain amount of money but they're living on one hundredth of it as if they had a hundredth less you know they had one percent of the wealth that they do. What are they hiding from? There's lots of answers they're all dependent on different people.
- Most of the people I hang out with, so I'm 32 years old. I started an internet company. My co-host Sean is a little older, a year or two, although than me, also started an internet company. And the majority of our friends are in the late 20s, early 40s age, and all, mostly, except for a few, in the internet. And so I run in this very internet-y young circle. And the vibe that I get from Tiger is that it's a little bit older and more traditional businesses or maybe finance or real estate who have kind of knocked it out the park.
- is Tiger 21 mostly am I am I categorizing it correctly or do you guys actually have like a lot of young only because of only because of how we've grown and when you have you know eleven hundred and fifty or sixty members- the answer is the average age. Has fallen over the history from the high fifties to the low fifties- but in order for to do that given that a lot of people stayed. Most of our new members are in their thirties and forties so we have a lot of Internet folks but the reason they're joining tiger as opposed to something else is when they're sitting around they're not just sitting with Internet folks they're sitting with people who have you know real real estate experience and experience running businesses- you know in the- in the in the in the world that isn't just from the Internet and the reason we're so excited to have a folks that are in the crypto space or the Internet space is precisely because they're understanding- these new technologies that are going to transform the world. In a way that many of our members. Wouldn't otherwise so it's this combination that makes- some of our meetings so electric.
- Have you noticed the difference between like let's us say group a is like these people who are made their money on the internet Made their money in only like three or eight years All is selling this internet stuff. So, you know, like not real stuff that you can touch versus Let's say like the small business owner who like scaled something over 20 or 30 years And then eventually sold it or made cashflow along the way versus the tech person who was probably poor for a long time And then suddenly boom they're not have because they sold their business and they weren't ever profitable But have you noticed a difference in those people's attitude or the problems they have?
- Well, there probably, you know, as many differences as there are people, but there's some fundamental truths that I think you're pointing at. You know, when I went to business school at MIT 40 some years ago, you know, if you were doing a marketing exercise, they'd say come up with a product that you could sell to a thousand people. And today, if you go to Stanford to a marketing course, they'd say come up with a service you could sell to a billion people, literally a billion people. That's what Facebook does and some of the other major social media. So scaling is not just a difference in size. We have a dramatically more frictionless economy. The nature of internet and technology allows businesses to scale. That's why we have unicorns today, but we almost never did in the past. So when you think about life expectations, people who started out 30 or 40 years ago had an expectation that they'd have to put their nose to the grindstone for 30 years before they'd hit a payday, not all of them, but some of them. And of course, there are many different types of wealth I distinguish between people who are workers versus people who have some kind of God-given talent, a singer, a basketball player, an actor, a rapper. These are people not who are building businesses, but have God-given talents. Of course, they have to work hard to hone those talents, but it's very different when your wealth is created from your own talent than when you have to scrimp and save to make a payroll and get everything done. But then if you compare that to people who are creating wealth today, first of all, they can do it in three to five years. You have unicorns in three to five years or not much longer. And so one of the big differences is that if you were 58, you could have a lot of money
- 20 years ago and you sold your business, you probably were retiring because you spent 30 years doing something. That was your first sale, but today if you sell, you might be 30 or 35 or 38. You're not retiring, you're going on to the next thing. I think the biggest difference is this expectation of what a life looks like. A generation ago, a really successful entrepreneur had one or maybe two serial successes. Today, a successful entrepreneur could have three, four, or five or multiples because he or she has figured out how to manage a couple at the same time. Elon Musk is not the only person who has multiple businesses. He's certainly the most visible, but it's much more a creature of today. It happened in the past, but just much less so. When I was selling my business, I would talk to some bankers and I would talk to some friends and advisors. And a nice amount were like, yeah, sell it and get paid and you don't have to worry about money anymore and that's wonderful. And then the other group of people though were like,
- I mean, starting something that works is really, really, really hard. And a lot of people sell a business and want to start it again. And they don't realize like, you know, like there's some luck involved and it's just actually really, really challenging. And sometimes you get confident and you think, Oh, I can just do it again. And so if you don't have to sell it, never sell it. And I've lately fallen in the category of like, if you don't have a lot of money, sell a company, if that means that you're like financially secure. But then after that, oftentimes try not to sell anything ever. Like to see if you can just like run it or get it to run it on its own or hire people because it's quite hard to get getting something going to such a pain in the butt. Do you tend to?
- When you're talking to your members, do you? What do you think most like which of those categories do you think is actually a little bit more true or more common and I think you're on to something really important and it's kind of like all of the above one of the biggest Learnings is that most people who sell their first business Have no idea That it feels like having the rug pulled out from underneath you because you see a big dollar amount and And you're so focused on the sale that it's the everything else. That's kind of the shock and The most important one is the momentum or the platform that you don't even realize how valuable it is So, you know one of the things we really talk about is before you sell you really have to think about not just the pros but the cons and and Particularly in an environment like today forget that the markets are down this year in a low interest rate environment When you sell, you know a typical industrial building obviously you're talking about
- other other types of metrics but it used to be a typical meat and potatoes business would sell for seven or eight times earnings and you know if you take a business that was making i'll use an example three million dollars and you sold it for twenty million dollars and you paid the taxes now you have sixteen million but if you buy bonds at two percent you're now making three hundred and twenty thousand dollars on that same capital that was generating three million dollars before you've lost ninety percent of your earning power and we call that sticker shock and ninety i would say the vast majority of people who sell their first business go through sticker shock because they haven't really thought through that the passive earnings
- on the profits of the sale will generate dramatically less income than the business itself did. Now, of course, the positive is that when you get when you sell that business, you don't have all the risks of that business. And maybe the business had risks that could put it out of business. So a good sale allows you to take chips off the table. And that has a lot of benefits. But I think you're really, you know, you're on to the central issue around selling businesses because particularly if you hold on to the business, you don't have a tax liability. I'm not against taxes in general. I'm just saying that it eats into some of the value. Whereas if you continue to own the business, the full value is working to make the business larger and larger. So when you're thinking about risk,
- I think the greatest service that we do is help some of our members think about the things they hadn't thought about when they're thinking about selling. Like what? Well, just what we're talking about, this sticker shock, this sense of do you really want to lose the platform that you have and will you have enough capital because we've had many examples of people who think when they sell the business, it's going to be easy street, but when they don't realize the loss of income that occurs when you're taking dollars from a sale and putting it into passive assets or worse in order to generate income like they had before, they take risks, they don't understand in investments because investing can be a lot harder. When you own a business, it's kind of like being on a dog track, a dog track you have a fence to your left and a fence to your right. Somebody shoots a gun behind you and you can only go forward. If you're a paperclip manufacturer or you sell rocks or frankly even an internet service, you have one direction, you want to be the master of whatever your business is and that's really hard. But intellectually, when you're an investor, how can any one person understand all the markets? And if you're starting out with no fundamental understanding of the markets because you've just been running a business.
- One of the real shocks is most people think the hard part is making the money and then once you have the money you're on easy street. But from an intellectual challenge point of view, many of our members find the challenge of managing the wealth that they've created is actually intellectually more challenging than the business because the business might have come naturally to them. They might have had an idea and they just pursued it to its good ends. When I sold, I mean I didn't know it, this was only a year and a half ago or a year and a couple months ago. I didn't know anything like.
- I mean, I knew nothing. Like I didn't know, like when people said that they're gonna short a stock, I was like, I don't know what shorting means. And they say they go log, I'm like, don't know what that means. And so like it was, and people, like, you know, friends and family were like, well, what are you gonna do at your money? And I'm like, I don't know anything. Like I think people are surprised that your ability to earn is not often correlated with your ability to like invest. Just the opposite. That's what I'm trying to say. You can be a great entrepreneur and a really lousy investor. And you know, just to give an expectation for people who might be listening, how long do you think it takes to go from being a successful entrepreneur that is a mediocre investor, where you were a year ago? How long do you think it takes till you have sort of a modicum of confidence that you know what you're doing as an investor?
- I mean, years. I don't know. I mean, I've been studying it now for a year and a half, and I feel like I don't know much. Five years. Five years. Yeah. And that's if you really work in edit. What I just did was put, so I, are you familiar with HubSpot? Sure. So they're the ones who bought us. So I own HubSpot stock, and then the rest was just mostly a Vanguard total index fund and some real estate and real estate funds. What a, with your folks. What's like the asset allocation of like a, what you've seen? What's like a fairly successful. Sure. So I want to, yeah, I want to be really, we're not an investment advisor, but I do track the asset allocation of our members and can simply report on it, which is. Yeah, you guys put this annual report. That's awesome. I love that. Yeah. So the, the asset allocation very roughly is traditionally real estate has been king with about 28% of the assets, maybe 27. Is that include primary residence? No, generally not. It's, it's mostly investment real estate.
- And does that mean they own it or they're in a REAT? It could be they're in a REAT more likely they either own a building or they own a limited partnership in a real estate fund of some sort. Second would be public equity, about twenty six, twenty anywhere between twenty four and twenty six percent. That's so much lower than I thought. Exactly. And private equity, and this is unique to the tiger community, our private equity has for the last couple of years been more than public equity. It's now a little neck and neck, but private equity is around twenty one to twenty four percent. And what's so remarkable is if you take those three numbers, the private equity, public equity and real estate, it adds up to seventy plus percent. Those are the risk on assets. So our members are relatively long term bullish on investments. Even when they think we're going into a recession, they still are over seventy percent invested in, when I say risk on assets, that's what the investors say are assets that are risky and have to do with business like qualities. Then fixed income until now is at a historical low point, about seven, seven percent. It was as high as twelve or fourteen in prior years. And crypto and gold creeping up one or two percent assets each.
- and cash at 12%. Our members cash has stayed relatively fixed over a long period of time. The biggest, it typically fluctuates between 11 and 13%, but in the pandemic, March of 2020, it spiked to 20%, which statistically is off the charts. That's how concerned our members are. But generally, in the 12% range is what our members are looking at and cash. What do they love about real estate so much?
- It's the gift that keeps on giving. And first of all, they're terrific tax attributes of real estate because of depreciation. But when most people think of an investment asset and they buy a company, that company is subject to competitive forces every single day. It's why most operating businesses don't lend themselves to multi-generational families. Of course, there are exceptions and some very important ones, but real estate is a much more tolerant asset for multi-generation. Or if you own certain natural resources, if you own timberlands, those are good to pass from generation to generation. Because when you own a great piece of real estate, the joke is your child can be, let's say, less than brilliant and still know how to collect the rent. And even in your own lifestyle, if you own a great piece of real estate, the tenants have to pay the rent even when you're playing golf. But when you're running a complicated technology company or something else, you've got to be out there and work and every day, your team has to be really, really good. And I'm not in any way suggesting real estate. It takes a different kind of unique smarts. It's not an easy game, but it's very different. One way to think about it is if you took the whole economy, I don't know if you remember the Dewey Decimal System of Libraries, but if you broke the economy into all of its sectors, and one of those sectors was real estate and nine other sectors, medical and education, everything else, high tech, aerospace, et cetera. If you took those nine other categories, real estate is more different than those other nine than any of the other nine are to each other because of this durability, this multi-generational capacity of real estate.
- We always make a joke that people they get offended about this, but I'm like it's kind of a compliment We always say that real state has the highest number of dumb rich people And that was kind of like a fox in other words They may not people who have the same intellectual pursuits that you are right But they can go and smell an opportunity and sniff out where there's a problem in a way that most other business owners Don't and that's why I say it's very deceptive because They're a breed apart, but that's become a little less so in the last generation Because as real estate became more securitized with different types of Ownership and debt that went to Wall Street. It became more of a Wall Street game So it's a little more today a Wall Street game than it was 20 years ago
- Yeah, and the kind of the strategy that my wife and I had was let's just try to get somewhat wealthy with tech stuff and have that continue to make cashflow and selling companies and pile a lot of it into real estate because that's something because like with my business we had to send an email every day but Gmail changed like it could go out of business. A building that I own, I could lose a fair amount of money on it but like there's still a thing that someone will purchase even if it's at a huge loss but it's not going to go to zero whereas my company it definitely could. Like if I owned a conference business and a pandemic hit like which I did, like it literally made zero dollars whereas this land that I own that I'm looking at right now like that's probably not going to go to zero.
- You know, none of these things are as simple as we'd like. I think you're making some really excellent points. But if you owned retail or movie theaters or airports in the pandemic, that went to zero too if you had any leverage on it. So it's not that realistic- I'm being hyperbolic, but like- No, I just didn't. I totally get it. It's not that it's without risk. But as an asset category, it's a long-dated asset.
- I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out-of-sink spreadsheets or billing databases. HubSpot grow better. One more thing about the selling versus not selling, because you have a way bigger sample size. A, do you regret selling your companies? And B, the thing about selling...
- Let's say that you sell a business and you make 30 million you pay taxes now you're left with 20 to make 20 million like you could build a business for five or ten years sell it and Make that to make 20 million after to make 20 million from cash flow annual cash And that's really freaking hard like you you got a I mean your taxes are higher because it's income versus capital gains but and then you I mean it's just like it just seems like Selling a business is probably the the easier of the two and it's still not easier
- It's not easy. It's the easier the tomb to accumulate like your first bit. Would you agree with that or no? Well it's it's the problem is that It's better to think of it as a shift in risk because when you made the decision to Self for 30 million the example you just gave What you've done is you've taken a lot of risk on the table So the chance of losing that 30 million now goes down radically. It's much less once you've turned it into cash
- But the chance of getting to 60 million might have gone down also because you lost the engine of growth So it's you know, do you want to sleep well or do you want to eat? Well, are you long-term greedy or short-term greedy? But there's no question that When you sell your business In my opinion more often than not it's it's not number dependent. It's risk dependent You want to take risk off the table You don't want to you don't want to have the risk just as you said of losing your business anymore So you can take your chips off the table and diversify it over a number of investments
- But it's going to be much harder if the business was a well-functioning growing business to get to that You've increased the hurdle rate before you can get to that next level of 60 or 80 or a hundred million dollars Do you regret selling your two things? and tiger You didn't sell it first of all I'm still the chairman and majority owner of tiger But it's run as if I'm 50 50 partners and tiger would be a great example I'm 66 and the when I sold tiger the risk that I was most concerned about because I'm a cancer survivor is Long-jevity and sustainability of something happened to me So our board said I was the number one risk and because I love this business I said well, how do I how do I do how do I reduce that risk? well, the first thing is I bring in a co-owner and the second is we bring in a world-class CEO and In order to bring in that world-class CEO. I needed to bring in a co-owner
- So tiger is a measurably stronger today from a team point of view and an ownership and a resilience point of view. It is still my legacy on the founder was my idea but I never went into it for money and I'm not sure that I would have done any better on my own I think I think the. The diversity of ownership and the addition of a team that we built into a world class team is just dramatically different than I could have created on my own.
- So I have no regrets whatsoever with Tiger. And with the other businesses, it was interesting. I sold my first project that I mentioned to you when I was 30. And that project- What did you tell- Can you say what you sold at Source? So we have contacts? I mean, it was a project that I was a partner in, but the project got sold for over $100 million. And that was in 1987. So that was pretty life-changing, I'd imagine. Totally life-changing. But the point is that-
- What I remember is not so much the dollar amount, what I remember is it was heralded as the most successful real estate project in metropolitan history in terms of financial return. And so, but it took me a couple of years to kind of find myself again, because I went from being one of the top hundred developers in the country. I also had the advantage. I had a partner. The project was my idea. But selling was his idea.
- and he never would have gotten to that project if he hadn't been my partner and I never would have sold it if I hadn't been his partner and we sold at the end at that point a hundred percent ninety nine percent of what we were worth was tied up in that project and if somebody had got hurt or killed in construction you know it could have it could have wiped us out and so we sold and we closed in January of eighty seven and in October eighty seven the market crashed and real estate followed after that and we had been one of the top hundred developers and we might have been one of five developers in the whole country that had lots of capital and no buildings to weigh us down with the problems from the market crash so that gave us an extraordinary opportunity to get back in at the bottom and I did that by creating a company that bought distressed real estate from banks and went on to buy close to a billion dollars what became a billion dollars of assets.
- When people, one of the surprising things when I kind of started, when I sold was, I had never heard of this thing called an asset backed loan, which is like basically one example of that is when rich people buy a home, you'll hear that they bought like a five or $10 million home in cash. And oftentimes what that really means is they're using this thing called an asset backed loan. So basically if you have a stock portfolio of $10 million and it's like in a Vanguard index fund or some basic thing like that, you can borrow like 60 or 75% of that at a given a very, very low interest rate as low as 1%. What are some surprising things that people who come into money up or selling a company that they see and you're like, like when my banker told me about that, I was like, are you kidding me? This is like, this is how people do it. This is amazing. What are some other things that kind of fit in that category? So I'm sorry, but I would never do that. Most Tiger members, yeah, yeah. Most Tiger members wouldn't for two reasons.
- one I don't have any debt I wouldn't want any debt it debt can be very corrosive at exactly the wrong time You know the market has just gone down for people who are levered they could have been wiped out if you want to be here For the long-term and preserve wealth. I would argue you want as little debt as possible Just in that's a good idea. I understand it's just an option that people have like for sure to pay taxes sure But the other the other part of it is that 1% Can be a lucery because the rate can go up if it's a floating rate And if you have a spike in interest rates and you made Assumptions that you were borrowing at that low interest rate and then it goes up you can really wreak havoc with your balance sheet So I one of the things that most tiger members enjoy when they reach a level of wealth is The ability not to have debt hanging over them now having said that
- Who are the best managers of debt? Well private equity firms and real estate is the place where most debt is? So people who've spent a career managing debt understand the power of it But they just understand that at some point you want to reduce risk and take chips off the table I think the other thing is something you said before Not everybody fully appreciates Why they became successful because for every person who had a plan
- somebody else was lucky let's say doesn't mean that they didn't have a plan but fundamentally they're lucky and It's just a statistical thing the the number of people who have had two successes is Dramatically smaller than the number of people it's a bell curve of who's had one success And for people to have three and four successes gets down into the you know one in a thousand entrepreneurs or something and I think that many people Systematically over estimate their own skills when they've been successful and there's a real come-up And that after they sell their first successful business They assume they'll be successful in the next one and they get their clock handed to them as I did when I was 30 It was a very painful lesson, but it was the most valuable lesson. Well, I sold this amazing project And when I was 30 and then I started a business in the real estate information This is before the internet, you know pretty much what Zillow is today where you can look up any house and get a price on it We created a business that was a precursor to Zillow before there was an internet It was a much of your of your net worth from the previous thing to do invest into this new thing
- I probably risk somewhere between twenty one the order of twenty five percent something like that and so one of the biggest one of the biggest. Learnings is. When you sell a business. You know many people think they're great investors because when they own a business if they make an investment they have to talk about it a cocktail party and if they lose money on investment it gets swept under the carpet because the business itself is profitable so it covers up those losses. So many people who've been successful entrepreneurs don't realize how poorly they are as investors because they've never been battle tested without the benefit of the company providing you know the fill if you make a mistake. So I think I think the one of the biggest mistakes that people who sell business.
- Make and it's what you said before is That they're that they assume they can do it again and again and only a portion of people who've been successful once are going to be successful twice We're talking about earning money. What about spending money? like something that I ask myself is Yeah, I'm quite frugal and I say like I don't want to buy this this and this because it costs too much money And I just don't it just it and some stuff like owning You
- a lot of objects in my home, it kind of just stresses me out because I feel like I gotta take care of it. But then there's other things like flying nicely or staying at fancy hotels where I was like, I don't wanna spend money on that. And then I was like, well, that actually makes me happier. Like this is fun for me. I should spend because that, I feel like- You know about the marshmallow test? Yeah, about, delayed gratification. Yeah, delayed gratification. So should I tell it for your listeners? Yeah, I go for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A very famous test that was done at Stanford in the, I think, 50s or early 60s. And they put a table of 12 three-year-olds or four-year-olds out and they put one marshmallow in front of each of the kids. And they said, look, I'm gonna step out of the room. If you don't touch the marshmallow while I'm gone, when I come back, I'm gonna give you another marshmallow. And only one or two of the kids could wait for the person 20 minutes to come back. They just had to eat the marshmallow in front of them. Those one or two could handle delayed gratification. And it turns out that they tracked many kids who went through this. And the very few who could delay gratification were more successful in school, more successful in life and more successful in business by various measures over the next 30 to 50 years of their life. It's a remarkable study. And it has to do with what I was saying before. When you're an entrepreneur, as apparently you were,
- you had to delay gratification because you were putting money into your business you couldn't you couldn't do all the things others who were making a lot less but didn't have a business were doing. And delayed gratification the discipline of delayed gratification is at the core of entrepreneurial success but frankly when you're. A movie star rock star baseball pitcher or a basketball player delayed gratification isn't so much at the core of your success because you don't need to scrim and save you need to practice and be well. So when people sell.
- There's a syndrome where somebody's been very successful, but they've been delaying gratification so long that they only open up one step at a time. They still are driving a Chevy. They still are wearing a certain kind of suit. They're wearing a Timex watch, but they go on a great vacation or they go on a mediocre vacation, but they're wearing a really expensive watch. You find when people have sold their business, they open up slowly because they want to be smart and they don't want to waste and they have to find that new balance. But we have a rule at Tiger, which I think is the most important rule. It's called the 2% rule. If you've been lucky enough to sell a business, one gauge you can think about is if you're solely
- living on the investments in your portfolio if you can live on two percent of your assets or less. Then you're in a safety zone and obviously some people have the good fortune to earn a lot more than two or three or four percent on their assets so they can live on a little more but once you start living on more than two percent. You're actually starting to stress the ability to preserve capital and my guess is if you if you went to a whole bunch of twenty five year old kids and said. You know if you inherited a million dollars how much could you spend a year and preserve the money you be shocked a lot of kids would say i don't know hundred thousand or two hundred thousand a year it's twenty thousand a year and that learning is really fabulous.course I was there's a this I.
- Funny cool subreddit, a forum that I go to, and it's called Fat Fire. You know what, fire is like, fire is like financially independent, retired early. And typically fires like people who want to save like a million dollars and live off like 50,000 a year. Fat fires people who want to like earn a huge, you know, much larger money and live somewhat lavishly. And on that subreddit, the number is like 3%. So it's a little bit higher than 2%. But like 3%. I think there's this thing called the Trinity Study and they said like 4%. Frankly, I think that sometimes is too high. But like I kind of buy in the 3% range. And anyway, there's this one book, have you ever heard this guy named Felix Dennis?
- I don't think so. He's amazing. He's kind of, he's dead now, but he's kind of like a combination of Mick Jagger and Richard Branson. So he was this, he was this British entrepreneur and he was kind of flamboyant like Richard Branson and like did a bunch of stuff, but he was like Mick Jagger in that he was like kind of a degenerate, like he loved drugs and hookers and he was like, he wrote about like his escapades when he got it all there. He was like, I had a drug problem and I was never married. So I was just like sleeping around and so he's kind of like a fun guy to read about. But he's got this book called How to Get Rich. It's kind of a poorly titled in a way that it's like embarrassing to talk about, but it's quite a good book. And he was like, he eventually founded Micro Warehouse, which was a publicly traded company, but he also started Maxine Magazine. He was a publisher. So he made all of his money in magazines.
- And he was like, so I'm gonna die soon, because I've got cancer and I'll die with like a $600 million net worth. But if I could do it all over again, my goal would have been to make 20 or $30 million by the age of 35 and not focus on money making ever again and only focus on like the people I cared about. But like a boxer who's punched drunk, I went back into the ring every time because I was addicted to it, even though it didn't always bring me the most amount of fulfillment and happiness. I just wanna share three reactions to that. The first is there was a band leader from the late 60s or early 70s who was being interviewed a few years ago and the announcer said, you know, you were the first band to make a million dollars a month. No band had ever made that much money. What'd you do with all that money? You guys must be rich. He said, well, we spent about 70% on wine, women and drugs and wasted all the rest. But the thing with Mick Jagger is what you don't see is he like works out six hours a day. He eats a food regimen that's like second to none and here's a guy who's maybe- Maybe Keith was a better example. Yeah, well, that's important because even with Richard Branson with his, whatever your persona is, you know, he knows how to lever from a marketing point of view. He puts like nothing into a business and others invest around his name. So his risk is very low. These are people who are real geniuses at what they do. But the thing that you didn't mention
- is philanthropy like how does people create meaning I think that people who've created a certain amount of wealth and then say a higher percentage of what I'm going to make I'm going to give back to causes that I believe in and try and make the world a better place I think that's a really important way to get meaning so that guy who made 600 and said I should have just made 30 maybe he should have just been a little more philanthropic and looked around the world and said I can make an impact in a positive way have you heard of this book called you got a ton of books behind you so maybe you have it looks like you read a lot there's this book called I'm dying with zero it's by this hedge fund guy named Bill Perkins and I've just started reading it but it sounds like the premise of the book is basically like
- spend, like if you're going to give, instead of giving away money when you're dead, like give your kids the money now. So if they want to buy a home or do something like maybe you can enjoy it together. If you want to leave money to a certain cause, just give it now because you'll be able to see it and you can all get a little more joy out of that. Sure. That was the biggest debate. You know, for many years Warren Buffett said, I'm leaving a big foundation when I die. And he said, because I'm growing my capital so quickly that by leaving it in my portfolio, I'll leave so much more and Bill Gates made the argument with him. Yes, but what's the value of a life save today versus a life only save 30 years from now when you die? And some things aren't financial calculations. So the point that you're making is there's a lot of value to being philanthropic, both with your time and your money earlier on and not just later on. And I think one of the things that is really important is many entrepreneurs have a lot more than money. They have skills and insights and contacts that they can lever philanthropically. So I do believe in being as active as possible to make climate is my number one issue. And so I'm involved in climate, both politically, philanthropically and in the way I invest. And that's given me a lot of feeling at least of I'm doing as much as I can.
- Well, last two questions. First, the interesting thing about your business, Tiger 21, is from an outside, it seems like the vast majority of the value is your 8 or 10 person or 15 person, your group, which means I would think that there's a lot of pressure, or not a pressure, but there's a lot of faith that the facilitator, like you need that facilitator to be good. And if your facilitator stinks, then that could potentially ruin the experience.
- which almost is like your business is almost decentralized. Like, you know, different customers will have drastically different experiences potentially regardless of what's happening at HQ. How are you, how do you make sure your facilitators are good and are providing a valuable experience? So I think what you're searching for is kind of a classic example of would you rather own 300 gas stations or one oil refinery if they're both worth the same amount of money? Well, the answer is obvious on that one, I think. Which is what?
- multiple. I mean, it's like you don't want all your, you don't want one big-ass customer. It would be nice to have a hundred one that are equal. But the fact is, if you have 300 gas stations that have all the same label on them, the same name, you have a brand exposure that if something bad happens in one of them, it could affect people's demand for the other. So our only asset is our people, both our team, our chairs that facilitate the groups and our members. And we spend, we have like a private university, we spend fortunes of time screening the facilitators and then providing lots of opportunities for the facilitators to learn from one another. Our facilitators come in from all, we call them chairs of the groups. They come in from all over the world to learn best practices from each other. And we track all of the relevant metrics to see which groups are performing well, which groups are not performing well. And of course, the most important thing is that we have zero tolerance.
- for anything less than high integrity and maintenance of confidence if somebody if a member or a chair ever violated that they would be out in a second so I'd say that maybe besides the core asset being our team and our members the thing we protect the most is our brand by being really true to what what it stands for and I don't think we've ever compromised on Trying to put members first. That's that's kind of what we're about I'm a member first well at most of the value that I've gotten out of being a member of tiger has been being a member the fact that I've owned today a little more than half the business is almost irrelevant to the value that I've gotten by being a member and all the opportunities that I share with all the other members that come my way as a member I
- Well, you're awesome. The reason I wanted to talk to you was because I've I know of Tiger. I've thought about joining. I've got friends that are part of it and I love the business model. My business was tangentially related but not quite the same thing. It was community-based and I hadn't read or seen too many interviews with you and so I'm happy that we got to talk because I Wanted to kind of explore this, but you're you're you're you're cool as hell. I appreciate you taking the time. This is awesome Thanks so much for having me as and if I if people want to do you use Twitter or anything people want to find you You want to point them anywhere?
- I'm on LinkedIn, I don't use Twitter, I don't use Facebook, but I'm available through LinkedIn and it's kind of easy. It's Michael Dotson and Phil at Tiger21.com. Hell yeah, thank you, man. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Behind The Scenes of Selling My Company For Millions ｜ Suli Ali (#410) [F-McXK-60BI].txt

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- Every time I've had a company sale, when we sold Bebo to Twitch, and we just sold the milk road, you have been our, we would call the deal doula. You help us, you know, go through that labor process and come out the other side with, you know, the happy ending, I guess. So, Julie, welcome to my first million. You're subbing in for, for San Partite and like every substitute teacher, it's always the best when they're there. We
- We're going to do a bunch of things. We're going to talk about some of the companies you started, the companies you've invested in, things are some ideas you have. You were the first ever episode of the podcast. If people want to hear your life story, that's the place to go. Episode number one, we've come a long way from there. Did you think this is what would happen? I always knew the podcast was going to be big. And I think from the very beginning, you were like, let's do Barstool except for business. And that's what it's become and it's huge. And I actually think it's going to be way bigger in a year than it is today, like three times the size a year from now than it is today.
- Yeah, I hope so. That's the goal. We did the kind of bar still thing except without hiring anybody. It was like, okay, we will just be the jackasses and then let it go from there. All right, so I got, you sent me this doc, which is great, because there's a bunch of topics on here that I kind of want to jump into. You, I guess we should set the groundwork here. So I'll give you a very short life story so people understand who you are. You worked in a job for like a couple of years. You did like the traditional path. You worked at Microsoft, you quit, you decide to start your own company. This is right when the Facebook app platform comes out. So you start building like silly Facebook apps that go viral. So think things like superlatives, which was, um,
- Like which of your friends most likely to do X and It would invite those friends to like do it too and it grew like crazy But it was like a silly Facebook app so you didn't have to do with it But you ended up selling it so you got that was your kind of my first million moment. So you sell it You're how old at that time like 24 25 ish 26 maybe yeah 26 26 Take that and you go on the next big wave, which is Mobile apps are gonna be a thing you are creating games I think maybe first on Facebook and then on the iPhone when the iPhone app store comes out You're like oh, this is gonna be big you create a company called tiny or tiny co and end up
- Somehow you raise money from Andreessen Horowitz, you live in the dream, things go south as the economics of that business change. And then you go all in in this Hail Mary strategy, which again, episode one for the whole story, you go all in on this Hail Mary strategy of like, we're going to get the rights to family guy. And you end up somehow as a startup that nobody's ever heard of getting the rights to the license to make the family guy mobile game. You did it for Harry Potter and a couple other big IP things. Sell that company.
- And then I met you after that. So I met you kind of when you were selling that thing, we met at a dinner that Sam was throwing because you were speaking at HustleCon. And immediately we hit it off. We made some big plans. We were like, you know, you were talking about Tony Robbins. I was like, oh, I'm a Tony Robbins guy. You're like, really? I don't even know about Tony Robbins. Tell me. And I started gushing about my experience there, whatever. And I was like, yeah, we should do that here in San Francisco. Like let's do it tomorrow morning. Let's have a, our own power session with people like us. You were just electric.
- And yeah, we were like Tony Robbins is amazing. Nobody is doing this in this kind of modern way. Let's put up some Facebook ads today. And then tomorrow let's have 50 people in here and try our hand at like being Tony Robbins for a day. We did the thing where you spent 20 minutes being like, this is great, this is a great idea. This is a no brainer. And we just keep talking about how much it's a no brainer, how much it's a, it's I am dunked. We're gonna do it. We're using all these terms. Never did it. 10 years later we still never did it, but we became good friends along the way. I still think it's a great idea. Yeah, it would be the most fun weekend ever. Yeah, I think I still think we should do it. But then we kind of got, I guess from there you, you did a couple things. So your brother started native Deodorant, you kind of helped him with that. You started another company, which we don't really talk too much about. Then I was starting my e-commerce brand. You have helped me out a lot with that or kind of a shareholder in that business. And every time I've had a company sale, when we sold Bebo to Twitch, when we just sold the milk road, you have been our, we would call the deal doula. You help us go through that labor process and come out the other side with the happy ending, I guess. So that's kind of like how our interactions have been on a business side and then become great friends since then. So that's my intro that I miss anything.
- I love being the deal, Dulo, by the way. When we sold TinyCo, we had this banker named Dick Filipini, and he ran, he was our banker, ran the transaction for us. I told him that I loved what he did so much, that I just wanted to work for him for free for six months after this, so I could see all of the deals that he was doing. He did not accept my offer and said, no, you, you can't do this. Dick is great. This for free when, because the B-B-B-B deal was going to be too small. He does bigger deals, I think, like $100 million plus-type deals. It was too small, but he got on the phone with me several times out of the process, talked me off a ledge multiple times, and I was like, I'm just going to say this. He's like, no, well, you should probably just wait, see what they say. His advice was basically just like, don't eff this up, you know, son. He was totally right. He helped me a ton. Actually, I still feel the guilt that I didn't like send him a gift after I met him. He texted you like a year later. I was like, what's Dick's address? I did send him a gift. I can't believe I didn't. And here I am still four years later. I have not sent that gift. Dick, I'm so sorry. You were so helpful. And I will still send you this gift. The deal, another deal that Dick did that I thought was super interesting was he sold AppLiven to a Chinese company for $1 billion.
- And the Trump administration blocked the deal or the FTC blocked the deal and instead of it being a billion dollar sale, the Chinese company invested $100 million into Apple 11 and then a couple years later, Apple 11. So everyone I thought would be devastated like the founders were like, we're going to become so rich overnight was we sell this company for a billion bucks. Transaction doesn't happen. I assume founders are sad and upset. And then a couple years later, the company goes public and at some point it was worth $30 billion as a publicly traded company.
- Yeah, such an amazing transaction to not have had closed. Well, they got the best of both because they, whatever the company was putting out, I think it was 1.6 was the original one before, and what's six was the original purchase price, and they were going to put in a few hundred million dollars to own 70 or 80 percent of it. And then instead, it was like the year went by, nothing happens. And so with that anxiety came to this big payoff because the business grew like crazy in that time. So they're like, hey, okay, same deal, but now you own like 20 or 30 percent. And so they got the money, they got liquid on that, but they only had to give up a tiny fraction. And then they sold it and then they went public later for way more. So that turned out.
- You know pretty much as good as it could go right? Just had to wait a year. Speaking of kind of like acquisitions, I got a I have a milk road related question for you first which is You saw you saw both the acquisitions that I did from like sort of start to end and I shared you know It's like in high school when it's like the boy texted me this should I've applied this? Like no no that looks too needy say that like change the period to a comma and then just you know cut that last line Like it's that level of help that that you were doing with me What's your I've given kind of my debrief of the acquisition? I'm just curious What's your what was your takeaway or was your what are some nuggets that you would you would share from from watching that go down?
- I love the deal structure that Milk Road ended up with, which was a bunch of cash upfront, and then a bunch of equity in the new company where those two guys are wanting to grind it out for years and build a giant business. Those guys in my head, some percentage of the work that they do is just creating value for you and Ben, and that's awesome. I love that deal structure. The
- In my head, kind of having been through this a couple times, I feel like a lot of the, you know, texts, the nuance of words that you care about when you're trying to sell your business, the buyer doesn't care about that much. And it's more of a emotional thing than a practical thing where practically the buyer is like, I want to buy this business because of the strategic reason and the revenue and the profit. And a lot of the things that, um,
- You can be squeamish about or uncomfortable to say or not sure how to say things. I think a lot of that stuff doesn't matter. One of the things that I learned actually when I was trying to sell TinyCo was we ran a sales process where I was trying to sell the business and we talked to a bunch of acquires. And we got pretty far along with one and then the deal didn't happen. And then a year later we went and sold the company successfully. And there was a bunch of stuff that I was trying to keep close to the chest and I was like, oh, people aren't going to want to hear this. People aren't going to want to hear that. And what was great about a banker and somebody like Dick was he was like, no, actually this isn't a big deal. Just tell these guys this and they're not going to care about that.
- So it took this kind of discomfort I had around like things I thought were secrets that I needed to take to the grave with me. And he just made me comfortable telling them about them. Sam, Sam did something for me in this process. As we were selling the milk, I was like, yo, any kind of tips or advice you've had. And when he sold a HubSpot, he goes, oh, on that same note, he goes, just do, just tell them up front. All the shitty things about your business that they might scare them away. Because guess what? They're going to find those anyways when it comes to due diligence. And you're just going to be, you know, four weeks in or six weeks in emotionally invested. And it's going to get ugly later. And they're going to feel like they just found some like, you know, big wort on the deal at that point in time. And he goes, just tell them all the skeletons, your closet now. And be like, here's all the reasons you shouldn't buy this company. If these bother you, you now know them and you can decide for yourself, you know, if that's a deal breaker for you. This was like not the very first thing, but shortly after. Like we went to a dinner and everybody was interested. We hadn't even fully negotiated the deal, but I just said, they're like, you know, any questions you guys have or, you know, any concerns?
- I said, well, I want to make sure you fully understand this business. I've been through this a couple of times. I know it's better to just be fully transparent. I said, here's all. I made a list of the reasons why you shouldn't buy this. Here's all the skeletons in our closet. You can look at these today. You can decide if this is too concerning for you. Let's talk through these now. We did it and later, after the deal was closed, we did a debrief. Basically, this is how you know they're smart. They're like, what could we have done better in the acquisition process?
- From your point of view and we asked the same. It was like, how was that for you? Was that good for you? It was good for me. And it was like, we told them, they gave me that feedback. They were like, you know, you said something at this dinner where you were just like, here's all the ugly parts of our business and like, little bit just tell you about them and we could talk through them. They go, that built so much trust because we didn't know you very well. And immediately we were like, oh, okay, we felt at ease and we felt like we could trust you guys going forward. And so that turned out to be a big win. And that's the exact opposite. I think the entrepreneur's instinct is hide that, you know, as far put it behind your back, you know, if they ask for it, you show them, but like, don't scare them away. And in fact, what you want to do is like,
- Find out as quickly as possible if there's a real match here or not and use that as a tool to build trust Versus to build distrust by not disclosing it upfront The other thing I've seen entrepreneurs do that I I think is also kind of the wrong common sense out there is When you ask an entrepreneur if they want to sell their business Entrepreneurs are told to say no, I do not want to sell my business and they expect that the buyer is going to come over the top and say Even if you don't want to sell your business. We're super interested in buying it
- We'll do anything it takes. Please come talk to us. And in practice, that's not at all how it works. Oftentimes a buyer is looking at a bunch of different businesses to buy at that point in time. And so they'll reach out or talk to 10 different businesses. Five of them will say, no, we're not for sale. And they'll say, okay, great, we're knocking these five off. We're going to focus on the five that have said, yeah, we are for sale. Right. And so what's the way to say yes without seeming desperate there? Or seeming too eager to sell because you don't want to do that either. I think the way I've done it before is
- One, when I was ready to sell a business, I would find somebody that I knew was interested but wouldn't have a good offer and get them to make an offer and then say, cool. That enables you to reach out to other people and say, hey, we have an offer to sell the business and we're thinking about whether or not to do that. And you are somebody that we think there's a great strategic fit with, so we thought to talk to you before we did something else. Yeah. So that's kind of one way to do it. If they come inbound, it's sort of like...
- You know, we have had interest and nothing, you know, nothing felt felt right. You know, we really like our business. Um, but you know, we respect you guys. And if that's something you know, we obviously be open to listening, uh, you know, we, we, we owe ourselves that, right? And so, so you kind of, you just say, we like our business. We had interest. It hasn't, we, we didn't really, nothing went too far because we weren't very, you know, weren't too keen on it. But, you know, really like you, if you want to talk, like we're open to talking, there's no, you know, that's fine. Yeah. Um, yeah, I think that's a good setup. And, uh, I think buyers who are experienced can kind of read between the lines pretty quickly. Uh, cause what you just said is like, I'm wide open. Somebody please ask me out for the day. Uh, I'm ready.
- And I'll be a cheap date, send me out. Exactly. But it's the signal. It's the signal that I'm interested in without begging you. But it's like, to be clear, I'm interested. Yeah, yeah, it's perfect. It's like looking at somebody across the bar and catching their eyes for one second and then smiling and looking away. There was another meeting. We won't name the name, but you were a part of a few of the meetings as we talked to different people from Milk Road. And it was the first meeting with one of the buyers. And you immediately called me afterwards. And you were like, wow. And then you said, there's this phrase, a fool in his money are easily parted. And you immediately sniffed out that this person was,
- sort of an idiot and like, you know, would, would would be. And sure enough, they made the by far the largest offer and, you know, turned out to be, you know, they turned out to be not exactly who we didn't go with them because of that, but of the three or four people that we talked to, this was one of them, but you sniffed that out immediately. What tipped that off for you? And what can you say without getting us in too much trouble? You know, there's a lot of people who are charlatans nowadays and they'll often lead with a lot of like flattery and not substance. Like it's very easy for me to tell when somebody is like, hey, this is who I am. I've done X, Y, I started this company. I sold it. I started this company, didn't work out. They're just like honest about their resume and there isn't tremendous amounts of puffery.
- that with a couple Google searches, you can be like, actually, that's all not true. Right. And that's like, what's that? You've said a lot of words, but you haven't said anything yet. Okay, that is, you know, either I'm not understanding what you're trying to say or you have nothing to say, basically. Yeah, that's right. And they don't lead with like numbers and information. They lead with like flowery language that doesn't go anywhere. So I'm curious, what are some business ideas that you think somebody could start that would be successful either at the smaller scale, like?
- I think this can be a clear business that'll make a few million bucks and I just think if somebody out there is looking for a way to get financial freedom, this is a way to here's a big idea. Somebody who is willing to grind that out should go do this. The big idea that I like the most right now is Robinhood for real estate. Robinhood makes it easy to invest in the stock market. The way I've thought about this is I've got a ton of friends who are in their 20s that work at Facebook or Google and they make a ton of money but what they do with it is they just stick it in their bank account or in a savings account or a CD. Sometimes they'll invest in the stock market.
- I think it's so hard to be able to invest in real estate. If there was a turn-key way through a mobile app to be able to invest in real estate, that would be huge. I think it's really different. You did this investment and I followed you in a company called Jar in India. They make it super easy to invest in gold in India. You can invest with $1 or $50 or $5,000 and just by going to the Detroit one click. If you believe that gold is a good thing to invest in, we'll make it easy for you to do that thing that you already think is a good idea.
- Exactly. And so it's a one-click thing of like, how much money do I want to invest today? And then the best way to do it is to kind of set up a subscription where every month you're like, cool, I'm buying $200 of gold every month and 10 years from now it's going to be worth millions of dollars. I think the same should happen with real estate. There's a bunch of companies that are like CODRA and� Like Fundrise or� Crowdstreet. Yeah, whatever those are. But you have to look at the individual deals. You have to be� They're targeted towards people like me who like investing in real estate and who are sophisticated about it and want to know what the cap rate is and the location and the year of construction and all this stuff.
- I think there should be a one-click way to be able to go buy equity in rental properties that generate income. It should be marketed to people in their 20s. It should be marketed through Facebook. It should be set up so that you basically log in and are like, cool, you want to invest in real estate? How much do you want to invest every month? $200? Great. $200 is now happening in real estate. And now investing $200 in real estate every month. And boom, it doesn't. ACH from your account every month.
- on the customer side and invest in that real estate, and the income that gets generated goes back and reinvest in more real estate. And that's it. And so it shows this is how much you've invested so far, and here's how much it's worth. Boom. Okay, love it. Give me more. What else you got? What else do you got? Hey, hey, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? Then this is, you're the guest of Otter here. I got a, I'm dope at ideas every week here. I'll give you one that like I think is
- I'll give you one that I get asked a lot, which is not actually what's a big idea, but what's the easiest way to get to like a million dollars? And I always think that like the easiest way to get two million dollars, if I need to get to a million dollars right now, here's what I would do. I would create an agency that's going to target a really specific part of a business that makes money already and just figure out how to make more of it. So for example, email marketing for e-commerce brands or conversion rate optimization, CRO, for companies. So you basically say, hey, visitors are coming to your site, we can help you convert more of that traffic into sales.
- And I think there's such an easy play where you basically just create content. So you create content that basically just says like, here's the before and here's the after. Look, I changed these three things because I call this my hot cold hot method and we boost a revenue by 32%. By the way, if you want somebody to boost your revenue by 32%, work with me. And I think that this is like a such a bootstrapable easy way to get to 100K a month in revenue, right? You get 10 clients paying you 10K a month. It is not hard to get 10 customers to pay you 10K a month when it's a part of their business that's already going to produce like already producing hundreds of thousands or if not millions of dollars of revenue and you're going to provide the turnkey service. You take the headache off their plate, but you do it better than they're doing it because you get seen as a thought leader by putting out like 10 of these case studies. And this happens all the time with ad agencies, email agencies, conversion rate optimization agencies, but you can do this with anything. You can do this with site speed. You could do this with like any number of things. I would just go and you could start with start at zero and become a quote unquote thought leader expert just by publishing like very simple before and after like kind of case studies. And you start by not even having a client. You say, hey, if I was this brand, here's what I would do. Look, when they do this, it sucks. This is a dead end for them or they should steal this good idea from this other company. And so you could put together case studies without even having clients. And so to me, this is like the easiest like if you are willing to work hard and you feel stuck at a job that maybe pays you a hundred K a year, you're looking, how do I go from a hundred K to 900 K? How do I go from a hundred K to 750 K a year? This is the like all it takes is hustle approach to that type of business. And then those businesses can be sold. So like your job, you can't be.
- You can't sell your job, right? Like if I write a book, I might write that. That might be the title. You can't sell your job. Just like my one line case for why you should start a business instead of have a job. And if you get a business like this to 900K and 60% profit, you could sell that agency or that consulting business for maybe two or three times, you know, Ebida. And so you could sell that, you could make 600 to 800K a year and then sell it for two or three million, after a couple of years. And so that's a very easy pathway to financial freedom, easy meeting. It's simple, not that it's no effort, but easy that like anybody can do it and it doesn't take being the genius with the one idea who beats all the competitors in the space.
- Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think there's a bunch of other examples in my head like just setting up a Facebook pixel and doing it a way that's actually optimized and Perfect and following all the Facebook guidelines. I think that's super hard And I think there should be some guy who's like I'm the expert at this right? And I take care of that for you and I gave a brand of e-commerce, but like you can also do this for just hey every Legal practice every dentist you need websites. I make websites for dentists
- So it doesn't even need to be like, you're the best at doing growth for D2C brands. It could be like, hey, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I make the best websites for restaurants in Minneapolis, Minnesota or legal practices, whatever. And just through cold email or some communist, cold email, LinkedIn referrals, you can get time customers to pay 10K a month. Yeah, I think you could pick any of these big sectors of the economy like accounting, law, medicine.
- dental. I think so. You're laughing. It could be whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm just going to go and build a online thing that makes their life easier through marketing to them, making it easy to make a website. It's insane how many of those old world businesses are still like, don't have a good website. Right. Don't do any Google ads. And I've seen some stuff like Newtopper. Our friend Nick Huber does this thing where he's like, he basically has a playbook to make a self storage unit run better. And so his thing is like, I'll buy it at some multiple, but I know I can run it at 30% more efficiently or 40% more efficiently. So I'm getting value. I know within nine months, I have a turnkey process to make this thing generate 30, 40% more.
- And so he does that buying the properties, but you could also just take that playbook and say, hey, self storage owner, I will do this for you. I'll do it risk free for you, man, you pay me nothing unless I deliver this outcome. If I increase your revenue by 30 percent or your net profit by 30 percent, that would be, you know, that would be great, right? And here's my playbook. I do these three things. You would agree that you're not doing those three things today very well, right? Okay, fantastic. How about I deliver those to you risk-free? And when I do, I get to keep, you know, half the value for the first year and then it drops down to 10 percent after that. And you could do this for senior living. You could do this for self storage. You could do this for any business that's like out there once you find a good, like whatever best practices. This is what Alex Formozi did with his gym launch thing. He's like, hey, gym owner, you want more customers? Like he used to own his own gym, developed best practices, and then realized the value was not in his gym being run with best practices, but taking the best practice and selling it to all gym owners.
- And so that's what he did. And I think you could do that with pretty much any niche business. What do you think about niche content creators and trying to build the same thing by creating content in a specific niche, like eco-friendly, sustainable products, that kind of thing? So what would somebody do there? So I'm a content creator. What am I doing there in this example? Making YouTube videos, Instagram videos, Instagram reels and TikToks about that content. For the business, marketing a two business owners as like, hey, business owner, here's what you should do? Or two? No, not to business owners to consumers, just being like, this is how I live a sustainable lifestyle.
- pick anything that you're passionate about and make a bunch of YouTube videos about it or content about it. I think that can be a big business like Doug Demiro with cars. Right. See, I don't like those as much because, A, I think it's a good thing to do because good things come of it. I don't think they're very reliable at creating successful businesses. Most content creators don't make successful businesses. If you just look empirically at the numbers, you're just like, okay, of the 2 billion Twitch streamers and of the 10 million YouTubers, like who's making over 10k a year and the numbers like astronomically small. And so, you know, the problem with those is that everybody wants to do that and there's not a clear way to like get the value out. It is good to do because you will learn, you'll become good at content, you'll meet cool people, it'll lead you to the thing, most likely, but it's not usually directly the thing when it's consumer facing. If it's business facing, I think it's pretty easy then to say, oh, yeah, I market to the owners of self storage units. I create the best content for them.
- You know, you could go that that's what Nick Sharma did right Nick Chalmers like hey, I'm gonna write the best newsletter for a commerce store owner And I'm just gonna put together awesome information case studies deals whatever for them And like that's not for the consumer. It's for the business owner and he created You know what what should be like a five to ten million dollar your business when it's fully mature? Doing just that and I think you could do that for basically the owner of any business construction businesses You know whatever
- any doctors, lawyers, whoever, any type of business, if you focus on that and you get good at doing that, so I think that one I like, I don't like the consumer facing one as much, because I think the numbers would show that they don't make very much money the way that they currently do them. And I have this problem too, where it's like, what's the most competitive thing, is like being a content creator. What are most people doing from, even a 12 year old can do it? And I have this problem myself where I'm like, oh, I wanna create a bunch of YouTube content. And then I'm like,
- Man, I'm competing with every 15-year-old in America. And they're better and faster to have more time and have nothing to lose and are willing to do way crazier stuff. Like, wow, this might be the wrong game to compete in. And I'm still trying to square that for myself. Like, is this the right game or the wrong game to even compete in? I could have said that about podcast in general too, right? So some of the best things I've done have been in that category and it worked out just fine. But it does feel a little strange. It's like against my own business advice to like...
- Don't compete in the thing that everybody is trying to do because most likely, you know, you're just playing game on the game on hard mode Yeah, the way I've seen it done well as like there's this guy who's a realtor in LA and You know small-time realtor and he started making these YouTube videos that were walking through mansions. Yeah Yeah, and so he just like made Ten of them and we're like was like this is fun and then he got access to more and more places and just made really high-end
- video walkthroughs of LA mansions. And, you know, his job was already to be a realtor, so he was doing this as a way to get new clients in LA. And then as he did more and more, it became a business of its own, and he stopped being a realtor, and now we'll fly around the world, because people will be like, I'm trying to sell this house, make a video of it, and I'll go make a video, and a million people will watch it in three days, because he's got so many YouTube subscribers. So I think where you're combining it with like, a profession that you already have, it probably is a good fit. Like there's some guy who's,
- SMB acquisition attorney on Twitter. And so it's just a great way for him to get. Lead Jen. Yeah, new customers. Well, I also think like, I don't know if there's a good thing or bad thing was that 30s age thing where it's like, I used to think about a business and only look up like, wow, the skyscrapers are huge in this field. I too am gonna build a skyscraper. And now I'm like, cool, before I do that, let me just go quickly look at the graveyard of people who have tried to do this.
- And like when I was in my 20s, there was no graveyard. I didn't think about the graveyard. I'm like, music startup, love it. Everybody loves music, right? Like what could go wrong? Yeah. And then when you're in your 30s, you're like, don't touch me. So should we start out? Let's see. I did social networks for like seven years or six years of my 20s because it was like, the skyscraper was so attractive. And like, there is some beauty of just doing it that not even paying attention to the graveyard. Like I think the people who win will just do that and it'll work. And their success formula was like, yeah, I didn't worry about the graveyard. Why would I do that? But as I got older, I was like, man, you know what's more fun than.
- Trying to build a social network like winning is really fun. And so like let me just make sure that whatever I'm doing like The odds are not like 99.9% chance of failure Like that's because and if I'm gonna do it, okay, I'll go in eyes wide open I'm gonna look at the graveyard and say I'm still gonna do this That's kind of what happened with the podcast like you know what? I'm still gonna do this even though I know that most podcasts nobody ever listens to Whereas before I did not even pay attention to that and I didn't you know But I don't know if that's a net positive might be a net negative actually in terms of like how
- They you know the the strength of that kind of like the ignorance Yeah, there's this guy Bobby Kodak who's the CEO of Activision and He's like I can be CEO of anything I could be CEO of a toilet company or CEO of Campbell soup the thing that matters to him is success and momentum and you know there's so many people who are like you're the CEO of a Games company that's what I Entire life would be made if I could just be that and he's just like success is what matters more than anything else And I'm kind of closer to that as I've gotten older where I'm like
- Success is the thing that brings me joy more than the specific category or product that I work on. The thing that I think you've done really well, Sean, is you've seen friends who will have a successful business and you're like, let me just clone this business in a different category. Like, you know, you did that with Sam and the hustle with Milk Road, and then you saw an e-commerce business with Ramon in the way that he was doing it. And you're like, I can do this too. So I think that's a really good way to do it. That's like kind of underrated. And most people don't do where they're like, I see this person as successful. I'm just going to do the exact same playbook, but in a different product category or different sector. Yeah, I call it having a blueprint. Like if I don't see that there is a blueprint of success in a category and that it is replicatable, like, okay, I can look at how the guy started Snapchat. But if that doesn't seem very like, yeah, I can't replicate that. And so, but when I saw an e-commerce or I saw, oh, the newsletter business, I thought, okay, not saying this is easy, but I like, I understand this. This is simple enough for my dumb brain to get how a business like this works. What does the cost? What is the, where does the revenue come from? Where does the growth come from? Got it. Did they have some unfair advantage? Did they, did they start at the right time and that there's now is like, you know, not the right time or whatever. I tried to just figure that out. But if there's a, and so now with new things, I just look for that. Like first, we're going to go searching for a blueprint. I'm going to talk to people until I find a blueprint. Like, okay, I want to buy companies. Cool. Andrew Wilkinson is a good blueprint. What does he do? How does it work? And then do I want to like, do I believe that I could replicate that in my own way, in my own sector or my own style? And if I don't see a blueprint, I don't really get that excited at this point because I'm like, why would I do it without a blueprint when I can do it with Personally, I'm like that. Or the same thing. If I'm going to do it without a blueprint.
- All right, that's cool, but I'm gonna make the announcement. Hey, I'm choosing to do this without the blueprint, and I gotta go in eyes wide open on that. So like all of my rules, I break all the time, but I say them and I do them because I'm like, I'm cool violating this rule, but I just, I'm not gonna do it some time. I'm not gonna do it blindly. I'm gonna do it knowingly. And I'm gonna make that trade, you know, knowing exactly what I'm trading off by making this decision versus, you know, how I used to do it where I didn't really understand, I didn't even know what I was looking for, you know, when it came to that. I wanna finish with some rapid fire. Can I do some quick ones? And then I just want you to say your reaction to this. Okay, so I'm gonna say, this is the first category is things you've told me that I thought were funny and I want you to just like react or elaborate. Sort of like explain this tweet.
- I don't know what the hell mental models are. I used to think I was dumb for not knowing what mental models are. Now I think everybody else is dumb for thinking about mental models, some version of that. Yeah, that's right. In Silicon Valley, it's so in vogue to be like, oh, I'm applying this cognitive bias theorem to this situation. And everyone in Silicon Valley that Smart talks like that. And so I was just like, why do I, when I see something, I don't see it in that same way. And I just thought I was an idiot.
- And I always solve a problem like from scratch, like Tabula Raza, like it's the first time I've seen it. And I just like that way of doing it. So I gave up trying to find mental models. All right, another one. You started your first two businesses on what I'll call WAVES. So like the Facebook app platform, I think launched the same day you like had quit your job and we're like, what can I do next? Let me just do this. You saw the announcement, you're like, I'll just do that. I have nothing to lose. Same thing with the mobile app, store launch. I think you were one of the first big iPhone games. What are the WAVES today? What would 22 year old truly be doing now?
- Probably something in genetics or AI. Yeah, probably one of those two things. And it's the biggest sectors. Okay. Seven years ago we were at dinner and I was just asked you a question. I was like, why haven't you, you were like, I want to build like a big company, a billion dollar company. I was like, why haven't you done that already? You're so smart, you're so great. Why like, what's gone wrong? And you said to me, I don't think I understood what a billion dollar company was before.
- What does that mean? I think you need to have a certain moat and there's a bunch of things you need to get right to build a billion dollar company. You need to have a big market. You have a clear way of getting customers that makes economic sense and you need a product that's really good. So even today I feel like I've got a very clear path to be able to build, you know, a hundred, two hundred million dollar businesses, but I haven't quite figured out how to build a billion dollar business. Outside of taking five or ten hundred, two hundred million dollar businesses, I think there's a different code to build a billion dollar business than a hundred million dollar one.
- Excellent. What would you do if you were Mr. Beast? I would start a Y Combinator for creators and maximize the basically find the next Kim Kardashian, the next Mr. Beast, and support them and own a piece of them and be a kingmaker where I'm making other kings. You did a lot of startup investing. I think you've pulled back some from startup investing. Jimmy, the...
- the bullet point version of your take on startup investing? I think startup investing, I think competing for deals sucks. I find it very demeaning, trying to convince somebody to let me invest $50,000 in their round. Front of mine was raising money and got a term sheet from Andreessen Horowitz and Bill Gurley at Benchmark and went with the Andreessen Horowitz term sheet. Bill Gurley was so mad that he called the founder up and yelled at them for two hours and sent them 15 angry emails.
- And Bill Gurley is one of the most successful people in the industry. And the fact that he still has to do that made me be like, this is an industry with no moat. I don't want to have to go kind of beg or try to twist people's arms to let me invest in their startup. The other thing that's happened is trying to turn $50,000 investments into $2 million over a 10 year period. It doesn't really do anything for me anymore. So my first startup investment ever was 100k investment.
- called Chart Boost in 2011 or 2012. And then the company sold in 2021 and I made $2 million. So that was a 10 year time span. So I think having to wait 10 years to get cash out is really annoying and makes me like it a lot less. I think the valuations have also gone really crazy. And companies are so much more competitive like
- There's a company called Divi Home that raised at a billion dollar valuation and there's four other Divi homes out there that are competitors to it. So the combination of high valuations and increased competition makes it really hard to make any money as an investor. And I've evolved from being interested in kind of making these 50K checks into trying to buy a majority interest or a 30, 40% interest in businesses that have revenue and profit or a path to profit. I think that's a better way to invest for me because
- I'll see money back and be able to take that money and reinvest it in other new businesses. What's the biggest investment miss you've had and biggest hit you've had? Biggest miss was Coinbase. My, at TinyCo, we had this guy who worked for me named Adam Merber. He was roommates with Fred, the Coinbase co-founder. And so Brian, Armstrong, and Fred were fundraising for their Series A. They got a term sheet from Andreessen Horowitz and Ben Shemarik and a bunch of other firms.
- And so they called me and said, hey, should we go with benchmarks? Should we go with Andreessen Horowitz? We at TinyCo raised money from Andreessen Horowitz. Mark Andreessen was on the board. And I was like, go with Andreessen Horowitz. Here's what's awesome about them. And on that call, if I was like, hey, by the way, can I put in 25k into this round? I feel like they would have said yes. And that 25k at their IP was worth $200 million.
- I think it's probably not as good you didn't believe or you didn't ask because you didn't think about it. I didn't ask because I didn't believe. I was the answer. Yeah, crypto Bitcoin. These guys are building PayPal for crypto and Bitcoin. That's silly. That's just PayPal. What about biggest hit? Biggest hit. Well, let me ask you. You wrote something on here. You said could have invested in Facebook stock. I thought you I read something that you had bought after you sold your company. That was on the Facebook app platform. You had bought Facebook secondary shares. Did you do that or am I missing that? I did this really stupid thing that I'm still embarrassed of to this day, which is I signed a contract to buy some Facebook stock, like $150,000 worth.
- And the stock price was private, but in the private market, the price went down by 50%. And I called my father and was like, oh, this happened to me. And he was like, don't worry about it. Just buy it and you'll be fine. It'll go back up. And instead I didn't buy it. I think they might have sued me and said, hey, you signed a contract to buy this. And then I said, okay, fine, I did. And I paid them $75,000 to not buy it. Versus $100,000 to buy it.
- Yeah, yeah, it's 150 I get by it. So I paid them, said, I got to have K to not buy it. And I was going to go buy some from somebody else who was selling it and they backed out. So I didn't end up buying it. And then while I was buying it from the other guy, somebody else came to me and was like, hey, I've got Facebook stock to sell too. And so I hooked up a friend of mine with that Facebook stock and he bought 50K worth of stock. And that 50K ended up being worth like $8 million.
- for him, which is kind of amazing. And I was actually raising a fund to be like, we're just gonna buy Facebook stocks. Yeah, that's what I read. After we had very first met, I was like, who is this guy? I googled you and I saw some article where you had sold your app on your Facebook app and you were like, it was like, what are you gonna do now? And you're like, actually, I think Facebook is the good investment, not like my app. And you're like, I'm gonna just buy like millions of dollars of Facebook stock if I can. And I was like, wow, this guy is super aggressive and interesting. Like, what a great in hindsight. Well, this was now many years later. So I was like, you know, wow, that must have turned out amazing. I didn't, and I never asked you about it. I never knew the full story.
- Yeah, this was in 2008 during the great financial crisis. So everyone was running away from everything and Facebook was valued at $2 billion in the private market at the time. And you know, had an IPO and was unclear when it would IPO was, you know, probably at a hundred or 200 million MOUs, something along those lines. And actually I met this guy who's in New York City and was like, hey, I'm trying to buy this stock. And he's like, that's a brilliant idea. And I was like, yeah, I'm trying to make, you know, get the best price possible. And he's like, you idiot, don't worry about what price you're getting. Just buy from everyone who's selling it, go buy it because this price is so cheap that it doesn't matter. Matter. Don't worry about whether it's $2 billion or $3 billion or $4 billion. Just go buy it all.
- I just kind of fucked it up. Yeah, easier said than done for sure when those moments happen. It's happening right now in crypto. It's like, I know so many people that were like, I missed it, I wish I got in blah, blah, blah, as it was going up, crashes back down to, you know, eats at a thousand, Bitcoin was at 16,000, you know, like a month ago. And it's like, hey, you know, if you did want to buy, like now would be a pretty good time to buy probably. And they're like, oh, I mean, this thing is, who knows now? And they're the same people that three years from now are going to be like, I wish I had bought again. And they're still, they're just never going to buy. There's going to constantly reach the side and wish that they were buying and never buy at the times they should and always wish they could buy at the times they shouldn't.
- That's me right now because I've got like $40 million or $50 million in UST bills that like mature every 30 days. And I'm keeping them on in like short term T bills because I'm like, I'm going to find some other investment, whether that's the S&P 500 or something else, there will be other investments. And now is the time to go buy them. The a couple months ago, the S&P 500 was at like 3600. And that was my trigger to go buy it. And I was like, ah, it's going to go to 3500. I would wait till 3500. It never hit 3500. I am still sitting on those T bills did not buy S&P 500. Yeah, very, very hard to do this sort of thing.
- But like maybe this is where the mental model works. The cognitive bias or whatever bias this is, I got it. You know, there's someone out there who knows all these biases and they're right. I have all of them. Actually my father is really good at this. And you know, I sold my first startup and made a million bucks in 2008. He lived in Florida and was like all the real estate prices here are at 25 cents on the dollar. I'm going to go buy it. And so he bought a house. I sent him the million dollars. He went and bought a house for $150,000. Two weeks later that same house was selling for $75,000. If it was me, this is literally what I did. I would have freaked out and said, fuck, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to stop. This is not working. Instead, he bought another house for $75,000. And he just kept buying houses.
- Like for the next two years, all the way on the way down as the stock market, as the real estate prices bottomed out, kept going down. And then even on the way back up as they were increasing, he would just keep buying them. And so as a result, he owns or we as a family now on something like 100 single family rentals and for that. And what's the line there between degenerate gambler? Because I've done that too when I'm losing money and playing poker or with blackjack or whatever. And that's the line between degenerate gambler and genus. Maybe there is no line. Maybe it's how the result turns out. Yeah, I think it's a result. But also it's the psychology going in where you're like, I know this is going to go down. I don't care because I know I can wait five years or 10 years and this will go back up. And he was like, this is below replacement costs. So if you were to build a new home right next door that was the same home, it cost you four times as much as I'm paying for it right now. So yeah, amazing. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See most TRMs are a cobble together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new TRM. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better. You have a very honest LinkedIn and I saw a guy who I think won up soon. I actually want to tell you about this business.
- in a second. So, so Google this guy Justin Yoshi-Mura. So Justin and then Yoshi Emuare. So, I want to read you this guy's LinkedIn. He goes, I'm currently the founder, founder, chairman of CSC Holdings, one of the dime a dozen quote unquote unicorn startups. So, already, I'm like, wow, who's this guy? Who's the startup's dime a dozen? I'm trying, I've been trying for 15 years to make a unicorn. He's like, these are dime a dozen. And then he goes, after being told that nobody would ever hire me, I quit the bureaucracy and the negative negativity of palace verdes high school. So, already just like holding a grudge against his high school.
- to start a marketplace for unlocked cell phones. Anybody who sells cell phones, ringtones or any of that shit, they're like the best. They're a great hustler. So already, you know, bonus points. So he's got two points. First, making fun of the fact that he owns it. He's the CEO of a unicorn. Second, dropped out of high school and sold unlocked cell phones. He goes, which was acquired by family office when I was 19 years old. More recently, I started 500 friends, a marketing loyalty thing. We merged with whoever and eventually acquired by whatever. And then he goes, I enjoy the best 50K to 1 million in interesting companies run by interesting people that he names a bunch. When he names the companies, he names the round he invested in. Another key, another key thing that only real investors and honest people do, which is that they, you know, I invested in mucks in the seed round. I mean, this one, late stage, right? Versus what most people do is they'll go by, you know, Airbnb shares in the public market and call themselves an investor in Airbnb, right? It's like, we know what you're doing here. I've seen big venture funds do that too, where they're like, this is a hot company. We wanna invest in the secondary in the series D, a couple million bucks just to be able to put on our website. Small amount at any valuation, don't care, I'm just buying a logo, basically. Yeah. So then he goes,
- Besides business and things I shouldn't be discussing on LinkedIn. I love animals, dogs, many cats, especially Persian and Himalayans, dolphins, whales, he names like 10 animals, manatees, turtles, and he goes, despite this, I'm not a vegetarian, mainly because I lack self-discipline. However, I do want to clarify, I don't need any of the animals above, and I would judge you for doing so, especially considering that the prevalent belief is that eating wild animals at what mark is what caused COVID. Where is this link from? I've included many vanity lists such as Forbes 30 to 30, Inc 500, whatever, 40 under 40, but thankfully I stopped advertising these on my LinkedIn headline when I was 19 after realized I was being a douchebag for a formal bio go to my Wikipedia.
- First, just to be friends about just this guy. Have you ever heard of this company, CSC Generation? It's pretty interesting. So what he did was he started buying up all these kind of antiquated furniture companies. So it's this kind of hush hush thing, but they own Z Gallery, which like half my house is like from Z Gallery. He owns, what are the ones here? One King's Lane, he owns Surla Latabla. So he bought like Surla Talba for 89 million. Z Gallery for 20 million, one King's Lane. And then he started making offers to buy. I heard about him because our buddy, I don't know if you know Metab, but Metab sent me this video. This guy would be great for the pod. And Metab's like 100% signal to noise ratio. If he sends me something, a book, I instantly buy it. So this was like instantly just put it on the list, do research on this guy. So this guy's 32 years old. And he's built basically like a sort of like a billionish, let's call it a dollar company rolling these up. And what he's doing is he's making them more like e-commerce and digitally like savvy. So he'll close down half of the retail locations that aren't performing. He'll get the e-commerce side to build up. He'll take all the customer data that they have. And he's like, dude, they have like years of customer purchasing data, but it's in a machine that's like 20 years old, that they can't even like literally extract and like put into an email database or like find it, you know, put it in Facebook ads or anything like that. So he's like, we take this, he's like, we build a system to buy these companies. And he's trying to build like what Constellation Software did for small SaaS companies. He's trying to do that for large furniture companies. He's like, he's like, that's my model. They built an amazing intake engine to buy like 30 software companies a year and like unlock more value from them. I'm trying to do the same with furniture companies.
- And this guy gives like no interviews. He's just this one guy. And the reason he's on people's radar now is because he started making these wild public offers at these old school furniture companies. So he went to them privately. He's like, I'd like to buy your company. And they're like, you know, they're in Nebraska. They're 65 years old. They're like, you know, my father's father built this table in this furniture store. Like, what are you talking about? And he's like, here's this 32 year old kid who lives in LA. And they're like, no, we don't, we don't want your kind here basically. So they don't like his offer. So he's like, okay, this is getting me nowhere. So he just started releasing press releases saying, I'd like to buy this company for 20 or 30% over the public, you know, share price right now. Please respond, board. You have not been productive. You have not responded to my offer in private. You have not told me a counter offer. You've said, neither yes nor no. Your shareholders deserve this publicly. So he's publicly making offers on these two public companies. And that's how he's like now on people's radar because he was like pretty much doing this under the radar before this. What do you think of this guy, this idea?
- That's genius. I love it because there's just so much unlocked value in these businesses, and he's focused on a specific vertical furniture. I have no idea why he's focused on that vertical, but just that kind of focus will allow him to be able to take the same product, sell across a lot of these different retailers, get crazy improvements in margin by combining the scale of all of these. And the idea of doing it, going after publicly traded companies that are undervalued.
- So good. And so he said, so they're doing, they're doing over a little over a billion in revenue now out of their thing. And he said he's targeting furniture because they're undervalued. They lag, they're like kind of like, they're sort of like lagging and they, they, they, who could benefit the most from like a digital glow up? He's like, it's these companies that are like basically not participating in the right way in like the digital world and the economy and e-commerce and whatnot. And so he goes, a lot of these old school furnishings have a ton of customer data. It's an old physical server in their warehouse, software's 34 years old, the company that made the software out of business, you can't even like get them to update it. He goes, I'm just trying to get it to be modern. We've built a platform and a process to unlock the value of this customer data. I'm always a little skeptical of that type of claim, but he goes, I have, I have no desire to have my own brand. He goes, constellation software has no brand. They're just a $40 billion company that goes 33% a year. And then years ago, the stock prices of 100. Now it's 2000. They created a platform to buy these companies and unlock the value and tuck them in. They have to infrastructure people and process. They created a machine to unlock value in this category. I don't think anybody's done that in retail. That's what we want to become.
- Wow. First of all, I just love the tone with which he speaks and like the humility and is just kind of like, this is what we're doing. It's simple. There's no magic to it. It's obvious. In fact, why isn't somebody else doing this? Okay. Nobody else's will do it. And that's kind of amazing. So I bring this up for two reasons. One on the tone. He reminds me of you, your LinkedIn is the same way where you'll be like, I invested this company kind of got it was kind of like a Yelp for this ish. I don't know. These guys can explain it better. And like no, no investor would write that on there or you'd be like, I kind of got acquired Aquahire, shadow no good outcome for the guys, you know, okay for me. You're very honest with like your portfolio, which I thought was good and unique. Nobody writes on LinkedIn like that. LinkedIn is basically like, you know, it's like those dog shows. It's not like owning a dog. It's like those dog shows. If you watch the dog show, you'd be like, is this what owning a dog is like? And you'd be like, no, that's nothing like what owning a dog is like.
- So I thought you liked that. You also, when I started my e-comp is, you sent me a one-line email. I don't know if you remember this, you go, you go with my last business, we realized that we just have to do this one thing differently than the current status quo, and it would work. We didn't need magic, it didn't need 10 genius things. We just had this one fundamental thing. What's the one thing you're gonna do that's gonna make this work? And that one question I was like spinning for like a week because I was like, I don't know. I don't have a good answer to this question. Does this mean my business is gonna fail? But this is a great question, and I stashed it in my great questions list. I thought, okay, I need to find that for this business, but also for every business going forward. What is the one thing that needs to be true, or like is true about this? Do you remember setting me that?
- No, not at all. But I think that sounds like the sort of thing I would do. It for some reason, it reminds me of my first company I started. I started with a friend of mine from college. And we sold the company. And after we sold the company, we got into a fight. And he sent me this email that was like, 50 reasons this company succeeded, despite your existence. And I was like, ouch. And so I went and read it. And you know, he got to like 25 good reasons. And then at 26, he was like, you get the gist. And for a little while, I've read that email like every day for like the first year that I got it. And then after that, I've read it like kind of once a year every year to just be like, what is it that he said and what was the truth to it?
- I don't know why it reminds me of that, but that was such a great email. We great email. There was some truth to it enough where I could kind of be like, cool, let me just take this feedback and action it in the future. And is also ironic in that, you know, he didn't he kind of gave up the startup game kind of shortly after that. Man, you really broke him as a partner. Well, he actually tried to do a couple other startups. And then I think, and I think got into YC and did a YC funded startup.
- But I think it's, you know, startup game is a hard game. And so he was just like, this game isn't for me after some number of years. And the other thing that's crazy actually is, so, you know, I started that company, then I started TinyCo and we were raising our series A from Andreessen Horowitz. And he found out and he sent them an email saying, you shouldn't let this guy, you shouldn't invest in this guy, call me. And so they called him and, you know, he was like, basically read that list of 50 things.
- And it almost killed the deal because they were like, yeah, we're worried about investing in this deal because of this. And it's funny because there's so many things that there's so many things that people will like admonish privately, but kind of celebrate publicly like Travis, the Uber CEO, when he heard that some VC fund was investing in Lyft, he stopped what he was doing. He drove down to that VC firm and said, here are all the reasons you shouldn't invest in Lyft.
- Right. And that seems crazy, but because he was successful, brilliant. And there were a couple other things with like Mark Pincus and Zynga where he did the same thing. So it was just a funny experience going through that with him and kind of in Dries and Horowat series A. And it's funny now because somehow 10 years later, we're great friends again. And he got married and I was like the best man in his wedding, which is insane. Happy ending to this. You also have been talking about this kind of like by a public company thing. So I'm like, yo, what's next for you? What's the next big swing? What are you excited to do? And you've talked about this. So let's go into some of those, that idea. Because I don't think most people in the startup game,
- think or talk about going and buying a public company or, you know, sort of a hostile takeover or what have you. What's the idea here and why might you do it? Yeah, so I've been kind of trying to figure out what to do next. I think after TinyCo, I was like, wow, startups are hard. I'm going to try to take it easy. And now gotten to a place where I'm like, cool, let's do something big again. Starting a new company from scratch is really hard. So I've just been like, is there a public company that I can acquire?
- where I don't go through that zero to one phase that everybody loves but is really difficult and go to a place where something's already at a five or ten. And can I then take that and scale it as a way of running a business? So to me, the perfect business out there to acquire is this company that was, this is number one on my list is a company that was a three billion dollar, that's currently a three billion dollar company but in the private market was ten billion dollars. So it was worth ten billion dollars before and now as a public company it's worth three billion dollars. The company is Squarespace.
- Squarespace is down. Squarespace is down. Squarespace ad. I feel like the only time I ever hear Squarespace is in their ads now. Yeah, Squarespace spends so much money on these podcast ads and you hear about them everywhere on podcasts or places that you don't see companies doing direct response advertising. Like I never see them on Facebook, but I always hear about them on podcasts. Right. And so the stock is down 50% since the IPO. They're at this like kind of 900 million revenue run rate now. It's a subscription business with more than 4 million subscribers.
- I'd love to buy it because I think it's a great company that's super undervalued. It's not being run to maximize profits. So it's being run in a way that keeps it at break even. So I think you could run it to maximize profits, get rid of those podcast ads, focus on direct response, Facebook ads to get new customers. Where's the fact in their spending? They do a ton of non-direct response ads that are like TV ads or podcast ads that I think are great to have this like halo effect around the brand. But I don't think those are the optimal way to maximize return on ad spend.
- And so they do, I think, 300 or 400 million of marketing spend. So that's one. You could make that more efficient or cut that down. Where, what is the other? Is it like, you know, like Elon buys Twitter, he fires half the staff type of thing. There's like a huge headcount or what else is like fat in their system? Yeah, I think they've got a ton more people than they need. Their headcount costs are like 225 million a year and their headquarters is in New York City. You could just cut that team materially and.
- get rid of the New York City headquarters, because it's super expensive to be there. Yeah, Sam was talking about, I remember back in the day, like one of the earliest podcasts, I talked about Casper, and he's like, Casper, you know how new Casper's gonna fail? They had like 150 employees in New York. And it's like, why are you hiring all these people in New York? You don't need, these people should be sitting in like, South Carolina, Omaha, and like, you know, these other places, like why is your customer support, you know, somebody making, all this money in New York. He's like, that's the first thing you gotta do is just get rid of New York. He was like, so adamant about it. It was like his number one rant. And this is at a time when Casper was still like,
- seen as like kind of like one of the rising stars like now I think that's just kind of taking a beating in the market and all that stuff. I think my gun private again because it has to be private could it could last publicly I guess but the. Remember that was his like number one thing like I say no more I don't need to read the P.N.L. I just saw how many employees work in New York I could tell you this business is this managed from day one. There's this great Carl Icahn story where he buys a business that makes like subway cars and they've got a huge team in New York and team somewhere in middle America and he goes the team in New York and is like there's three floors of them in some fancy midtown building and he's like so what do you guys do and you know they show them all these presentations for two days and he's like okay I saw the presentation so what do you guys do and they're like we just told you.
- And so there he's like, all right, let me go visit the guy who runs the middle America thing that actually makes the railroad cars. And so he goes to visit them and he hangs out with a guy, the guy's super charming. And at the end of the day, he's like, so, you know, there are these guys in New York, what do they do for you? Do you need them? And he's like, no, those guys don't do anything. In fact, I got four guys that are just there to manage those guys and all the questions that they bother us with. Firewall. Yeah, if you get rid of those guys, I think the business will continue to grow and will be fine. And so the next day he goes back to New York and fires three floors of people.
- It's like that scene in entourage where Ari Gold just walks in with the paintball gun and just starts blasting everybody. That's basically what I like the New York, the New York firing by Carl Icahn. Yeah, he tells this story with such a smile and actually he tells it as like, this was pretty early in my career. So it took me like a couple months to do this. If it was now, I would buy the company and fire them like the next week. And so how would somebody actually do this? How do you go buy a $3 billion company? Because you're rich, but you're not $3 billion to spend on a company rich. So how does somebody do this?
- Yeah, I think the $3 billion thing is probably too much for my personal balance sheet. But the way you would go about it is just like the guy at CSC Generation is doing, which is make a public offer. It's the same way Elon Musk did it. You first make a private offer, then you make a public offer. Make sure that all your financing is lined up when you do the public offer. The way that the US stock market works.
- shareholder rights laws work is a board has to respond to that offer. And they have to have a really good reason to not take it if it's at a material premium to the current stock price. Otherwise they're going to get sued out the Wazoo by shareholders. And so yeah, that's kind of how you do it. Okay, so that's one way. Let's do some of the other things. So that's from big idea to...
- fun smaller ideas. So you were telling me something like you helped your buddy, I don't know, high school friend or college friend or something like this sell their dental practice. What? Tell us, teach me about that. I don't know anything about that. Yeah, this was a chance for me to be a deal doula. So this friend of mine called me and was like, Hey, I got a quick question for you. Somebody, I started this dental practice, you know, 10 years ago, somebody came in to make an offer. Should I take it? And, you know, I thought I was going to be one phone call. It ended up being like 60 hours of work with a bunch of phone calls with him and the buyers of the business.
- And it was super cool to see the inside of a dental practice and how the P&L looks and how a company gets acquired like that. So he has a dental practice that's massively profitable that he runs in a way where he's optimizing for his lifestyle. So he does seven figures in Ibadah, has a 50% net margin all while working three days a week. And I was just like, Oh my God, is it like three days a week? What is he doing the other days?
- He is making up new hobbies that he's getting excited about. Like he's never gone fishing before. And he's like, I got all this time to kill because I don't have. I've got all this gear. Now I have to learn this hobby. Yeah. So he'll go find a new hobby and like buy the gear, find somebody in town who is good at that hobby and go with them. So actually I hung out with him recently and he's like, let's go fishing. I was like, when did you take up fishing? He's like, I got so much time.
- So he works three days a week and he's not optimizing the business for Ebida. He has a big waiting list of patients who want to become patients, but he doesn't have the time to see them. He has one dentist that works for him and a bunch of dental hygienists. But none of that is being done in a way where he's like optimizing for revenue or profit, just optimizing for his quality of life. So this private equity firm is doing a roll up of all of these dentists in that area. And it's super interesting how the private equity, so they've got a company that's going around and doing this roll up of dental practices. The company is...
- Run has a CEO, which is a dentist, super nice guy, super well-known in the area, and admired and liked by all of the other dentists in the area. So he's kind of like the figurehead of the company. Good cop. Good cop. Then they've got a COO who is this hardened guy who's bought tons of businesses and worked for a bunch of private equity firms and has experienced a choir. And you don't even like talking to him after five minutes. And he's the bad cop.
- So, good cop and bad cop go in and, you know, good cop does all the charming saying, this is going to be a great acquisition. Look at how it's turned out for me. Bad cop does all of the numbers in negotiating. So they bought this business and they bought it with a really simple premise. They bought it for a 7X EBITDA multiple and they're like, we're going to go buy all the dentists in this area that we can and we'll sell it at a 15X EBITDA multiple because we'll get to a scale of 20, 30 million in EBITDA.
- That's just the valuation arbitrage, right? Which is basically that small EBITDA businesses, like let's say you're doing a million or two million, they'll sell for seven X. But if you had 20 million of EBITDA in a business, it'll get acquired by a larger institution. It's an easier buy button to buy 20 million a year of EBITDA for 15 X. And so all you have to do is kind of like accumulate, roll up, and put this together to get to that next stage of buyer. Yeah, exactly right. So that's one aspect, and then the other aspect is they were like, there's all these things that we can do to increase revenue for this guy's business.
- One, we're going to add another dentist, eliminate the waiting list. Anyone wants to see a dentist, they're going to be able to see a dentist within a week. They added another dental hygienist chair. So the dental hygienist chair costs like $10,000 and my buddy just didn't go buy one and kind of put a dental hygienist there to increase dental hygiene revenue. They even told him that there's all these things they can do to maximize, to increase the amount of money they get from insurance companies.
- So they were like, there's this one instrument. Whenever you're doing a cleaning, just pick this instrument up. You don't even have to put it inside the mouth of the patient. Just pick it up for a second and then put it back down. And then you can claim that this higher insurance code and we're going to generate more revenue. So they called me and was like, you know, is this moral or is this immoral? Like, can I go back to these guys and say, hey, I don't want to do this. This doesn't seem right. He said as he's holding the tool up for 45 minutes just to see what happens. That's right. And then because they bought all these other dental practices in the area, they're able to take one dental practice and say, oh, you need braces or you need a root canal or you need whatever oral surgery procedure. We're going to refer you out to somebody. And so he used to refer to people who are just kind of third parties. And now he gets to refer to people that are in the network already owned by the private equity firm. Nice.
- Yeah, okay, that's great. So you see that machine and you're like, wow, this is amazing. What's your kind of like big takeaway from that experience? Because I think most people wouldn't take the time to go do that. You did and I think you probably got something out of it. What was your big takeaways? Well, I thought it was amazing that it was a win for the private equity firm and just being able to see the roll up strategy and how good it was for them up front was awesome. I also got to see it from his perspective. And from his perspective, it was also a huge win. It was an easy transaction. He didn't shop it around.
- It was a way for him to retire and become the richest person that he knows. He owned the real estate of the dental practice. So he got to keep the real estate and now the choir pays him rent every month for the real estate that he owns. And now he gets to go because he was working three days a week, which is a lot. He now gets to take month long vacations to Europe or Africa or wherever he wants to go for fun with his whole family.
- Yeah, that's amazing. I also like the I'm the richest guy. No, that's a funny thing that actually does happen in a bunch of like, especially smaller towns and like niche things is like, if you can make $8 million or something like that, you are, you know, you're done. Like, you don't need anymore. And you feel like there's a beauty and that like if you're in Silicon Valley, you could build a billion dollar business and like, you might not get invited to the big boy table still, right? Because it's just like everybody knows.
- 50 people that are more successful, younger, smarter, and more ambitious than them. And so there's never ending race that you're on if you're in Silicon Valley, New York, LA, and that's just not true in these other places. And I think there's something great about that. Yeah, it's amazing. The only way to win the rat race is to opt out of the rat race. And he has opted out and has there by won the rat race. And it's so funny to compare my life to his because I spent so much more time working. And
- You know have made a bunch of money so that maybe I don't need to work as hard or at all And yet I continue to work and he's like I'm chilling And you've thought about that or no, it's like just not your nature I have one of my goals for 2023 is to like take it a lot easier work wise and spend a lot more time Doing as many fun things as possible Like I'm in LA right now. They have this thing called the Porsche driving experience
- So you go and go with a bunch of friends. They've got pourshes and a racetrack and you get in a Porsche and just drive it around the racetrack as fast as you can without killing yourself. When we got back from the weekend getaway that we did, I gave a debrief and I talked about this one observation I had, which was that at that thing, we met people or we were hanging out with people that were like four or five different life phases. So there was like, you know, Victor and Judy are basically like 12 year olds and their mindset was like, yo, wake up, it's time to play. They literally woke us up with a boombox by the window just playing like Tiesto or something like that and they're like, come on, the pool's already warm. And then we can go to the sauna and then we can play golf. Then we can play wiffwoll. We can play this, play that. They were just, and from the moment they woke up to the moment they went to sleep, they were like, let's play.
- So I was like the 12 year olds. And then it was like the 20 year olds we met that came over that night that were basically like building the NFT projects or doing the like TikTok, the TikTok DDC brand that was just taken off. And they were like, I don't know how to describe it, but they were kind of like in that hustle of like, they kind of thought they had it all figured out, but they don't, but they don't realize that yet, but that lets them do some cool shit because they don't know what they don't know yet. So they were just like young stallions, like just full of exuberance and didn't understand where the limitations were, what the drawbacks were, but that's okay. They'll run headfirst into that wall when it comes, but they're having a good time doing it. And then there was like me, Ben, like we're like in our 30s and it's like, you know, the 30 year olds are sort of like, okay, I'm, you know, I still have enough energy to do things.
- But I'm not dumb enough to just do them blindly. I don't have that that great ignorance yet I yeah, I really like kind of overanalyze things almost and so the whole time We were like trying to think through our next project trying to like sit down and map it out and pros and cons and all this stuff and And then there's you guys who are in your 40s and you're like yeah, you're like yeah, you're like oh Ramones like throwing out his back playing pickleball and like you know you guys were basically some combination of like let's have fun Like let's go surfing let's play sports like yo sees the day. I don't know how much longer I'm gonna be able to do all this stuff constantly like I'm doing it and You know like I guess like there was like an element of like
- You know, yeah, business stuff is cool, but like life is a lot cooler than business Where the 30 year olds and the 20 year olds were like no winning and businesses And like I remember just continually trying to be like hey guys alright You guys want to just sit down and just whiteboard for a minute And it was like you know just sort of like I was feeling this urge to do that I feel you guys with this urge to like the Sun is out Let's go outdoors and like but let's wear our sunscreen because like we don't want to die Like this element of like I want to live and I don't want to die That's where you guys were at and then we hung out with like a 70 year old guy and he was just sort of like
- I want some action. I'm bored. I want some action. And I want to contribute, I want to give back. And that was a big focus. And it's just fun to have this energy around me. So that was one observation I had. Is that accurate as far as you read it or am I making stuff up here? Yeah, it's super accurate. Ramon and I were like, it's Saturday night and we have a bunch of entrepreneurs who are just trying to sell us their business and just get themselves excited and meet people on network.
- And me and Ramon were like, it's nine o'clock. I think it's time to go to bed. And these guys are like, no, let's see, up till two a.m. Let's talk about business ideas. Let's start a new business tomorrow. Oh my God, this guy is selling mini katanas on the internet through YouTube and TikTok. Wow. So it was a real funny thing. And then you know, you and Ben were like, let's talk about new business ideas. Here's a new business idea. What do you think? What do you think? What about this? What about this?
- Ramon and I are like, how about we jump in the pool? Just take an ice bath. Yeah. So it is funny to see these different seasons of life and, yeah, I'm trying to kind of adjust to this new season. And for example, now on Saturdays and Sundays, I try not to touch my laptop at all and be outdoors and with friends as much as possible. Well, it's hard to make that shift in that season. Even at the beginning of this podcast, I'm going to buy a public company and take it to the moon. And then it's like, actually, I'm going to enjoy life and whatever.
- do family things and things like that. It's hard to even be congruent in a one hour podcast with like, you know, a kind of like direction. So, you know, I think that's, that's, I've observed that amongst many, many people. It's like very hard. It's very hard to stay congruent. I noticed this about myself. Like I'll be like, oh, I love this content podcast thing. This is great. I think I could be the best at this. And then I get all this positive feedback where it's happening and it's like growing and people like it. And then I'm like, yeah, but should I start this business doing this B2B thing? And then it's like, wait, what happened to the whole, like I wanna do this content thing? It's like, ah, I don't know. Like I just, it's hard to be congruent and it's very easy to get distracted and get off kind of like mission when you're used to doing one thing and you know you can always go back to that well and do it. And there's this new thing that you think might be the right thing for you, but it's different and maybe a little unfamiliar, a little less familiar.
- I met this guy who started a company called Solostove and sold it and then later went public named Spencer. He was like, I started this company. I worked really hard. I sold it. Now I made mega bucks and I'm good. I'm financially independent. He doesn't invest in any startups. He doesn't invest in any private equity funds or VC funds. He's like, when people are like, do you want to invest in this or that? The other thing, he's like, no, I'm good. He takes all of his money and puts it in the stock market in the Vanguard VOO, the Vanguard S&P 500 index.
- doesn't think about it at all. And he says that everyone else who is like this, is an entrepreneur, starts a company, makes it, and then goes back and starts another company. They're only starting another company because that's the only thing they know. And he's like, they just keep building a new prison for themselves. That's bigger and brighter, but it's still a prison. And why would you do that? And so I had this call with him and then for a week after that, I was just like walking in circles, like muttering to myself, what am I doing with my life? What am I doing? Why am I starting new businesses? What is all of this?
- So it's really interesting to see people on the other end of this spectrum. I think I told you that once when we, I remember we were at some park in San Francisco, you were telling me about your new thing and it was working great. And I was like, I was like, that's great. And I'm like, I admire that you do this with such ease. It's like watching Steph Curry shoot three pointers. Like, wow, you just can start a business and it just works like this. That, what happened to all the hard, gritty stuff that I feel all the time? Like, you're just doing it. That's amazing. But then I also told you I was like, I feel like you're playing the same level of the video game again.
- And like, you know, you kind of beat this level. Like shouldn't you just like go to the next level? I don't know what that level even is. I don't even know what that means. Maybe it's not even business. But like, you know, I said that. And I felt like a real dick afterwards. I was like, that was a stupid thing to say. I remember like feeling like, you know, that I was at, I first felt really bad. I was like, that was just kind of like a, I don't know. Like that probably didn't feel good to say that or to hear that. And then I was like, also like, I was like, well, do I believe it? And like, you know, would I want a friend to tell me that if they felt that about something I was doing. And I was like, yeah, I think I would. And I was like, I think he doesn't take that stuff seriously. So, you know, that's no problem. But you know, like,
- I've felt that in and I've seen that now in many people, the same like build a prison of your own making. And like you said, the only people who win are the ones who sort of opt out of the rat race. And it's really jarring when you see that. And you're like, wait, what, you're leaving? But you could do- We're still here. And they're like, yeah, we're still here. And they're like, yeah, it's great. I'm gonna go wander over here. And I'm like, oh my God, you can leave this room? I didn't know that was possible. It's like, it is honestly very jarring when you meet the like one out of 100 people in Silicon Valley who do that.
- Yeah, it is stunning that people do that. And it's so interesting when you meet people who do that and like what they choose to do with their time. Like you were telling me about that brain tree guy who's like, I'm trying to maximize my life. I'm trying to reverse my biological age. Yeah. And so I changed my diet. I've got like a team of doctors, nutritionists, physical therapists, trainers, and I'm reversing my age. And that's what he's doing with his time and energy and money. It's super interesting to hear when people...
- Yeah, the thing I've seen. I now have this thought which is that my life is actually limited by my imagination and Growing up I always assumed it was limited by you know money or resources and now I realize my life is just limited by my imagination and One of the things that made me do is I'm trying to hire a chief fun officer My definition of fun is often like let's work and let's grind it out I'm trying to hire somebody who's the exact opposite of me to
- Be like, no, that's lame. Here's like five more fun things you could be doing right now. Go do those instead. And I will literally close my laptop and just go do one of those five things in response to that. That's amazing. That thing you just said, my life is limited by my imagination. I think that's probably, I don't know how many minutes into the podcast video, but that's like a golden nugget right there. Like that's something I'm gonna think about a lot. What, say more about that. Like either how you thought of that or what's an example of that? Yeah. You know, it's funny because I'm living with my brother right now and the two of us wake up and we're like, it's Monday morning, let's go. Let's grind it out. Let's go, let's win the ball game.
- And yesterday we played paddle tennis for four hours until our limbs fell off. And that was way more fun than whatever work we're gonna do today. And so I just want somebody to, like I don't spend all this time being like, actually what's happened for me is, as I've seen more businesses and gotten older and more experience, I feel like this is a little bit of a hyperbole, but I feel like Neo in the Matrix, where you show me a business and I can like see through it and actually see the fundamentals of the business and have an opinion about whether it's a good business or not, or I see opportunities where I'm like,
- there's a hundred million dollar business here. And it's just a matter of like doing the work and executing it and it could be a real business. So I spend so much of my brain power thinking about that stuff and very little of my brain power thinking about how to have fun and like other cool things that people do in life. I spend a ton of time reading the Wall Street Journal and talking to entrepreneurs, but very little time talking to Instagram influencers or just people who are like balling out and having a great life.
- And so I just want to spend more of my time and energy imagining fun things to do like I love magic. I love to have a magician show up randomly in my week. Like while I'm at a restaurant, a magician shows up and is like, Hey, everybody, I got a magic trick for you. And then does a magic trick at the table. I friend of mine told me that him and a bunch of guy friends would go to Vegas every year. And one year this guy was in charge of planning it and he hired like five little people in tuxedos to follow them around. And then a bunch of
- like the Brazilian carnival dancers to follow them around the whole weekend. And so everywhere they went, everyone was like, who are these guys? They got into every club. They got free drinks. They got to all these people coming up to them. And they had a dope weekend as a result. And lots of people will just go to Vegas and go to the hotel and gamble. And these guys just through their imagination had a better way of doing it. Yeah, amazing. All right, this has been good. Where do people find you? You started tweeting, so shout out your handle. And then...
- We can wrap it up. Yeah, my goal is to get to 100,000 Twitter followers by the end of the year So I'm gonna be tweeting a bunch more my Twitter handle is my full name Suleen a la. I yes, I'm on Ali. All right, great. Thanks for coming on man. You bet. Thanks, Sean You

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- I think once you treat your hobby like a job, that's like a recipe for failure. That's what happens to a lot of people. Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my own in it like my days on. I'm on a road. Let's travel. Never looking back. All right. What's going on? What's up, man? So we're going to get into some ideas, but let me tell you something that I did this week. And I cannot give the, I actually have gotten in trouble three different times where someone was like, Hey, we had this conversation and you're just talking. Well, I'm like, well, I don't.
- I just when you and I the way that you and I talk now is how we talk all the time Yeah, and yeah, and they're so they're right So I'm gonna try to keep this one vague I had this dinner and I was with a guy who has 8,000 employees in China as well as many thousand in America Wow, yeah, yeah impressive person like a factory or something else in China Tech related just like just some huge company you if I gave you a hundred guesses you likely wouldn't guess it It's just some big company that exists and in the tech world fair enough and It's impressive, but it's not like a mainstream thing Okay, and there was this other guy there who made a comment where he was like China's gonna crush us in the next Five years or something and then a couple other people love to say that by the way don't people love saying how China's passed up America
- A bunch of other people bounced on that and then this guy it was this guy. He lives in China I believe he he I don't know what ethnicity he was but he looked like he I mean He's probably maybe born and raised in China and then there's other woman there who actually was born and raised in China and This guy with the six thousand Chinese employees goes a lot of people say that I do not think that's true And I don't think any of you should ever think that He was just saying he was like Americans actually work maybe as hard or harder than a lot of other countries And also you talk about this like artificial intelligence in this
- It's mostly AI that people, I mean, they talk about China crushing America and a bunch of stuff, but AI is like a hot thing. And this guy was like, I don't think that would happen. And what I think you should do is invest most of your money into American equities. I think he goes like, I'm just so bullish on America. And so it was like an interesting perspective. Have you ever heard that? It's like the one person who probably knows what they're talking about at the table and everybody else who just reads shit on Twitter and like regurgitates it. All right, I'm going to go with the guy who's got 6,000 employees in China. That makes more sense to me. That's, you know, and that was good. I felt great about that. And so it was just an interesting perspective.
- We have you some pro America news Yeah, well, so I'm also just finished reading this really great book. Do you know who John Steinbeck is now? Of course you do grapes a wrath No, what is that? I got a blank here Have you been a Gilmockingbird? I have heard the Gilmockingbird. That's the author. Oh my god like John Simon People gonna make fun of you by the way anyway The guy he was born in 1902 so he's dead he's died probably died in the 70s, but anyway I'm reading this great book about his memoir from driving across the country for three months in America and getting to know America And it's really funny in 1965 when he was doing this trip He was complaining about how Americans are getting out of touch with and are getting too focused on technology and how there's refrigerators everywhere And there's TVs everywhere and how there's artificial food everywhere. It's very funny. We've always complained about this stuff. Bye
- I do love learning about America. I think America's special. I think we have this resilient resilience and I think the yeah Anyway, I'm very pro America. So yes, I did like hearing it, but you want to talk about some ideas? Yeah, by the way Dan corrected us. I don't think he wrote to kill a mockingbird, but no He didn't write to kill a mockingbird. I'm saying his work is like it's like it's like it's like did he write of my cement? I know he wrote like grip to wrath. It's just like a famous like American classic I'm just shocked the fact that you don't know that he wrote of my cement. So you know that so the fact that you You know, I know that as in I've heard those words before that's all I know about that Anyways, let's let's go into the stuff. I do know about cuz I feel a lot better about that and also
- Bitcoin rally. Thank you. I've been waiting for this Bitcoin pump and here we are. We're back up. Life is good because Bitcoin is now right. It spiked up to almost 40,000 over the last 24 hours, 48 hours. There was a bit of a short squeeze. About a billion dollars of short positions got liquidated and that caused the price to run up because are you familiar with how that works, by the way? What a short squeeze is. So here's the non-technical, non-super-nuanced version of it. Basically, when you have a short, you're betting against something and if it goes up, you are on the hook to pay the price for being wrong.
- And so if you think something's gonna keep going up, you're better out just closing down your short position, just taking the L and saying, okay, I'll pay, I will go buy the shares now because I'm, you know, let's say it's at 30,000, I think it's going down, it goes to 32. You know what, to close out my position, I'll go buy the asset at 32 and I'll eat the loss, right? But what happens is because all the shorts start worrying that the price is gonna run up, they all start trying to close out their positions at the same time, so they all start buying. So the people who are betting against it, all of a sudden at all this buying pressure.
- Where they have to close out their position, they have to buy Bitcoin, which causes the price to go up and up and up and up. And so what happened is as it started running up, all the shorts had to cover their positions because they were massively leveraged, right? They're not putting in their own money. They're putting in like five to ten percent down and they're taking the they're taking 10x or 20x leverage on their position. So as the price goes up, they're very sensitive to it. And so I think that's what happened to cause the price to go about ten thousand dollars in the last two days is you
- those shorts had to cover their position. This is what happened with Tesla. Tesla was the most shorted stock in the stock exchange. And then as the price started to go up, those shorts, they're basically are paying a huge price for every dollar it goes up. So they start to close out their positions which puts a bunch of buying pressure, which is why it becomes a squeeze because the shorts themselves cause the other shorts to like have to cover and it just causes the price to shoot up way above what its earnings is and anything else. Dude, this is funny. It's funny because like when you, so we're in this chat group, Sean and me and a bunch of other like successful young guys and they talk about like alpha, like crushing alpha. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. I got no idea what that means. We talk about short squeeze of like this, these words don't mean anything to me. I don't even know what they mean. You guys feel like so sophisticated to me.
- Yeah. All right. Let's talk about some ideas. Can we? Yeah, let's do it. You want me to go? You go first. Okay. I have one. Okay. Here's another one that's crypto related and you're going to be like, what? But I'm telling you this is a good idea. This is actually Ben's idea. So first of all, Ben is visiting me. So I'm getting to see Ben in person. He's sitting five feet away from me. I wanted him to join this, but and somebody goddamn technical difficulty setting up that like, I don't know how I could get it to me where it works. But maybe Wednesday will take an extra hour beforehand and just get it set up for a two person set up.
- But anyways, Ben, we're talking last night, and he's like, you know, one, we're talking about courses, right? Because, and I can share kind of like how, what the numbers, like, I just finished my course, I can share what the numbers were on that. But we're talking about other potential courses we could do, like what would be fun? He's like, I don't know, he's like, we're not the right people to teach this, but I think this course would crush right now. So Sam, tell me, do you know what solidity is? If I say, oh, solidity. So so- No, when I say writing, I thought it was a typo for us, not clarity. Yeah, but solidarity is all good. So solidity is the programming language that you use to write smart contracts for Ethereum. So let's say, like one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract. So think like a basic escrow contract. I buy a house, you're gonna give me the title, I'm gonna give you the money, but I don't wanna give you the money first, you don't wanna give me the title first. So we use this third party, this escrow agent, we pay them $5,000. Basically you hand them the title, I hand them the money. They say, yep, they're both here, and then they give it to each other, right? So in the real world, we paid these exorbitant middleman fees. I don't know what you paid for your house when you bought it, or you just did another real estate transaction. I don't know what you're paying for escrow. I didn't even look at it. I don't even- For me, it was like four grand to do an escrow transaction, which sucked. I was like, this is just $4,000 for nothing.
- When I sold my business, I think the escrow was $50,000. Right. Crazy. They think this is crazy. And they literally do like one ounce of work. They literally just, oh, you hand me the title and you hand me the money. Great. I'm going to just turn one hand over here and I'll give you this. You'll give you this. I'll give them that. So a smart contract basically says, look, we don't need this like person in the middle and we don't need to pay them $4,000. Let's just make a contract with some rules and we'll just instead of writing it like a lawyer contract, we'll write it like a programmer contract. The programmer contracts says, hey, when this wallet has this much money in it, person A has fulfilled their obligation. And when this wallet has this asset in it, person B has fulfilled their obligation and then release the assets to each other. And so instead of paying $4,000, you can pay $4 or $40, whatever the gas fees are at the time. So that's smart contracts. So what that means is a lot of jobs today that go to lawyers are going to go to programmers because you're not going to want a lawyer to write a contract for something. You're going to want a programmer to write it down, but you need that contract to like work. It needs to be like solid bug proof, hack proof. And like, I needed to do the many things that I need my transactions to do. So there is an extreme shortage right now of smart contract developers, of developers who know how to write in this new programming language and write these types of contracts.
- But it's clearly like a big part of the future in my opinion. And so one idea here is to create basically a bootcamp that takes an existing engineer and says, hey, cool, oh, you write JavaScript or like, you know, you're a backend engineer. You're one of like 10 million. Why don't you come over here where there's this high demand, high shortage of engineers that know how to do this thing? I can train you in six weeks to learn how to write like smart contracts and solidity and then go to all the companies that are trying to hire this and basically do a Lambda school. I think you can do Lambda school that's really niche, really focused. And if I'm an engineer that like,
- I'm a crypto nerd. This is a business that I think you could do. You could just train other engineers to like learn how to write smart contracts and then get hired and placed in these jobs that you take the placement fee. What do you think of that? So I'm doing research while you're talking. All right. Oh. Wow. Okay. No, I agree with the lot that you said except for the last part. So there's this company called Coursera. Have you heard of Coursera? Of course. So they were starting 2012 and I believe that they were started because the two guys, I think they worked at Google and they're noticing that we are struggling to hire a particular type of engineer. I'm just, this is just off memory. So I might be a little bit off here about some of the stuff. But anyway, they, and so they built like these courses and they built it so people can get jobs at Google. Let's say data science or machine learning or something. Yeah. It was sometimes a data science or machine learning. I forget exactly what it was.
- And they came out of the gate and they crushed it. And then like over the last five years, they kind of like went nowhere and kind of like, it's like, what the hell happened to that company? And they're not really doing that well anymore. Well, over the last year and a half, two years with COVID and a bunch of other stuff, they started crushing it. Do you know what Coursera's revenue is now? No idea. So they went public. Did you know that? No. Yeah, a lot of people didn't know it. I kind of thought they had like stagnated and like wasn't going anywhere. That's what everyone thought. So in 2020, they did about $300 million, sorry, my bad, $400 million in revenue. And they're currently publicly traded at a $5 and a half billion valuation. And yeah, it's crazy, right? Totally forgot about it. And what you did with your course, well, I don't know if you did this, but what a lot of people and like you and me will do courses and we'll kind of do these kind of like bootleg things, not bootleg, but like, you are literally it.
- Yeah, and you'll charge like $300. $300, which I've done before. And that makes things a little bit, and you want like a person to buy it. And that makes things a little bit challenging. What I would do is I would take the thing that you're describing and with this, with Bitcoin, there's like all these crazy new things that you've got to learn really quickly. I would just copy the Coursera model and just churn these fuckers out and charge like $8,000. And it's like we're gonna, like a company needs to buy it in order to train them their people. So I think that's lambda for X. I would do Coursera for X. Okay, I think that's fair. The thing with the Lambda side, which is basically, I think every time you place one of these engineers, that's like a $20,000 to $25,000 fee that you get. And so it doesn't take much to be, I wouldn't do this as like a venture scale business, not at all. This is basically,
- I'm a developer who you have to be the right mole. It's like I've been tinkering with smart contracts for the last two years anyways. I've actually kind of like gotten up to speed myself. I'm a converted backend engineer who now does smart contracts. And I could go, I work at like a fan company today. I make $400,000. Like wouldn't it be great to make like $4 million a year? And I think this is a way to make $4 million a year as like a two person company basically. That's just- I agree. But I would never do it in the land. So when Sean says Lambda School, he's referring to it's free. And you make money by getting like a $25,000 referral placement or a percentage of their- Income. salary. I know nothing about Lambda other than we had Austin on the show. And I think he's amazing and I love him. And you're an investor. That's really all I know about it. I think my prediction, if I had a bet money on it, is that it won't work.
- Yeah, I mean, I think that's a fair prediction about most startups. I think that's true. Yeah, but they're not most startups. They've raised like $100 million, probably. They're not like an early stage startup. They're like in the thick of it. I think that if they're out of business in two years, I wouldn't be surprised. Right. And I would agree with that even as a fan and an investor. I would agree with that. I think that, okay, so here's, okay, let me do two things. First, let me share with you a really hilarious story. Do you know this Twitter account? Greg is like Greg 955-3002-3267- A white guy? Like a white old guy? It's a white, not old guy. It's a white like nerdy, dork guy.
- No, I don't know it. So, you haven't seen this? Just Google search, Greg Meme, Greg Meme account. You'll see it and I bet you've seen this guy. So, you know, like these Meme accounts, so there's like Dr. Park Patel, by the way, big fan of him, I think he's a big fan of us. He works for the hustle, you know that, right? Dr. Park Patel works for the hustle? Oh my god, you just outed Dr. Park Patel, amazing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He, like him, he's a contractor for us. He writes for us sometimes. Oh my god, I love it. Wow, no, I did not know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My brain is racing to figure it out, who it is now, okay. No! He's not like, like I was a fan of his, and I DM'd him and I was like, Oh, so you don't know the real identity?
- I do. Okay, you do. But it's yeah. So you're saying after you saw a dark art, so then you contracted. Okay, gotcha. Makes way more sense. So anyways, one thing he does is like every time Chima tweets, he's like the first reply and he's like, just says that like, like I'm proud of you son or something like that, like something like non standard. So Greg does that with like Kylie Jenner and like other people like that, where every time she posts something, he'll be like, babe, why did you like, you didn't call me or like, it's like, we're like, I'm so proud of you, babe. So it's like as if they're dating. And so he's this like dorky looking white guy account. And the other day, do you know who Jose Conseco is? Of course. Ben told me the story. So Jose Conseco, the base former basal player tweets out.
- I need a smart contract developer for a new token developer for a new token I'm gonna launch as you're just like the classic thing for like Paris Hilton and Jose could say come on these like you know anyone know any good designers has been has been celebrities that are like ready to launch their own crypto token here we go that what could go wrong so so Greg replies and Greg's like like whatever like me then what did he say what did he always reply was it just like pick me something like that oh yeah he goes hey it's Greg DM me how can I help and Jose replies and goes he goes awesome like are you a token developer and then are you are you a developer or can do you not a new token development and then Greg just replies
- No way Jose. It has like 200,000 likes on that tweet. It's just like almost like tweet on Twitter. And it's just like so good, so dumb. But anyways, this guy's like, Chris, I get right now, like he's got like, 100 and something, 130 and 30. Well, it's the funny thing is, you know, when you send it for Twitter, let's say you type Sam, it'd be like Sam's not available. Would you like Sam 800,000 and six? Cause that's like the next one available. And then it's like 12 numbers that are like the, whatever the default thing would be. So it's like, you would never think it's going to go viral. Yeah, it's Greg, one, six, six, seven, six, whatever, like, you know, like 10 numbers long. So what does this have to do though with? Okay, so that was just my smart contract token developer tangent.
- My next idea, if you're ready to transition, is unbundling a piece of YC. So YC does a few things for founders. YC puts a stamp on you. It says, does the YC start-ups, all of a sudden your valuations get go up all of them. They kind of coach you, so they say, oh, you know, coming for office hours, tell us about your idea. Maybe we help you pivot your idea. Maybe we help you stay focused on growth or, you know, how to like tweak it. So you grow faster, and they do that for three months, and then they start working on your pitch, and then there's demo day, which is like...
- You're going to get to stay in front of investors. You've got to give a one minute pitch. You're going to raise money. That works. They have like whatever 120 startups a year now or something doing that. But another kind of like course quote unquote core. I was the brainstorm. I was like a very interested working backwards from what's a course where the person gets a clear outcome. So this is part of my learnings of like doing a course, which is people don't buy a course for learning. They buy some change. They buy a transformation for themselves. And so like for a startup going from unfunded to funded or like, you know, no name to like, oh stamp of approval, that's actually a big change. And so one transformation and one change that people would buy is getting their first round of funding. It's like I'm not just going to teach you knowledge that you can may or may not use.
- It's like I'm gonna help you get funded. And so I was thinking could you, like I've raised probably $20 million in my life and I've helped a bunch of founders raise money. And I think I'm pretty good at storytelling. So I was like, I think I could help a founder who's got no no funding today, get funding in like a one month period. And I think I could basically just sit you down with the deck with your story and then basically say, cool, like there's a pretty intense workshoping of your deck and your story to get that to be as good as it's gonna be. And then there's like a bunch of angel like introductions and like teaching you how to manage your pipelines that you run this like a process, like a bidding war. Unlike what most people do, which is they kind of try to date one investor at a time and they go kind of slow and they fear rejection and they don't know how to reach out and all this stuff. I can teach you that kind of like the sales process of investing. And I was thinking I was like, oh, you could do this like on a success basis. So,
- Again, like Lambda, which you don't like, but you could align your incentives. By the way, I like Lambda. I just think the business model is silly. I think because the thing with education is that most people will never benefit from what you're telling them. Well, in some ways, that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the bad side of Lambda. The beauty of Lambda is their incentive is aligned. Let's say most courses, let's say from my writing course, I don't care if you're good at writing, bad at writing, and I really don't truly care if you're going to do it or not because I get paid either way. I'd love for you to take the course and have a big benefit.
- But the reality is like my financial incentive is not such that if you don't hit your goals It doesn't really make a financial difference to me. Whereas for Lambda it does They have to select people who are gonna be able to succeed and then they only make money when somebody gets what they want Which is a high-paying job. So that's the beauty of Lambda, but it's also the hard part about telling Lambo What were the results from your course though? Like what did not go well? It went well, so basically, okay, so here's the kind of the learning from my course All right, so can I guess can I guess yeah? Yeah, we'll do it on each category So first is let's just start with the most interesting one money. How much money do you think I made doing this course?
- And by the way, you get the context. I taught a course on power writing, which is basically writing to get a result. So like the writing I type I do, which is like, if I'm writing an email, it's because I want somebody to reply. If I'm writing a landing page, because I want somebody to click buy button. I'm writing a tweet storm, it's because I want people to share it. And like the stuff you learn in school is not the stuff that actually works in the real world. And so it's like copywriting plus plus. That's the course. All right, so I do this. Hunter, I face my guess. 150,000, very close. So I did 127,000 of top line sales. And then let's just break down the P&L. So then there's my cost of making the course. So I basically had a guide to custom illustrations and graphics and things like that. That'd probably be eight to 10,000. 7,500.
- And he was amazing and he was really good. And so I'm like, I love that. That was worth it. Then there's Maven's fee. So Maven's fee is on the top number. So I should take that number. Like 10%. 10%, right? So take out 12 grand roughly from 127. Then you take out 7,500 of cost production and everything else. Then there's payment processing fees. That was another three or four grand. And so my net was like, I'm doing the math bad here, but I think it was like 105 roughly. And then, okay, so that's kind of like, that's the money in. And so that was off of 320 students. I charged the first batch I did at half price. So I charged, I think.
- $450 or something like that. $400 maybe it was for the course. And if I had to ask that. Did you do like an MPS? Yes. I would bet it was like out of 10. Out of 10. So for those who don't know, Net Promoter Score, basically you ask one question to your audience which is how likely are you to refer this to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being I absolutely will refer, I would absolutely refer a friend to this one being no way. 7.3. 9.1.
- That's amazing. Most everything is seven. But it's a little bit biased, right? Because some people didn't reply to the survey. So I'm assuming the people who really didn't give a shit also didn't reply to the survey. So I gave myself a true NPS of probably eight, but it was a 9.1 on the stats. So do you think people loved it? I think people loved it. The feedback was kind of amazing. And then I did a survey of like, what did you like about it? And basically it broke into three categories. It was like, look, I can't, you know, the first one was, do two of those sessions were like.
- like, which game changers for me. It's like, oh, you're a cold emailing one. Like, that was great. I immediately implemented this and I got, you know, meetings that I wanted, I book more sales. Like that one I just, I used right away. Or like the second one would be like, you have one about writing inside of a big company, how to like stand out with your writing inside of a big company. That was, I didn't even know who I wanted that. That was a great one. And so everybody kind of had two of the, I did seven sessions. Everybody had like two sessions that they were like, that was the one and the rest was fine. You know, like the rest was good, but like didn't really like.
- Those two, I got my money's worth, the rest was gravy. And then I asked people, the other question I asked people was on average, how much value did you get? Like, you know, $0, the price of admission, like a 1X return, 3X, 5X, 10X, whatever it was. And then the average answer to that was 10X my money. I got 10X my value back out of it. And I was like, okay, for what? I don't know if that's like a scientific question because how the hell are they measuring that? I don't really know, but okay. Down sides, guess what the biggest downside was because you've done a course before. So tell me what do you predict was my biggest...
- the biggest downside of it. Well, does that include logistics? Like quality like a. So I think they'll probably complain about your camera or your sound or the time. Yeah, timing was the biggest one. Cause I taught it live. And so a lot of people, you know, we're like, oh, you know, I could either the time worked great for me it worked okay for me or it was horrible for me. Cause I'm in Australia and that time zone was awful. So I only watched the recordings. The, I ran the biggest complaint I had to do the course. What was the biggest downside of doing the course?
- Talk too fast? No, no, I mean like why what was a pain in the ass for me? Well, it's probably just way too much work Yes complete under estimation of the work. Yeah, it's so much work. I spent probably 50 to 100 hours like making the content which was way more I thought I would do I thought it would take me work an hour or two per session. All right So let's say two hours for sure. That's like 15 hours of work It was like a full day. It was like an eight hour day per per session I made plus like the actual teaching of it and then afterwards what I would do is so I structured my quick The one the best thing I did by the way was I think
- I don't think I invented this. I'm sure other people do this, but I didn't really know what it's called. But I basically structured the session like this. It was like, all right, you show up. So it's like, hey, we're gonna be here for an hour. The very first thing I do is I say, all right, the promise is this, by the end of this hour, you're gonna be able to do this. All right, so that's my problem. That's the magic trick I'm gonna show you. Today you can't do that or you're bad at it. You're gonna be good at it by the end of this hour. And then I basically would do, I'd say, all right, let's say it's a cold email. I'm not gonna tell you anything about cold email. Write a cold email right now. And they would all have to sit there while I'm sitting there watching them. 10, 15 minutes, write the thing. So it was called do learn reduce. I'd have them do it.
- And that that gives the baseline. They would all share it in the Slack channel. Then I would teach them like, not everything about cold email, I'd be like, hey, here's the three biggest things you could do to improve your, improve cold emails. I'd do some examples. I'd teach them the theory. And then I'd say, all right, last 15 minutes, you're gonna redo it. And then they would redo it. And then they would just have a before and after of their one hour session, where it's like a really shitty first attempt. And then like a pretty good second attempt. And then after the course, I would take one hour and I would just go through as many examples like good of students and just give them like feedback through Loom. So that was like, that worked pretty well, but it was like kind of intense for me because I'm basically performing a magic trick live. I don't know what they're gonna do. And so it was kind of high risk. It wasn't like,
- Like it could, anything could have happened. My wife did it, by the way, Sarah, my wife did it. And she sold out, she made 10,000 in like two weeks maybe. And why did she cap it? Because they told me to cap it. And I didn't cap mine. She's not like you and me. This is her first time doing like a public facing thing. Right. You know, you and I have, you know, tens of thousands of hours of like riffing under our belt. And like we know how to perform. She, she's just learning and trying to figure out how to do it. By the way, one thing you should tell her best thing I did was I did rehearsals. So for each session, I would invite four kids who were like kind of like 25 and under usually who can't afford the course. And I'd just say, Hey, you want the course for free in a personal session? I need to do a dry run with you. And so I did a dry run for each of the sessions. And in doing that, I would realize five minutes in like.
- Oh, this is all fucked up like I gotta change this or like wow, this is way too hard when I just asked them to answer They're confused like yeah No comedy. Yeah, so I needed to do those open mics basically to make it work But you do this do you think this will be a significant income source free in the future or are you gonna quit doing it? So I'm doing it one more time and we're gonna see how that goes my goal was basically I put the price back We're the original price so 950 So I'm like alright Let's see if there's enough demand there at that point price right because below that it's not really worth it for me I don't think because you need a lot of students since a lot of work So I'm doing it one more time in August
- We'll see if it's like good again. I had a lot of fun doing it. So we'll see if it's fun again or if it's gets like old for me. But then I also have a bunch of other ideas for other courses that I want to do. So I think I'm going to teach different courses, which is more work, but I think more fun for me. Can I tell you? Okay. So now, by the way, we're talking about maven.com, which this is the here's your disclosure. We both have incredibly vested interest in this and I want them to make money because we invested in them. Yeah. Yeah. But I do think they're going to have to change. I think it's going to be a lot of work to do live courses. I don't think are going to have it can't be their bread and butter. It's just got to be how they get into the market. That's my prediction, but we'll see. Well, I started off being like, I'm going to do it recorded and I started recording the content and I found a few people and I was like, Oh, first of all, recording good content takes a lot of time too. So it's not like it was going to save it. It saves you time when I, you know, it's scalable later, but it takes a lot more time upfront. The second thing was people were way less excited about me recorded.
- And I was like, no, no, look, I'm like, it's me. I'm like planning this out. It's gonna be like as good as I can get it. It's gonna be edited. It's gonna be tight versus me live. And they're like, no, we'd rather just to be you live off the cuff and like not so tight. The perceived value of live is way higher. And so I was like, okay, if it's easier for me to do and it's higher perceived value, that was one pivot I had to make halfway through of like switching to live. All right, let me pivot to a different topic. You maybe told me about this, but I had Jake research it. I think you did you tell me about Swimply? Yes.
- Okay, so I like to keep a list of things that I thought are horrible ideas and ended up doing like amazingly well I definitely would put Bitcoin in that category like if don't make around like the stupid thing I've ever heard of Ryan Hoover told me about product on the day he was launching it and I was like just quit I also thought it was stupid. Yeah. Yeah If you have an easy hack to do this when I just have a bookmark thing on my Chrome So whenever I see a startup website that I'm like, oh, that's interesting I bookmark it either into I think it's gonna work or think it's not gonna work So I have this like then I can go back like a year later I could just go click and see how many of those websites are still like up and like doing something You know, and I have this for like five years
- So if I saw this next company that I'm about to tell you about and this next idea if I saw that Five years ago or a year ago. I would be like well like just quit Why are you even doing these stupid games like this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard so it's what's explaining even stupid It's called swim Lee. Is that peace supposed to be there is that though? Me Let me see is it swimly it might be swim like No, it is swimly It's simply that's it. Okay, so we're looking at the people's act. That's that's crazy I thought that I wasn't sure that was a typo, but he wrote swim I found this I was just driving and I saw billboard and it just said simply
- Rent a swimming pool near you. I was like what? And that's what it is so You know with everything going on people are desperate to get out of their homes and they're working from their house And they want to get out and so they go and they can rent someone else's pool Airbnb for pools If you told me about this four years ago I'd be like this is the dumbest thing I've ever done. This is right next to like go out and rent a dog for an hour But you're a believer? I'm not a believer yet, but the numbers definitely show that I'm wrong So they've grown 2,000 percent since summertime and roughly fourth that what's so if you grow for they've grown 4,000 percent in a year. What's that mean 40 X?
- 4000 is 40 X. Yeah. Okay. They just raise the theory. I could be on anything, right? I could start with one and get to 40. That's true. But they raised a series A, which I'm shocked. And who's their? There is 11 or 12 million dollars. So the idea is like I have a pool in my backyard. I can set like a $50 an hour rate and somebody who doesn't have a swimming pool in the backyard, because that's a big expense. Can say, cool. We'll rent your private pool. We're going to come swim for two hours, 100 bucks is four of us. It's worth it. We're going to have fun doing that. Are you like kind of clean up your backyard later? That's the idea. They rent its craft.
- The raise their money from like some ballers like people who like I think I respect as knowing what they're doing So I definitely think I was around who? North West North West ventures there. I mean they're like a huge a huge thing, right? Northwest Yeah generic name come on if you're gonna Multi-billion dollar they're big enough that I assume that they haven't pulley used to like that Okay, so they're traffic like if you look at their similar web thing. It's pretty nuts like January It's you know 50,000 visitors and by June Ticocki sticking to 400,000 monthly visitors according to similar web
- So similar webs the exact numbers are not right, but the direction is correct usually and so this thing is like doubling It's like doubled last month doubled the month before that doubled the month before that so four doubles in a row And so I got I was interested in the space because I found a company that was raising money And what they were doing and the reason I got interested in this company was we had this guy who I talked about this guy named Preston on the podcast his name was a I don't even remember his last name Preston I think the company star was called spacious where they would do short-term
- retail space and rented out for co-working. There's this other company that I'll find, I'll say the name in a second. And what they're doing is you can rent people's homes just during the day for co-working. I've heard of that. And it starts with the C, what's it called? Cozy or some, I don't know what it is, yeah, chill, I'm just making up names. And again, that idea I thought was a stupidest thing. And then I talked to President and he's like, no, these could be legit, these could be huge companies. It's astounding. And so here's a few more companies that are interesting. So neighbor is a storage marketplace. And by the way, almost all these I would bet against and I am being proven wrong consistently. Neighbor is a storage marketplace. They just raised a $53 million series B. I move is an electric vehicle subscription service. So you can, they just raised a bunch of money. I'm actually on board with that. It's just like leasing. Cozy subscribe your next car online. Picasa buy and own a second home with eight others. That's just a time share, isn't it? Yeah, it's fine. And then resort, for a resort pass, you can share day passes to resorts, pools and hotels. So anyway, kind of interesting. This space is always interesting to me because I've been the one saying how I think it's really stupid and it's not gonna work. But these things are actually are beating my, are proving me wrong. Right.
- By the way, you just said something like share a thing. We were talking about courses. We had this idea a long time ago. I still think this is a good idea. If somebody wants to do this, I'll be first customer, slash your minority business partner who does nothing. Besides give you the idea, which is class pass for online courses. So I right now would pay, like if you said, hey, I can bring you a student, but you're gonna have to give it to them 50% off. But I can get you volume of students and you don't have to worry about getting students. I'd take that. And if you basically, I think you can work out the math where you can basically get
- let's call it $100 a month from somebody, and then they get access to your course, my course, Sarah's course, like 10 other courses right now, and get all of them basically, like, and all you can eat past. So I think there's a class pass for courses that could work for online courses. Let me, could exist. Let me keep being a hater, but there's this company called Every, Every Dot, what is it called? Two, Every Dot. So, or Every Dot Two. I think Every Dot Two. Yeah. So, I think guys doing that for newsletters, and the guys running it are great. His name's Nathan, really cool, wonderful guy. I know Nat is a writer there, I like his work. There's a bunch of interesting great writers on there, but I think this business model's horrible, because dealing with how you're gonna pay each writer, seems like a huge pain in the ass, doesn't it? And if I'm like, if I'm like a big shot. You're like a big fairy based on who brings in subs. So if your stuff brings in a sub, you get the bounty of that, you give some to the poor. You're bringing in subs, like go F yourself, I wanna own all of it. Yeah, but you get, so you get the majority bounty on yours. So let's say you get 50% of those subs you bring in.
- But you're going to put 50% of the pool. So you're going to get 50% from everybody else. And so it's a, but the beauty of it is when you do in paid newsletter, there's this obligation like shit, I got to write this thing. I can't write one a week. I got to write two a week. It's got to be good. It can't just be like off the cuff, you know, random stuff. They're paying for this. It's got to be better than normal blog content. So what they, what every does is say, look, you just got to write one good thing a week, let's say, because the consumer is going to get at value from eight other writers in the bundle. And so that's the, that's why this works is for each person, they don't have to carry the whole subscription value themselves.
- They have eight other people contributing to that subscriptions value and you think they just give away some you think this is gonna work I Don't know if it's going to work. I think you can't bet at least you're yeah I think it can I think it can work. I think so basically I think I'm kind of a believer in that that the Mark Andreessen thing that he stole from whoever Which was basically like most businesses just bundling and unbundling and so I think that right now Newsletters are all unbundled and somebody creating a bundle of newsletters. It'll be like the cable package and like
- You'll somebody will say, ah, why am I paying for it? I don't want to pay for 10 individual subscriptions and some of them are good, some are bad. And instead if I could just pay a flat $15 a month and get access to my 10 favorite writers, like great. So I think I think you can work. Are you getting sick of newsletters? No, I have fun. I like writing my stuff. But I do it on my terms. So like I'm not consistent with this thing. I send out every Tuesday. But like if you subscribe to it, you're like, bullshit, you don't send it every Tuesday. You send it like every other Tuesday at best. And so yeah, cause I just like, if I'm doing something else, that's fun. I just don't send it. And like you've experienced the pain of my like, my like inconsistencies or being laid and things like that. Like it's just kind of like the way I operate on all things and like, you know,
- The good of it is like, when I do it, like I'm never just going through the motions. Like I'm always trying to bring it, but if I don't have something to bring, I don't like do it. Or like sometimes I don't send the thing because I'm doing something interesting, but that'll make the next week's letter more interesting because I was doing something interesting. So that's my only way of sustaining these other things. I think once you treat your hobby like a job, that's like a recipe for failure. And that's what happens to a lot of people. They think it's fun to blog, and then they wanna make that their career. They make the grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job when you didn't want it as a job, really. Yeah, it's hard. It's fucking hard as someone who is not, I haven't written them, but I own the newsletter company that has sent 365 newsletters times four years.
- It's very hard. By the way, I heard another newsletter company that shall not be named say that, oh, you know, our subscriber base is like, you know, the third largest city in America. And I thought that was just a badass way of saying like we have whatever 2 million subscribers, 3 million subscribers or whatever it is. And I think you should steal that and start saying things like that. Yeah, I like that one. Kind of like I think the skim was the one who said, the skim said like, if we were a morning show, we would be the number one most popular morning show. Right. Another great way of framing. That's part of this part of the part of the. It's like, how do you. It's like frame it.
- It's a bit bullshit, but it is yeah, it is useful right We want we want to wrap here to go to one more let's do one more fun thing. Do you have one otherwise? I can Yeah, you pick one You want to pick one off your list maybe do this Elon filing a patent thing that sounds good Okay, so basically I'm working with Jake our researcher to like find different signals and figure out what do those signals mean and so There's something interesting. I've always been I've always been interested in gas stations because like I said we said earlier I'm like into this nerd about America. I love like nostalgia Middle America stuff and gas stations are interesting to me because we spend a lot of time there Like I have five men or memories of gas stations and many of the biggest top 100 privately owned businesses in America If you look at what are the biggest privately owned companies in America most not most but a very large percentage are gas stations Right and so by revenue gas makes up typically two-thirds sales for gas stations but it only makes like one-third or less a profit the majority of profit comes from buying shit on the inside and Elon Musk recently filed a trademark for different restaurant services aimed at electric vehicles and things like that and for food services basically So I'm very eager to see what Tesla's gonna do and also I'm very eager to see how the
- the modern gas station is gonna change. And so far, so what are the biggest ones? I think the biggest ones are K-C's, quick trip. There's a few more that are the top ones. They're not doing shit. Because if you go to a gas station right now for Tesla, it's still a pain in the butt. The Tesla superchargers are way better. And so I'm very eager to see, and I wanted to know what you think. What is gonna happen to gas stations, and how are they gonna continue to make you money? Yes, I think there's two big changes that are happening.
- So cars go electric, then what the hell happens to gas stations, right? Do they just convert into electric charging stations or is it gonna be different because you're charging at home, right? Like I can't fill up my tank overnight in my garage, but I can charge my electric vehicle that way. And so maybe those gas stations, they're just not needed anymore. They need to convert some other use of real estate. You know, it's like blockbuster in the corner store when why would I need that when I could just push a button and stream Netflix to my TV? The second is self-driving cars, which is gonna change the game for both gas stations and for parking garages.
- So you don't need as much parking when you have self-driving cars. Most of city real estate is parking. Whether it's street parking or parking garages. There's a huge amount that's just parking and because cars are idle 90% of the time. When cars go self-driving, they're not going to be idle 90% of the time. So cities are going to have to like re- renovate basically the way they use their land because it's going to become totally obsolete. But let's do gas stations for a second. So one theory is gas stations become like entertainment hubs because actually charging a car takes a lot more time than filling up a gas tank. I think even supercharger takes like 30 minutes, right? To to fill up basically to recharge your Tesla while you're like on a road trip or whatever. And so you know, what do you do to entertain people during that time? Maybe they're just sitting in their car
- Using the in in car entertainment system, but maybe there's something else that you do with food and drink and TVs and sport Maybe it's a sports bar essentially that you turn this into the other thing that I think is interesting is Like oh, so I'll give my cousin a shout out So my cousin Rohan has a startup called stable. Auto. So check it out You're not gonna fully grock it from that from the landing page, but but I'll just tell you about it So it says company stable Uh just stable like sta boe like a like a stable of what is that what auto a uto
- So he started off, what he started off doing was he was like a robotics guy from MIT. So he's like, look, how do I make it where a self-driving car, when it, like self-driving cars are going to need, they're great because they're going to drive people around without a driver. But how are they going to charge? They have to go to a charging station and then are you just going to have like a tendons there plugging in cars and taking them out? Like, how's it going to do that? And so he was creating like, if you're ever seen Elon tweeted this out once, which is a robotic arm that would just find the charging thing and would like plug itself in. So it was like a self-driving car.
- a self. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, as imagine the gasoline pump could go into your car without you having to pick it up and put it in the hole. So he built a robotic arm that did that. So what my cousin was doing was basically he was just saying, oh, if Tesla's doing that, but then there's all these companies trying to compete with Tesla, I'll make the robotic arm for all the other companies. So like every other company has a different like charging, like kind of like location on the car. How do I make machine learning that's going to find the hole and stick that's sticking the hole basically for that? And he started doing that. But the problem was, and I told him this, which was like, look,
- So, like self-driving cars are not here. So, you're building for a future market, like you don't know when it's going to happen. Like, we all know it's going to happen eventually. Like that's a little bit difficult. And so, and so, and you're also building this robotic arms really hard to build. So, now he switched to something else, which is basically like software that basically will, it basically tells you when you need to, when you should go charge your, when you should go charge your electric car. So, imagine like Uber and Lyft, they have these fleets of electric vehicles that are going to be out on the roads, and that's for sure happening. And so, when do you go charge?
- If you go wait till you're almost out, you might miss peak traffic time where you're going to get a bunch of rides and make a bunch of money. You also might go charge when it's really expensive to charge because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day. So what they're building is basically an app that you load into your, this is the least last I heard of it. It's like an app for any driver of Uber or Lyft that has an electric vehicle that will say, now is the optimal time to charge. Go over here, there's a charging station nearby. There's not much traffic for Uber rides right now and the price of electricity is low. And so it basically, that'll work while you have human drivers and then when you have self-driving fleets, it'll do that whole thing automatically. It'll basically say, hey, let's send this 10% of your fleet to go charge right now. Let's keep 90% on the road and it'll optimize it so you're like saving the most money both ways.
- But let's talk about what do you think is gonna happen? Where's the opportunity right now? I mean, his idea that maybe, I think it's far simpler. Have you ever heard of Bucky's? Yes, tell people about it though. What's Bucky's? Do you know what it is? Bucky's is basically in Texas, there's like a gas station chain that like people love. They don't just like it, they love it. It's a tourist destination. It's a destination for a couple of reasons, I think. I've never been to one, even though I lived in Texas. It has extremely clean bathrooms.
- And they have a bunch of food that people like obsessed with. It's basically shitty sugary food, but it has a funny logo and they serve like brisket. It's just like low quality, but fun. It became a thing. Yeah. But it's huge. So I think that it's going to break down in two categories. The first categories is just everyday use. I think people are going to keep their shit at home, charge at home, or they're just going to charge while they're in the grocery store. And that's how they, and that's in Whole Foods is going to be the winner. The second thing is traveling. And I think the way that that's going to look is buckies. It's going to be just like, it's going to be a buckies meets museum of ice cream.
- So when I go to Bucky's, it's a spectacle. I stop there because I'm gonna get like a huge soda. I'm gonna get maybe something to eat, but I'm just gonna look at stupid shit, like a Bucky knife or a Bucky book bag. Just dumb trinkets. I don't need a Bass Pro shop, basically. It's like going into a Bass Pro shop or just walking around Ikea. It's just a spectacle. It's gonna be like that with a little bit of museum of ice cream where there's gonna be a little bit even more spectacles that are fun to take pictures in front of. That is where what's gonna happen, I think. And I think like the shells of the world or whatever gas station 7-Eleven.
- 7-Eleven I actually think could become a bucky because 7-Eleven has a little bit of nostalgia. Like 7-Eleven, it's kind of, it could be cool. It's like Subway. It could be like fans. Yeah, yeah. It could be Subway could be the next version of vans. Yeah. So I think there's definitely some people that are going to go that route, right? They make it a tourist destination and they have a quirky brand and that works. I think some people are going to go full automation. So like in San Francisco, we had to think Cafe X. Did you ever buy coffee from that? No, it took too long.
- I mean, it takes like a minute, right? It's just stupid. I thought it was dumb. Cafe X is stupid. How do you think that's stupid? That's like, that's so good. So if nobody knows what cafe is, describe it. So it's basically, okay, but here's the thing. So like, it's basically a kurig machine. Like it's not that fancy, but it looks, it's usually like it's in a building and it has like this glass around it. And it's a massive robot arm that's making a spectacle of like moving the coffee cup around and then pouring the milk in it. In reality, it could like, you don't need that stupid fucking arm. It could just be like a coffee vending machine. Like that, so that's why whenever I saw that, I'm like, when I see these like in warehouses and stuff, it's just like you put two quarters in and you just get like at the hospital. You've never been to the hospital and you use one of those like cappuccino machines. Like I don't need a dumb fucking arm to trick me. And I feel like it's doing something special.
- Okay, so that's definitely one way of seeing it. And I can see that point of view. I think what's the difference between Starbucks and that vending machine? Is it the quality of the coffee or what's the difference? Probably not the quality. So what is the difference? One's a spectacle and one you talk to people. No, no, no. So I'm saying like between the Keurig machine and Starbucks, like, why do you even need a Starbucks? Why can Starbucks just be a Keurig machine? Is that like getting out of the house and seeing people? Okay. So maybe it's that. If that's the case, then Starbucks is safe.
- The other case is basically that There's some middle ground of like variety and quality. That's like above a coffee machine but More like a Starbucks where you have like 40 drinks that you want because you want your soy latte with you know You know you want you want almond milk and then you want two pumps of sugar and you want light ice or whatever and like that's how you like your drink And so you know you can't get that out of a car in a normal coffee machine either the coffee doesn't taste as good or the drink is not as elaborate And cafe Ix basically says cool. What if we could serve coffee faster and cheaper than a Starbucks What if we could serve Starbucks quality coffee, but faster and cheaper than a Starbucks Why because we have a robot arm that could just like do the thing 24-7 and never call in sick and never be an employee never need never have any employee like issues
- And by the way, I take up one tenth of the square footage of a Starbucks, because it's like a giant robot in a hamster ball. It has everything it needs right there. It takes up like 10 square feet, whereas Starbucks is much bigger. And so what they're doing with the idea with Cafe, I don't think Cafe X specifically is gonna succeed, but I'd be shocked if there's not a Cafe X type winner down the road, because you can shove these things anywhere. You can shove it inside of an apartment building, and it can make sense in an apartment building, whereas a full-service Starbucks with staff wouldn't make sense in an apartment building.
- And so I think that those are gonna succeed. And so I think there's a version of the gas stations that's like that. I think there's a version of the gas stations that basically is just all automation. The charging's automated and then you go and you push a button and it creates a giant slurpee for you like 7-Eleven, but it's just a robot arm doing it. Well, Steve, well, Steve, it works out but I think it's gonna be more like buggies. At least I hope it will be. All right, that's the episode. I gotta go get a haircut. Uh huh. Yeah.

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- I'm a 25 year old. I used to work in banking and M&A. I made like low six figures and it was a cool job, but I recently quit after listening to you guys and now I own a bunch of vending machines and it's allowed me to make 10 grand a month and do a bunch of running and he said, quote, do memorable things, which is what you guys talked about at the end of the pod. This is pretty amazing. This is pretty amazing. All right, I think we're good, we're good. Dude, Sean, thanks for dressing up. You look nice.
- All right. So for those who can't see the YouTube video right now, Sam is like in some kind of like, I don't even know where he's at. He's in some kind of like LA, some kind of Playboy Mansion podcast studio. I don't even know what's going on. Not a single wall is normal. One of them's like a 3D texture. One of them's got like a plant from, you know, the Amazon jungle. And he's got like five people there. He's got like a movie crew. Somebody just came and powdered his nose. I don't know what's going on. I'm still in my bedroom. And I recently woke up. So, you know, we got a little yin and yang going. I'm playing what you're wearing, Sean.
- I'll say a sleep. I'll leave. Let's put he. No, a Sam's calls shirtless. If Sam sees a shoulder, he has like a fighter panic attack. It just, you know, it's something. We can't all dress like Arthur. So I was hoping that if I came here, so I came here the other day to record a podcast with this guy named Danny, and I came here. I go, I call Ben, like, right, what I was there. I FaceTime, I go, Ben, book this for like in three days. This is where we're going to record from now on. And I was like, if we do this here, maybe it would inspire Sean to like record with more than just one air pod in his iPhone and a plant in the background. And maybe we can make something happen. So hopefully I'm going to wear off on you. And you'll do it right on your end because I think we'll get more views on YouTube finally.
- Yeah, the last time I felt this much pure pressure, I ended up on shrooms. And so hopefully this just ends better, but I do feel the pressure now. I will find, you know, I don't even know what is this place that you're at. You give them a shout out. What is the name of a. It's called their name, but what's it called? WF media? WTF media. I can't that guy. You know, like I like Danny, you were on his thing too. He's been emailing me for me. Oh, really? Okay. Cool. Well, I came on his thing and I came here and it was awesome. I paid a couple hundred bucks. I don't remember to be here. And I think this is actually the same studio that Andrew Schultz and Charlemagne. I think record their thing, right? Yeah. And it's like pretty easy. So I just took, you know, rode my scooter here and did it. Just like Charlemagne the God does. Yeah. All right. Let's, let's jump into some stuff. You have some topics. I got some topics. Where do you want to start? We got a bunch of different ways we can go. Wait, we got to do this. Did you see this email that I got from this listener?
- No, where? Okay. So I forwarded it to you. So basically, we were talking about like adventurous shit last time and this guy emailed me and let me pull it up. So basically he said, he goes, all right, you, you wrote, you guys talked about like living in adventurous life. I wanted to write you and fill you in on what's going on. I used to be 230 pounds and like pretty overweight, but then I started running and I started listening you guys the whole entire time while I'd run. In fact, I did a 50 mile race and I only listened to MFM the entire time and I've lost a ton away. And now next week I'm doing a hundred mile race and I intend to listen to you guys the whole time as well. And I'm a 25 year old. I used to work in banking and M and A. I made like low six figures and it was a cool job, but I recently quit after listening to you guys and now I own a bunch of vending machines and it's allowed me to make 10 grand a month and do a bunch of running and he said, quote, do memorable things, which is what you guys talked about at the end of the pod. This is pretty amazing. I forward it to you. That's a good story, right?
- Yeah, dude, that's my my version of torture though, like having to run 50 miles while listening to my voice in my head that would be like that would be like, you know, worse than waterboarding for me personally. But dude, props to this guy. This is amazing. Uh, you know, fitness got influenced by you listening to the pod got influenced by both of us, you know, did the vending machine side hustle that we had talked about got to the 10 K a month and now he has the freedom he's thinking about doing short term rentals. I think this might be your best friend. I think you might have just found an adult best friend. Yeah, this is my little brother, man. I like this guy. His name's Jack. So I saw that email and I was like, we got to bring that up. That's a good one. But, um, this is he ended it with hashtag do things. And I like that. I like do things. That's the serious version of no small boy stuff, which is the official motto of my first million.
- No, it's good. I like that. All right, where do you want to go? What did you do? Yeah, good job. Jack Nurmur, good job. I want to tell you about an idea that I saw recently. I'm thinking about investing this, but it's kind of just like one of these really low key, doesn't even seem like a business things, but I think it's going to be kind of big. So have you ever been on YouTube and seen this thumbnail of like this kind of anime character wearing headphones and it says, lo-fi, chill beats, study music? Have you ever seen that? Do you even kill it? They have, they run it on live, like YouTube live, and there'll be hundreds of thousands of people on it. And I think like the other day, it like was paused for like a few minutes or something like that and it was in the news, right?
- It got banned and then it got unbanned after 133,000 people like signed a petition to be like unbanned this right now. That's crazy. But okay, and what about it? So let me tell you about it. So lo-fi, basically the channel has 10 million subscribers. It's one of the most like sort of longest watch time things on YouTube because people will just sit there for hour, hour or studying and just having this as background music. They have a discord of 700,000 people. They have their own. Well, it's just people that are chilling. It's people that want us, people that are trying to study, they're trying to focus. They just want to be in a group of other people doing the same thing. It's like a virtual study hall.
- So this is kind of like an emergent behavior. It's just a thing that started happening. It's not what YouTube was trying to do. It wasn't, you know, some company that started right away. It's just kind of like this thing that people wanted. Like, oh, you know, like I had this when I was in college, my buddy would, it's like, oh, hand him the ox plug cause his music is good for us to just chill, do nothing to, it's not gonna be distracting, that sort of thing. And he would kind of be the DJ. So this is like a thing now. And I found, but it's still like kind of informal. It's on YouTube. It's not really like easy to use in that sense. Like, you know, you don't know who these other people are. You can't do a private room, that sort of stuff. So there's a startup called Studyverse that is trying to do this. And what they did was they basically turned this into like its own experience. So me and Ben used this now when we work. We basically go into Studyverse.
- And you go in and there's like a jukebox basically. So you could just put on like chill hip hop style music or chill electronic style music or whatever. And both people are hearing the same thing at the same time. You could turn your camera on or off if you want to just be there, microphone on or off. And you could like put your to-do list there and other people can see it. And as you knock them out, it makes a little sound. So you can see other people knocking off their to-do list. There's a little chat. And you could just set the background. So you could be like, let's just give the, yeah, we're working remote. We're like, I'm in this little home office here. Nothing too grand. But you could just set the scene like, now what if we were by the beach or what if we were in space or wherever you want? So it's just a cool little product. And they're going after this use case of
- virtual study hall, people getting together to study, hang out or work, but it's really around studying, I believe. And this is like a big deal. There are millions of students every day who do this, and they do it with strangers. They're not necessarily hanging out with their friends. They some do, but a lot of people just wanna feel like, they don't wanna feel kind of alone and bored when they study. And so just having any other people chatting or they see their screen names, they see their profile pictures, it just makes them feel less alone when they're doing it. How does this make money? I think this is gonna be big.
- So the lo-fi thing on YouTube, I don't know if they just run ads, they just monetize that way, I'm not 100% sure. I know they also have like the music is their own music, they have lo-fi records, so it's all copyright free, which is kind of cool. Because that would be the other problem if you try to do this commercially. But for these guys, I think they'll probably have some premium version or some upsell, or I don't know what they'll do to make money. The main thing right now is can they get to like a million students a day who are studying with this thing, which is like, at that point, it's pretty valuable.
- To be the hub where million students today are spending like multiple hours. They raised your name did They raise money now. Yeah, so so I'm investing this thing You're doing it a ton. Yeah, I'm gonna do it this right. It gives me heavy like twitch vibes in In a way where I'm like this kind of a behavior that doesn't really make sense until you start to think about the use case And like yeah, that would be fun actually thousands of them. I just googled it. There's so many of them Well, like virtual study holes. Yeah Yeah, there are I don't think there's thousands of them. There's one serious competitor. That's like been around for a little while
- it's called, but they have like- They're close to that point. Yeah, I think it's studied together. I think that's the one. They have a million people in their community. And so these guys are trying to build like a better user experience than that. So this- I think that this could be big. It's on study together. It says that there's 34,000 people concurrently online. So at the hustle, we are getting, let's say that we are getting two or three million monthly uniques. Basically that means that, which is like two to three million a month is pretty good. If it's the right niche, you can make like, you know, a million a month off, two to three million people a month if it's the right one. And at any given point, we would have-
- 2,000 people online like it really would never get maybe occasionally you get to 3,000 and 4,000 but virtually never and the fact that this has 33,000 that's pretty insane. Yeah, that's right now. I mean, I don't even know if school, I think it's like still summer for people that they're not even like in school right now. And if you are in high school or anything else, like you're you're the middle of the day, you can't be doing this while you're at school. So this is only going to be like college or summer school right now. I bet this number could be three times as high for them.
- during like kind of peak seasons, definitely. So I think that's kind of amazing. And you know, like, you know, whether they sell, you know, like little emotes, like Discord did, like Discord makes millions of millions of dollars off of just their, like their super emoji that you can have. Or, you know, yeah, that's Discord business model is, you pay $6 a month or something like that for Discord Nitro and all it gives you is like, your little, your group can have its own emoji. Like you can upload your own emoji and you could use the premium emoji that they have.
- And same thing with Twitch, like people subscribe for five or six bucks a month to a Twitch channel and like it's not like they couldn't just watch it for free. They can watch it for free too They do it to get a little badge that says I'm I'm a paid like patron of this person's channel And secondly they get to use the custom emoji of that channel. That's right Really the only perks like sometimes it's subscriber only chat, but but that's not usually the case and so So yeah, I think you could get pretty big with something like this But I think it's one of those I
- Under the radar niches most people don't even really recognize that this is a niche So I think this is a cool idea. I see how we talked about it before All right, let me bring something by you because you you just actually have been talking about this to check this out So you know who Scott Galloway is Course the professor Prodigy yeah, but those who don't know there's do named Scott Galloway popular on Twitter for making all these like tech takes and He gets made fun of for being wrong a lot, but he takes a lot of swings He's gonna be wrong a lot But basically started this company called L2 which I think he sold for like 200 million bucks So he's like really successful already whatever and he's got this new thing called section 4 which I think it's just like courses But dude check this out. So in your time It said mr. Galloway who was already wealthy from selling two companies and taking a third public also makes more than $5 million a year from speaking gigs He said largely from corporations and industry groups that pay him $50,000 a year or $50,000 for a virtual event and $250,000 for an international event. I should be broken up. He joked
- Which is pretty funny, but that's that's a ridiculous amount of money for speaking that is huge How how how does that work? Because I know that you were talking about like it has to all be it has to all work from Book sales right or for you know just like me a New York Times bestseller Yeah, I think it's like a common age second you just you're in people's face enough with like, you know You you sound polished because you know they have a podcast they have His blog which is pretty famous. He's got he's been he's been doing this for like he didn't do this forever dude I feel like this guy's been publishing content for like 10 15 years at least something like that Dude, isn't that right? He's not like some some new. No, he's not just a guy. I mean he's he's he's great You know, he's good and he's hilarious. I listened. I was at when I was in Germany He spoke he was very good and like I've hung out with him He's a really nice guy and his schtick online I don't always agree with a lot of his takes and I think that sometimes he's unnecessarily a hater But without a doubt incredibly entertaining when he does talks like he's got a little bit of like a comedy schtick on there He's kind of like a little f you and he like says like hilarious jokes about him being like old and like bald and stuff He's hilarious. He's good and this is that but that's so much five million dollars a year from speaking Is like the equivalent of having like 50 million dollars five million dollars a year of income is is astronomical
- You know what I mean? What is that it really is well just it's true. It's like it's funny that it's It like it's funny that you're absolutely right that is an absurd number to be making and speaking fees You're like a pretty good NBA player at that point You're just like giving it a presentation on you're using PowerPoint And often by the way, it's the same presentation. It's the same one you can do it for 15 years You know, I mean, it's like in your free time a little bit This is crazy It I just I heard that number and I was like I couldn't believe it at first because it is it's an astronomical number
- How much does David Blaine make? Because Prof G is basically inviting a magician to your conference. It's like, oh, here's the entertainment. We all know and love. This guy, Scott Galloway, he comes on, he kind of does his little routine and he entertains you. And that's what he's getting paid for, is to be kind of like a name people recognize, adds legitimacy to the event, and provides some entertainment that's not like completely off the wall circus stuff. It's like, well, this will be entertaining, but it's still relevant to this. And here's the thing, here's the rub.
- His pod it gets it's two times the size of ours So we get like between we get like in the hundred thousand sometimes more sometimes a little less Range per episode downloads per episode. He's at 250,000 so in my head sure in him or who is yeah, yeah, I don't know what it's called But it's like him and Cara Swisher. It's on I don't even fucking know what it is recode It was like recode or whatever something else and in my head. I'm thinking You
- I'll take half that right. I mean we got to be doing this I'll do you one better I'll take a third of that undercut Sam I will do You want how often do you get asked to do it? I don't get asked that often I don't get asked that often the numbers always good whenever I do get asked But I don't get asked that often And also I'm not really that interested in doing this because like you know for this you got to travel a bunch To do it. I think to do it. Well, you got to travel a bunch I don't think people are gonna take your kids with you on like a trip somewhere
- I'm not right now. You don't want to see Kansas City bro? Exactly. No, I do not want to, I do not want to take the first take my kids somewhere is like already, you know, the prices went up. So, so no, I wouldn't want to do that now. But yeah, later in life, yeah, that'd be great. So by the way, funny you mentioned Scott Galloway, there's a couple of things people should know. Number one, he's very entertaining, great at content. Number two, his business takes are pretty awful for the most part. He's been wrong, famously wrong many, many times. In fact, somebody created the anti.
- Professor Galloway index or something. What's that website called where it's literally just says anytime He says to buy or sell something if you just did the exact opposite. Here's how you'd be doing. It's like he's down X percent, you know s&p 500 is up y percent and this is up like double the s&p 500 Yeah, I performed the market. It's the websites bet against the professor introducing the anti Galloway index and What is the stats? What does it say? How does he done or how's the thing done against him? So his worst prediction was that he said that may
- I think you said that like Macy's was going to like outperform Amazon. So like not that good. And then he also said that he also said that Tesla was a bad bet. So like I don't know even know how to use it. So let's see. Since October 2019 tech companies that have that the professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the S&P and seen a whopping 61% return. So you would have made 61%. Exactly. So that's really funny. Whoever did that.
- I do appreciate that. Last thing is, so I just talked to a guy yesterday about this course business. So he's got this thing section four. And I was like, dude, how much money does that make? He goes, actually, I kind of like, I've been, you know, I'm in that same dish. So I've been doing research on it. Here's what I think. So here's what he thinks. He goes, I think section four does like 14 million a year in revenue. They've raised like $37 million. Too much, but they just did some layoffs because, you know, yeah.
- And he's basically like, you know, that's an average of $1,000 a year per learner, you know, 30% discount, let's say $700 and he has 21,000 people, you know, paying to learn or something like that. Maybe 2.1 is what that was supposed to be. I'm not sure. But, but yeah, that's kind of like kind of crazy. Then he was like, you know, also reforge, you know, reforge. It was like the, yeah, if I had a guess for is basically like some marketing school. Dude, I would guess that reforge is in like the 18 to 20 range.
- For revenue? Yeah. Do you know how much money Riforged has raised? How much I have no idea. If this guy is right, Riforged has raised a total of $81 million. Which is just kind of absurd for what they're doing. But they did acquire some other marketing training company. So maybe they've raised a bunch of money just to buy something that had established revenue in EBITDA. So anyways, these little marketing schools that people have created, these can be kind of big. If we wanted to monetize MFM, this would have been the way to do it. It's just me and you create our own marketing school. I'm pretty sure with our audience and what we've actually done this. We've actually done marketing to grow our businesses successfully owned and exited multiple businesses now. Brought multiple businesses to this seven, eight figure in revenue point. If anybody should be doing this, this should be us. Not these guys.
- but who wants to go do that? I don't know. So let me tell you about something that I question if I actually wanna go do that, but I hear the numbers and they're amazing. So B2B media, so media companies that make content for other businesses. I was talking to this guy the other day and check this out. He's got this company called Aging Media, okay? They make newsletters for nursing homes. So I guess people who own nursing homes and people who own hospice care businesses.
- And it's like, I think only three years old, it's, or four years old. It's not a very old company. But he was telling me that this year they'll do around 10 million in revenue and like three or four million in EBITDA and completely bootstrapped and they have got 40 employees. And if you go, go to, it's called aging media, go to the website and look at their shit. It is so simple. It's such a straightforward business. And I see this stuff and I'm like, oh man, I could totally do this for X, Y and Z. And that's a small example. There's a bigger example. There's this company called industry dive. Industry dive was just acquired like a...
- a week ago, I think, or two weeks ago, they require for $500 million, they do $110 million, let's see, they were doing, where is it? They were doing $110 million in revenue, they're doing 110 million in revenue with 30% profit, 380 employees, 53 newsletters, across those 53 newsletters, 2.5 million subs, and pretty straightforward, like not, not complicated, not necessarily easy, but not complicated, straightforward, their content, I think, it's okay, it's basically just bullet points, it's an email with bullet points of what's happening in the restaurant industry or whatever, but these companies, the bar, I think, to be good, is so low for B2B media, because it's just mostly all sucks, they think that you have to write a certain way, but in the way they monetize and make money is so much better than a consumer media company, because if you are a person who's selling software, whatever, to a hospice care owner, you only have a couple places to go to, and one sale gets you hundreds of thousands, or maybe even millions in revenue, a pretty huge number, and so these guys, basically what they do, they have ads on their site, but they do webinars with a sponsor, and 15 people sign up for the webinar or the talk, it's basically like a podcast just like this, but you gotta enter your email to get in, they give that email to the sponsor, and that sponsor hopes to go and email the 10 people that signed up, and hopefully they buy their shit, and it's like 20 or 30 or $40,000 to charge for getting those 10, 30, 50 leads, it's crazy, it's the bar's so low. Yeah, this thing is crazy, they have, they're big verticals, or it's like, they have waist dive, waist dive is for the waste management industry.
- then they'll have pharmaceuticals, and then they'll have finance, and then they'll have these different things. I think they're biggest ones. So marketing dive is 510,000 subscribers, BioFarma dive, 275,000 subscribers, construction dive, 300,000 subscribers, HR dive, 450,000 subscribers, and then they have just a bunch of others, right? Utility dive, restaurant dive, retail dive, they're biggest ones, 700,000 subscribers.
- It's pretty crazy. This is not a media company really. Like, you know, yes, they're media company, but like the game isn't, are you good at making content? The game is, are you really good at acquiring users and like acquiring subscribers in this industry? And then like monetizing. I don't think you have to be that good. If you're like a data seed dork like you, like you don't have to be that good at this. Like because you're already pretty good at like trying to acquire a user for $2 so you can make eight bucks. Like you're probably better more skilled. You're just choosing like a less lucrative game. And here's why this is interesting. The guy who started industry dive the same, Sean.
- He previously was the president of another company called fierce markets and they did this exact same thing But they did it starting in 2005 or like 2002 and it was literally the same thing But they just did a different like slightly different industries It had 1.2 million subs and it sold for hundreds of millions of dollars The reason why this is industry industry interesting is it's the same shit over and over and over again They just like kind of like have like a dart board of like boring shit They just like throw a couple of darts and like yeah, yeah, let's do that one Yeah, like that's I mean obviously I'm oversimplifying this but it's incredibly fascinating to me because the bar is so low to be
- successful. Yeah, one thing I have noticed though, like, so I agree with you, this is one of those blueprints that's like a good blue, really good blueprints doesn't take like genius doesn't take ton of luck. And so, you know, in that sense, it's a good blue blueprint to go after. The downside is now that this is like, this game I think was really awesome, like over the last 10 years, I think over the next 10 years that window is closing. The same thing happened in D2C. The same thing happened in dropshipping. The same thing I think the blueprints. Any of the blueprints is easy. I think that when the company sells for $500 million doing something, there's a bunch of sharks like you and I who hear about this go study their blueprint and you get 15 new like,
- aggressive people who now know how big the prize is for something like this and now have a blueprint to follow all doing the same thing. I still think you could win and some somebody will win, but it is, I would say, 10 times harder than it was over the last 10 years, in my opinion, because you're going to have that set of people. This is exactly what's going on in D2C, which is that cost of acquiring customers are going up. Why? Because people realized, oh, you could just do this with like, you know, pick a product, run this, run this Facebook ad blueprint. You Shopify, you use Klaviyo. It's like the stack of like, I just needed these six things. There's so many more people doing that than this. There's so many more people starting deodorant and like.
- jewelry brands than there are this boring shit. Yeah, but for those, you can have way more, right? You can have, how many jewelry brands can the market hold? It can hold the ton because people are gonna have a bunch. Now, let's say that industry newsletter, a way to find out what's going on in your industry, how many is somebody, if I'm in the waste management industry, how many of those am I gonna read every week? I don't know, two. One or two, right? Probably one or two. Okay, industry drive is one. Now, everybody else is gonna fight for two. And then if you're not gonna go for waste management, you're gonna go for the next best niche in the next, now industry drive's already done 20 of these niches, 30 of these niches themselves. Other people are gonna keep going for more and more of these niches, so you're gonna get to the less valuable niches or the ones that are harder to acquire subscribers for, because you're all fighting for that same one or two slots.
- And so I think that still somebody will win, but it is way harder than it was when the word wasn't leaked that, oh, these industry newsletters can be that big, that's crazy, right? I think you're giving people too much credit. I think that not that many people are gonna get involved in this. It's just so much cooler when you're 22, like what's that one kid who sells sex chocolate? Like that's just so much more fascinating. What's that called? Pabs chocolate, that makes you horny. That's so much cooler to like everyone in LA than any of this.
- Yeah, do you get some of that included when you rent the podcast through your space? You're in? It seems like it should just be on the desk for you. I'll get the book. All right, let's do another thing. Okay, so I have one. So here's another kind of like what I'll call boring idea hidden in plain sight. Aunt Flow. Have you ever heard of this company, Aunt Flow? Wait, is it aunt or aunt? Wait you say aunt? I say aunt, but it's also. Okay, whatever. All right. Yeah, your mom's sister. Yeah, mom's. Yeah, exactly. That time of the month is the slang for that time of the month. So what these guys are doing or these gals are doing, I don't know who's behind it.
- What they do is they go to a school or a company and they say, hey, you know, your restrooms need to be a little bit more female friendly here. So why don't we install this little like case that's going to dispense tampons and you know, other kind of like female menstrual cycle products, anything that you can think of that goes in that category. We're going to install this dispenser and now your place is going to be more welcoming for females that are attending your space. So maybe girls at school or university or in your company, whatever it is. And they just made it sexy. So these kind of hygiene products already exist in bathrooms, but they're all like, we all know what they look like. They're that boring, you know, silver box that looks like, you know, if I open this up, am I going to get tools or a circuit breaker or like, you know, what am I going to get out of this thing? It's hard to hard to really say. They just made it look good and feel good and like really nice packaging and design. And it's like, it's like the Tesla of these things that are in the bathroom wall and they're doing great. So let me pull up there. So they have, I think, 900.
- I don't know if I have all these numbers correct, but they have 900 orgs that are working with them. And basically you pay 300 bucks to install the thing and then you pay like $1,300 a year for tampon refills or pad refills. And so that's basically like $9,000 for a school with 20 bathrooms. And think about that, there's just a lot of high schools. Like there are like, you know, or 15,000 high schools in the country. That's just high schools in the US. Then you have colleges, then you have companies.
- And they just made it like a sexy DDC product. Like the logo looks cool, the box looks cool. And now States are requiring some schools like in California, Colorado, Michigan, that you have to offer products for this. And they do this like, you know, for every 10 that we sell, we donate one to a menstruator in need. Like they have like a whole thing around it. It's like kind of crazy. Our software is the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See, most TRMs are a cobble together mess. But HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new TRMs. Our software is the best. HubSpot, grow better.
- I, uh, last year I was pitched like three different of these. When we ever we did that vending machine pod, I had so many people reach out, like I'm doing like smart vending machine things or something like that. And a lot of them were like either tampons or like hygiene things or, or then they were like healthy food. And I looked at all the numbers and most all of them were horrible. And the ones that were the best, they just sold Coke and M&Ms. Like just like normal. Like everyone wanted to do this like one particular thing. But it's like, man, America just wants Coke and M&Ms. And that like crushed it. What are the numbers on this one?
- on track for 10 million in 2022. In revenue. So tripled from last year when they started, but they, you know, now they're doing Princeton University, every Apple retail store, offices like Google, Netflix, Disney, Twitter, quick and loans, four year contract for all K through 12 girls bathrooms in Utah. Like why am I not investing in this? This is such a defensible business. Like once you get the contract, they're not gonna have, again, they're not gonna have two of these at the bathroom. And so like, if you're the brand that like looks good and you can like,
- Sprint into market something like this will get I think to like 30 40 50 million in revenue Sure, they raise money. I need to chase this down Yeah, they're the race money or they're they already raised somebody did you a you ever seen those dick pills at like the counter at 711 Can't say I had Yeah, surely you have like it's like a goat It's like toad I forget what it's I don't go into seven light I don't leave the house out of definitely don't walk into 7 11s and look at their vending machines They like it's like Viagra or something like that. It's like some type of like
- I actually have no idea what it is, but it's like a it's like a herbal supplement and it's like your wife was telling me about this Got it. Keep on You can have that one and You ever think who makes those and what are their business meetings like You know what I mean is it just like a bunch of dudes like serving monster energy drink like sitting around like You know what I mean? I've seen that I've seen that the whole meeting is just done over Xbox live It's like we'll be serving Mountain Dew and and monster in order to like get this meeting started I've always wondered what those things are like and how you could be proud making that crap
- This is way better than that. It's not the same thing, but I've been thinking a lot about that. Define a lot. How much have you been thinking about this? Well, you know these, so we talked about milk boys and the send it thing? Or what's it called? Full send. And so many people reached out to me after that and they go, they make money because they're sponsored by this crypto poker thing called, what's it called? Roblitt? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And I saw this video where they were talking about it and it does like tens of millions a month in sales. It's just astronomical. It's just huge. And I was thinking I was like, that's pretty cool, but I think that gambling, I'm okay that it exists, but it's just not for me. What do I always say? Cornrows and sleep tattoos. It's cool that other people have it, not for me.
- By the way, that's catching on I did a meeting with somebody and they I was like oh nice that they go yeah, you know what Sam says Cornrows it's leaf tattoos. It's not for him I respect it's right to exist, but you know it ain't for me But these like these these businesses that do like let's say gambling. I'm like that's kind of like It's most likely a little bit shady. It's definitely not legal in America But there's definitely it's related to shadiness like it's in the same family and I just wouldn't be proud doing that on a I wouldn't be proud doing that on a daily basis. You know I mean
- Right. And that's why I was thinking about this. As somebody who spends a lot of time gambling and has, you know, I ever tell you in college how we used to drive from North Carolina, where I went to school down to South Carolina, a three hour drive, then we would board a riverboat casino that would, that would sail into international waters, turn off the engines and then let us gamble for four hours and then it would drive back. And that's what I was doing as like a 20 year old. I was playing poker once and the guy next to me.
- Either fell asleep or died and I was like, oh my god, like what am I doing here? Why am I hanging out with these low-lifes who are this guy's like this guy? You know like those people whose nails go so long They start to like corkscrew like this guy look like that and I was like this guy hasn't moved off this boat in like a century And I shouldn't be here, but I can resist Sleep or dad, I don't know I just left the table I was like I don't I'm not gonna tap this guy and find out it's like Schrodinger's box is the cat dead or not I didn't want to know so so I just left but uh yeah lost a bunch of money doing that So I don't know I like gambling I think it's cool, but also for sure like it's not a business I would start because I feel like
- I don't want to start things where the end is me in a Netflix documentary. It's like, what does the percent chance I have to like be on the run at some point in this business venture? I don't really want to flee the country. I'm not looking to like, find out that like, we have a huge amount of like, you know, child pornography or, you know, money laundering in my app. It's like, dude, I'm not here for the stress. Like I'm not trying to do all that. And I don't need to make like a trillion dollars in a year doing this. Like the state guys, I told the story about them on the pod. They do like 40 million a week in revenue. No way. They issued, I think a. But how much is that?
- What's out like a net revenue versus gross? This is their take They were a week did it eight. I heard they did a 800 million dollar dividend To their why they can't sell the business. So I heard that they distributed like 800 million dollars And I this could be tough. This could be wrong, but I don't think it's wrong by like More than 30% So so that's pretty crazy These these think this guy these guys are printed cash. These are the guys who bought that like they didn't know who was behind it until some guy $40 million home. Yeah, they were like, how did this 26 year old afford this?
- And they're like, oh, where's the source of your wealth? He's like, I own stake.com. Did people just, we're based in, correct. Did people just message you? About what? And they told you that number. Whenever we talk about any of this crap, I just don't want to be messages. That's my same friend who told me, yeah, my same friend who told me about them in the first place when I featured them on here, he was telling me about like, you know, their dividend and stuff like that. Rubett is also big. Yeah, these things are really big. Basically it's an online casino. And so like you take one of the best business models in the world, a casino, and you strip away the biggest costs of it, which are like, you know, the building, the giant building and having all this labor because all the games are digital and the casino is digital. And now all you have left is the marketing cost to acquire customers.
- And you could acquire customers from around the globe in their bedroom and they don't have to like fly to Vegas to do it Right, it's a kind of an amazing model and like it's pretty obvious why it's why it's huge, but yeah, it's not for everybody All right, what do you got? Okay, I got I got another one I Got a framework and then I have actually I got two framers. I got one framework for I got a quick one and a long one I'll do the quick one first I Realize this the other day. I was like So yeah, Brian brain Armstrong the founder of Coinbase went on like streaming his podcast Yeah, it was like so like what is what is your startup advice? What is your advice for starting a startup? It's like
- It's one of those questions that as, you know, as an entrepreneur, you kind of hate because you're like, well, it's like saying, you know, like, what is a good life? Um, so, but he gave an answer. He's in kind of broke it down. He's like, well, there's like, there's like two separate eras pre product market fit and post. And I was like, that's, I agree with that 100%. Like the things, the way life is pre and post is like important, but like, they need, okay, so for Lex, you got to define like what is product market fit. And like, it's kind of hard to define product market fit. I don't know how you felt it for the hustle because you kind of went from events.
- To like I feel like we never had it flashy blog posts to the newsletter. You don't think the newsletter had it. I mean we got to We have 2.5 million people a day reading so like I guess that there's definitely something there but like people When my friends talk about it, they're like oh man It just started working like it never felt like it felt like a slog the whole time it never felt like things were just working I mean do you feel that way the milk road? It just seems like like it I guess maybe technically there's exponential growth because it's growing like two or three hundred percent a year But it wasn't like I can't keep up
- You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. So I'll tell you the frameworks I've heard about this. So one is Emmett who's the founder of Twitch. He said this once and I was like, Oh, that sounds right. He goes in a startup. There's a big period where it just feels like you're pushing a giant boulder up a hill. You're pushing and you're pushing and you're pushing. He's like, and then there is a point if it works where all of a sudden you're not pushing anymore. The boulder starts to roll down the other side of the hill. And now you have the opposite problem. You're running chasing to try to catch up with it because it's rolling faster than you can keep up with.
- And this is what other people say too, like your customers are demanding, you run out of inventory, people are, it's flying off the shelves. Like these are the phrases people use to describe this feeling. And it's what it starts to feel like the market is pulling you rather than pushing. And so I've never came through that. I've experienced a little bit with our D2C brand where we would, but it's not like, it's not like this magical Eden where it never feels that way, it never feels hard again. Like that's kind of how it sounds in my head. It's like, oh, at some point I'll stop pushing and it'll start like rolling by itself and I'll have to run and chase it.
- It's like, it kind of like starts and stops of that. It's more like a mountain range where you go up and then down, and then you climb the next mountain, it's a little higher than down. Then the next mountain, down, that's how it feels like. So for example, with a, with a, with an e-commerce company, okay, getting the product made and getting it to market and getting people to first hear about our brand, that was pushing the boulder up. But then literally as soon as they, like, I remember it went viral in like a Facebook group. People started sharing it in like, enthusiasts of that category, they started sharing it. And so we all, so I remember like the third day, we did like $3,000 in sales without like spending anything on marketing. And I was like, where did that come from? That was awesome. I didn't do anything. And like people started buying it. And by our second month, we ran out of inventory.
- And we had a full, our third month, our sales sucked, because we just had no inventory. So that was what it felt like to pull. But then to get the business to grow even more, well, that's, you know, like that magic, you know, sort of slowed down. And sure, people were still telling their friends, but I wanted to hit a bigger goal. So now I had to push again. So it's been kind of starts and stops with milk road. I feel like the growth is pushing the boulder up a hill. But then I look at some numbers, like the number of organic people who, like people who've joined because they got referred the thing. I think a really healthy percentage. I'm like, okay, so that means people are liking it if they're sharing with friends. And the feedback, like the replies we get are not just like, oh, that was a good one today. It's like,
- They like they're using our own language and sense of humor. It's like they want to be friends with us They're like they're like, you know, the milk was so hot this morning It turned into butter and like you know, it's like who said who like goes into a product uses it that day And it comes up with a funny review just because you kind of want to be boys with the people who are making it Like that's that shows that they really cared somewhere and we get like hundreds of those a day So so that shows me it's working But still to grow and fill the revenue slots like that feels like a slog like that doesn't feel easy That feels like very very difficult. So um, so yeah, I don't have a good answer I've seen it firsthand with two different people. So the first is I used to share this office Called founders dojo, you know, you it was uh, dave grows black and a bunch of us when I was starting the company uh, the hustle and
- There is these two guys that were like the most stereotypical like Silicon Valley nerds It was like a skinny Indian dude and then this white guy that looked like this jock He was like really good looking jock But he was like the dorkiest dude ever and they were partners and it was a hilarious combination and They created this technology that would basically I have no idea why they wanted to create this technology He's honestly kind of pointless, but basically it would crawl the internet and it would find the most shared and most popular HD gifts, whatever on the internet that day and They built this thing and then they would spend hours
- making the search. So if you just typed in one letter, it would auto fill with like things that you could search, like GIFs, like if you typed in like the word C, it would auto fill it cats. And then like the search would just pop up. And I remember we'd be like staring at the computer with them just saying like, look how much faster it is. And it was like, you can't even tell like, you know, how much faster it was from the previous time. But they were like, nerd it out over this. And they launched this thing and it did okay, it did okay, it did okay. And then one day we get into the office and they've stayed there all night and they slept underneath the table, that their desk I remember. And I remember like Dave had bought them pizza because like they were working the whole time. And we were like, what's going on Raj? Like why is this happening?
- And their website was called the worst drug, which is pretty hilarious. It's called the worst drug.tv, I think. Basically, some porn guys got a hold of it. And they somehow, I don't know how it worked, but the most shared gifts on the web are almost all porn. And so they disabled the not-safe-for-work feature and it was all porn. And when we get to the office and they had this fancy setup, like this, a huge monitor, and it was the highest deaf porn I've ever seen. And you click space and it would auto-fill with a new porn GIF. And like, that person's- And first and second, I used this, by the way. I remember saying it. It went viral in 2014 or something. It was like, somebody shared it in our IRC. They were like, this is a crazy website. And it was like full-screen, HD, immediate porn. And you're like, whoa, you touch any key and it just reloads another one instantaneously. It was like, whoa, what's going on? It was like, I remember- I remember TikTok. So basically, there was eight of us. Eight guys, and we were gathered around this computer. And at first, we were shocked. It was like hardcore porn, like shocking porn that would go viral or like people like click on. And the whole porn thing, we got past it. And then we were like, wow, that's really high deaf. Look at that. Oh, if you click space, it really loads so fast. And there were just eight of us gathered around us. And Tim Westergen- I can see your hair on his thigh. Yeah, it was crazy. It was disgusting. And Tim Westergen and his assistant, I forget her name, but they, I was supposed to interview them in preparation because they were speaking at Hauslkahn. And I told them to come to the office. And they walked into the office. Pandora. Yeah, the founder of Pandora. They walk into the office.
- And there's eight of us gathered around this stream just like staring intensely at this porn like, wow, good job Raj. Like what do you type in see it really auto-fills like really quickly like, you know, like this is amazing. And they walk in and they're like, oh, hey, what's going on? You guys want to see something check out this tech dot? Like it was, and they had like millions of people a day coming to the website overnight and they slept there at the office for weeks trying to like, you know, do something with the server they keep up with the traffic and like, increase the speed just a little bit. And eventually something happened where like someone in Romania offered to buy it, they flew there and it turns out that it was like some gangsters and then they like all had like guns on them and they came back and it was like a whole ordeal. But that's the one time that I really saw product market fit work.
- So I've heard stories like that. Like when Instagram launched, it was kind of the same thing. They like, they launched it, they put it out in the wild. You know, first hour was pretty slow or whatever. The guys kind of go to sleep, they wake up and like, or like not even they go to sleep. It was like late at night and it was early in the morning in Japan and the app had started to go viral in Japan. And so they were like, what are all these like, why are there only pictures of tea? And it's like, oh, this is in Japan. People haven't tea in the morning. They're taking Instagram pictures of it. And they had like 25,000 people downloaded that first or second day. And the servers like, you know, basically melting and like pretty quickly the only problem became how do we get more server capacity? It's like, oh, you stop thinking about features. You stop thinking about the logo. You stop thinking about names. You stop thinking about hiring. It's like, all I think about is like, how do I add more servers?
- And so actually I started to realize that there's a test, the simplest test of product market fit, because people have tried to come up with these tests before. In fact, there's a kind of famous Silicon Valley one which is you survey your users this thing, which is if our product went away, if you could no longer use our product, how would you feel? Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, or not disappointed? And the idea was if 40% or more say very disappointed, you have product market fit. Sounds good in theory. It's sort of like, it's like a astrology. It's like giving you a way to have this answer to this mystical question.
- And Mark Andries said this thing, he goes, product market fit is like sex. If you're asking if you have it, you're not having it. And like, you know, I think that's more real, which is like, there isn't this 40% survey number. You can't survey your way to finding out. You'll know because it kind of hits you like a punch in the face. And so what I've seen is that the people who really have it, like their thing is going to go supernova. They only care about two things. Those two things are, if it's a tech product, hiring more servers. And if it's any kind of product, hiring customer support people.
- And anytime I meet a founder now who's like, yeah, dude, I just really, you know, any good customer support people are like, where do I find more support people? Or like, hey, do you know how I can get like AWS credits? I'm like running up a crazy bill. I'm like, let me invest first. And then also, yes, let me help you with that. Because I know when that happens, that is almost the truest sign of product market fit. It is the survey you don't need to go do with your customers. When a founder stops thinking about features, stops thinking about like future plans and marketing and, you know, company culture and everything else. And they're like, dude, the shit is melting. So I asked Michael Burch, who was my former boss and then became my investor at my ideal lab. And, you know, Michael had basically sold Bebo for $850 million. And I wanted to know like,
- And he had struggled before that for three, three and a half years to like make something work. And so I asked him, I was like, you know, what was it like kind of before and like, you know, when the turning point happened, like, did you, were you just feeling like so good once it, once it clearly started to work? He was like, well, he kind of described the boulder pushing up the hill thing. He's like, well, before when I was like, I quit my job, we had two kids and a third on the way. We had mortgaged our house and like, I had told my wife, give me six months to try this. And now I was three years in and I still hadn't figured out anything that worked. But I felt like I was getting closer and closer. He's like.
- That was hard. I felt like I was pushing the boulder up the hill Then with bebo we like I finally put together all the pieces I knew that social networking was a good product like a good category like this is before Facebook Like I knew that social networking was gonna be big people were gonna talk to other people on the internet They were gonna have profiles and comment on each other's pages I just felt like that was true and then I knew how to grow it Which was like these viral like kind of fill in your profile quizzes and share it with your friends I knew how to grow it and like So I I launched the thing he goes in nine days We had a million users and he's like back then a million users was like so huge on the internet He's like he's like you know nine days later. None of them came back I had a retention problem, but he's like I knew that I had like something that could light fire So I turned it off and I started working on the retention to like give you a reason to come back every day He's like I knew this is gonna work. He's like and then when it worked. He's like I didn't feel like this immense joy Like yay. I finally overcame it. He's like I felt even more pressure He's like dude now This is actually you finally did it don't f this up like this can actually be valuable Don't mess this up He's like that became a whole new level of pressure and like burden that I felt and he's like I worked so hard and I think after
- they sold like what are four years in or something like that. I think he had like major heart surgery like five months later because he had been like so working so hard and under so much stress and pressure that whole time. I'm sure that could contribute to something like that. But when he described that, I was like, okay, so I've never felt that. Like I've never felt anything that you just described. That means I've never felt the like the violent version of product market fit with that like a billion dollar company feels. So what did Brian Arfroz say? He didn't say what it feels. He didn't define it as much. He was just, he had said basically something along the lines of, you know,
- You know, you're making something that people want and you know, there's like, you know, whatever true to ban for you He says something sort of general like that But I've been thinking about how do you know because that's so general that you're going to be optimistic and Think you have it when you don't because God it would feel so good to have it and man It really sucks to not have it So you're always kind of like squinting and looking for these like this evidence and what Brian said was he goes act He goes my lucky thing was that I wasn't a big analyzer or a big thinker I was just like action produces information
- So I would just do a thing and I'd produce some information like oh people want this or they don't want this or they want it But there's something wrong with it like the the bebo thing where oh they grew but they didn't stick around Okay, but that produced information that first nine days produced a lot of information and so he's like Okay, I built this wrong, but now I know what's wrong with it So let me do another round and like he's like action produces information so as a founder like just focus on the action part and like It'll either hit for you or or if won't but like action is really the only way you're gonna get to it and like You know smart action meaning you take action then you sort of like accurately assess
- what's working and what's not so that you're not taking blind action. Have you ever thought about the logistics of that though? So, Coinbase, there was this article a couple years ago written about them. And when they were, when I think in 18 or 19, when like the first cycle was happening, and they're saying how like they've torn down walls at their office, like just because they don't have enough space and like they, people needed to be in the same room to like shout out one another. And then they're like, we're also just taking meetings in the park. I forget where their office was, but it was near where you and I lived in San Francisco. And they'd be like, yeah, we're taking meetings in the park because they're just physically not enough space. And if you think about the logistics of it, you basically have this idea and this small thing in 2015 or 16 or whatever. And so right now, there are, I think, 4,000 employees, which means they've probably hired 6 or 7,000 if you count for turnover. And if there's, you know, 360 days in a year or whatever it is, 350 days a year, that's like, you're basically adding 10 to 20 people a day in headcount every single day for three years. It's pretty wild. That's wild, right? You know where to add?
- 10 or 30 people a day, whatever. And that's not even like that much compared to like a Facebook or Google, but like, that means that you got to talk to like a hundred people a day. Yeah, you're interviewing five times, ten times more. Yeah. He says that he goes, we have, I think he said 3000 people now, he goes, but, and I, he's like, I personally, I think was involved in the hiring of maybe the first, like, I forgot what he said, like 300 or 500. He's like, but then to hire those 300 or 500, I had to talk to maybe three or 5,000 people. And I've done a lot of interviewing now. And I have a good idea of like, if you think about like the interview, he's like, I got totally burnt out from it. If you just like, all right, how are we going to get everyone to laptop?
- Or how do we make sure that breaks? Everything breaks. It's crazy. Have you ever experienced that firsthand? Not that, but I've heard stories, again, I've heard stories and that's how I know I didn't have Broadway. Even when I thought I had it, growth is happening. I've only ever felt it one time with BLAB when our servers kept melting down. And it was during a period where we went from about zero to two million users in like a six month period. And like we just kept like our vendors servers were going down. And then we're like, shit, what do we do? Like, dude, how is TalkBox going down? How is CloudFlare going down? What's going on here? Like, it was like, and we were also getting DDoS attacked and shit like that.
- But basically, yeah, that's the only time I sort of felt it. But that was like, you know, a very brief window of time. The, there's this guy Dan Rose. I don't know if you follow him on Twitter. He was like a very, he was like number three, number three guy. I had the least one or something. Yeah. He was very early at Amazon, maybe like first 50 or 100 people. I was like, yeah, something like that. But he was early, early days. Like he was around when the dot com bust happened. Like so 99, 2000, 2001 time period. Then he went to Facebook and he was, he ended up being like the number three guy at Facebook behind Zuck and Cheryl. And so anyways, he shares these war stories from the, from like then he says, these things that again, you don't feel unless you're building one of these like, you know, Thunderlizard type companies that are just like these Godzilla's. And he's like, yeah, at Amazon, he's like, we used to just do meetings in the stairwell, because it was just like, we ran out of desk space. We were starting to put two people at every desk. That didn't even work. I was just working out of a stairwell for like a three month period. Like just imagine like, he's like, yeah, I just took my laptop and just sat there on the top of the stair and I was just like somebody would be walking by and be like, hey, hey, for that thing we're launching tomorrow. Like, hey, can we? And then I just walk with him down the stairs while we talk and that was our meeting. And so he shares these stories about like what it was like. His Twitter father, his Twitter is a good father for sure. Did I ever tell you, did I ever tell you about the Airbnb cafeteria?
- No. So when my wife works there and I used to go to the office, because my office was right next door to it for dinner time all the time, basically they had this beautiful office and every office or meeting room is made to look like a popular Airbnb, like, you know, thing you could rent. And it's like this beautiful office, you know, Brian and Joe, they're like designers. So everything like in their office looks exactly like that. And their cafeteria can, you know, seat three or feed 3000 people or whatever, however many people they have there. And their whole shtick was every single item was made there at the office.
- So the Red Bull they had like Airbnb bull the ketchup the mannehs made right there the trail mix like they made They made everything 100% except for the beer I think that's the only thing that they didn't make but besides that if you consumed it It's like they didn't have Doritos you couldn't get a coke in that office It was all made right there in the spot and I remember thinking like this company just that in itself It's like a pretty amazing feat and that's not even close to being like their thing. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's exactly that's like that's not their thing. This is a logistics You know that's their version of lunch Yeah, it just table takes to get people to work there and I remember like thinking like how on earth
- Do you pull that off? Because like just literally five years ago, or maybe three years ago, I had interviewed there and it was 200 people and it was like an okay office. But that, I remember seeing that and I was like, this is just amazing. This is absolutely ridiculous. I had the same experience. I went to Zinga's office, back when Zinga was like, you know, still. Airbnb used to share an office with them, I believe, by the way, I went to that Zinga office as well. And then that office is crazy. First you walk in and there's like a tunnel to enter. Like you remember that tunnel, the light, the lit up tunnel? So it's like you walk in, it's an LED tunnel. So you feel like you're entering a special, you feel like you're entering a spaceship of some kind, or like, you know, you're walking out into a stadium. And then there's just dogs everywhere. I was like, oh, well, do people have allergies here? How was this allowed? And they say, oh, yeah, no, we just, it's like this free, free land. And we met the chef, this guy, Matt. Matthew, I think it's a,
- do Trumbull, what was his name? It sounds like a chef name. And so he was like, yeah, let me give you a tour. And so he was the one who brought us into the office. I was like, okay. He's like, yeah, I'll give you like the kitchen tour. And I was like, okay, cool, this will take like, two minutes and then we'll go see the other thing. And like the kitchen tour took an hour because it was the exact same thing. He goes, he goes, so this is our staff. He goes, everything that you eat here is made on premise. And I was like, okay, he's like, see that? Like, I was like, you guys have like a, he's like, you want anything to drink? I was like, yeah, I'll take like a sparkling water or whatever. He's like, cool, it's on tap here. And it was their fizzy water. I was like, you make your own fizzy water? He's like, yeah, we make our own celtries, ciders, beers. They made everything. He's like, yeah, this like, you know, the salad here. Like we grow all the, like we have a micro farm on the roof. That's crazy. And so like this mushroom was grown here. This like arugula is grown here. It's all a circular system. I was like, what? And then he's like,
- I was like, but what about them? You don't have like animals for like, you know, he's like, no, no, no, we do get animals and we get the full animals. So he opens up the walk in fridge and there's just cow cows hanging upside down, full cows. And I was like, what is this? And he's like, yeah, we break down the entire carcass and we like, you know, use every bit of it for our things. I was like, you and what army, dude? He's like, oh, we have 45 people in our chef. That's crazy. I'm the executive chef and we have 45 people on our team. I was like, you have, I don't have 45 people in my company. You have 45 people on the lunch team. And I was like, this is just absurd. It was insane. And I was like, wow, the arms race for like, you know, pampering tech, tech things. I'm like building this like culture of your building something special was.
- You know kind of amazing to be honest. It was really amazing. I was blown away by that I've cows on my at my ranch on my Airbnb property and I've we have like 18 of them or something like that and I've and you know They butcher them so they like every year they send away like four or five and then I see the new ones being born and I thought it'd be cool to get a freezer out there and you like paid 20 bucks and you could get a steak and be like Yeah, this cow is you know like the mother of the one that you see right in front of the off like yeah Like you know cuz you could sit on the porch and like watch the cows would come up to you sad for me
- And it was too sad for me, I couldn't do it. I knew it's like distance from it. I need to like, ignorance is bliss for me when it comes to eating meat. Yeah, I didn't end up doing it because I was like, this is just TMI, I can't handle it. Because I like, I see these guys playing and like it's a gnome and they get to gnome me. And I was like, oh fuck. Right. I'm not nearly as tough as I thought. I know. All right, should we wrap it or, cause they're like, are you paying by the minute now? Your surcharge here, your studio? Cause I'm free here in my studio. Yeah, well, you know, Ben's still getting used to like, the logistics of this.
- So I'll just leave it at that, but I think I think our time is up. What do you think? Are you inspired now to look better or you still don't give a shit? I am very inspired. The inspiration isn't the problem. The skill to do it is the problem to like upgrade my own space. It's not going to give, it's going to like do it. Do you use that room for anything? I use it for this and my wife works out of here too, but we can use it for how we're going to work. It's an office though, right? It's like, it'll look like a CNN newsroom. Just have her in the background like working.
- Like it'll look fine. You just make it look a little pretty. They'll put some of this crap on there. Dude send them I'm open to it that doors open ring the doorbell All right. Well, I guess that's the pod. We'll see if this actually Changes anything, but it might You

Billionaire Marc Lore on What He Would Build Today and Future of Ecommerce ｜ My First Million -186 [3NfcPxFct-s].txt

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- I want to create a company and I want to sell it for 100 million plus to Walmart or Amazon in three years. What opportunities exist in the e-commerce world that Amazon or Walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that I'm selling or sometimes a solution that I've created. Would you like him to do anything else for you, Sam? The most specific question. No, that's actually not that specific. A lot. I feel like I can rule the world and know I could be what I want to. I put my law in it like no day's on, on a road, let's travel never look.
- Looking back. All right. Today we have Mark Lorry on the podcast. This guy is an OG of e-commerce. He sold diapers.com to Amazon for like, I don't know, $600 million. He created jet.com and sold it to Walmart for $3.5 billion. Good guy. He came on and me and Sam were pretty blown away. We're kind of little fanboys of his right now. We enjoyed the episode. He had a bunch of good ideas. He talked about how to go raise a bunch of money to go after a big vision. He had some ideas in healthcare. I'm asking a great question. If I wanted to start a company today, then it could sell for $100 million to Amazon or Walmart.
- What product would you recommend I start and he had a fantastic answer? So he had ideas at the at the end and at the beginning he talked a little bit about his kind of approach to Why he bought the Minnesota Timberwolves and how he's gonna run the team how he builds his team how he hires people stuff like that So the beginning is more philosophy and his ideas and he also had a great a great answer I asked him I'm like when you bought the the basketball team. You just like send a huge wire Like just hear me those details are really interesting, but we do a whole deep deep deep at the end of the
- episode which you might even find more interesting in the actual episode because it's always fun to like discuss uh like I always find the recap to be one of the most exciting so give it a listen. Yeah but he was great I think you're gonna love it and we liked him so much we wanted to come back on one hour was not enough and here's what we asked you to do um listen to the episode if you're liking it he said he's big on LinkedIn so go to his LinkedIn his name is Mark Laurie last name is L-O-R-E um and just go pop comment on one of his LinkedIn posts and just say hey if I like if you like the episode just tell him love the episode um come back on and I think if he gets enough messages we will be able to bring him back on and go deeper on a bunch of ideas.
- that we didn't get to do today. All right, here's the episode. Enjoy. OK, cool. So we have a guest here. Sam, do you want to tee him up? Who is on the line? Yes. So e-commerce tycoon successful billionaire, and as of 2017, is exceptionally jacked in ball. Mark, I have to ask you, which of these is your favorite part of Jeff Bezos? LAUGHTER Says, I've been polishing that one up for the last hour
- No, Mark, Laurie, we have, Mark, you've got a lot of stuff. You've started four different things, right? Four different startups that have successfully exited. The most popular one is probably... There's a few more that are in stealth that I'm really excited about. Maybe I can share a little bit about. Yeah, we want to learn all about it. But the biggest one was jet.com. That's one probably everyone knows. Before that, you did diapers.com, which you sold to Amazon for $550 million bucks-ish. That one might have been bigger because that was sold to Amazon very early. And Amazon appreciated a lot since then. So maybe that one, I don't know, you tell us which one ends up bigger.
- the early, the early one or jet? I think no, a jet definitely. I mean, that's not my stock doubled over the last four and a half years. So that was, that was good. I got to thank you for that. When they bought you, um, I bought the stock because I was like, yeah, there's plenty of room to run here for Walmart e-commerce. And yeah, I feel like I was a part of the company. I won a little bit as well just off the news. And you, um, and then you also sold a company called the pit, uh, which is sold the top. That was like for 5.7, right? Back in the day.
- And you're prior to that you were you worked in banking, but then before that you were a runner I saw I was a runner. I ran the 200 meter and 400 meter. What was your what I ran? high 21s the 200 and 48 for the 400 same with me almost exactly the same. Yeah, high 21s high 48s exactly Yeah, I got slower as the distance but longer and 400 was was sort of long. I was better at sort of the 60 yard and and 100 200 but yeah, what's her 100 meter PR?
- 1074 Wow and was that FAT? Did they do? 74. Wow. Well, that's pretty you're moving. I didn't have the endurance to keep it up, you know, in the two and the four. But yeah. So you've done a lot of stuff. You've done a ton of recent, you've done a ton of stuff in the past, but even the stuff you're doing now is also interesting. You just you guys made a bid for the Timberwolves, right? Yeah, we actually went through. So we signed the agreement. So yeah, we're just going through the NBA approval process now and then hope to.
- closed like probably in like six weeks. And was that a dream like, you know, I've had this dream as a kid, you know, own an MBA team. That's the point of doing business. You know, it's a really small kid. It was like play professional sports. Of course, that's where you start. Every kid you eventually realized, okay, it's not gonna be that sports, not gonna be that sports. You know, and then I was like, oh, maybe, you know, it would be the Catholic, you know, and go to the Olympics. And then I was like, okay, that's not gonna happen. I'm like, all right, forget it. You know what? I'm just gonna like one day own a team.
- That's what I'll tell you. That's amazing. That was the dream. I was a huge sports fan growing up, followed every sport, watched every game. It was a huge Nick's fan. And then I had two kids, and life happens, and you get a little bit detached from sports. But I love it. I'm excited to dive back in and have a reason to it. It seems like, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, the sports team thing was like, you've made it. This is your, it's like buying a car. It's like, I buy my toy. I always wanted this toy. This is kind of like lifelong dream. And I think it's obviously still kind of a passion thing. But also, the business merits of buying a team as an investment has actually become a pretty big deal, because these franchises have appreciated like crazy.
- because there's only 30 of them and there's more billionaires than there are teams. So give me a pie chart. Is this, what percentage of this was just, I just wanna have it. It's like art versus this is actually a good business decision. How do you think about that? Yeah, it's probably 80% the former, 20% good investment. Like, yeah, it's not so much about being a great investment. It's just not gonna lose money and I'm gonna have a lot of fun. Anytime you can have a lot of fun and not lose money, I love going to the horse track.
- You have a lot of fun, but you also have a lot of money. I kind of like this, you know, where it's, it's a, have a lot of fun and maybe make a little bit of money too. It's like perfect. But I'm excited about, you know, just innovating using, I think there's a lack of like real innovation in sports in general, like applying sort of a technology mindset. Like how do you bring augmented reality to the entertainment experience? How do you move to like dynamic announcing so you can choose your announcer dynamic real time ticketing? I want people
- would be able to move to any open seat in the stadium at any time. Like, I've got all these tech ideas on how to augment the experience. And it's just fun to have a platform to be able to apply these things and try and even, what's the money ball version of, of, of, in basketball too, you know, like as a mid-market team, how do you win? What strategy? Thinking that through, how do you apply the same techniques of vision capital people? Like, what's the, what's the mission? What are the values? What do you stand for?
- How do you show up every day? How do you live those values? Like treat it like a real startup. And to date, I've talked to a lot of people, it doesn't really seem like anybody's sort of gone down that path yet. And are you just gonna run this like a company? I mean, like, because you're incredibly successful at running companies, but you know, I mean, you know a bit about sports, I imagine, but like this is like a total, this is totally outside of everything that you've done. You've done e-coder. But I love the challenge because every business that I get into, I don't know anything about it is gonna start.
- I didn't know anything about retail when I did diapers.com. You know, I didn't know anything about the pay when I started that. I started a bunch of startups recently. I don't anything about that. I'm starting and building the city. I'm doing a reality TV show. I'm doing these things. And you know, it comes down to vision capital people. It's you have to have the vision and you just think about it. Share it with people like a piece of clay and keep molding the vision molding like wow, this is a big vision. Everyone agrees. This is freaking huge. Okay. How are we going to capitalize it?
- Great, that's what I do. Raise money, have lots of connections with investors that have raised over a billion dollars. So like, okay, we're gonna capitalize it. And then the third part is the most important and the hardest to get right is people, the people part. And it's finding a great CEO and a great executive leadership team, setting the values, setting the mission, the corporate culture, getting the org structure right, getting the right people in the right spots and creating a culture where you get the very best out of each person that you bring in. Then you kind of just sit back. Then you're there as a student.
- strategic advisor, I think if you try and, you know, micromanage and make decisions when you don't have the experience, that's where you get in trouble. You know, so if I were to come into the team and say, you know, I think you should draft so and so, and, you know, why are we doing this? And we should be playing, you know, this, and that's not going to work. I just don't, I think who is the very best, you know, person in the world to, you know, run this part of the business, to run that part of the business, to be the chief people officer, to bring in the very best town and create a great culture with the best people in the world, and get them in the right spots in the right.
- positions. If the vision is right, everybody's clear, exactly where you're going, what the North Star is. And you've got great people and they're happy and they're empowered. Great things will happen. And that allows me to do multiple things at the same time now because you know, I'm not getting into the weeds. A lot of your companies are how much do you guys raise at diapers.com? Diapers raised 55 million. Okay. So that's a lot, but not close to, I mean, jet was what like a.
- I mean, you guys, there's a lot of- Yeah, anyways, you know, like 800 million. So it's essentially larger, although both are quite large. This idea of being able to hire the best in the world and being able to hire people to do a lot of the work that they specialize in, could you have done that if you were bootstrapping your companies? No. I mean, that's why, you know, we started, Alex and I, A.R.I. just started a venture fund called VCP, Vision Capital People. We believe that there's a really big hole in the market for people with big visionary
- ideas to get a big infusion of capital early, like when they have nothing, so they can go out and hire the very best team in the world. I think a lot of startups, it's a little bit of chicken and egg. How do you get the capital unless you have the team? You can't hire the team until they have the capital, but you don't get enough capital until you prove it. And so you get a million bucks, then you get five million bucks, then you get 10 million bucks. And each step of the way, you're sort of on a tight wire. You're basically like, one little thing goes wrong, suddenly investors lose confidence where you under over promise and under.
- So, the liver, lots of things go wrong. We basically say, no, vision capital people. You have a big vision. We know this could be a really big idea. We know somebody's going to do this. It's the right time to do it. Let's not let her capitalize it. Here's 10 million seed. Go out and hire the best team in the world. That puts you in a position to have the best shot of a really successful business. And if you got the best people, you got the capital, and you have the vision right, you're player now. You're kind of like, worst case, you're going to exit this. Somebody's going to pick it up. That's the best you got.
- Great people and it's the right time. It's a big vision. So what do you think when? So there's there's the case where jet where that clearly is what happened and it worked and then you see like quibi or something like that raise, you know, clearly successful people at the start raised a bunch of money raised a billion dollars or so more than that I think big vision hey, we're gonna you know rethink Netflix for mobile and Didn't quite hit it and they're burning a lot of money. So even though they raised a lot They're burned still left them with I don't know how many you know the same sort of time You know two years of runway or whatever it was that like a normal starter pad
- So how do you think about that? Do you think it's a look just the numbers game? It doesn't always work out or do you think there's something different in the strategy that maybe they could have done or you've done differently that Least to better results. Yeah, I don't know that Intimally do you know the story and I do think that's probably more the exception than the rule I mean, I think listen startups don't all work So some mark work do I think it had a higher probability of working because it was a big vision they had a lot of capital and great people? Yeah, I think it does specifically why it didn't work
- The only thing from the outside looking in was, were the most talented people in the organization fully committed and all into it. That's the only thing I wonder. I don't know, obviously you had really talented people, but were they dedicating their life to it. You need somebody in these businesses that's sort of like, I'm running this business and dedicating my life to it. Doesn't have to be necessarily the person that's doing the VCP at the top, but who is that person? And you have the right team to support. So I don't know the answer.
- for that, that's where I'd probably wonder. And so me and Sam talk about this a lot because we think about art, what's next for us? We got some money in the bank, we got time, we got all these dreams about what we might wanna do. And one of the paths is similar to you where you as an entrepreneur, you sort of can see these opportunities and you can be the spark that helps start them, but you're not necessarily gonna be the day-to-day operator in the weeds, maybe like you were with your first startup. And some people, like you seem to be pretty successful with this model and it seems like it's dependent on those three things you talked about. Having the right vision, shaping that first.
- getting capital in and then recruiting the right people. On the people part, take us into a job interview with you. So obviously there's the standard stuff, you know? You ask what they've got. I'll let me tell you, I've hired, I'm trying to calculate it, but over 1,000 people that are personally like, you know, interviewed in my career and I've honed over the years and it's changed. I think it has changed on hiring people, resumes and I've gone from early in my career and I first started.
- I just want to feel like I want to have a be with this person. Right. And I realize how wrong that is and people make that mistake today and at least to all kinds of unconscious bias and things like that, it's the worst possible thing to do. I spend an incredible amount of time upfront on resume read, which I never used to do before. Used to be like, hey, this person's great. Oh, they were a CFO. I'm looking for a CFO. You say they're great. Come on. I will tell you them. Listen to what people tell me necessarily about people because there's always somebody out there that'll say something good about everybody. And so I kind of just discount.
- that for the most part. There might be a select couple people that I really trust that like you work with this person trust me there they're top 5 percent okay but that'll show on the resume. And so when I look at the resume like I'm looking for a demonstrable level of success in whatever they do so I think I get into their mind I start at the beginning when they graduate school and it doesn't matter what school they go to but but they graduate they go into into a company if they're there for a few years did they get promoted like what did the trajectory look like.
- like, and then the most important part, when they leave that company and go to a new company, is it something that a top 5% would do? Top 5% is moving a certain way that you start to learn, machine learn these trends. And top 5% are top 10% are the elite people. When they move, they move in step fashion. It'll be a bigger title, much bigger role or a better company. They'll get in that company.
- and they will be promoted multiple times. And then they'll leave, there'll be another step change. And so I'm looking for that like multi-company movement within the company and big step changes. Any kind of deviation to that? I just don't even want to even do so. A lateral move out. Move from a Google to Kmart, sorry Kmart, but out. Like I just, any little like tap that says not top 5% and somebody could say, hey, but that's not fair. Like I'm actually good or this person's great. I'm like.
- You know what? I'm not going to interview it because you know what? There's a chance I get honey-potted. Right. Honey-potted. Everyone's experienced this. You basically bring somebody in for an interview. The resumes may be not ideal. They come in, you spend one hour with them, and you just really like them. And they tell some buzzwords around. They've got an old experience and you're like, hired. Think about that. I mean, you're committing to hire somebody and keep them in your company, hopefully for years, to be an important part of the company and like you have an hour with them. Maybe you have multiple people spend an hour, but still a pretty small amount of time.
- time. And so I don't let myself get honey potted. I've been honey potted many times in the past. And I unless that resume screams superstar, which again, it's only five out of 100 resumes if you say top 5% or 10 out of 10 and one out of 10 and be really like say no, no, no, it's hard because you're tempted like, oh, they have good experience, this person, whatever. No. So when I interview someone, I know that they're a superstar in the resume. And so I can focus primarily on core values, and they're.
- Spotic traits. So Spotic is an acronym I come up with for traits that look for in people I hire smart passionate optimistic tenacious adaptable kind and empathetic and The last two are really important kind and kindness and empathy I found over the years and you can get somebody that's super tenacious Passion that will run through a brick wall, but also run through people and over people and they're not you find somebody that has the passion They're optimistic and tenacious and adaptable because you need that in startup, but at the same time they're
- very kind and empathetic and you get that person that's able to balance that, that's magic. And so those are the things in the interview questions, have nothing to do, I won't ask one traditional interview question, there'll all be questions to open them up to try to get at what makes them tick and do they exhibit these traits. And you know, I have this theory like, I've now, if you work in tech, you meet so many smart people, that smart becomes kind of like table stakes. Great, everybody's super intelligent, well now what? And clearly smart isn't just the only thing that leads to safety.
- success, you need a whole bunch of other things that you mentioned. And I sort of found like what's in rare supply? So which of those traits is in most rare supply? I'll give you my kind of opinion, which is I found that two really simple ones tend to meet the lowest in supply and have a pretty outsized impact in startups. And those two are energy or like enthusiasm, I think bringing energy to the table every day is quite contagious. And you need it at the beginning when you're starting something from scratch. And so it seems like one of these does anyone can do it. Yeah, anyone can do it, but most people don't. And the other one is courage. So the courage to either build something new, say something that's on your mind, to like not let something that's below our standards go. And that's what I encourage. I feel as an.
- and extremely short supply. What do you actually take risk to? So we're- Right, I call it boldness. We call it bold at our company. Right. But yeah. Do you feel like when you meet people, is there something you're just like, ah, I wish more people had X? What is X for you that you feel like is in short supply? You know, I mean, when you said this, or when I say passionate and optimism, I think optimism is, you know, the sort of the optimism that allows you to be bold and take risk. And it's that optimism that you believe in.
- not only great things can happen, but also believe that people are good, like you're starting place, that is just an optimistic view of the world. I think that's really important and it allows you to trust, which is one of the core values in all my companies. I think trust is really important. If you want to create a culture where the company trusts the employees, the employees trust the company, that's really important to create an environment where people are happy and feel empowered and they feel a sense of ownership, trust is so I
- I have this idea that a lot of people say, you know, trust, of course, trust but verify. And I don't believe in the but verify. I think you start out trusting people and until they prove otherwise. And it's very risky because you can get burned, but I've seen the power of the upside, of trusting somebody before they've necessarily proven that they deserve it. It's incredibly powerful, motivator. And I've seen it in my personal life. I've seen it in business. People wanna...
- They want to run through a wall for you when you're like, wait, you trust me, but you can, I can burn you. I can yeah, but I trust you. Are you gonna burn me? Of course not. You know, you're trusting me. I'm not gonna burn you. That is an incredible value that I've learned. It's trust, transparency, being really open with you in place, not hiding, not secretive. Here's the cap table. Here's the rounds of financing. Here's the numbers. Here's all the information you need. I'm an open book. What do you want to know? Like there's no secrets here.
- you work in this company, you're an owner, you have stock options, trust transparency, the other one is fairness, that it's really important that people feel in order to create an inclusive, diverse workforce, you have to create a safe work environment where people feel safe coming to work, you have to feel like it's fair. There should never be this feeling of like, that's not fair, that's why I have a open comp system where everybody knows what everybody else is making and everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money. So women, minorities.
- Everybody makes the same. There's no like this idea that maybe it's not fair. My colleague, why is my colleague, that I do the same job? Why are they making more money than me? That sort of thing, which is usually a big reason why people lose trust and they don't feel like given you everything they've got. And so I kind of take that off the table. And so those are the three primary values. So you have the values of the organization, how they live them, and then the traits that you look for in people you hire. I mean, you kind of get that right. I think it's magical thing.
- Where did this confidence come from? Because having the confidence to hire the top 5% is a pretty big deal. Is high school track day, Sam? Some place your confidence comes from. Well, it's actually just trial and error, failing a lot early on. It's just somebody I want to have a beer with. It's making those mistakes. It's getting honey-potted. It's hiring a person and having go through the pain of having to let them go and replace them. It's so many lessons. I make so many less mistakes now that I'm.
- I did early in my career because I see everyone makes the same mistakes. That's why I like to talk about it, because it's like, it is the same mistakes. And people say, yeah, I guess you're right. There was, the resume kind of did, but I was kind of like, well, the person said they were good. I liked them, and so I hired them. You have to be really, extremely focused and selective in that. The other thing, by the way, it does help with unconscious bias, too, if you're inclined, when you go through the resume and you bring them in.
- and it's not about whether I like the person. You know, you've already like, you know that they're rock solid and you really can focus on on Spotic and sort of help there. So I wanna ask you about, I mean, I think we got, which is ask you about ideas, but before we get to that, I wanted to ask one quick question. So you left banking in 96, right? No, it was 99. Okay, and then I'm looking at some information here on your timeline. You started this thing called the pit. The pit was a, it was in the internet marketing. Yeah, it's basically a sports stock market. We use,
- to avoid gambling, we used the baseball card as the proxy for the athlete, but essentially it was meant to be a sort of sports stock market where you buy and sell players like stock. And you sold that for like six million dollars? Yeah, that was right after the whole NASDAQ crashed in 2000. I don't know if you guys remember it like went down like I don't know 80% or something. And yeah, there was no way to raise any venture money and we only started it maybe 10 months earlier and we're able we raised five million and sold it for 5.5 million.
- and seven, everybody's like, yeah, do it. This is a great exit. And we're like, okay, I'm gonna do it again. Let's, that's great. We'll sell this and get the next idea. That's what I was gonna ask you is how you could sell for six million bucks after, so short about time. But I guess the answer is, well, because you raised a fair bit. At least for six million dollars. I think it was just, you know, the tops at the time was interested in the people that we hired. We hired a great team. We had a vision for what we wanted. And they were there to provide some capital. So yeah. So let's talk about some ideas that you would need optimism about now.
- Right, so I think we could talk about jet for example, like take some courage and optimism to go after that prize and basically compete with the the the the Empire of Amazon. So, but we'll come back to that I want to start with, where do you need to be optimistic today what are you optimistic about what ideas are I know you've talked about startup cities I don't know if that's the one you want to talk about or if you have some others. But let's shoot us some ideas of what you think is exciting that you're optimistic about that maybe the whole world isn't. It is not not proven yet. I mean I gravitate toward tend to gravitate more towards B to C businesses business to consumer I just like consumer businesses and I think it's easier to understand some of those businesses than sort of more like a, you know, if you were like.
- like a biomedical company or something like that. It's harder to grab arms around. I think there's more. So most of the ideas and things and thinking I do is in the B2C world across lots of different industries. I've made a number of investments and I'm involved with a few companies that I'm really excited about. One is Archer, which is basically they're like passenger drones. So I think it's like basically an autonomous electric helicopter that basically flies passengers around. It's safer than a helicopter. Is this a spat that you did?
- Yeah, yeah, it did us back a couple months ago and going through the SEC process now. That's crazy. Super excited. That was a great VCP. So the two founders came over, actually sit on the couch right here, and they said we got this vision for these flying cars, these drones and carry passengers. It's the right time. This is why it's the right time, Mark. This is how big the industry is going to be. This is why it's going to work. This is why the technology is right. And I was really taken by the vision. I thought they had it nailed. And they said, hey, we need 5 million now. We're going to hire the best.
- engineers in the world, we're going to take them from the best companies, we're going to go raise 50 million and build the state of the world, the latest and greatest of these aircraft. And I thought the two founders were exceptional. So great start to the founding to the P part of the VCP. And I thought, OK, I'll give them the five million and I'll help them, you know, hire this this team and I'll help them raise the 50. And then you're on your own. That's what we did. I put five in, we helped raise, you know, helped hire the engineering talent, helped them raise 50 million. And that was two years ago. And then they just raised a billion through this back. And so now it's a four billion, three point.
- 7 billion market cap or something. And it was really an idea on this couch two years ago. But it shows you what I was saying before about rather than going through this process of like seed, can't hire the great team, the chicken and egg thing. It's like, here's five and then let's get the team and simultaneously go and raise 50. So very short order, they had $55 million and they had the best team. And I do think they've built the very best aircraft in the industry right now and they're on their way. Like it's a massive tam. And so I'm looking at opportunities like that.
- And I can tell you some other ones too. Yeah, go. Yeah. Well, another one that was in the news is basically mobile kitchens. So looking at the trends in food delivery and millennials and Gen Z not wanting to cook and want food delivered and things, I just saw that it sort of takes a long time to get it delivered, inconsistent, the quality suffers and transit and it's expensive. And I thought, oh, if you can solve those three things and how do you do it? Well, what if you cook in a mobile kitchen?
- kitchen if the restaurant basically came to you and it cooked in your driveway. Hot, much faster because the trucks are already on the road and so they're likely just minutes away. And so I made a pretty big bet on that company and still in stealth mode but I'm really excited about it. I think there's a... How's that different than a food truck? So it's a mobile kitchen but it's for multiple types of food or probably like... Each mobile kitchen is a different restaurant, different cuisine. And the idea is to get the best restaurant of that cuisine in the country and sort of bring it to a central place. It's high quality food that's pipe and hot that's delivered to your door fast. That's an exciting thing.
- I think a big tam, big market food, that's where the puck's going. I think there's lots happening now with laws changing in sports gambling and things. I think there's really big opportunities there to maybe bring back some of what I did before. What was that, exactly? What? You said, you're talking about the pit. Yeah, but you said bringing it back before. No, just in new, now with the gambling laws changing thing, I think there's an opportunity to create a true sports stock market and do it right, where it really feels like you're...
- buying and selling players like stock by leverage some of the changes in gambling laws. Have you seen something? I mean, Sean was really into this big club. Did you see that? No, I didn't. You don't know what big club is? Oh my gosh, Sean, you want to explain? I mean, it's pretty much what it's kind of what you're describing. What they did was they basically took Twitter and they turned it into a social network where you don't just follow the person, you can invest in them. So the cool thing about this was what they did was, let's say on Twitter, I have like, I don't know, 140,000 followers.
- So from day one they what they did is they took the top 10,000 Twitter accounts and they had raised I think 150 million dollars from VCs here in Silicon Valley and they used it to basically pre-buy Invest in all those accounts. So on day one when I walked in and said hey if you sign up for bit cloud if you claim your account and verify it Like basically meaning you tweet out that hey, this is my bit cloud. I walked into like 75k Worth of my own coin right worth of my own stock and others were already buying it because they were saying hey if Sean joins We think that he might you know continue to grow his following and so we want to invest so the idea being We've all had this experience where you discover a band early or an athlete early or a content creator online a blog And if you see them before they're huge, but you really like their stuff you can buy their coin It's like every single person gets their own little little
- a little bit coin basically. And then as they get more, people buy it, yours appreciates. So as a curator, as a fan, you get to sort of go along for the ride, along with the star themselves. It's a pretty little concept. It's a value ultimately. I think that's the key. A lot of these things fall down in the end. So they don't have a ton of intrinsic value. They don't have a ton of intrinsic value. The one thing that it does have is now as the creator, so I have all these shareholders, right? They own my coin. Some people own tens of thousands of people and a thousand of people and a hundred bucks in my coin. I can then basically reward my shareholders. So in the stock market, you give out a dividend or that you can reward your shareholders. In this, I could do the same. So I could say, I could do it literally a dividend. I could say, hey, for whatever I earn this month, my shareholders are going to get their proportionate share. I could also say,
- Hey, we're gonna do a version of this podcast That only my shareholders get to listen to right like a like an only fans or or these different products that sort of say If you if you're a subscriber of mine, then you get the content so you can kind of pay wall of the content I'm a membership almost like a membership. I can come up with whatever the perks are for my members And so then the creators all jockey to offer better value to their holders because their stock appreciates the more Incentive incentivizing they make it now. This is a one in a hundred hundred a thousand idea, but I do think there's something interesting
- I think there's something interesting. Yeah, it certainly sounds interesting. I tend to shy away from things where I don't see like the 20 year, 30 year like the intrinsic value, like how it ultimately like this could be a great exit. And yeah, like I think with gambling, law is changing, there's a way to give players intrinsic value. So you basically basically say at the end of somebody's career, I'm going to pay you based on their career stats acts. And so you know, this rookie comes up, you know, like it has real value because the the extreme.
- a stock market is giving it intrinsic value by giving you a predetermined amount of money based on certain stats over the career. That's interesting. So you could say, so the house basically sets the line, right? Let's say Zion comes into the league and we say, okay, the house believes the Zion, the market, the line gets set, the Zion's going to be a Hall of Fame player. And maybe that means X, Y, and Z stats. This can be a P's, this many points, whatever it is. You think it's better than that? You buy? You buy if you think if you think that's not going to happen, you don't buy. Are you short? And basically the careers, so you get to predict the players.
- journey and then the better than it's like a super fan basically as the better they perform you feel like you're being Vindicated and you're actually gonna economically benefit from having identified Somebody who's gonna perform higher than the what the market thinks. That's cool. Yeah, exactly what um I think I read somewhere that you like to look at google trends a lot like you're you're and and because you're a entrepreneur you invest in a lot of stuff. You're always looking for trends. You're always looking for what's popular what I want to know is What what do you use like what signals do you look?
- before to figure out where you're gonna go to. And also what signal told you that Jett was interesting because a lot of people probably said, don't even think about doing this. Like you're, you know, I imagine a lot of people are like, Amazon or Walmart or someone already owns the space. What are you crazy? This is like an impossible feat. Yeah, no, it's two different things. I mean, I think with Jett, I had been intimately involved in retail, you know, with diapers.com and WAG and selling it to Amazon and working inside Amazon. And I just felt like huge market, huge tailwind. It's the e-comm's gonna continue to grow at double digit.
- the next five, 10 years. And I just believe that there wasn't, you know, it wasn't a winner take all, that there was room for another player. And I thought we can raise a significant amount of capital and hire a great team. So we had this really big vision with this tailwind, raise a ton of capital and have a great team. I thought if we do those three things right, good things will happen. I don't know what's gonna happen. Either it works, your exit, a strategic wants it. Like if you're in the right market at the right time, you have a great team.
- and you've invested the capital wisely, you've got an asset that in worst cases can be worth more than the capital you raise. That's my mentality with these things in anything you do. It's like there's the worst place to be is in that no man's land where you spent not a ton of money, you don't have the best people, but you spend enough money that is kind of expensive for somebody to buy as a strategic. It's not really worth it. People tend to buy the barbell strategy. They'll buy the aqua hire. You raise a million bucks and you bootstrapped it and you have like three...
- good people and somebody will say like, oh, this is great. Like here's 10 million. And you're like, oh, that was like not a bad exit, made a little money. I'm going to work for this company. There's that. And then there's like you can be big enough to matter to a really big company that has the capital to put down hundreds of millions or billions in an acquisition. There's a lot of people in the middle. And that's what VCP is. That's why it's like, no, 10 million, 50 million. That's how the very best team, if it's the right market, there's going to be a buyer for it. And that's kind of the strategy. What's interesting is, so when I sold my company, we never revealed the price. But let's just.
- that like hypothetically it was like 30 or 40 million dollars. I noticed that a deal in that size, it seemed like it was as hard of work as if I sold it for 400 billion dollars. No, it's harder. That's what I think it's harder at. It was harder because I was doing a lot of the work. I actually didn't hire a banker, so I was doing most of the work and it was hell. But it's not just the work on your side. I think what he's pointing out is that the price tag is significant where the company can't just cut the check real quick, right? Like you could with a small aqua hire.
- But you don't have enough of an asset that they can say this is a big strategic bet that they're making. You're in the middle and I think that's Forget the entrepreneur side. It's always hard as an entrepreneur. It's a really tough place. Yeah. Yeah Well, I'm saying that that's just one of the reasons why it was hard. It was hard for many reasons. It's really hard You must be a really good entrepreneur because it's really hard. I think to exit in that middle ground like it's hard to exit Most companies in that middle ground they don't exit successfully, you know, it's easy to do the aqua hire and I think it's easy to do
- the big acquisition of a big company. It's tough. That's sort of like 10 to 100 million. And the entrepreneurs I know that have exited in that space there, they're strong. They're like really strong. Well, so that's kind of an interesting thing because I think that me, well, younger, like even just a few months younger, me as well as most people would think that, well, as far like if I could sell something for 20 to 30, that's like bite size-ish. That's like some company would buy it without having to do it.
- and get like board approval, like, oh, it'd be a no-brainer for them to do it. And what you're kind of saying, and what I experienced a little bit, is it's actually probably easier to be a little bit more audacious and raise money and go after it. Or I would actually say the other way around, it's easier to do that. Or in order if your goal is to build wealth and have a good life, it's probably best, maybe not to raise any money and never sell and just try to like build the company over a long period of time. Let's say you were you, but you don't have your brand name. So let's bring you back. We give you youth, but we take away your reputation. So we're going to take you back, you're 21, but you don't have the reputation.
- But you do have the same sort of mindset that you have today. You have the same knowledge, let's say. What spaces would you be going into? And would you also be trying to do the same type of bet? Like do you think you could raise the large amount of money just through charisma and hustle and vision without having the reputation? So take us to it through a scenario. What do you think you would be interested in working on or building if you were 21 again today without the reputation? Yeah, no, that's a great point. And I think early on, and a lot of people I think share this, you feel like it needs to be something like really original or something nobody's thinking about it, nobody's doing it.
- or something niche or like, and that's kind of what it is. It's niche and the venture capitalists are like, nah, it's not that interesting, you know? And I've learned that it doesn't need to be something like niche or super inventive. It could be just finding really big tamb, like just say something like, okay, healthcare, okay? And what's a really big idea? Like where's the puck going in healthcare? I would study where the venture capitalists are investing, what types of companies.
- I do the research, like where is the money going? Follow kind of the money, because that'll kind of give you some idea of where some of these trends are right now. And, you know, with artificial intelligence and telehealth and things, there's like a lot of money pouring into that. So just, I would look at the landscape, I'd study the different companies who's getting funded, who's doing well, and think about, is there another angle? Is there something not like inventive or super original, just like just a little hook of something different that's not being done?
- done and put together a big vision that requires ultimately hundreds of millions of capital and work backwards from that and say, okay, you know, that we think this is going to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity. You know, we're going to, you know, start with 10 million. We're going to hire this great team. Here's the vision. Here's how we're going to get there. Work on that plan and that pitch deck. I'd spend hundreds of hours on that deck and on the vision and mapping it out and somebody will bite because it's the right time. It's the right space. You know, if you're really good and these.
- They feel like you've got something and you've got this big plan and you know, there's a good chance you'll get that you'll get that $10 million seed check to go hire a great team and you talk about you've talked about where's the puck going? Give us more. What do you wear? What are some other space? So you talked about food delivery and you talked about how what the next evolution of that might be the restaurants on wheels That solves a bunch of problems. You talked about transportation right huge Tam flying cars That might be where the puck is going. We see that Google funded You know Kitty Hawk and we've been
- Uber was working on it, a bunch of people working on this, maybe there's something there. Give me a couple more. Yeah, give us more. So, one I think conversational commerce. So in retail, I think the next big step change is the idea that you would use text and voice to order anything you want in a very conversational way. So imagine talking to someone that is as knowledgeable as the most knowledgeable person in that area on the showroom of a specialty retailer. You want to buy a TV? It's like your...
- They are at best by talking to the TV expert, you know? And you're just conversing. And somebody at the same time who knows you as well is your best friend. So hyper-personalized, this idea of getting a one best answer. The idea of like search engine 20 years from now is gonna be laughable, they like to cassette tape. It's like, wait, so dad, you used to like go, you wanted to buy a toast and you typed in toast during this like search engine, and you had 10,000 responses, and you had to like read reviews and look at all this and search and filter. That's not the way it's gonna be done. You're basically just gonna.
- to say, hey, I need a toaster. How much? I don't know. What's a good amount? $200 you get a great toaster. Really good. OK, great. Want to make a recommendation? Boom. Buy it. And it just ships it, right? Like, it's going to be very conversational. And we talk a lot about personalization and retail, but nobody's even close to doing it in a way that it's going to be done in the future. And I think voice requires one best answer. Otherwise, voice doesn't work. It can't give you 100 good things. It's voice.
- It's got to be like, you know, if you were asking your best friend, hey, like, you know, I know you're no toasters like what should I get man? You know, like that kind of thing. It should be very On point who's doing this now? That's exciting. I like that. What what companies are doing this now? I mean, there's a lot of companies that are like again early stages of it and stuff But there's nobody again. That's if you said like who's got the world-class team who's raised, you know, significant capital You know, what is there a is there a product? I can go look at and be like, oh, I get it I understand what he's getting at like I understand
- why Mark is obsessed with this? Yeah, I mean, we had something called Jet Black when I was at Walmart, and it was basically this for New York City, primarily parents, and it was gangbusters. I mean, it was like, people stopped using Amazon Prime. It was just dropped it. It's like all the shopping, the entire wallet share was given to Jet Black, and it was multiples of what they were spending on Amazon. It was deep into the tail, it was everything. People loved it. The big test is very expensive because
- in order to get the comments to see the conversations. Sorry, you need to see a lot of conversations to have it automated. So in the beginning, you have humans in the loop to sort of bridge between the time that, you know, there's AI in the past tense, did it go away or that still exists? No, it went away. But I think- It was expensive, yeah. It was expensive and there just wasn't the right time for Walmart. But I think if for the smart up world, yeah, I think it's totally different. Cause-
- Walmart maybe doesn't want to invest hundreds of millions of billions, but a startup totally different. It doesn't hit your income statement. Everyone gets the gate, knows it, you put capital to work and you build something great. So there's that. I think in healthcare too, I think, like things I was talking about with telehealth and all the stuff's coming together, I think the idea of people taking control of their health with home diagnostics and things, there should be a dashboard that exists. You can look up, I put in my...
- My name is Mark Lorry. Here's my dashboard. I've got a number of gadgets in the home that I do on a weekly, monthly basis. You brush your teeth twice a day to take care of your teeth. What are you doing every day to take care of the rest of your health? You don't do anything. There's all kinds of devices and things. Monitor a little prick of blood and monitor blood sugar. Do the blood test once a month. Get all your things in there. Look at the trends of what's happening with your PSA. Do you have this issue? And then basically the machine learning and through all the data to be able to see like, okay, you should see a doctor here.
- You should do this then. You should do this. So here's the probability of dying at this age. Here's the heart attack risk that you're running. Your cholesterol is too high. If you get it down, here's your probability of heart attack comes down. Sort of make it more transparent. Right now, it's like this black box. You go to the doctor once a year. Do some tests and whatever. It's just kind of like a black box. Like, oh, here's some medicine for your cholesterol. You don't know what's wide or why or how it impacts your odds and whether you should be really worried, a little worried, no doctor will ever give you probabilities about it.
- anything. There's no diagnostics. It's like you have to go to the professional. There's no home stuff. I think all that's going to change in the future. I do think people are going to like really take control of their their health in a completely different way. And they're going to be doing things other than brushing their teeth to take care of themselves on a daily basis. That's who I just had a daughter. And I feel like when she's my age, she's going to be like, Dad, how are you even alive back then you guys had you didn't know what the hell was going on inside your body now we have this thing that we wear that tells me everything that I need to know I know when I take a bite of this, my blood sugar goes up or down and I know like how stressed I am I know you know, I think it's gonna seem like cavemen how we we operate today.
- I agree, there's got to be certain things you get tested certain times. My daughter had celiac disease. We didn't figure it out until she was nine years old. I mean, it's not that rare of a disease. Like, come back to the point like, hey, here are the things you do. Here are the probabilities of what's what. And these are the tests you need. I was asking my mom, my mom has celiacs as well. And she found out when she was like 50. And she's like, yeah, as a kid, everyone was like, oh, I don't know. You're just having upset stomach all the time. She's like, you know, I'm a kid in India. I'm sure I had this my whole life. It's just like, don't be ever knew. And I was like super, I never gained any weight because I couldn't like process the food I was eating. It took till I was 50 when I found out.
- Exactly, everyone should have genetic profile. That gives changes to probabilities based on genetics. Everyone should have that. It should be tests certain times, it influence your odds and probabilities in certain ways to structure everything that's more organized. Right now it's not organized. I don't know if you guys feel that. I feel like it's not organized at all. Yeah, well, you got like a wolf and then an aura ring. And I have a smart scale. I've got like a glucose blood, a continuing glucose blood matter. I've got a smart bed. I've got like 18 different smart things.
- but they are quite siloed. Yeah. But they don't actually tell me the answer. They just, you know, like they don't actually say like, uh, this is what this all means. Yeah. You know, maybe they'll say like, your extra stress this morning, sleep more or don't work out as hard or your body fat is too high, but, uh, it's kind of limited to like pretty high level stuff. Yeah, it should, it should be way more structured. You should have be much more in touch with it. Like sleep at me is another thing. I don't know. So many people struggle with this.
- They're like all these things and the doctor doesn't just say like, you know, it takes a long time before the doctor's like you should do a sleep at near study or something like totally. There's things you can have devices that are listening near your bed that can know. It sounds that sounds like. Well, I always thought it was weird. Like this, a lot of cancers you can are here are are okay. Like if you can get a certain type of cancer and be perfectly fine, so long as you catch it early enough and it's kind of outlandish and archaic that like you can have like a cancer.
- and not know for many months or a year. It's like, what the fuck? A year, yeah, many years. Yeah, you could have known this like instantly, and that's kind of like crazy to me. MRI, by the way, there's MRI scans that you do, whole body scan and the detailed look at anything cancerous and then stitch it together every year, you do it, and you can see micro changes and things. That exists now, it's just not made available to the people because of the cost of it. But nobody even has the option of even knowing that that's available, that I should be able to do.
- should do that, you could imagine like a system that basically says, hey, here's the probability of cancer. You can take this test. It's a couple grand. It's up to you. But at least you know, okay, wait, maybe I should just spend the two grand because it'll increase the probability of catching X number of years in advance. And I know, okay, it's healthier. No, we just wait until we're sick, like you said, with cancer. It's like, all right, now it's now it's, you know, definitely, I like asking these questions because I like knowing like what meets your standards, but basically who in this space are you.
- you're looking at where you're saying that's kind of promising is there any like one or two companies? Yeah, I don't I kind of maybe I should more but I really spend a lot of time just thinking about like a complete sometimes sometimes I if you know too much about a space it's hard to clean slate and invent because you're kind of like get tied too closely into what what people are doing so I like the idea of just thinking about it through the lens of a of a
- consumer on what is, you know, this trends are happening telehealth, AI, you know these trends are happening, and then how do you stitch it all together? That's just thinking, sitting and thinking every day, like what's the big idea? And when it's really big, you do know nobody's doing it. And then you can reverse engineer and go back and say, there are any people that are working on certain things that could be helpful to it, but you gotta go so big that you know that nobody's playing there. And that's where I think the opportunity lies. It's like, yeah, it's gonna need billions of dollars to pull it off.
- off, you're going to have to prove it in a small area. It's going to be very expensive. But then when you prove it, it excents out to a trillion dollar business, like market cap opportunity. Let's say. Yeah. You guys, I couldn't tell you, like, I'm not, like, tell you all the different little components that exist right now. Something that you said earlier was basically you kind of like were reversed engineer a little bit from, like, you'd be like, I'm going to find where the money's going. Then I'm going to build this deck. And I'm going to
- to raise money and then go build the thing. What's something that, let's say that I said, Mark, I wanna create a company and I wanna sell it for 100 million plus to Walmart or Amazon in three years. What opportunities exist in the e-commerce world that Amazon or Walmart would buy my company because they desperately need something that I'm selling or sometimes a solution that I've created? Would you like him to do anything else for you, Sam? The most specific question. No, that's actually not that specific. I mean, I don't work at Amazon. I don't work at YouTube. You're 100 million in three years. Yeah, no. Well, you said one personalized shopping.
- conversation. I think that's not likely 100 million that is like way bigger or it's or it's not like that's a little more binary. I don't think 100 million necessarily possible. Sorry, I 100 million was just some no it's good have a goal. I'm gonna answer three years. I think it needs to be a sort of a niche technology that could that's where the puck's going that's gonna be helpful to differentiate. It's gonna be something
- like three years is fast, so it's gonna have to be tech more than having shown real market traction, but it's gonna have to be a technology that's probably hard to build, that involves AI. The thing that comes to mind would be like fit analytics, this idea that you're going online and you're buying a dress and being able to see it fit on you without having to get it delivered to your home. Return rates on apparel are 40%. It's very expensive for retailers.
- And it's a pain for people to buy stuff, bring it, try on it, send it back and things. So the idea that you know my body dimensions and use artificial intelligence to know the inside dimensions, the garment, to see exactly how it's going to lay in my body without having to try it on, to cut down return rates dramatically. There's billions of dollars that you can save retailers there. And apparel is definitely an area where there's a lot of focus. And that's just one thing. I don't know off the top of my hand. I love that. That's a great answer.
- There's a great answer. I saw this guy in Japan. He was a billionaire entrepreneur and like this is like his third or fourth swing, but he Created a suit that had these ball like these dots on this black suit And he would send you this bodysuit for $20 and these these white dots on this black bodysuit would You know like in a video game where the motion capture you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what it was and it would the camera was able to tell Differently than if it was you weren't wearing this suit
- and he would use that to try to upsell you on proper fitting clothing. I saw that it never went anywhere. But I was like, oh, that's kind of an interesting idea. Listen, for every idea out there, there's hundreds of people trying. That's why it's never really about the idea. It's about execution. It's about VCP. So where they're under capitalized, that they have the best team in the world. Like in the quippy, I know you said in the beginning, but other examples of, you know, big vision, right time, massive TAM, like. Raise it a lot of capital.
- and have the world class team that's like all in. There's not that many examples I could think of. In fact, when I think of those examples, they usually have examples of things that have worked. That worked, yeah. I don't experience that many times where you have a world class team, ton of capital, and a big vision at the right time. Those companies get acquired because- Like DeepMind was a good example of this. DeepMind got, DeepMind, it was an AI company got acquired by Google for 500 million. When, you know, no usage yet, it was just vision and team. And then I think DeepMind, they said that once they've plugged it into, they do the fun stuff, like they'll go beat the best go players in the world or the best chess players in the world. So they show kind of its power. It goes flexes from time to time. But they also apply it to the Google AdWords machine learning. And I think it's generated like incremental, multiple billions of dollars already for Google, just on the slight optimization of AdWords. And then on the other side, you have Magic Leap, where Magic Leap would probably be the current example of raised like a billion bucks. Huge idea, looks awesome in the demo, but they haven't executed it well enough where it actually works.
- Yeah, or you could argue also a little bit early. Yeah. That same exact company like today going forward. Right. Could be totally different game. So it is kind of interesting. It would be great to map out VCP against companies that have worked and didn't work to see what the hit rate is. Right. Sorry, guys. I'm realizing I have a four o'clock. Yeah, you got to run. Okay. Where should people find you if they want more, if they want more plug, how if people can follow you, find you, contact you, whatever you want. Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn is my primary where I'm putting out a lot of business advice and things like that.
- do LinkedIn. I just recently finally just launched Instagram and start becoming more active there. But LinkedIn is probably the best place right now. Yeah. All right, Mark, this was great. Thank you for coming on. All right. Thanks, guys. Thank you. It went way too fast. Yeah, it was good. But it ended quickly. I wanted I had so much more we could have talked about. I had so much more. I think we should actually hit him up and be like, dude, after the after this episode goes out and he gets some love. We should ask him to come back because I need a part two. I had like five other things. I had so many. I had so many questions.
- He would, it seems like a great guy. He is, yeah man, he's really charismatic. I get like why, I understand why he's successful. He would be describing an idea off the cuff and I'd be like, you know what, this makes so much sense. I would like, I would back you to the hills. Yes, this makes sense. I could see why he's been able to raise so much money. Yeah, I asked that confidence question because he just oozes with that, with charisma and confidence. So let's talk about, okay. So first, I really love that, I thought that was great. I thought he was great. I thought he was great and I thought he made for a great guest.
- especially the second half. His setup was bad. I cannot stand with people's, I think he was talking to a sis on a phone or a laptop. With someone who's so successful like he is, why do they not have awesome Zoom setups? Yeah, it's crazy to me. But I think they're just like on the go all the time. So they're like, I don't even have like, I don't even hold my phone. This woman holds my phone for me. And you know, I just sort of speak out loud. I don't even type anymore. That's my, that's my- Wait, a Bray just said he doesn't own a computer. Was it, I think he was honest. No, no, no. You just bullshit and then the chat.
- That's what I was told he doesn't own a computer. See that's what I was saying dude. I knew it I knew he's in that ultra rich wait So there's the mega rich so all the most rich is they don't own a computer Nor do they even touch a computer their emails get printed out for them And they either hand write or just say things out loud and people go relay the messages I think he's one notch below that where he doesn't own a computer and he just does shit off his phone That's weird to me I mean not weird because I mean if you're a baller go ahead be baller ball out But like what if you just want to type a long essay or if you want to or if you want to just like like us can't understand The the feeling where you don't need to type nothing ever or or you just want to like search the web and like or read it Like it just seems like easy to have if you take my computer away forget the work I would be so bored. I like need to like, you know browse the internet
- Yeah, that's crazy. So he doesn't own a computer. That's pretty cool Yeah, the guy's awesome. He said he had a few really good ideas I wanted to ask him so he sent us these notes ahead of time and he said this thing about million the difference between a million and a billion And I was like oh come on. I'm dying. We gotta save it. Yeah I wanted to know what he was gonna say. I think we slow played it a little too much at the beginning and just as my fault I should have gone into one of these but okay, so a couple of things so here's my takeaway. Here's my like I Don't usually do takeaways because I don't think like I don't know
- I just don't bother. Usually, it's not like I really learned so much that I really want to do takeaways. I was just kind of entertained. But in this, I actually didn't have a few takeaways. I thought, I'm just going to rattle them off. Insight number one, the barbell of selling your company is very easy to sell at the small end. And even at the high end, the hardest path is actually that middle ground where both of us actually sold our companies. And I think that that's true. It feels very true for my experiences. And I've never heard anybody like kind of say it out loud. So I thought that was a good insight.
- I liked that basically what he I don't think you summarized it or I don't think you said everything basically he said It's easier to sell a company for like he actually said 10 million or under yeah or like hundreds of millions right exactly And the reason why is you know the small one you can kind of cut the check just on talent The big one you're buying like kind of a flesh more fleshed out asset of technology or traction or Talent unique talent and in the middle he's like you've usually raised enough money
- Where like your price you're asking prices too high for them to just just do it without blinking But you don't have enough proof and enough of an asset that they can like justify You know a big strategic purchase and so that's actually the hardest one I think he was hinting at something that I think is true Which is that entrepreneur who's done that is the most dangerous entrepreneur because they have enough money where the next thing They chase they're gonna go bigger But they didn't get enough where they're just satisfied and gonna go chill on the couch or on an island somewhere and They've been through it, but they're not they're not done and I think that that's what he
- he was kind of saying, which is like, those entrepreneurs are the ones you want to bet on. I also, when I invest, that's like a great signal to me is when somebody has had a small win under their belt or a medium-sized win, I should say. Yeah, I had, of Andrew Chen, very successful, A6 Andreessen partners said, some of the most, he just said, the most dangerous entrepreneur is someone who's somewhat wealthy enough that they're set but they have a huge chip on their shoulder. Exactly. For example, Travis, before he started Uber.
- You know, he had Red Swoosh, which was like a kind of tens of millions win. Um, have Williams before Twitter, you know, he had blogger and, you know, that was good win, but you don't went for more. And there's, there's a bunch of examples. Mark Cuban did the same thing. Right. Okay. Some other things I thought he was interesting. So his model, I didn't realize this beforehand, but his model is basically. It's kind of like moonshots is basically he's anti the, the traditional playbook of Silicon Valley, which is. Raise in small steps. So raise a little bit of money, make a little bit of progress.
- raise a little more money, make a little more progress, raise more money, make more progress. He's sort of like, find the biggest market you can go after, raise a bunch of money, and go make the boldest bet in that market. For example, what he did with Jet, he's like, e-commerce, huge market, and growing double digits. I thought it was interesting, he was saying like, you don't need this like brand new novel invention. It's like, the bet is going to be on execution. And you do want to have like a new hook or like kind of like the 10 to 20 percent that's...
- That's innovative, but like 80% is the same as other players in the market. And so he was saying, do that basically go raise a big chunk of money, recruit the best people, the best people make great product, and then go raise a huge amount of money to go for the home run shot. And I thought that was interesting. Most people don't use that playbook or don't talk about it. And that's like his specific lane that he did as an entrepreneur, and he's doing as an investor. I thought that was cool. So I asked him a question that you laughed at a little bit, but I thought it was a great question. Well, the reason I laughed, it was a great question, and he actually gave a great answer, but you asked like, what's a company I could start? And in three years, so for $100 million to Amazon or Walmart, it was so specific that I was like, it's almost like.
- Hey, Mark, I don't want to think, just tell me what to do, and I'll go do it. It was such a solve my problem for me, I just laughed. Well, it was, what was the word that you said the other day? Org? Orthogonal. Orthogonal. It was my orthogonal way of asking, of asking what is a problem that big E-com that this is? The team? Yeah, that they had that. What are problems that need to be solved? A pain point. That was my way of asking that. He gave an answer. He gave a great answer. The answer, he actually gave a previous answer where he
- said something like a conversational commerce, which is a really cool thing he'll explain. But the answer that he gave for that was, oh, fitting at home. Virtual fitting, yeah. Virtual fitting. So he gave a ton of really cool answers. And this guy, Mark Laurie, who was the, he started Jet.com, which he sold for $3.5 billion, and then he was the CEO or president of Walmart Ecom. And then before that, he had sold a company for $600 million to Amazon. So like his, his, his.
- his perspective is like about almost as great as it can be. Yes, exactly. So I thought that was really strong and I liked some of his stuff on the interviews, kind of like job interview side. I think I don't know how much people will love that content because it's not as fun and it's not as junk foody as ideas. But if somebody ever, if you ever actually have to do that, I thought there was some good insights in there. And even though it was a little bit like safe, nobody can disagree that things he was saying were good.
- I didn't feel like it was just cookie cutter. Like I think that, I think he genuinely believes it and that's genuinely his approach. And it matters a lot to him. And I think that came through during that part, which is cool because you always wonder like, this guy's doing this and this and this. How's he doing it? Well, it's like, it's always, he's got great people underneath him doing all those individual projects on a day-to-day basis. All right, well then, how do you find those great people to actually make the difference between failure and success of the same idea is having, you know, that great operator underneath. So I thought that was.
- Pretty good. What do you think of that part? Yeah, I wanted to ask him more about it, but we didn't have time. But basically, it sounds like he's not totally in the weeds of his businesses, which is the way to go. You know, like, if you can, if he can go out, I don't want to be in the weeds of anything. I don't want to be in the weeds of my marriage. I don't want to be in the weeds of e parenting. The weeds are the weeds, bro. I don't want to be in the weeds. I only want to be in the weeds of the things that I want to be in. And when you start a company, there's so much stuff that you think you have to do.
- It's cool. I wanted to hear his perspective of it. He's like, look, I have the vision. I hired the initial people and I raise a ton of money and I just deploy that money and make everyone else specialized in what they specialize in. But we didn't get to ask him about it. Well, one thing he did show was sort of like, when you were like, how do you figure out what that vision should be? And he talked about a couple of things. He's like, I look at where the trends are. Where's the puck going? He's like, one way I do that is I see where investors are pouring in.
- money. Okay, that tells me that these spaces are probably big or these technologies or breakthrough technologies. And so it's either like a technology like AI machine learning. Okay, cool. I can apply that in another industry or everything's, you know, a bunch of people pouring money into e-commerce. Okay, e-commerce probably really big or education and healthcare is really big. All right, that's a big space. Now, how do I go create the most bold vision that has like, you know, a slightly novel hook? And I thought it was cool that he was basically like, I don't get bogged down in kind of the details of like, what is this player doing versus this player versus this player? He's just sort of like, how should it be? Right? When he was talking about healthcare, he's like, I should just wake up. I have a dashboard that says here's what's going on in your body. And it recommends that hey, you should get this checked with a doctor or you
- you should improve this. And I thought the kind of like just from a mind of a customer instead of like industry research, I thought that better. That's a big Amazonian thing to do is that, which is like, you just start with the customer and you say, here's how their life should be that would make them really happy. All right, now I have a pleased customer. Now I'll go figure out how to make that happen instead of the other way around, which is, what can I do? And then, oh, does that partially satisfy customer? Okay, that's good enough. And I wanted to ask him about Amazon and...
- working with Bezos and things like that. I wonder what his opinion will be. Right. Or buying the Timmerwolves, I feel like there's more we could do there because he bought a sports team. You know, one thing, this is a crazy story that I'll just share here. I didn't get to bring it up with him, but Ben found this when he was doing some research for this was he goes with when jet was when jet was growing early on with jet, they had a contest. I don't know if you've seen this article, but it was awesome. It was awesome. Who can acquire the most customers for jet? You become a marketer. You go spread the word. Whoever does whoever gets the most customers gets a hundred thousand shit.
- shares of jet. And some guy went and did it. And he basically just did like kind of like paid marketing in a unique way. He spent the guy invested $18,000 into the paid marketing, won the contest. And his 100,000 shares became worth 20 million when it sold. And so this guy turned 18 grand into 20 million as a fan of the company outside the company, probably made more than anyone else in the company besides Mark, which is amazing to me. I remember that story and I was one of those people trying to, this was like, you participated in this. Oh, definitely. You didn't participate. Like, it was just, it was basically so Robin Hood did a good job of this.
- I believe it was Robin Hood. Clubhouse has done a pretty good job, but basically Robin Hood's campaign, right before they launched was, you're on the waiting list, refer five people to move up the spot. This was Jet's version of that, although Jet was first, I believe, than Robin, before Robin Hood. And it went incredibly viral. If I remember correctly, I think they had billboards promoting this. The contest. Yeah, do you remember that? What do you, I think? Dude, we should have asked him about this. All right, we'll save this one for next time, but I thought this is an amazing story. Yeah, I think it's been about too much.
- more hours with him easily. So I hope he comes back, let us know in the reviews, what you think, oh, quick update, we're going to Miami, I think in eight days or something, June 4th, we sold 300 tickets. That's great. We have a few left, we're releasing maybe what? 80 more, 100 more, something like that? Yeah, we moved it to 400. It was 300, we moved it to 400. We'll see what happens. All right, if you want to come see us, if you want us to autograph your dollar bills, bring them to Miami.
- June 4th. I don't know how they should find the event bright. Just go to MFM pod or my first million pod. So m f m pod.com. And put it in your email. We'll email you the details, right? Yeah. And there'll be a link on there. If you go to m f m pod.com. And also, if you just follow one of us on Twitter, you could definitely see the links we're we're promoting. And do us a favor. If you liked this episode with Mark, when we post it, we're going to post it. I don't know. I guess go on LinkedIn.
- And we, I want to shower him with love of people being like, dude, this was great. Come back on and then he'll come back on. So we need to game LinkedIn a little bit. I might have to dust off the old LinkedIn password to go and, and cause that's the thing. When guests come on, they, I've consistently heard this from the very beginning of this podcast, which is, dude, I get way more messages about this podcast than any other podcast I've ever been on. I don't know why that is. I don't think our audience is bigger, but something that works. And when they get that, that magic moment that of
- of people emailing them being like, that was amazing. It works. They're there down to do whatever and come back on or do whatever else. And you only need about 10, 20, 30. Like you don't need a significant amount. Right. 20 emails in one day being like, I love it. I love you is a lot of emails for most people. It feels like a million. So Mark's name is M-A-R-C space L-O-R-E, look him up on LinkedIn and just whatever his recent thread is, just click like comment and be like, this saw you on the podcast, so good. Yeah, saw you on my first million.

Billionaire Of The Week： Founder Of Chewy.com [57qIflVpcv0].txt

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- Sean, you and I were sent something from our friend Jack stuff. I'll fill you in. So basically there's this guy named Ryan Cohen. Ryan Cohen, he started chewy.com, which is like Amazon for pet stuff, when he was young. Right? Sean, I think he was like in his early 20s and he was aggressive when he started it. He raised a ton of money. He started out of Florida. So he was very much like an individual thinker. He was like, no, we're not doing Silicon Valley. We're going to do this out of Florida. He raised like a billion dollars, a huge sum, ended up selling it for three, four, five, six billion. I don't know the exact amount. Then it goes public worth many billions. But after doing that, he made, I think, around like six hundred million dollars, like a huge amount of money.
- And after he made that money, there was an article written where he goes, I pretty much put all of my money into two stocks, Apple and Wells Fargo. So he put like all of it in there. And since that article went live, that means that the money that he put in there has gone up 361%. Then, about a year and a half ago, he noticed that there was a brand that he loved that wasn't doing so well. And he thought, these guys can totally revolutionize the game, but they're just really getting crushed right now. I'm going to buy 10% of the company, which he did for $76 million, and that company was GameStop.
- And when he bought GameStop, that's when this whole like meme stock thing went down. Cause everyone was like Brian Cohen bought it and he actually, it worked. He turned the company around or at least it's in the process but it's being turned around. And his $76 million, he turned in to 1.1 billion. And he currently still owns like 13% of the company is on the board of directors. Now, just this morning, it was released or announced that he just bought 10% of Bed Bath and Beyond. So he's doing the same thing. And this guy is a madman. I think I'm almost positive. He's still only 34, 35 years old. I also researched on LinkedIn, I'm almost positive that it's just him. Like he doesn't have an employee, maybe as an assistant but it's just him like searching around for stuff. So this man's crazy and I love him.
- So his money's already up. Yeah, okay. He's amazing. I feel like there should be like a ticker for just like stocks that aren't small that have fallen like 80 plus percent from their highs. It's like what crazy operators want to like come in here and totally turn this thing around. I feel like you could also have a podcast about that where you just like you find a stock like Bed Bath and Beyond and you're like, look, highs were at $80. It's now at what was it before this? Like $6. Like what would you do if you were operating this business?
- and have people come on in battle, like Jeopardy! style, and see who comes out with the best strategy. That's kind of cool. Yeah, right now, there's a whole bunch of growth stocks that are down somewhere between 50% and 80% from their all-time high. And stocks like Zoom, and Vasily, and a bunch of others. And there's that one-buffet phrase, be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy. And sure does seem like now is a good time to be greedy when others are fearful, right? Like, there's a lot of...
- opportunity everywhere in the market. And so, you know, if these are things that you believe in on a 10 year time scale, then like this is a fantastic entry point. Here's another interesting one. So I was thinking about this Bed Bath and Beyond thing and Game Stock and my friend Joe sent this to me. So have you guys remember Express? Yeah, I don't know if they have that in Canada stuff, but Express, mostly women's clothes. It's like, it was like fast fashion before that was like even called the thing. So look at what their market cap is. I think their market cap is $250 million right now, but their EBITDA is $150 million.
- So I think Express is an interesting one too. Yeah, but you got to look at like the debt and all these other obligations. They have a ton of debt. Yes. They have a ton of debt. That's the problem. They've got a ton of Jack was like a Ryan Cohen is basically he's doing the Tai Lopez playbook of buying old retailers and spinning them into like, you know, e-commerce and sort of rejuvenating these big old brands. You know, he's doing the same playbook as Tai Lopez just without being Tai Lopez, which is actually a great idea in general. That's a great business point to follow.
- Do the Tai Lopez playbook without being Tai Lopez is like a Great great idea When people talk about buying when the like by by the dip I hate that I'm cuz I'm like I don't I don't have any money to buy to the dip Yeah I don't know whenever people say by the dip I'm like with what I don't own anything. What do you what do I do? Well, you don't keep any dry power. I feel like you always you're always mr. Like safety net with cash and other things You have dry powder. Why aren't you buying the dip?
- I have $100,000 in cash. Oh, wow, okay. I think you used to have way more in cash. Now that's your short-term real estate mogul, you've deployed everything or what? I've deployed everything. Yeah, I don't have that much cash. I don't have it. Do people just keep cash in a checking account? Yeah, certainly. People do that, they do CDs, they do different versions of a market neutral cash position. I own bonds, I own a ton of bonds. Seven figures of bonds, but I guess I can do that. Who told you to do that?
- It's five percent of my net worth as embossed. I'm not sure who told you to do that. Nobody buys bonds on their own. Everything gets told to buy bonds. A lot of my portfolio is in 90-10, so 90 percent equity is 10 percent bonds. You don't play, do you own Aband? I don't own a single bond. Steph, do you? I don't own a single bond. Really? I feel like Sean's right. What rate are you getting on these bonds? Aren't interest rates at zero? Yeah, nothing, like 2 percent.
- Yeah. You're the only one who's like traditional. You talk yourself into a money losing position. Congratulations. Well, actually, that's a good question with, with Havoc going on right now, Sean, from one, is your net worth down from one year ago today? If, assuming you did not add any new cash. Yeah, for sure. One year ago, because one year ago is like a market high, right? Like if you're talking about right after the COVID bounce. So like, let's say COVID crash, then COVID recovery all happened in like a three month period. Or six month period, basically. So let's just take the all time high last year.
- Today, I got to be down 25, 30% easily, easily 30%. I would have thought it would have been a lot more because of you have more high risk stuff. Yeah, but a lot of my stuff is an Amazon stock and Amazon stock has done fine. It's done a little bit, but yes, that one's not so bad. And I would say that's a pretty large position. So that's not super risky, in my opinion. And crypto, crypto's down one over 30%, 35% for last year, most of it, but I have a few altcoin bets that have done really well. So like,
- I was on here talking about Luna not long ago. Luna's up 100%, so it's like that doubled while other stuff went down 30%, so it's okay. We do all right. Michelle, where's your psychology at? Because I feel like everyone knows the strategy. Like yeah, Bylo, Selhi, but when this actually happens when all your stocks or all your investments go down, it's like so hard to actually maintain that psychology and be like, oh yeah, I'm totally gonna put more money in the market. So are you, is your conviction still as strong as it used to be? Are you like, yeah, this is awesome, I'm gonna buy the dip or are you struggling?
- Quick interruption, do me a favor, scroll down, and you're gonna see a link to the hustle. So if you wanna stay up to date on the tech and business news you need to know, check out the hustle, it's a daily email. I used to help write it, I love it. So check it out, scroll down below. Let me guess, don't talk Sean, don't talk yet. I have a feeling that this means nothing to you and you're totally cool about this. It's actually even better, I don't even look, I don't look at it, because I'm like, oh, why would it look, it's just gonna be down. Sometimes don't look, which means I don't think about it, which is actually the correct way I should have been doing it altogether, waking up and seeing green.
- put a lot of nice little pep in my step, but was sort of this like false positive and And now I just don't look cuz I'm like, oh, yeah, of course I'm down 5% again today like what I just lose 5% every day or 2% every day That's just like an average day now So I just don't even look at it and because I'm not looking at it It doesn't matter because I wasn't selling I wasn't selling when it was going up But well not selling when it's going down so it doesn't really matter the day-to-day fluctuations of it So now it's just I just get some time back because I don't like Want to go look at it because I don't want to see any carnage So I'll just like kind of ignore it and just go about my my day and You know I kind of asked I'll pause all of a sudden stuff, you know, has anything changed meaning do I view these investments differently now?
- Do I do I no longer believe that these are good good investments to be in over like a five to ten year period? No, okay, so then you know what am I thinking about there's nothing nothing to think about it essentially at this time Do I buy the dip? That's one where you know sometimes I like I do like to just chill and just like sit on the sideline for a bit because I'm a pretty like I've spent a lot of time in my life gambling like I literally played a lot of poker a lot Like I've spent so many days in a casino so I know the feeling of chasing a loss trying to win it back and And so I just like to make sure that I'm not doing that so there's a difference between buying the dip and chasing a loss
- and throwing good money in after bad. And so just trying to differentiate between the two. Like am I on tilt or do I actually believe that this is a good entry point and whatever else? So I would say the one thing this does do is it heightens my focus on earning money because like, oh, I need to earn money. I can't just rely on my investments completely. So like, what do you know? I got off my ass, I taught my course and I submit my invoice for the podcast. And I do things that I will bring cash in because otherwise, you know, it's easy to get lazy when everything's just going up so much.
- Right, there's many days where you could just look at your portfolio and just be like wow That was a whole year's worth of salary just today swing like swing up So that that kind of makes you kind of lazy to like do the work that day in a way, right? Because it's like oh well this if this just can earn that much money just doing nothing every day like Why do I need to go hustle for that? You know that next dollar? I feel like a lot of people are feeling that way. They're like, oh right. I have to work like this doesn't last forever Very healthy very healthy position to be it

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- I don't know if you know this, but Warren Buffett made like 97% of his wealth after the age of 55. So it all happens very slowly. He started in his 20s or whatever, and he wasn't really well known until the 90s. And the same thing happened with us where we didn't really talk about what we did. People would meet us and they'd be like, oh, you're some schmoes from Victoria who owns some digital agency. You seem to own all these really boring businesses, whatever. And so it requires being kind of underestimated and dismissed and playing a very boring game while watching everyone else go and make tens of millions, billions of dollars, taking risk in startups. Meanwhile, we're just going, how do we take 100 grand and make 10, 15, 20k a year on that money and just keep compounding? And so basically the mental model was take 70% of our profits and constantly reinvest, take the other 30% live a nice life. And that number went down over time. And yeah, you do that for 17 years and it turns into a big number.
- And something that you wanted to talk about today was whether it's better to own 100% of something and bootstrap it or to give up equity for partners, whether that's for sweat equity or money or money. But we were talking about that and I asked my audience companies that were bootstrapped and quite big. And there's a few that are doing billions a year in revenue. And I noticed two commonalities. One, a lot of the things that were bootstrapped to be really big, they were things that were easy to take baked loans against. So it's a lot of restaurant stuff. So maybe they took like loans against some equipment or they took loans against a building they owned, things like that. The second thing was.
- I've noticed that there's a lot of agencies that were bootstrapped and became pretty substantial-sized agencies or agencies or service-based businesses. So like recruiting companies, IT services, things like that where it's basically you bill out people's time for $100 and you charge $300 or something like that. Well, think about it. You don't need, especially if you're a young person and you've got enough money to live for a year, you can go and start an agency because at the end of the day, it's you go and sell, you win a contract. As soon as you win the contract, you go and find a developer or you do the work yourself. And then before you know it, you're cash flowing and you're always able to hire people just in time for the work. And so at the end of the day, there's really no burn and it's very capital efficient and you don't need-you don't even need an office anymore. I mean, we almost never had an office and you know, over time we had, you know, a couple small ones or whatever. But the big fuck up a lot of these big agencies make is they start starting like these fancy humongous $5 million offices in New York, San Francisco and Spain and you know, whatever. They're great businesses if you run them right. And how many people work at Metal Lab now?
- I think it's about 170. How often do you say to yourself, I'm not sure if the headache of having 170 employees is always worth it? It's very abstracted for me, right? I haven't been in the business for five or six years. The way we run Tiny now is that we meet with the CEO once a year and otherwise they check in whenever they need help with anything. When I was running it, first it's exhilarating. Running an agency is awesome. When you're starting out, you get a seat at the table and all these places you don't deserve to be. I was like a 22-year-old PIP squeak and I was meeting the founders of Pinterest and Slack and all these amazing places and they were asking me for my opinion. It was crazy. At a certain point you get so exhausted, you're making a good amount of money, you don't want to get on a plane to San Francisco every second day to go and sell. At that point, it starts to become a much more intensive business. For me personally, I don't enjoy running businesses after about 15 or 20 people. Once I hit that point, I knew I needed to transition to a CEO.
- So when we're in the document, you say the pros and cons of bootstrapping and owning 100%, what do you have under those? Well, I mean, I think that I've changed my opinion a lot on this. Like when I first started, I was like adjacent free, David Hahnemar-Hanson, Accolate, like 100% every business should be bootstrapped. I now think that's crazy and stupid. And I think there's certain businesses where it's insane not to raise money, right? If you have an opportunity to grow your business, it's like the analogy I always use is if you own a bakery and there's a line out the door and you have a single oven and you need to buy three more ovens, but you don't have the money. And in order to service the people in the line, you need to buy two more ovens, it's crazy not to raise money or go get dead or something. I just was never in that position. And I think owning 100% or owning majority in your business, it's like a dictatorship. And dictatorships can be very good, like Lee Kwan-Yoo from Singapore, or they can go terribly like Kim Jong-un, right? And the question is, what's your personality and what's going to work for you? I mean, you can move insanely fast. There's no board, there's no committee. You don't owe anyone anything. You don't have an outcome. You don't have to IPO. You don't have to sell. And you have total integrity. Like when Chris and I buy a business, we can look people in the eye and be like, we're cutting a check. Like this is us, right? That's very different. On the cons, I mean, you're on an island. You don't have anyone who's aligned and cares and can tell you you're being an idiot. And so you can really drive your business off the rails. And then you also think in a limited way. I mean, I know so many entrepreneurs who could 10x their business, but they're so addicted to their dividends or their conservative. And so they don't. So what about that conversation? It's just very new. It's like, I'm...
- I raise money for our podcasting software company Supercast. I'm gonna raise money for our news business. Like there are situations where it's logical. All right, and then I forgot to tell you this, but this is the most important thing. I can't believe we didn't talk about this earlier, to be honest with you. Because if you're listening to this and you like what you're hearing right now, and you haven't gone and subscribed to the My First Million Podcast wherever you get your podcast, then that's the thing you've got to do. There's nothing more important than doing that right now. And don't do it because I said to do it.
- Do it because you want to do it because that's who you are. What about that conversation of employees saying they want equity? And you don't give equity. Well, there's certain businesses where we do and there's certain ones where we don't, right? And the big question is, what I always say to an employee is equal risk, equal reward. And if the business is going to sell at some point or we think it can IPO, great. Love to talk about equity, but there's a cost to it. Right. If you want to make 300 grand a year and you don't want to give up any of that 300 grand in order to get stock options or buy equity, then it doesn't matter. So I love, I love giving people the option and saying, look, you can either give up some of your comp or upside or whatever and we'll give you stock options. Or you can get the big salary and prioritize cash. And a lot of people prioritize comfort and cash, I find, at least, you know, outside of the Bay Area.
- By the way, Andrew, you mentioned the guy from Singapore saying, do you know this guy leaked on you? I know a little bit about him. I didn't realize he was a dictator. I thought they called him like the CEO or something. Now he's literally a dictator. So like a good, the good dictator. Andrew, can you give us like the two minutes, two minute kind of summary of who this guy is and why he's awesome. So effectively he took over Singapore as like an island, tropical island state in Asia. But at the time it was like rice patties, poverty, like a bog. And he literally took it over, you know, had an autocracy, had total control. And he basically thought like a business person and was like, okay, how do we make this the most business friendly place? How do we optimize taxes? How do we ensure we have hyper competent government? How do we pay government really, really well? How do we incentivize the whole world to manufacture and export, you know, their products from here and basically built it into Asia's kind of outside of Hong Kong. I think it's like the central banking and finance hub in Asia. So it's a pretty incredible story. And I think he
- his background is like he's like a math and computer science guy, right? Like he doesn't come from kind of this like, you know Political background like he came from a different sort of background and I think that's why you got different ideas from from a leader in charge Totally you want to tell me something you I was gonna say you had one thing you tweeted out that's related to how you run the business at Tiny Which is this this higher one higher ten? framework what what is that I cuz that sounded interesting to me and I think that that's like From what I understood it was a pretty useful concept. So explain that
- Yeah, so our CEOs get super annoyed because I say this all the time. It's probably the number one thing I say. And it's probably the biggest hack that enabled us to build tiny over the last eight years. So I mean, think about it like this. So if you had an army general who is commanding a thousand troops, but he's still telling individual soldiers what to do and he's personally restocking their ammunition and he's shuffling people around, you'd be like, what the hell is this guy doing? Right? But I think a lot of people operate their business like this. I mean, I certainly didn't the early days. I would swoop and poop and instead of hiring a VP marketing, I would go and I'd hire a whole bunch of marketing people and just kind of become the VP of marketing. And or I'd bypass people and tell people what to do. And what I realized is you should never ever hire the 10 people. You should always focus on hiring the one person. So that could be a CEO who will then go out and hire all the executives or could be hiring an executive who will hire an entire team. But it's just it's such a hack, right? It's like 80 20. How do I do 20% of the work for 80% of the result?
- And yeah, I mean, it took me ages to figure this out. I feel like I've only cracked this in the last like five years. And I still, Chris will still catch me in this. He'll be like, hire one to hire 10. But when you hire that mistake all the time. And when you hire that one person, how much? So let's say your business is doing, let's say one million in revenue, it's small. No, let's say a little long, let's say 10 million in revenue, two million in like actual cashflow you have. You hired that one person, you pay them. A lot of money, $250,000. Do you only hire that $250,000 person when you know for a fact? You've got budget for like two more people.
- Yeah, that's my approach. That's why I've shifted to is like, I hire, you know, here's an example is like we hired the CEO of AeroPress and he asked me questions, oh, you know, what do you think about this hire or that hire? And I just said, that's your, you know, that's your hire. You know, I hired you. I trust you 100% you make those hires, right? And so it's complete delegation of, you know, when I buy a business, I make two decisions who runs it and how are they incentivized? And unless they do something dirty or horrible or the business goes to shit, you know, I just leave them to it. What's the trick on the, uh, how are they incentivized? So, so what's the
- How do you think about that when you buy a business? Do you say, all right, the business today is here. And I think naturally it's going to get to there. And I'm bringing on this person to get it to be some inflection above that. And I also know that things could go wrong. So how do you think about that incentive structure? Is it case by case you're coming up with very unique patterns or very unique packages or do you have kind of one base that you go off of? It's so different. I mean, like everyone's incentivized differently. There's certain people where, for example, they need to be able to say they're a partner and they have equity. There's other people who don't care about that and they want just targets to hit. I mean, we've done everything from saying, okay, let's say the business makes $100 million and it's growing at 15%. Anything you do over 15% growth, you get 5% of, right? That's in its simplest. We've also done things where it's like, hey, when the stock price hits X, you get a payment. And I remember, I got to have dinner with Charlie Munger like two years ago. And I was like, what's the perfect incentive structure? And he just said, I've done hundreds and everyone is different and I still don't know what works. I think it's really an art, not a science because different people are just so differently motivated. And you actually have like a stake. So you...
- Sorry, one more, Sam. When it's usually, usually when it's like, ah, it depends, there's, there's, that not that what that usually means is the winning formula is different a lot, but there's usually a common losing formula. So what is the common losing formula for incentives? The common losing formula is them not being aligned on risk. So for example, if they're able to use my money and I can keep injecting money into the business, but it in no way hurts them. So for example, they don't get diluted or they don't have to pay a high interest rate or, you know, if it goes bankrupt, they don't lose anything. That's a huge problem. And I've learned that over the last five years. And so now what I try and do is if somebody wants equity, I always make them right of check, right? Or I loan the money and it's literally a personal loan guaranteed by their house or something, right? And it's got, it doesn't, I don't want it to be so much money. It's going to ruin them or be a problem. But I, if someone wants equity, I'm like, okay, you got to put up something because if the business fails or goes down, you got to have a sense of loss. People feel a lot, people feel lost more than they feel game. I just imagine the Wilkinson moving truck coming in from the house is like, no, honey, it's all gone wrong. You have to come into your own furniture, your own art on the walls. They get to live there, but they have to know that it's your house now. And they truly have. We have done it. We have done it. We, I obviously, you know, I never want to do that. It's always structured in a way where it's not, you know, we're not going to have to take their car or something. But I just want, I want a feeling of like, there's got to be some downside, you know, Sam is going to take this way too far. He's going to take their car and it's like a punch cross. Like I need to punch you just because I'm going to punch you. Yeah, I love this game. You also speaking of that of risk, you also hire people really early. You told me, I don't know if you talked about this, but you were tinkering around with this bank. Do you want to talk about the bank? Can you mention the bakery or no?
- Yeah, well the bakery's kind of sad. No, sorry, not the bakery. The ghost kitchen. Ghost kitchen. You tinkered with this thing where you hired a baker and you were making stuff to sell on DoorDash and Uber Eats. And I don't know if it was entirely legal. So we don't have to talk about it. But the point I'm bringing up is that you- Well, no, I can tell the story. Well, tell the story and then let me ask my question. Sure. Basically, I'm pretty interested in health and stuff and I was trying to get off sugar. And so I went to a baker friend and I was like, look, can you try and make like sugar-free cookies using modern, there's all these like crazy modern sugars. Like devia sort of magic spoon. Yeah, like magic spoon uses alleolos and stevia and monk fruit and stuff. So we started making these and I was like, okay, these are like not as good as a chocolate chip cookie but they're like 90% there. And I bet you a lot of people would be into this as like a replacement, like think about Halo Top. It doesn't taste as good as ice cream. You can eat a fuckload of it and it's not bad for you in the same way. So I basically made that. We started making all these treats. We were cooking it out of our office, which is not technically legal. And what happened was I got a call from Island Health, which is like the local health authority. And they just said, hey, you're using an ingredient that's not approved in Canada. And unfortunately, Alulos is not approved in Canada. And so you just legally can't serve food with it, even though it's generally regarded as safe and everything. So I'm still gonna do it at some point, I think, but I just legally can't, it sucks. And I've never, it's insane to me, you can hit up against these regulatory issues. Like imagine being a real estate developer and like you have this amazing vision and then city council is just like, nope. Yeah, it sucks. That is insane to me as an internet entrepreneur. And that's what I was gonna ask. You hired a baker to do it, but then also with your newsletter business, your local news business, you hire, I forget the guy's name, but he's a nice guy. You've hired him to be the CEO. And so you hire people pretty, yes. And you hire people pretty early on. And hiring someone to do something to me is a huge risk, because in my head, I'm like, man, if this guy's got a kid, like I'm like, his kid's now kind of my kid too. It's like a big risk if he's quitting it. That's why I felt when my, one of my first employees got married, I was like, oh, I've got a family now. Cause I was like, some of the decisions I make are gonna impact this entire family. And that's really stressful. And it's also a huge conversation to convince someone who's in their 30s, 40s or whatever. And they're even in their late 20s to leave their fancy gig at Salesforce, to bail and come to my company that I'm gonna pay them $45,000. That's a huge thing. When I go to bed at night, that stresses me out. But you seem like you overcome that pretty easily. You hire people relatively early and you're like, yeah, it's no big deal. I'm just gonna hire this person.
- What's that like? Like, what are you thinking when you do that? All right, what's going on? Just a quick break, a quick interruption. Scroll down into the description box on YouTube, and you're gonna see a link to the hustle. The hustle is a daily email. It gives you all you need to know about business and tech news. I started it years ago, and it's awesome. It's kind of how this podcast got started. So check it out, the hustle. Scroll down, do it. Well, I've lost, I've messed that up a lot, and I think you guys know my whole story about losing $10 million building project management software. Like, that was a perfect example where I got ahead of myself. The business didn't make sense, and I threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, and none of it stuck, and I had to let a whole bunch of people go, and it was really horrible and sad, and it was like a 10 year slow death, right? So I've been through that. So now it's more, with the amount of scar tissue I have, I have enough signal where I can be like, okay, I'm gonna try this. And with the bakery, I was just contracting a friend, right? So that was the best example. I said, this is an experiment. With the news business, I actually ran it for three years before I partnered with Farhan, and he took over as CEO, and by that point, there was enough signal, it was slapping me in the face, I was like, this is a big opportunity.
- And is that the case with all the things that you start? We take that bomb. Yeah, usually, like if I go in, I hire a CEO, I'm pretty high conviction that there's something there. Or there's already a business that supports, has cash flow. What I would never do is be like, hey, there's, you know, I have an idea for this. I'll just go hire a CEO. Like I would never do that. Andrew, I feel like you've reached this point. And I used to be like, how did these motherfuckers do this? Where I remember I was doing a startup. And it was so hard to get my one thing to work. And then I would meet people who were like, oh yeah, so I have that past success, then I have my current success. And then here's my three side successes. That I had this idea, then we just started doing it. And then guess what, the line's out the door. And then this other one, it's like kind of cool. We just started it, you know, like I accidentally, you know, my hand just fell on my keyboard. And I accidentally wrote this app. It was amazing. It went viral. And then there's other thing that I just tweeted about. And then this all coming together nicely. And I just remember being like, what? Do they know something I don't know? Is there just like extreme luck component?
- And I felt that way for many years, five, six years straight when I was pushing the boulder up the hill with my startup. And then I now have experienced exactly what the thing that I was most jealous of and I have no idea what switched in between where like the last five things I've tried have all worked and all worked pretty much immediately. And that doesn't matter how big or small like, you know, whether it's like the podcast or the course or, you know, the, my e-commerce business or my, the new milk road, newsletter business, like each of these has just worked straight away in a bigger way than anything I'd ever done before.
- with less work and less stress than like the old stuff I used to do and I have no idea what changed. Well, I have a kind of an inkling, but I don't really know. Sam, have you ever thought about this? Are you what I'm talking about? And what do you think? I know exactly what you're talking about. And I completely agree. You're on a roll right now. And what's your inkling? I have a feeling of my my my answer is it's kind of like a shitty. It's like a mindset, like abundance attitude and being on being on offense versus defense. But what's your what's your what's your inkling? So my inkling is that.
- I switched up my situation. So like I was in one situation for a very long time. Like it was a nice situation. It was a very nice situation. But it was like, I was going to this office every day, working with these people in this hierarchy with this boundary box of like what projects or projects we can work on and like what success might look like. And as soon as I got out of that and I was just me, I was like, oh, okay. So now that it's just me that I have to look out for, I guess I could just do a podcast and didn't have to have like this big venture billion dollar outcome. I didn't have 20 engineers to go tell what to do. I had no engineers. So I just did what I could do with no engineers, which was like, I'll do a podcast. I'll do a course. I'll do, I'll just try to get big on Twitter. Let's see what happens. And oh, you know, like five tweets go viral and boom, got 200,000 followers. It's like, there's these things that I just wasn't doing before because I think before I had a really set thing of like, here's what I need to do. Like here's the only way to win. And I had like almost too much ammo. I had like too many people at my disposal, too much funding, too much everything. And because of that, I had a very narrow window of what could work. And so I was just trying to come up with ideas that might work versus, oh, let me just try this because I'm, I just kind of want to try it. And then once I got into, I just kind of want to try it. And I didn't have it, I didn't have to worry about what other people thought or I didn't have to come in and manage anybody in that day and tell them what to do. I didn't have like investors to go pitch to. I just did the thing. And then all of a sudden I feel like, you know, sort of like all the talents that had been building up over the past 10 years, like finally got to just do them.
- Yeah. Don't you think it's like dating or something though where it's like you date a couple crazy girls and it's really exhilarating. And then over time you're like, wow, that was horrible. And there's pattern matching. You're like, okay, when I go to a restaurant and a girl's rude to the waiter, that's a no. Right? And in the same way with business, you go, oh, okay, like I used to think I wanted to build all these kinds of businesses, but those were 10 foot hurdles. I don't want to jump 10 foot hurdles. I want to jump one foot hurdles. And so if you think about it, all the stuff you're doing, they're in your circle of competence and they're relatively simple to execute. They don't require a lot of people. They don't require funding. I think learning that is like a 15 year overnight success kind of thing where it just clicks suddenly. And I'll catch myself occasionally getting pulled down rabbit trails of like, oh, what if I did this crazy, you know, drone AI startup, whatever, but then I always go back to base hits. And I think there's a.
- There's this third component. We'll go ahead. You go ahead. All right. Oh my god. What's going on? We're like, all right, I'm going to go. There's this third component of confidence. And so I think that because of like my work, I've been more confident and I understand like, well, if I invest a dollar here, I think I can make at least $3 the next two years. So like just understanding how machines like money making machines work investments. But then also, I think Sean, because we get to hang out with, we hang out with each other. We hang out with Andrew. We hang out with our circle of friends. We hang out with all the people we've had speak at our events. We hang out with our podcast guests. It becomes more normal. Like succeeding has become far more normal than not succeeding actually. And not succeeding is just like, oh, yeah, it's going to happen. But then you just move on and do the next thing. And it's like, and then inevitably it works. So it's not if it's or it's not when it's if. And I think that confidence has actually helped a ton where. So for example, now if someone wants to like real estate is an easy one because it's so predictable, but with real estate, you're like, oh man, putting $100,000 down on this house is a lot of money. That's a, you know, that's six figures. It's like, well, dude, but it's going to make 12%. It's like, well, I don't know that. And I'm like, yeah, I know, but it's going to do that. So you actually want to invest more. So like that confidence of just knowing the motions and knowing the routine and process has actually helped a lot.
- Totally. Yeah, the other thing I was going to say is, which is what you guys both just said, but frame differently is I was taking a shitload of market risk before. And now I basically take almost no market risk. I just take execution risk. And before, even if I felt like I executed great, which I did, I feel like I did in a couple of the projects that we had done during my kind of like the previous startup, the market risk was too high. Like there was just no, it was like inventing a new fucking like new science, you know, on a new land. And it was just the market risk was way too high. Now I'm just doing things that are like, oh, I just know that this works and I just need to do it well. So it's like e-commerce is nothing. There's no.
- fancy science to it. And I had buddies who did it and I just used their model and I just did my own lane of their model. Milk Road is the hustle, but in the crypto lane, which is the lane I like, right? It's like, I just took your blueprint for the hustle and I just copy pasted over here. And also execution risk from there. I know dude, I saw that you literally copy and pasted the Twitter handle. It was hilarious. Your Twitter description is literally copy. I sent you some old resources from the hustle and we call ourselves your smart, good looking friend or something who tells you everything you need to know about. You just copy that and you put it's in a business attack. You just put like delete crypto or something like that.
- And actually the thing is it wasn't even, you know why I did that. I remember seven years ago or eight years ago when you first said that to me and the very first like, you know, like you kind of sat me down here like, look, people are not people are age like we don't watch MSNBC and like CNN and this stuff for our information. That's not the brand we trust. And you said it. You're like, I just want to be like, they're smart. And remember you said it. I just want to be like your smart, no bullshit friend who just explained and tells you what's going on. I like it clicked with me eight years ago. And so when it came time to do this, I was like, that's the exact description. The smart, no bullshit friend.
- I think one more thing Andrew is that I look at, I used to, you kind of said that Andrew and in terms of like financial success, which is a big, but not only measure of success, Andrew, you're like a grand slam at the moment. You know, you're, you're, I imagine you're incredibly wealthy and you've built businesses that are incredibly large. So by that measure of success, you are like way out there. And for a while, I think I like, you're like mystical to me where I'm like, how does he doing this? Now it's changed to where I think I acknowledge that you definitely have talent that makes you special. You for sure have skills that make you special, but really a lot of it is also, I don't know what percentage of it is each, but let's just say a third, a third, a third of it is, well, he's just been doing it for like 15 years now or a certain amount of time. And he just like took the risk of raising or building the business and then he raised the money a little bit for the fun. And so it's not a matter of like, how is he doing is doing this is just like, well, if I want that life, like I probably could do it. I just have to dedicate 15 or 20 years and go through the same motions that he does. And that mayor may not fit the what I like.
- The interesting thing is, I don't know if you know this, but Warren Buffett made like 97% of his wealth after the age of 55. So it all happens very slowly. He started in his 20s or whatever, and he wasn't really well known until the 90s. And the same thing happened with us where we didn't really talk about what we did. People would meet us and they'd be like, oh, you're some schmoes from Victoria who owns some digital agency. You seem to own all these really boring businesses, whatever. And so it requires being kind of underestimated and dismissed and playing a very boring game while watching everyone else go and make tens of millions, billions of dollars, taking risk and startups. Meanwhile, we're just going, how do we take a hundred grand and make 10, 15, 20k a year on that money and just keep compounding? And so basically the mental model was, take 70% of our profits and constantly reinvest, take the other 30% live a nice life, and that number went down over time. And yeah, you do that for 17 years and it turns into a big number. Ironically, I still feel just as at risk and terrified as I did 15 years ago. You think that's real? And I think it's the classic thing of... You're not actually scared. Yes, I do. I have liquidity now and I'm scared, but I'm like, am I as scared as when I only had $20,000 in my bank account? I can't just do it. No, no, no, no, but it's maybe it's different for me because I have an... For if you told me 10 years ago how much cash we have or what our cash flow is, it would blow my mind and I'd say, how could you ever feel at risk? The problem is that the stakes are bigger. We have almost a thousand employees now, right? So there's a lot more, there's the stuff that can go wrong. Do I feel that I've built out a castle with a whole bunch of moats and stuff? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm better diversified than I was 10 years ago, but there's still that kind of dust bowl farmer mentality, right? It's actually something I wanna talk about. Like, just we all kind of have this feeling of like...
- The way I'd put it is I started chopping wood just because I was anxious, right? Like 15 years ago in my backyard and my neighbor pokes his head over the fence and he's like, hey, can you chop some wood for me? For my fire, I'll give you 20 bucks. And I'm like, okay, amazing. I didn't know this was a business. And then before I know it, I've hired three or four buddies. We're all chopping wood in the backyard. We're a married band. We're selling to the whole neighborhood. It's awesome. I love it. And then one day, 15 years later, I wake up and I'm in a sawmill. And I own 15 sawmills.
- And all I do all day is file papers, but there's still this part of me that beats myself up for not chopping wood. I still have this mindset, even though all the machines do all the labor, there's still this part of me that's constantly saying you need to chop wood, you need to chop wood. And so I think you're gonna, you know, you guys have this for sure, like, doesn't matter how much you have, how diversified, whatever it is, you have a need to do labor and there's an anxiety that you're harnessing to perform. That's a good ass analogy.
- I'm not gonna lie, the first 30 seconds while you're explaining it, I thought you legitimately took up wood chopping as a hobby. And I was like, oh, that's cool. It must be cathartic. And then I realized I was inside of a Charlie Munger, a Warren Buffett analogy, like parable. You had this thing on here that's pretty cool. Bad guys usually win. As a bad guy myself, I would love to hear how this, what you mean by this? Oh man. Dude, thank you, bad guy.
- I don't think you're a bad guy. I'm just joking, but go ahead. I think a bad guy is a fun con artist who lies. I call myself a bad guy. I call myself a bad guy. Rather than calling myself a good guy and having all the comments on YouTube tell me I'm a bad guy. It's easier just to call myself a bad guy and have people tell me the opposite. Or bad meaning, not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good. That's how it is. So I'm sure you guys have had this experience. I'll kind of anonymize this story. In this case, it's a bad girl. Bad girls usually win. So this happened to me almost 10 years ago. I was really overwhelmed. I was running five businesses. I got introduced to this older woman and she had just sold her business for 20 million bucks. Super successful. And she kind of says, hey, I'll mentor you. I'll help you out. And so she comes over to my office. We start whiteboarding and I'm just like, holy crap, this person is a genius. She could help me so much. And so first she's an advisor and mentor. And then eventually she's like, hey, how about I come in and I'll help you with marketing and sales. And so I inject her into the business. She starts killing it. Like business takes off, everything going great. But I did zero diligence, right? She legitimized herself by being this super successful person. And because she was so successful, I was just grateful to have her. She was like a miracle and made all these problems go away for me. And then suddenly the cracks started appearing. So people started saying she was lying. She was spending money in weird ways. There, you know, her expenses were out of control, you know, staying in crazy hotels, all sorts of stuff. And it turned out that she was lying and like falsifying documents. She hadn't sold her business. She wasn't rich or successful. And when I called a bunch of people that she'd worked with in the past, like a bunch of them had had terrible experiences, right? So we fired her, we move on. And I'm in this very odd spot where ethically, you know, I want to be like, okay, this is a bad person. I want to shoot up a flare and I want to be like everybody watch out, right? And I'm thinking like, okay, you know, people, diligence her, they'll call me, you know, she won't be able to keep, you know, pulling this off. But legally, I don't know what it's like in the US, but in Canada, when someone calls you for a reference call, you're quite limited. You can basically just say, you know, I wouldn't work with them again and do your diligence. And so people would call. I usually say, yeah. And I used to like, I'm not a lot of talk about it.
- And they get the hint. Right, that's smart. I said a bunch of stuff like that. Like, you know, I would never work with this person again. It's one of the worst professional experiences of my life, whatever. But almost always those people go on to work with them. And you realize these people are just incredibly charming. And they always assume you're the better ex-girlfriend, right? Cause they've obviously buttered you up and told some story. And so this woman, you know, I see her on LinkedIn and she's still succeeding and going every year she's somewhere new. And, you know, people like this, they don't get super rich. They're so short term. And if they only knew how much money you could make by not being a crook, they would probably be ethical. But it just, it was so sad to me. And I wanted, my sense of justice was like, I gotta put a stop to this. And you just realize like, no, like you just have to let go, never wrestle a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it. And so, you know, these people are out there and they continue to succeed. And unless they're Elizabeth Holmes and they get, you know, in the Wall Street Journal, they're fine.
- I want to know who the person is. I will never say. You had another example of a guy at a famous company who you had some fraud or you had some issues of people not being honest as well. Remember you told me about that one, folk? I don't know which one that is. I mean, look at like you guys talked about Navin Jain on a podcast, maybe like 10 episodes ago. There's a perfect example. There's this guy who basically did a pump and dump. That's my understanding. A ledged, a ledged pump and dump. These people go on unless they're criminally indicted. Even people who are criminally indicted, look at Michael Milken. Michael Milken was literally front running his own investors committing tons of outright fraud that if you or his investor you would hate, went to jail for 10 years and now he's lauded as a philanthropist. How about I always win? Do you know the guy? Do you guys know? I think his name is Garbash. He's G is what people would call him. I think he's Indian and Indian guy, Indian American. He started a thing called gravity something. What was it called? Gravity four. Gravity four. And then he started another one called like Radium, Blue Radium. Is that what it was?
- And he got arrested, he was on Oprah as this like, you know, uh, 150 million dollar man under 30 or something like that. Like the best bachelor, most available bachelor, all this stuff. He's good looking guy. He got in trouble three, two or three different times, both times he basically locked his girlfriend in their apartment and it was, there was a camera there. I don't know what he was thinking. And he was hitting her and just being an, I mean, he's just a horrible guy. He was arrested, spent time in, in, uh, jail months, got out, raised money again for starting the same company. Now he's overseas because he's kind of burned all of his bridges here in San Francisco and America. He's overseas. I think he's raised money again for another ad tech company.
- This is the hard part is if someone is a, I mean, typically someone who does bad things, like truly unethical things, they're either a psychopath or a narcissist, and they're very, very charming. They're very compelling. They're fun to hang out with. They're fascinating. They're great to listen to. It's hard not to like them. I mean, one actually heuristic after having that experience is I actually had a company that I looked at investing in, and I liked the CEO so much, and he was so compelling that I didn't invest. It made me suspicious, right or wrong. I was just like, I left the meeting and I was like, I would buy anything from this guy, and I just want to give him all my money right now. And I stopped myself and I was like, this is that feeling. Don't invest, right? I probably made a mistake, but maybe I'm too concerned, but it's crazy. No, I'm the same way, and I'm willing to throw out the good with the bad, just to steer clear of the bad because I know how intoxicating.
- that type of grifter is. And I've actually put in some, like you talked about air gapping for security purposes. I've now done that on decision making for some investments as well. Like, Andrew, you sent out an email to us and me, Sam, a couple others about a business that you're raising money for. And it's a really great email. Like it's a truly great email. I gotta give you a lot of credit and I actually wanted to ask you. Sam, Sam helped me with that. Oh, okay. I was gonna ask you what goes into writing an email like that. I'm there the master copy right here. You have a secret weapon, okay.
- So I put the record to the record, which is, I barely touched it, I barely touched it. I read it and it was like, this is actually great. And it wasn't like, oh, the writing, wow, this sentence structure was so fantastic, right? Obviously that helps, but it was the thinking. It was the way of framing the business and the opportunities, telling how you stumbled into the opportunity, your analogy to, you know, you can believe this if you want to, Chipotle, you really did a good job of framing this business. And it was so good, in fact, that I said, I am not gonna reply to this for like at least 48 hours because,
- If I read this email, I'm gonna say, give this person my money instantly. It was almost like whatever out of 10 the business opportunity was, it was a 10 out of 10 pitch. And I actually, when I look back at businesses that I invest in, that go on to do well, it's usually actually a nine out of 10 business opportunity with a sort of five out of 10 pitch. And in fact, it's only midway through the conversation with this person that I'm like, oh, wait, so you basically have X? And they're like, yeah, I'm like, well, why didn't you just say that? And they're like, well, no, I did kind of, right? And I was like, oh, dude, you have no idea how to pitch your own business? But that, to me, once that happens, I know, wow, I'm actually like, I underweighted the opportunity because the pitch was so bad versus overweighting a business opportunity because the pitch is so good. And that's become like a standard practice. Yours was just one example, but that's become a standard practice for me of like,
- Beware of the 10 out of 10 pitch. Beware of the 10 charm person that you want to hire or that's going to help you with your business. The biggest one that I've seen is you get this uber charming pitch and then you say, okay, what could go wrong? And they say nothing. And you're just like, no, this isn't saying, this is terrifying. I've had like five or six different pitches where that was the one signal and it went to zero or bankrupt or criminal. How's the news business going? It's good. It's really good actually. We just hit a profit in my hometown in Victoria, our first market. We're now in eight different cities and I'm super stoked about it as you can witness based on that email. That email, how?
- How quickly does, because you might have a knack for just understanding and framing businesses. That's probably a superpower of yours. I think he has that. How quickly did that come together for you? How quickly did I write it? It's something I've been thinking about and kind of talking about a little bit publicly for two or three years now. So I had all the analogies and stuff formed. But I mean, I wrote that in like an hour or two and then Sam just helped me touch it up. And then my typical writing structure is I'll write something at first draft and then I'll sit with it for two weeks.
- or something like that. So I sat with it for a week and then finally I sent it out. But it's crazy. I don't know if you guys get this. Something that drives me insane is I get all these emails from people who are raising money and it's literally just a template. It almost looks like they're sending it out with Salesforce or something. The formatting is wrong. It's generic. It's not properly addressed to me. I always think what I was trying to do with that email is I wanted the first sentence to hook you. I think the first sentence in that email was, in 2019 I was pissed off. Line one, you're like, what's he pissed off about? What's going on? There's a bit of a hook. Nobody knows how to use those copywriting tools to pitch in written form. I think a lot of people are very good at pitching in an actual pitch setting or whatever. But yeah, it's been a great tool to be able to do those tweet storms and emails and stuff. The most important sentence of anything you're right.
- It's the first sentence. This is something. Well, I love that one. What's the line that you said? Let me be very clear, right? And you're just like, oh, shit. Like this person means business. What's going on here? Yeah, so it was fucking good at this. And in fact, I made the criminal mistake when I asked you this question, which is, if you go to Michael Jordan and you say, Mike, how do you jump so high? He'll, if he's being nice, he'll try to answer something. But it's not going to actually tell you, and the same thing, how do you, you know, Steph, Steph Curry, how do you shoot your jump shot to be, and how do you shoot better than anybody else? People who are truly great at something, they have very low awareness to the actual, like, how, why, and what is making it so great. And there is a way to ask questions about greatness, but it's not, how do you do the thing you're great at? Because people will sort of fumble around and they'll try to tell you something, but it really has nothing to do with how they do the great thing. Like, for example, what you did great in that email was first you decided to not make it a template.
- That decision probably comes from you, some way that you view the world and that observation you had about pitches that were coming to you that most people just don't have. The second thing was when you framed the business, you used the analogy of these local franchises. That was because you had studied other great businesses. Just for fun, you probably studied the business of Chipotle and McDonald's and other businesses, not that you were ever gonna start a restaurant, but you stored that somewhere in the recesses of your mind and so when you saw something else that was a local franchise, you knew how to apply that. And so it's very hard to actually describe what goes into the art of making that happen. Well, not only that, but being able to communicate a moat, why does this have a competitive advantage? And in this email, I kinda go through the history of the news business, local news, why local news is so much more, why it has a better moat, right? And you think about it and you go, why would that be interesting? 50,000 people to 300,000 person cities, that seems like a small market, but in reality, it's the stuff nobody wants. You're fishing where the fish are off the beaten path and you can dominate a local market. You've always done this, so I actually read your email when you sent it to me in Google Drive and I was like, oh, this is really good. I'm gonna, because I was putting it in this course where I just like aggregate good writing and I sent it to people and I was like, oh, I'm gonna use some more of this stuff, let's see what's out there. And I went and read all your stuff on Medium and I think there's like 10 or 12 things or something. And you've filed the same format over and over again, which you clearly are influenced by Warren Buffett and you're influenced by like traditional storytelling techniques, but if you go to your Medium, you're actually pitching your business on Medium constantly. You're just not actually, there's just no call to action. So you don't actually care if it seals a deal, but there's like things where you have a headline called, you didn't mean to do this, but you could have done this. So it could have been we're raising a million dollars for our company, but instead you made the headline, where the headline was, Joe Rogan could be the world's first podcasting billionaire. Is that what it was at? Was that it?
- No, it was he got it's Joe Rogan first is Joe Rogan got ripped off which is funny because he just signed a hundred and twenty million Yeah, that's what I was counter So that was it was a good-ass headline and then you explain so that the emotion there was shock Which always does really well so you're shocked like what the hell you're saying that he got low ball A hundred million dollars is so much money and you're like no, you see it's nonsense You see how it's certain does this Rogan could have done this it just so happens that we have a company that does that I know about it and then like if you wanted a call to action So you have your attention interest desire already there if you want your action to make this a full-ada formula You could have been like ps for rate of course you can't do this is illegal but you go to the ps for raising money for our company and See this is this is like you've you've always said like the most valuable skill is Constrating I think both you guys have said that like a hundred percent I I truck up the only reason metal I've worked was because we would pick fights We'd write these controversial articles and we knew how to like we if there's one thing I'm good at it's just like taking taking a boring topic and just finding a wedge and Getting people going on it and that always results in people knowing of you and passing your name around and you become a topic of conversation And it led in our case to lots of client work and other stuff So I think everyone needs to read the book made to stick that was the book that like really clicked for me I don't know if you guys ever
- Totally. And it's that one, the first line, the first line just has to hate you. The, um, the best thing you do. So, so I think, uh, if I was going to break it down, the middle of your writing is, is like inspired by our influence by, you know, some, some ways Warren Buffett, but your, his stuff is very dry, right? Warren Buffett grew up without the clickbait generation. He doesn't need to do that. Uh, but like 37 signals. So like D H H or Jason freed, like to me, you're writing so similar to theirs that I can tell, you know, that was like a, you know, pretty major influence on
- it. And one thing that they do amazingly well is they will basically pick a fight while simultaneously taking the moral high ground. And I think you do that amazingly well too. What I mean by that is you'll say like, you know, Joe Rogan got ripped off, but you're not criticizing Joe Rogan. You're actually saying, you know, Joe, you sold yourself short and an artist and a creator like you should not sell yourself short for some to some company who's going to take advantage of you here. And so you're taking the moral high ground while picking, you know, going against the grain and like sort of doing a call out, which is amazing. Most call outs just basically it's somebody, you know, slingshotting from the crowd. And you know, they're sort of a sniper that's like, you know, angry at them. And so I've never been able to do this, but I've noticed that you do this and 30 semesters, it was just amazing. They say Facebook is overvalued. And they'll talk about why Facebook is overvalued. And then they'll talk about, you know, like, we're sorry, we're just the kind of guys that like businesses have actual revenues and profits, but you know, call us crazy. And so they're taking the moral high ground and they're saying that this Facebook valued it at the time. It was famously like, why billions of dollars? I would argue, I would argue those guys would not be where they are today without copyright. And I think that's like the sawdust from their sawmill, right? It's like, Hey, we got fucked on the app store. What would most people do? Okay, we'll just go in with Apple. They use that as the biggest marketing opportunity ever. They were on every talk show. They were their names were everywhere. I mean, they also got kind of canceled as well. So there's a cost to that. But they've done an amazing job. And that's 100% where I learned it. I worship those guys for years. I call it like the Malcolm Gladwell effect. So with Malcolm Gladwell, you read his books and you have to remember that a lot of what he's saying is just theory. There's no, there's some proof that it's real, but it's not proven. And but he's such a good storyteller that you think like, Oh, what you're saying is just a fact. Like, has he ever heard a story about David and Goliath? It's wonderful. And he likes to he's like, actually, David and Goliath wasn't that hard of a contest, because turns out Goliath was like mentally challenged or like had some issues where he like, and he's also blind. Couldn't see he like he had this thing where he was so big that it ruined it. Like giganticism or something like that. And then also, like David was a shepherd and they're actually so good at throwing these rocks that they could take a bird out of the sky. So it's really like, but basically taking a big dumb blind giant and shooting him in the head with a gun. That's not hard. And like, that's his argument about he's like, David Goliath, it's nonsense. And
- Is he right? I don't, there's no proof who knows. Is David and Klytheven real? We don't even know that. But you like hear this story that changes you. But the problem that I have with Basecamp and other good writers, and this is something that you have to be really careful of, I work on all the time. I'm like, I can be such a good storyteller that I can get you to things that something's real, even though like, I'll tell you, but there's no proof. But like, I'm gonna write it in such a way. And Basecamp does this all the time where they say, well, they'll write something and I'm like, oh, this is the truth. This is how the world is. Where it's like, well, no, let's forget. This is an opinion. Right.
- Totally. And there's lots of nuance and going back to what we were talking about with bootstrapping, I read all their stuff, I drank the Kool-Aid and I love those guys. They've built an amazing business, but you can't just have that perspective. It's very nuanced. There's, you know, like I said, there's so many situations where it is logical to raise money. And if you talked to DHH 10 years ago, he'd say sales force and Facebook will be bankrupt in 10 years and this doesn't make sense. And again, I love these guys. And I know them both. They're awesome guys, a huge fan, wouldn't have built my business without them. But I do think they present everything in a very black and white way, which I think benefits them because it makes them more compelling. No one wants to hear nuance.
- This has been a good pod. What do you think, Sean? Yeah, it was good. There's, I mean, there was a couple others we wanted to do, but we're way over. So we should, uh, we should wrap it and do another one soon. I know we didn't get it. Yeah. I think we got like, we have like, we have like 20 topics to do. So it's like, here's the five pillars of happiness. Like, do I want to be happy? I should probably ask about that one. Like I would like to be happy. And then the Jamie Dyson thing, there was the whole, you wanted to come on because you're like, I read this book about Dyson. I want to come talk about it. We didn't even talk about it. Oh man, I'm so excited to talk about him. He's incredible. Ah, well, let's do it. Let's do another one. Unless you have time. I don't know. We could, we keep going if you want, but otherwise, let's do another one and we'll do Dyson and its mothers.

Brainstorming Million Dollar Ideas with Elaine Zelby ｜ My First Million Ep. -175 [hQTZDC47MN8].txt

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- By the way, by the way, first unicorn officially today. Well, my one of my angel investments officially raised at over a billion dollars. All right, everyone, we have a great episode. But first, before we get into it, I've got a huge favor. There's this new feature in the iTunes store. So I want to show it to you. I want to be able to first use it. So go type in my first million or hopefully you're already are. If you're not, if you're on an Android, you could ignore this for now. Or you get, no, matter of fact, you can do this or Spotify. So go to your iTunes store right now or your podcast app. My apologies podcast app type in my first million and find our podcast. And then you're going to see a button. It should be blue on podcasts and it says subscribe. Click that button and something really amazing is going to happen. And I want you to tweet at me, the Sam Parr with a picture of that. And we're going to you're going to see his brand new feature that Apple just relaunched. It's a really cool hack that we just discovered. So click that button and tell us what's happened. This is what they were talking about in the keynote yesterday, right? Yeah, it's like a big deal. Only a few people got access to it. I knew a guy and I got access to it. So go ahead and click that subscribe button. And if you're in Spotify, I talked to Daniel L. He actually they're releasing something to click the button. So the cousin of Daniel X, the actual founder. Spotify, right? It's their cousin. It's a Norwegian thing or, you know, a Swedish thing, whatever he is. It's a Scandinavian thing. Anyway, today we've got a great episode. Sean, who do we have? We had Elaine Zillow.
- be on, she's a VC at SignalFire. And more importantly, she is an idea woman. So she has a sub stack that's three new ideas every week, very much like what we do. She also does this thing called, I don't know what it's called, but it's a podcast about boring businesses like unsexy. It's called unsexy. It's about like, you know, oh, you run a chemical plant, tell me about that, you know, so things like that. So very much in line with what we do, we had a bunch of, we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. So we talked about ideas, the adulting fault, we'll tell you what that is. The smooth
- sleep bed for adults. Therapunch was one of the ideas, a subscription to company idea. And then we also... That's one of the startup SaaS bundle. That was the best one. Start up SaaS bundle. And also she kind of gave us a peek under the hood of it. Signal Fire has this thing that's like a data machine that spits out like, you know, great investments using all 27 different data signals. And we were kind of asked her like, hey, is that bullshit? Is that just marketing? Seems like it's just marketing. Is that bullshit? And she gave a pretty good response. So we kind of talked about that as well.
- All right, we're gonna get to the episode, but first remember go to the podcast store, click that button that says subscribe, and then you have to send me a picture on Twitter, the Sam Parr, and you're gonna see this new feature that Apple released. I promise it's gonna be worth it, so make sure everyone does it right now. Thank you. So, Elaine, hey, what's going on? I'm Sam Parr. We haven't met. I think you were on the podcast before when I was sick. Yes. So, Sam, last time she was on, she had one idea that, well, two ideas, one that went kind of like semi-viral. That was the milk bombs.
- idea of like a functional milk bomb. I don't know if you even know what that means. Like, yeah, you get the picture. Basically, you dunk a little, like a bath bomb. You dunk it into your milk and it sort of has a little fizzy color, whatever experience. And you're adding some. Adaptogen. Adaptogen or Neutropic or whatever to your milk. Cause that's kind of interesting. People like that one a lot. But now that we have like these viral video people. Oh, and we're gonna hold on to the level now. Yeah, should we ask her to do that? Cause that's like a pretty virally thing. But sorry, go ahead. We'll do that one a bit. And the other one I really liked was
- Fantasy football for stocks. So basically creating a little game, like let's say we could create a game, me, you, Andrew, whoever. And we get our budget, we allocate it into a portfolio that you get to change it every month or so. And then we see whose portfolio would have performed the best. So like Fantasy football, where you get points based on the ups and downs of the stock. So a very social, you're not actually investing. It doesn't have to be real money. A very social way to be gambling or betting on stocks. What do you think of that one, Sam? I used to do that as a kid. Didn't we do that as a kid in like class? There was a thing back in like seventh grade. I think everybody did this one fantasy portfolio for like a month at school.
- But it was pretty rudimentary then, and it never made its way out. So I think somebody who worked at Yahoo Fantasy Football, it should just basically fork everything they learned about how to make Yahoo Fantasy Football viral and be like, cool, I'm going to do that, except instead of the Patriots, it's going to be Amazon and Tesla and what not. Did you folks, have you guys used, is it called the, they were one of our sponsors, was it Weebl? What's the Israeli Coinbase competitor?
- Israeli coin base really yeah, they're big one of those words is wrong Coinbase it's an exchange crypto. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like a rock both coin base. Well, yeah We funder is that what you're talking about or like people that's a crowdfunding But they I think it's we bowl But they have this feature. So basically it's like a stock investing. Oh, I know Jima. We bowl like BULL Yes, is it we bowl? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Is that the one but anyway, they have this feature where they have this thing where you can sign up and you can choose to share your Portfolio with anyone and people can copy you and I thought that was kind of amazing It's kind of like turns and you'd be like invest in their fund And I don't even think they make any money off of it But it's just like a bunch of these that came out in the last I don't know two years Elaine You've probably seen all of them public came out as like one of the Robinhood competitors where it's like a social network a social feed where you can see what people are investing in
- Then there's the more extreme versions like what you're talking about like doji I think is one of them and in doji I create kind of like my little basket of stocks And I call it you know the Shawn index and you could just straight up buy the Shawn index and you can invest in all my stocks And I get kind of like it's like my index becomes more popular because you've invested in it And you trust me and it like shows that you follow it or you invested in it Well in 2017 so Eric Voorhees who was the guy that created shapeshift he actually created Satoshi dais He was super super early in the crypto space
- He launched something that never got out of private beta called prism and you could create a basket of tokens This is when all the altcoins started popping up on ethereum And you could show so it could be you know Shawn's basket of tokens and Sam's and you could watch and I could follow you and I could just invest in your basket of tokens But it was a competition too, and I thought it was such a great idea I'm not sure why it never got off the ground, but it was cool. I dinged it. Can I ask you Elaine? What is signal fire? I'm on your website like Your landing page is
- I want whatever you're selling, but I'm still a little confused as to what it is. So we do that a little bit on purpose. We are a venture capital firm, but we're actually structured and operate a lot more like a technology company. So if you look at our team, we're about a third engineers and data scientists building products. We're about a third people on our platform. These are the in-house business people doing PR recruiting growth, and then we have investment. And we essentially monetize via the investment vehicle, and we're currently investing on our fund three, which is $500 million. But we don't have capital in the name. We don't have ventures in the name. We definitely try to be a little bit more start-up-y than the traditional VC.
- But are you using, like on your web page, on the landing page, it's like you guys use some type of data to spot trends. Is that- Yes. So we buy scrape or, you know, aggregate every data signal you could possibly imagine. And our engineers have proprietary algorithms that use that data to do one of two things. One, we have different systems that are alerting systems for us on the investment side. So they pull in all these signals and they try to show us at seed, at series A and at series B, who are the cool companies? Who we'd be looking at? And also trends around markets and things like that, fundraising trends. And then we have a bunch of products for the portfolio around talent migration, talent movement, who's good, who's in market from a hiring perspective, competitive intel, co-spend analysis, market intel, all that kind of stuff. Do you- So like when a lot of people, like when Sean and I probably have both started our things, which like granted our part- By the way, by the way, first unicorn officially today, my one of my angel investments officially raised at over a billion dollars. Although I got to say, it's not super exciting because it's a company I was trying to invest in from the seed. But at this point, I wasn't like a- I was running my company. I wasn't like- I only wanted to invest because I thought it was a great idea and I liked the founder. But I like forgot to follow up. And then like, oh, I followed up. He's like, ah, dude, we closed that like two months ago. Sorry. I'll get you in the A.
- And then when the A came around, it was like, Oh dude, it's super competitive. Sorry, I'm not gonna be able to get you in. So finally he messaged me, he was like, Hey man, I'm gonna make sure I get you in this time. I feel like I fucked you over. Once you missed it the first time, we're definitely gonna get you in here in the, I don't know, the B round at a $200 million valuation. I was like, bro, $200 million. I knew you were a baby here. This is way too high. All right, fuck it, I'm in. And so that company is now worth over $1 million. Which company? I don't know if I could, well, we'll say, I might blip it out. Well, you have to tell. We may have to believe it out because you may not have announced it yet, but it's a company called Deal. And they do. My husband and I were talking about that one this morning. Yeah, okay, what were you guys talking about? My first unicorn? Cause I appreciate that.
- Yes, the joke is this is essentially a company I wanted to build three years ago. And I started seeing every startup that had 10 employees was starting to hire internationally and they had to treat them as contractors and there was no way to manage it. And if I looked under the hood, most companies were using Shield Geo as the PO and everyone hated it, super old school. So I was like, okay, somebody needs to go and build a better Shield Geo under the hood. You kind of the plaid model of building the nitty-gritty going into each country that people in the US hire remotely with.
- and build out the infrastructure, go and find every startup and say, hey, we're going to handle all the hiring, the payroll, compliance, everything for your remote people. I love it. I think it's such a good idea. Wait, so what? Sorry, how do you spell it, Sean? D-E-E-L. I think the URL is let's deal.com unless they change it. I think they got deal.com also now. Oh, cool. So I actually use it. That's how I pay any contractors that I work with. Even if they're in the US, I'm like, oh, this is way easier, because I just type in their name. I say what the contract is. Every month, I'm going to pay them this at the first of the month. It's like, would you like an NDA with that? I'm like, yeah, why not? Let's add on an NDA.
- They're like, great, would you like to add a milestone based payment? Like, you know what, that's a good idea. I do like milestone based payments. That aligns our incentives. It's like, boom, here's a contract. We've sent it to them when they'll sign it. It'll be kept in your records automatically for you. We took care of all the compliance and tax issues that you're going to have to do with based on where they live. And we'll connect to your bank and then it'll auto pay every month for you and send you an invoice when you're done. And I was like, oh, wow, that's great. You just eliminated the need for me to have like a person who does that whole thing. By the way, it's on their page that they've just raised money at a billion dollar valuation.
- We're good. Well, they're biggest competitors, so there's two big ones, papayaglobalandremote.com. And Dio started out a little bit differently. The other two said, hey, we're going to really focus on full-time employment internationally. They focused on contractors, and they've had to shift from my understanding a little bit, because in reality, you don't just have contractors for the most part, and you want one-stop shop. You don't want to go and have different solutions for the different types of employees. Right. So I think they now have everything. Exactly. They have everything. They also let you pay in crypto and pay in every currency. They're doing all those gnarly problems, which is great. I almost invested in remote.com also. I really like that guy. His name is Job. The guy who's like, the founder, I think is pronounced slightly different, but it's JOB. And I just love that whenever it's like Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world, I'm like, this guy named Job is creating the platform for hiring remote workers. I'm interested. So he was like, what is your interest in this company?
- As soon as I heard the idea, I was like, oh yeah, that's a pain point. Like that's a real pain point. And I don't know how people solve it. But if I went to their website, I saw it was like, this is real similar. I'm not that sophisticated, right? It's like, yes, this is a real problem. Then I go to your website and I'm like, oh, you're one of the easy to use products, which is like just kind of the standard best practices of design and like clear, like good colors, good font, clear copy, two clicks and you're done. And I was like, oh yeah, this is gonna win. And so then I started hitting up the founder and I met with them and I was like, oh, this is amazing. Let's do something. And then like, unfortunately, this would have been a much, much bigger return had I just been like a little bit more proactive about following up before. But I feel like I've learned that less than 30 times. You invested $10,000 in then let's say. Would that mean that it's worth like what, five times more? Well, at the current valuation, yeah. On paper. On paper, yeah, it worked up.
- But if I had done it at the seed, it would have been, you know, maybe, I think the seed was probably like 10, 15 million coming out of YC. And so, you know, that's, that's taking 10 million turning it into a billion in terms of the multiple plus dilution, blah, blah, blah, not that interesting. More importantly, I can now say I invested in a unicorn. So that's just a stamp that I needed to collect here. Also, I appreciate your honesty that you invested at the B because so many people will come in at later rounds and be like, I need all these unicorns. And they invested in the previous round. What I wanted to ask though was Elaine. So when I started my company, I just was like, this seems like it could work and it's fun and I'm good at it. I bet Sean kind of did the same. I bet. Where's like, oh yeah, it might work. Signal fire seems far more analytical. My question is, in reality, I'm not going to say that.
- Do you actually think that that matters? Like if I'm trying to start something, do you actually think that the likelihood that I'm going to succeed by it? But if I just had a lane, give me three things to start versus I'm just going to go do whatever is do you think that you would bet? Let me give you an example here of like the honesty. So when I started my rolling fund, the marketing was I have this big podcast that's going to help me get deal flow and podcasts. Well, okay, if you have a podcast that does five million downloads a year in the business niche or startup niche, it's like, okay, that's a unique asset. I see how you're different than the other funds.
- In reality, most of my deals don't come from podcasts that are sending me stuff or reaching out to me. Most of the deals are from the same five friends who email me when they see something cool. And like, that would have been much less sexy to talk about like, oh, I have five great friends who will email me cool stuff and I email them cool stuff. But in reality, that's how the best deals happen. And or just like, I'm bored on Twitter a lot. When I see something cool, I reach out. Again, doesn't sound that great for my fund marketing, but is closer to reality. So the question is basically, how often are your deals because your like computer programs is like, do, do, do, do.
- This company undervalued, growing fast. Nobody's heard of it versus another fun, share something with you or you guys are interested in space and you see something cool on product under whatever and you reach out and then that's how it happens. So can you give us the truth? Well, so in general, venture capital, I have the most commoditized asset you can imagine that I'm selling, I am selling money. And so in terms of differentiation, you talking about having this podcast, having a different model and differentiation does go a long way. But if I break up venture capital into five stages
- It's sourcing, so how do I find people? Diligency, picking, winning, and then supporting. And so we try to leverage data in probably four of the five different categories. On the sourcing side, we've definitely done deals that were completely from our alerting system. In addition, we just do a ton more outbound than the average firm because we'll go in these meetings and we'll triage based off of, oh, this looks interesting. And oh, Elaine is connected to the founder or Elaine knows about this industry, you go follow up. So we do a lot more of that outbound than.
- traditional, is it the majority of our deals? No. On the diligence side, really trying to understand how good are these people? So giving people talent scores, understanding hiring patterns, mobile app downloads, Alexa score trends, a lot of the stuff you guys look at in, you know, the similar web or ARAF, so that kind of stuff, we're just doing on a different level. But I would say where we have the most value. Does that level actually matter? So you basically said that you you must listen because we I talk about HA reps all the time, we talk about similar webs all the time. That's like anyone could do that for either free or for $100 a month. And it's like, I could just skim it and I kind of have an idea. You kind of implied that you do that times 10 or whatever it is. Is that way actually better than our way?
- I think in our industry, it does actually move the needle for us. So give us an example. If I'm watching billions and I'm like, oh shit, Bobby, he gets satellite data and he can see how many trucks are leaving the factory every day and that's how he knows blah blah. I've seen some things in VC where it's like, everybody's got AppAnnie or whatever, something to look at app growth. But I don't know, second measure, where you get credit card spending data aggregated, that can be more interesting or like, you know, if you're plugged in with pipe or somebody you can see recurring revenue businesses that are growing in some way before maybe others do. So I'm curious, what's a cool data source that? Give me an example. Like, oh, we have this one data source.
- that helped us spot this cool company. Can you tell a story like that? So it's not the one data source piece. It's the fact that we buy or have access to all of them and then we combine them in unique ways. So it's really about the joining of the data and what that surface is for us. And that could be again on the, we look at things like business filings and then we combine that with data on, okay, well, what is their website? What are their app downloads? What do you mean business filings like incorporation? What do you mean? Yeah, so exactly. I can understand that, you know, somebody.
- is a founder based in San Francisco. They just incorporated their company as a Delaware C Corp. I can then know when they filed for incorporation. I know who the person is. I can put them through a talent ranking score or a founder ranking score. I can then see who are they working with, how good are those people? What is the business category? How interesting is that for us? How investable is the timing? So we have a kind of timing alerting system too. Those things combined will then give it a score and saying, okay, this one you should look at versus one you shouldn't based off of the aggregate score. And that's the piece that I think actually helps not the single dataset or the single piece of info. You have to have a score. Can you give me my founder score?
- I could, but I don't think I'm allowed to. Oh, what? Come on. What's going on? This is the best marketing ever for signifier. I know. We do. We actually do score. We give people ranks. It's, you know, one is like the number one person we think in our list right now. And then it kind of goes down from there. It's like a chest ranking. It's like, you know, it's like an ELO score, basically, or something where everybody is actually ranked one to one million or whatever. Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. And it changes. One is one. What's going on? No, because it's for us. Like, we only invest seed series A and series B. So I don't care about people in those other categories. I want to know who are the best people starting companies right now that are actively.
- looking for funding. Gotcha. And that's the timeliness is actually really important. But the thing that's also really cool about what we can do, so I'll give you a really concrete example. We have a company that is in the Shopify e-commerce infrastructure ecosystem. And they were looking to say, hey, we want to go and target, I'm going to make these numbers up, but we want to target every merchant who has between $10 and $100 million in revenue in these four categories. And here are three buyer titles. Oh, and like here's where they need to be located. We can go and pull all that data. We match that up to the people at the company. So we say, here are their email addresses. Here are the people.
- people you should go after, and we create this kind of custom lead list for them. And so being able to do that really, really, really impactful. That's on the support the company said. So you guys sell access to this platform, right? Like this is a product? No. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you because why? I mean, I bet you can make like $50 to $100 million a year in work. Yes, nobody told me that you guys are spinning this out or considering spinning this out as a product. We do not sell it, and we don't spin it out. That's part of our whole selling point is that this is within the family. So if you come and take our money and become part of the SignalFire family, you get access to all this stuff. So we don't actually give it outside of it. Interesting. OK.
- Who came up with this? So our founding partner, Chris Farmer, has a long history in the VC world. And he kind of got frustrated saying, why are we investing in these bleeding edge tech companies? And we're literally doing deals by talking to our friends, kind of what Sean was alluding to. And so he's like, look, we have access to all this data. Why are we not leveraging it? And so he had kind of spun this out in his last firm and then created an entire fund cycle around it and a firm around it. Yeah, I'm going to say, I still think it's 50% marketing and 50% useful, but that's higher than it was in my head an hour ago where I would have said it's 90% just marketing and 10% useful. So you've done a good job. You've moved things right along 40 points. Say that again. Is he right?
- In terms of what it is, I would say more useful than not for sure, especially I think the two areas I would say it's on the barbells. It's definitely useful on the flagging sourcing companies that we would never have seen. And it's very, very useful on the supporting side. And honestly, we're, as I mentioned before, you know, we kind of like say we're a startup. We do okay ours. We measure NPS score. We kind of treat ourselves like a tech startup in terms of how we operate. And so for us, we care so much about our NPS. We care so much about are we moving the needle for founders. So if we can be.
- If that's the only place that it's really valuable, that's enough. That's really enough for us. Did you ever hear about Chamath's eight ball? Yeah. Yeah, this sort of reminds me of that. Yeah, I go. This is going to be a clip. I'll go for it. Yeah, so Chamath, who was the founder of social capital, is the founder of social capital. At one point in time was like, look, he came from Facebook, super data-driven growth team. He was like leading the growth team, helped grow it from whatever, 100 million users to a billion users. And he was like, well, why don't we have that same level of analytical rigor when it comes to our companies? And sort of as that thought evolved, it came down to something really simple. He goes, let's make capital as a service.
- instead of software as a service, capital as a service. So here's how it goes. It's self-serve. You come and you plug in your analytics. Our little algorithm will run a formula and it'll basically tell you two things. It'll say, here's how you rank relative to other SaaS companies that are your size, your age, in your kind of like price point or your demographic. And then, so you'll know if you're above the benchmark, if your retention is way better or way worse than other companies. And then secondly, they're like, this is our money ball formula to basically figure out if we should invest in you or not.
- And so they hyped it. And as a founder, it was a little bit scary, right? You're gonna go, am I gonna give Tamath all my data? Basically pipe right into our database and just say, hey, here you go. And that feeds their system, right? Because whether they invest in us or not, they've just downloaded, hey, at this point in time, here's how this company was doing, and then it did your historical data as well. So it's like, they sucked in all this data so that if they looked at the hustle, they'll know whether they should invest in the hustle, but also Morning Brew and the Skim and any other company like the hustle. They'll be able to compare in contrast. And as a founder, it's useful because you wanna compare contrast, but you've just opened up your blouse to Tamath. And I think that that was for me a little bit scary, but I think some people really liked it. And ultimately, I think it was more marketing than substance. I don't know, Elaine, what's the word on the street? But like, I don't see them using it.
- anymore. I know that the group of people that spun off of Tamath, like Arjun and those guys from tribe. Tribe Capra. I think they still do that or that's a big piece of it. They don't maybe brand it that way. But I don't know. Elaine, was that like, was that legit? Was it as secret saucy as they as they try to make it sound or was it a little overhiked? I was never on the inside. So I have no idea. I know that it was very polarizing in terms of what you were saying. Some founders loved it. Some founders hated it. In my opinion, it only works at certain stages and in certain categories. This does not work at all at the seed stage. You're betting on people for the most part and you're betting on the growth of a category. There's no data. There's no data. Also, by the way, startups don't have their data structured enough or in a way that you can actually like run these types of apples to apples analysis until you're. Like clear bank.
- Clearbank makes sense to me because you're literally saying hook into my Facebook and Google data. And shop, yeah. There's nothing that I could be... Yeah, and there's nothing I can be fudging around that. I'm going to go analyze it and say, you put in $10 to Facebook, you get out 15, I'm going to give you a short-term high-interest loan. It works for everybody. We win. People are now doing this for Amazon sellers and to your point Shopify. So on Amazon, it's much more around working capital. So people are constantly in these manufacturing cycles where cash flow negative. So they're like, okay, well, I can hook into your Amazon seller portal. I can see exactly what your inflow and outflow of money is. I can hook into your bank account. I should be able to
- to do dynamic loans. So I'm never at peak exposure from a loan perspective for very long. I'm kind of like constantly pulling it in and pulling it out. That makes a ton of sense to me. Yesterday I invested in a C stage company and I pretty much only did it because Sean did it. I basically, I was like, I think this is silly. Are you in? He goes, I'm in. And if you don't want to go in, ask him if I could have your, your. I was like, I love it. And he's like, yeah, I don't know. I think I hate it. I was like, what's there to hate? It's amazing. And then he's like, yeah, it's so good that I kind of hate just popular things. It seems so good. And I was like, this is stupid. He's like, I've ever heard I say. If you don't want it.
- Give me your share and I was asking the founder for more. It was hypey. It was hypey It's got all the cool kids in it. I'm like, oh, all the cool kids are doing it I don't want to do it But Sean was like well I'm doing it and I talked to the guy and the guy seemed wonderful and I really don't even know like can we talk about the company now Or do we need to talk about it next episode so that there's a little distance between this guy with that? Yeah, we yeah, I guess synthesis Do you know this one? Yeah, what are they? Ah the algorithm didn't spot it But a yeah, the five friends did did did did spot this all right So this is a cool company so the the story of this is have you heard of ad Astra, which is like Elon Musk's personal school?
- school that was inside SpaceX. So for those of you know, Elon Musk, you know, he's CEO of SpaceX, he's CEO of Tesla, two kind of like multi multi-billion dollar companies. And his kids were going to school. He basically needed to have his kids be in school. And he kind of was like, you know, the traditional school system is not so great. Why don't we build a school inside SpaceX that's done the way we think it is his big kind of like theory was in schools, they teach you like, here's this tool, like let's say calculus or algebra, right? Like, here's algebra, go learn algebra. But they don't tell you kind of like why you need to know algebra, right? Like maybe
- they should be teaching you how to run a lemonade stand in order to calculate how many lemons you're gonna need per day, boom, we'll teach you algebra. That's a tool to help you do this thing you wanted to do. So his big thing was, why don't we teach kids how engines work rather than what a wrenches as like a basic analogy. And so he creates this school, he wants to have the school and he creates it and there's a guy, I think Josh has his name, he runs the school at SpaceX, it's great, it's kind of like well known. And the kind of the fundamental premise was, kids were learning by really playing games. And so have you guys seen the movie Ender's Game?
- Yes. So in Enders game, you basically, you're in small teams of kind of kids, and then you go into this one like simulation area where you're going to, you know, your team A fights against team B and C. And the game always has like some kind of like arbitrary set of rules, but it teaches you like strategy and teamwork and communication and like all the different things you need to do to win the game. And so kids love it because they play. It's competitive. It's like doing, not just sitting there and listening to a lecture. And so anyway,
- Those are the same principles they took into this. So let's say they'll create a game that's like, I don't know, it's about art, right? So instead of telling you, okay, here we're going to talk about art. So sit down and read these three chapters about, you know, the Renaissance period of Italy and memorize it. No, instead they'll create like a map. It's like, okay, where do you want to explore? And then you pick, you're like, Japan, you go to Japan and you find this artifact and then you have to bid on it. And the other teams are bidding on it too. And you're trying to decide, should we bid on this? Well, let's go look at it. Let's go look at Italy. Let's see what they have there. And the team goes and all these kids are playing this together on Zoom. Anyway, so it's...
- It's this really cool, totally different alternative form of education. What ended up happening was the guy who created this at SpaceX for Elon and his kids, the game system was called Synthesis. What he did was they spun it out with Elon's blessing. Elon was like, hey, go for it. This more kid should have access to this. He paired up with this guy who was the number one engineer at Class Dojo. We had been working at a tech company. A signal fire is an investor. That's our portfolio company. They got together and they created this company, Synthesis.
- Okay, I guess you can't share too much of their numbers, but they have this amazing traction so far. You know, business is only six to eight months old. They spent zero dollars on paid marketing. All the attention has come because of free press and people who are reading about Elon's school and just sort of click the links and find them and The greatest headline ever which is like Elon Musk spinning off school, right? And the founder was very honest. He was like, you know, honestly, like we had a big question like does this only work if it's rocket scientists kids, right? Because like maybe they are willing to like really engage in this material and figure it out and play these things like But is this accessible if your dad is not a rocket scientist at SpaceX?
- or your mom is not like a data scientist or wherever. And so, but they found that it does. And so they have like super high retention, amazing revenue already in six months, doing multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue with $0 paid marketing. And what seems like the perfect team, it's the guy who created the school at Elon's thing and this guy from Class Dojo. And so I was like, what's not to love? Great impact, super cool product. I wanna send my own kids their great traction in a very short amount of time. And like tons of room to grow because they haven't even started marketing yet.
- And so I was like, I love it. And Sam was like, yeah, like, it seems really great, but I'm skeptical of things that everything's interesting. It was expensive. It was expensive. Well, can I pitch you a spin on this that I wrote about recently? And you can give this to the guys because it might be interesting for them. So I wrote about a concept of doing this but on top of Roblox. And the reason being Roblox already has the eyeballs and the attention of kids. 75% of kids between nine and 15, I think, are on Roblox. And today, you know, anybody can go and build these games. But why can't you go?
- and build games, I was focusing more on life skills, so things like financial literacy, which you never learn, mental health, which you never learn, all the things that you'd want either a younger kid or a teenager to learn, gamify it, but build it where they're already there. Right. And also enable the kids to become the builders. So partner with some people like these two people doing synthesis, bring in some kids to make it actually appropriate and age appropriate, and then let them have some of the upside and let them spin off the games and bring in their millions of followers. But I think there's something to be done on top of Roblox. Yeah, I love that. I think that works for two reasons. One is
- You can if you okay teaching kids through games not a new idea like when I was a kid I was playing math blaster and what you know Whatever else these little games on whatever, you know like we had a computer room at my house and I used to go there and get to play an hour a day and So, you know teaching kids their games obviously been around for a while But now the games are already built with tons of love Kids already know the controls like in fortnight or roblox. They already know how to play they're already super familiar with it They already loved the game and so and they also have now created roblox and fortnight have these like kind of open field Open world systems where you can go build whatever the hell you want and just share the link And so it makes total sense to me to borrow the millions of dollars They poured into their game engine and the marketing And the distribution where they already have kids with accounts to just say now all we have to build is the learning experience and And so I think that is a great idea
- Can I ask you? And you might be able to port it over. You know, they can port some of these games to Roblox. Can I ask you about something you wrote about them? So you have Elena as a sub-stack. Is it what? zelby.substack.com? Three things. That's just my best name. It's cool. So it's a lot like this podcast. You basically put out three business ideas a week, right? Is that the idea? Exactly. I write about three requests for startups or opportunities I see to build big businesses and like, how I would do it, how I would monetize it, and why now? Great. So obviously, everyone should go sign up for that. Because it's.
- It's right up this R. Ali. I think I've seen you because you've linked to us a couple of months or twice and I've like tracked the traffic back. All right. So you have this thing called startup sas bundle. And I wanted to bring this up because I think that most everyone listening is in the world where they can actually go out and start this. I think that I've actually investigated this a ton. So I don't own it anymore, but we used to own this thing called the hustle. So we have like two million subscribers, many of which are like these business folks. And I'm like, oh, we should make this and sell it. There's actually a lot of reasons I think why this can't work.
- at a huge scale, but I think there's a bunch of reasons why it could work at like a I think you could build a Five to ten million dollar year company in like three to four years pretty straightforward Can you talk about your ideas here and you could actually tell me if you think I'm wrong or right? Yeah, and I'll tell you why I think it's way bigger than that right so the idea here is if you look at the average series a company They're using I think the status 34 different SaaS applications And what happened was we used to have these monoliths which are SAP and Oracle and I used to joke like bring back SAP And I don't really mean that but what I mean is I am so
- sick of now having to deal with 34 vendors, 34 UIs, 34 logins and passwords, 34 different bills and renewal cycles and all that kind of stuff. It just makes no sense. And if you think about what core business software runs a startup, it's very consistent. You have things like you need G Suite or Office 365, you need some kind of communication tool, you need something for payroll, for HR, for accounting, for recruiting, for like CRM, marketing, project management, issue tracking, and help desk. Those to me, that is the core of business software.
- software. And of course, they're best in breed for all these things at the SMB level, the mid market level, the enterprise level. But in reality, if you're a startup that is seed series A, probably even getting into series B, you need like not the 80, 20 rule, but like 60% of the functionality. And that's the easier stuff to build. The additional bells and whistles are the harder pieces. And those aren't even utilized by these early companies. So the idea is look, okay, if you wanted to build a bundle and get people to migrate over
- if they've already bought eight different pieces of software, that's nearly impossible. But if you catch people when they have nothing, and you're gonna say, hey, we have this out-of-the-box bundle, you can start with three modules, but as you go and you want a CRM, because you didn't have a sales team before, just add on the CRM module. It already hooks in, it's super seamless, it has the same user experience, no new login, no new vendor relationship, and you kind of continue to add to the bundle as your needs evolve. And I think- And to break this down though, you said something important that we have to go back to. You said something, you said it won't work if you already are using something.
- Yes. Can you explain why? Because that's actually a really big deal. Yes. Ripping and replacing software is so painful and it's incredibly hard to get people to do it. You've already trained your team on it. It has all of your information and data sitting in that system. It's just really hard to rip something out when it's there, which is why things like Salesforce are gazillion dollar companies. Even though people complain about it all the time, that is your system of record for that thing. I think that the vendor won't give you, let's call this a lane company, a lane bundle company. They're not going to give a lane bundle company a referral fee, I think. Correct. And the whole way this makes money, I mean, yes, there's too way a subscription or a referral fee. Their Salesforce is going to say, no, these customers already use this. We're not going to give you any more discount or we're not going to give you a cut. Well, I clarify. So you're not saying, you're not saying, you're not going to give a cut.
- It's not class pass. It's not saying pay me X and then you get discounts across all your 34 apps. What you're saying is make a beginner version of the core eight things as an actual bundled thing, not these single player apps, our single function apps, and do the 80 20 and just do the core functionality. Don't get the long tail of like edge case features that you need and offer it to somebody out of the box. It's like, hey, here's the simple thing. So you don't need to sign up for 12 different services. Yes. And when you look at the volume of companies at the early stage.
- versus the later stage, which need enterprise functionality. The volume is like a thousand X at the early stages. So in terms of your ability to capture those people and capture them early where they are going to be sticky and they're going to grow with you to a point, will people outgrow this maybe, but the number of people that ever get to that scale are so few and far between that I just don't think it matters. And I think- So far to acquire those customers early on, we've worked with a lot of people who advertise with the hustle at all their whole, one of them is called Just Work. See what Just Work says? Yes, I've used that. So just work is basically a, I'm gonna come in.
- Dumb it down really dumb, but it's basically a payroll software But because of the way that they operate you have to sign up with them pretty much from the beginning like right when you start a company and I have a feeling that they're struggling because they can't get it's really hard to get a lot of those people to sign up for you so Challenging in the same way in the same way. It's hard for signal fire in order to find companies who are just starting It's really really hard for these folks Well, so here's my hack and I learned this so back in the days when I was first getting into startups I got really into growth hacking back in like 2013 when it was
- It was a really hot topic. And I started my own side hustle consulting gig, working with Seed and Series A founders on growth. And I learned really quickly that if I partnered with the VCs, they would just send me unlimited number of customers. I never did any business development because they're constantly investing in net new Seed and Series A companies and they're trying to be helpful. And their companies, 100% of companies are needing help with growth, 100%. And so they're like, okay, who should we send them to? Send them to Elaine. So the hack here.
- is you start with all the VCs. So they're getting, I get asked a dozen times a week, what software should I buy for this? What tools should I use for that? So that's my hack to get started. Then you start to get some viral word of mouth going among founders because founders have their groups online, they have their communities, they talk, they're saying, oh dude, you have to get this. Like that's the best software you can use for all your stuff. So that's how I would go to Mark. But even then like where you were growth hacker, growth comes right after you, growth comes after you have a team, you have a product, you have something, right? You start to talk about growth, whereas, even when you talk to VC, you've already done something.
- You usually are not like, there is pre-seed where it's like just, you know, two people in an idea, but it is still hard to catch you before you've even started with Slack and G Suite. And, you know, three of those eight modules, you know? My whole thing around... So the one thing everyone will have is either G Suite or Office 365, that I'm not trying to build. That you do. You do G Suite, and this hooks into that. I'm not trying to kind of take that down. You know, Slack, yes, probably that one is a little bit easier, in my opinion, to rip out. But if I look at our seed portfolio and when they graduate to
- Series A, that is the time when they're starting to think about getting a CRM from marketing automation system. And that's, I think there's probably three different pieces of software that are the right insertion points. After you get G Suite, the next thing is probably payroll. And if you look, Gusto is kind of like the only thing most people use today. It's been around for a long time. It does find, I don't think it's a particularly super, super complex piece of software. So can you go and say, cool, if you're under 40 employees, we offer the exact same functionality as Gusto, but we also offer XYZ in.
- you know, a million more things. So you have a bunch of ideas. Let's hop to another idea that you have. Give us like, give us your top three ideas and we'll pick which one to go into. So just give us the one letter. Like, wrap this up. Someone should start this. I, I, yeah. Yeah. That's cool. If you think that's going to be huge, I think it would won't be huge. I think it'd be mild, but I think one of us could be wrong. But either way to win. Yes, agreed. I think it could be huge. But even if it's not, it will definitely not be a, it will not be a bad outcome. Right. Oh, man, where to start? Okay. One that I really like that I also really want somebody to build is
- an adulting vault. Is this what? Yeah, what does that mean? What's an adulting vault? So by the time you're out of college, you have a bunch of things in your life that are like, okay, I have a credit card. I need to get my first apartment. So I'm paying rent. I have to think about insurance. I need to have all my monthly bills paid and subscriptions. I now have internet and utilities and all these things are disparate. And there is no one place where kind of all of my adulting responsibilities live. And if I compare this to a product that's exactly
- to sit in the past, mint.com, which I think launched back in 2007, was kind of the first thing that said, hey, your financial life and financial picture is sitting all over the place. Can I aggregate it in a really simple app to give you that one stop shop? And I want to do that for literally everything in your adulting world. And as you get older, and as you have kids and a mortgage and a car and all these other things, you have so many different places where your insurance policies live, your bills live, your financial products live, you're investing accounts live, and nothing is accurate at that. And I also want it to suggest things that I'm missing.
- So it's like hey, you might want to think about life insurance. Here are the best life insurance policies for somebody that fits your description So you monetize via referral and you know via affiliate But it also can let you know of like hey This is coming up for renewal make sure you pay this bill and you can auto pay and stuff like that Can I niche this down even a little bit more so sure do you own a house? I own a condo So I just bought I know Sean did I just bought my home recently this first time I've done it I didn't know anything about anything I probably still don't but they gave me so basically what you do is for anyone who doesn't own a home Right before you agree to buy it and then someone you hired inspector in Texas I paid this guy only five hundred dollars was pretty crazy He comes through and he pokes his head in the closet and he goes All the electrical things work this thing looks like there's a little mold here yada yada yada And I got a booklet that was pretty thick about a 50 page to a hundred page booklet
- And I'm like, okay, that's kind of cool. But even two months after they did this thing, I'm like, wait, what is this light switch? This light switch doesn't turn anything on. What is this doing? And in the booklet, this guy has actually already addressed this, but I don't want to search this, like, this like actually printed out booklet. I almost switched, so you're almost talking like a life manual. I would niche that down even further. I'm like, someone should just create a house manual. So I can just do control F, bedroom, back corner light switch. What is that? What's that doing?
- I almost wish I had this just for a home and then you could layer shit on top of that like What's the best home insurance which I was trying to figure out? What's the bet? You know similar to that? So I'm with you Elaine on the adulting thing. I have two ways to contribute to this idea one is how do you get customers? I'm a big fan of quizzes quizzes. I think are extremely overlooked. I remember Michael Birch who was my investor in my previous company and he was the original founder of Bebo He he basically had sold he created a social network. He sold it to tickle, which was a quiz company
- And Tickle was like a hundred million dollar company that was just doing quizzes like what breed of dog are you? What you know, what city would you be if you were a city? That sort of thing like fun little quizzes and then they had some quizzes that were career quizzes that would help you get jobs And that's like where they made some money And then when he left there he was like alright I'm gonna start another social network and he's like I know how I'm gonna see it I'm gonna make a quiz and he created the best friends quiz which was how well do you know me and And so I would create a quiz I would answer a bunch of questions about me I would send it to my friends. I see take the quiz
- see how well you know me and then the results were posted on my profile. And you got a million members in nine days off this quiz. And the profiles were filled because they filled in a 10, 20 questionnaire about themselves. So now they had a full profile and they had their friends. It was crazy. And so I've started to pay attention to quizzes. I think you could create the adulting quiz and go viral, like kind of now of like, you know, what percent adult are you? Because I think most people in our generation kind of admit and acknowledge and laugh at the fact that we're like totally not adults, even though our age technically classifies us as one.
- And so I think you can, I think you use a quiz to get a bunch of people to just see like, you know, do you have life insurance? Like, yes, no, I don't fucking know. I mean, I'll like. What is life insurance? Right, like yeah, exactly. What is life insurance exactly? And at the end of it, you basically give them this little infographic that's like nine squares. And the nine squares are like, cool. You have like enough savings for like three months of life if you needed it. Good, you've checked that box of adulting. You don't have like health insurance. You know, you are an ex here.
- Click here and we can help you figure out like, why do you need this? How much it costs, how you should do it, depending on who you are. And so I think you could kind of give people a report card and then let them click in to like solve that problem for themselves and give them the, you know, education referrals that they need from there. I love that idea. Also, you hit on an interesting stat that I heard before, which was validated by a couple of companies I was looking at that the longer the quiz, the more likely people will actually continue to answer and convert. Oh yeah. 100%. It's crazy. So for the hustle, we get like 10,000 signups today and we would ask them a question after they sign up and we would do like, I'll put two questions in and then inevitably everyone at the company was like, oh, that's already too many. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, put five and we put five and then we put 10. And eventually we had like 30 questions and it had like a 98% completion rate.
- Yes, yes. The more quite, and not only that, they actually interact with you more after they've answered this, which is really counterintuitive. And a lot of like particularly startup people are like, oh, you know, I don't want to be too aggressive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm like, no, no, here's how it works. I've done this many time, tested the same thing many times because anyways, I'll skip the story part, but there's an entertaining also B-Boh story from Michael Birch where he was like, he put a red button, I'm not skipping the story part. I'm telling the story. He put a red button on the site for one out of every 1000 visitors. So imagine going to Facebook and just seeing a shiny red button in the corner for the first time and you click it and then the whole screen just went clear and it was like.
- Here's a cat click the cat when you click the cat. It's like this a bowl of pasta Don't click the bowl of pasta you clicked it and then it's like the cats dead We told you not to click the bowl of pasta. All right, click the cat bring him back to life It was just a stupid thing that he had a hundred steps And when he learned what just doing he doesn't this were fun just to mess around and what he learned was like The first the first button, you know, people usually click out of curiosity But you'll lose like 30% of people who just don't click it because they're busy They just go do something else and then the second one you lose another maybe like 20 ish percent And then after that the people who get to step three like 98% of them will go all the way to the end because they want to know how this ends And then we did the same thing for a charity project where we were raising money It was the exact same step 30% lost on the first one 20% lost the second one and then 98% finished the rest And so i've seen this several times and everybody in your team will tell you do this is too long We shouldn't ask too many things wrong it works Get as much as you can because once they get to step three question three They're gonna finish no matter how many questions are in the thing
- One nuance here that is 100% accurate for consumer and 100% inaccurate for B2B. For anything enterprise, shorter is better. But I think on the consumer side, I think there's two psychological things at play. One, people love talking about themselves. And that's why we do all the quizzes. But the second, which I think Sam was hitting on is if I've answered 30 questions, I think what I'm going to get after that is going to be super valuable. Because you know me now. So whatever it's going to be personalized, can be valuable and it totally works. What do you do at SignalFire? I saw your title. Is it just venture partner?
- I'm a partner, so I invest. But I also spend about 30% of my time leading all the growth and go-to-market programs for the portfolio. So, it's kind of just me getting to exercise that muscle still. Sometimes I parachute in, parachute out, help them with some of the growth needs. I have an entire network of freelancers, contractors, agencies, for everything like, hey, I need a SEO content writer or I need a TikTok video producer. And so I can match make on stuff like that. And we run a bunch of events and teach people how to do this stuff. And they're like two or three partners and you're one of them. Basically, a partner just means you're one of the owners. You're one of the shot callers.
- I have investment power, we'll put it that way. Yes, I think there are five partners at Sigma Fire. So let's do ideas, Sam. Nobody cares about VC. All right, I'll, no, wait. Are you going somewhere with this? I'm a compliment, which is, you're like, I'm looking through these ideas. You're like, you're very amazing. Every one of these ideas is interesting. I want to go through all of them. And I'll have me back on, we'll do all of them. I'm gonna be great. Let's do what we're talking about. Let's do snoo for adults. What's this one? I know what the snoo is, because I have a baby. Sam, do you know what the snoo is?
- No, I'll explain the snoo. So there's a company called the happiest baby and it produces a smart bassinet. And what it does is it rocks the baby, it has noise, it can sense all this stuff. And people swear by this, Sean, did you guys use this thing? Like my kid is in it right now while I do the podcast. So, you know, the only reason I could do the podcast because the snoo is basically babysitting my kid. So like you see this app and it'll basically say like, oh, Banks is calm. It's like he's sleeping in there, he's not crying. If he cries, it'll go to level two, it'll rock more to try to get him to like chill out. So it saves you the step of going in and like...
- soothing the baby. It's a thing that will make noise and rock like a human. And it's safe because there's a big like problem with something called SIDS. But is this new a category or a brand? It's a brand. It's a brand. And these things are incredibly expensive and you can only use them for a really short window of time. And so there's a whole secondary rental market and resale market for these things, but parents swear by this. So, okay, let's apply this to the broad population of human adults. We suck at sleeping.
- sleeping and nobody has ever rethought sleeping from a first principal's perspective. I mean, first off, it kind of makes no sense that we sleep with another human in the bed. Quite frankly, like, I roll over, I grind my teeth, you know, I we have a dog in our bed too. That kind of makes no sense. Second, I want something that is temperature controlled that rocks me and like knows my behavior that removes all light that removes my phone so I can't go and scroll on BuzzFeed's stupid quizzes at two in the morning. Why has nobody rebuilt the bed for human?
- And I think we have enough sensors. We have enough smart connected home products today to do this. So I would have been. I would buy this. I would have been skeptical about this, but for three reasons. A, I've used the snow and I'm like, oh, I wish I had this. Like this is great. B, you've seen a rise in these like expensive at home equipment, whether it's Peloton, Mirror, Tonal, like there's all these things that cost like sleep bed, you know, like things that cost thousands of dollars that you buy to improve one small aspect of your life. Whereas if you.
- actually, like, if you told me there was genuinely a sleep pod that I could go into that would improve my sleep by even like 20%. What's that really worth to me? Right? Like, of course, this is kind of a first world problem. High class, you know, high class, like product, okay, whatever. Yeah, it is. But I think that's worth at least five to 10 grand, right? Because that's it's eight hours a night every single night, getting better, which is making me healthier, happier, you know, like more productive the next day. So I actually now believe that a product like this could exist.
- I never used one of those Google nap, nap pods, but like, I feel like that's what this, those were trying to be. I think I would totally buy it. You're spot on. It's a first world problem, but for all the people that are buying $3,000 bikes or like the $5,000 treadmill from Peloton, that's the demographic here. So I want somebody to build it. That's what Peloton should do, honestly, like, because they're not going to find another bike, like even the treadmill, they're not going to find another treadmill. There's always so many of these like places to expand. They should go straight to the bed and create a, the bed with a sleep subscription. That's like the calm sleep stories layered on top of this.
- Well, make a wellness brand out of it. Health is only one piece. Sleep is a huge component of wellness. I totally agree with that. Can you talk a little bit about subscription running shoes? I mean, that interests me and I have a few opinions, but what is this? So I'm a huge runner. I think you are too, Sam. And I also have an Apple Watch. Most people who are runners have some kind of connected device that's tracking all your steps and things like that. And you're supposed to change your running shoes every 300 to 500 miles. I have no fricking clue when my shoes have had 300 to 500 miles. I can't even tell you when I ordered them. Also, for runners, you have a brand and a style of shoes.
- you typically stick with. I don't know any people, my running friends, who mix and match. So I'm a Brooks runner. I use Brooks adrenaline, 8 and a half narrow every time. I want Brooks to create a subscription for me. It hooks into my watch and my smart device. It says, hey, we're just going to auto order you new shoes every time you hit. Like you could pick 400, you know, 400 miles or X number of months. And it gives me a discount because it knows I'm going to be a customer for my LTV just went up 100 X because it knows I'm going to continually order. So a they're going to get me to order more frequently.
- I'm gonna be a super happy customer because I just get it in the mail They can start partnering with other companies and doing these bundled subscription products But to me this is such an obvious product that no brand's done You can also partner with some celebrities and make it really cool. I don't know why this doesn't exist Let me give you the low tech version of this. Yeah, here's how you do this without the Apple watch You know like toothbrushes have the little strip the one the the little blue strip That's like this is this toothbrush is like, you know Been used way too much and like I like baby diapers have this to the blue little streak which tells you they peed This what you need on the bottom of the shoe. There's bottom of the shoe
- to change colors as it gets worn out. And then so you basically have a visual indicator that you have out worn this shoe. It's time to order another. And if I can put the promo code for your next order under the face of where it wears away, it's like it's time to reorder. Here's your code. Get your next shoe. Here's the problem with that though. I know when my shoes are worn out. My friends know when their shoes are worn out. It's the fact that I have to go and be proactive and reorder. That's the sticking point. I just want it to happen. I mean, it's like the whole Amazon button that they were trying to line. It's a QR code. You just hold your phone up to the shoe bottom and then it orders you the next shoe. Then I like anything to remove friction. I want all friction removed. I would love to have a package show up. How would this make money? I mean, because like if you're when I hear this, I'm like, yeah, OK, cool. Sounds great. But as an outsider, I'm like, I don't think I can make money doing this. I have a few like brooks. Like brooks, why aren't you doing this? This is for Brooks. This is not. I don't think this is an independent company. I was excited about this. I'd love you to have an angle here. Here's an idea. You can offer this as. You can do this, right? Like.
- Correct. You can start. I mean, if you look on... It started a shoe brand, I think, is like on the upper 5 percentile of horrible ideas. I get targeted on social media, and maybe I must have clicked on one at some point, but every variation of your all-birds type shoe, so semi-athletic, I mean, I've probably seen 50, so it can't be that hard to make. The only way I think you do this as an independent company is you provide the picks and shovels infrastructure for every brand to do it. So you go and sell to the brand.
- to the Nike is to the Adidas to the Reebok. I think that's doable. Right. Okay, let's see. Let's pick one more idea that you have on here. What's the best one that you sent in that we haven't talked about yet, that you most excited about? This will be another fun, fun one that's kind of on the consumer side. So I have this concept called Therapunch. And I kind of need to give the back story here because this is actually funny and involves running. So there's a nice tie in. So like a year and a half ago, right before the pandemic, I was running in the mission in San Francisco at like six in the morning. And it was an area
- where there was no people, I'm just kind of going and I have a green light. I'm running through the middle of the street in the intersection and this dude in a super beat-up janky car comes and turns right and like cuts me off and comes really close to hitting me. And I kind of jump away and gave him the like, what are you doing dude? Look, and he rolls down his window and starts screaming out. And this is, I don't know if you want to believe this, but he's like, get out of the street you stupid fucking bitch. And I was like, holy shit. And I'm not an aggressive person normally, but I had had a rough week and I was kind of on edge anyways.
- And normally I just turned my head and run away, but I had to take every ounce of restraint not to go and just kick the back of his car. I was so pissed. I just wanted to punch something. And as I finally got smart and ran away, I was thinking to myself, there's something going on here, which made me want to go and punch his car or kick his car. And I was like, you know, everyone always tells you to go meditate, go download calm, go sit in a quiet room. Like, great, that's fine. I need to punch something. And so I wanted to go punch something and then meditate. So the concept here, and I think now is an interesting.
- because there's so much vacant real estate is you buy up a range. There's so much range. So much. Don't forget that part. So much range. I demand. Well, there's also an established concept of these rage rooms, smash rooms, break rooms. The problem with these are it's very dangerous. You have to put on a suit. You can hurt yourself. There's a lot of liability. And also there's a lot of cleanup. So this is the exact like low tech version. It's a padded room with padded walls, punching bags, things.
- to like rip and pop, imagine like stuffed animals, you could tear the heads off and you go and you connect to a Spotify rage playlist and there's a bunch you can choose from. You go in for 15 minutes into one of these things and if you guys have ever done boxing, 15 minutes, you'll be exhausted. So you just get it all out for 15 minutes and then they take you to the Zen zone for 30 minutes where they have guided meditations and they have, you know, spa water and you can sit and meditate. So you go and get it out, then you center yourself and then you go back to work. Sam, you're our resident, uh, rager.
- So, how do you feel about this? No, that would make me way too much like I'd be like I was a smasher shit right now. I like I smashed up. I like I do break What's the last thing you've thrown or broken out of rage? Well, cell phone. I mean Everyone does that My green is currently shattered. I mean I just get angry now and I do that as well Well, I like and a lot of people tell you not to do that. I think it's great Like you're just like cathartic. Yeah, you're just breaking a little thing that you could replace with some money and like So I'm hurting anyone I'll give you a quick spin on this idea because I also think that the the timeliness like I don't want to book and reserve the room By then it's all dissipated and now it's a task. I don't want to get it So yeah, I'm with Sam that you need the instantaneous release
- So, the other thing I found interesting is there's a whole bunch of these like alternative therapy things that I find interesting. Cryotherapy where you go in and your neck is out of it, but your body is in this like kind of like, I don't even know how low the temperature goes, but it's like this very cold, like kind of like liquid nitrogen gas that's put against your body. It's supposed to be great for recovery. There's the float franchise, which is all about floating in this like salt water bath where you're wait lists and you're in this light, you know, deprived pod and like an hour goes by and you're like hallucinator, whatever the hell else. I don't know. Joe Rogan talks about it. I have a friend who gave me a pass to go do this once. And so they're awesome. Flip to you. Never. Have you heard of it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's one in the mission actually I walk by it all the time. I have been to that one many times. And so there's and then there's basically like there's a set of these kind of like alternative things. And I wonder if you could create the equivalent of a gym membership that basically says, okay, instead of coming to this like a gym membership is a giant box that has all the heavy equipment you're not going to buy for yourself, but you can come here and you can use it.
- And I wonder if you could do the same if you bundled these together, where you bundled the different therapies together, sauna, steam, cryotherapy, float tank, whatever. And it's a gym with no weights, and it's a gym basically for the brain to recover and to relax. And you put a whole bunch of these things together, and maybe you create a different type of wellness like category. Would you ever do them back to back, just thinking about what those all are? Would you ever go? I'm going to spend two hours with... It's not intense. I like the... What about a class pass for that kind of stuff? Because they're pretty niche today, and they're expensive. And it's also not like a...
- gym membership where class pass had so many problems, I could go into that. But I was one of the earliest users and they lost so much money on me. But ultimately they were hoping, the vendors were hoping that you become a subscriber. But for these things, how often are you going to go to a float tank or cryo spa or whatever? So if it's more of a one off thing and you want to try a bunch of stuff, they could actually end up making money on that. I actually started going quite regularly. I think the difference between San Francisco and where I live now, so I live in San Francisco for eight years, right around the mission is it's like kind of a pain to get from A to B, you know, because you have to take an Uber or a bus or a bike. Although I hated by a pain in San Francisco. Now that I live in Austin, I just like, it's no big deal to like leave work at three and then go do the thing and come back by and do back by five and get some more stuff done. And I do these cryotherapy, which I don't even think does anything, but it's fun. I do the float tank. I love all that stuff. So I do think that can actually people would do that more regularly than you think. Yeah, if there's people go somewhat regularly or like smoothies or something, I feel like that might work on a side note.
- So I've looked into the economics of these things before, very briefly, but maybe we should do kind of a deep dive. These cryotherapy like places and float tanks places, these guys do actually pretty well. Like if you just kind of wanted to buy essentially a high-pank job for yourself, you can get a location, you basically buy one of these machines for $3,000, $5,000. No, no, no, no, no, no. Then they print money. I think they print more. I looked at the cryo stuff and also the second one is these DEXA scan places.
- I love it. Yeah. It's like literally it's one employee and online booking, contactless payments, all this stuff. So you basically have one person who's usually it's their place. Sometimes they have kind of a junior person who watches it while they leave for half the day. But it's very low labor and it's just the same machine that pays itself off in the first X uses and X can be, you know, might take one month, might take three months, might take six months max. But these businesses are pretty simple and can do quite well. Have you heard of that business called DeXaFit, the one they're like guys in a van?
- Yes, they come to you. Yeah, they're walking in front of like company buildings usually, they're like, hey, come see how fat you are. And then you know, you've got 80 bucks and you go get scanned or 50 bucks and go get the best. I go, but I would go every three months. I would go every three months. Say, I would buy a 10 turn pass or something like that. It was maybe 50 bucks a turn and you see progress. They are so awesome. It's a, I would imagine it's a pretty expensive machine, maybe a hundred grand per van. Um, they're really amazing. I would love to see what the revenue is. And eventually they bought a, they had a place right across the street from the, uh, Twitch studio or, you know, the studio is on the boot go to. And it was like a crappy lobby with just like a CAT scan and you would sit down in there and then you're out in a few minutes. I love that business. I would, I'm curious as to how they do it. Elaine, you ever seen this?
- I think I know what you're talking about. I've never done it. I'm curious with it. Is it telling you information you don't know when you do it the first time I get that that's a novelty? But if you're doing it every three months, do you not know how your body's been behaving over those three months? It tells your body fat percentage. Right. But like don't you know if it like went up this month? Well, that's something you want to measure the progress, right? So like for example, I'm working out right now. My actual weight stays the same because I'm adding muscle losing fat. And so I'm like, fuck, this doesn't I want my score to show
- So the progress, I can see it in the mirror. And my trainer's like, dude, do you need this? You just look in the mirror, it's fine. And I'm like, yeah, that's true, but I like the science of it too. I'm like, it's 40, I think it's 45 bucks to go get a DEXA scan. And so me and my brother-in-law, we kind of made a habit out of it. And like, we're just like, okay, we're gonna go get scanned every three months. That's how we measure our progress. And like, you know, great, we're down 3% body fat. Like, let's do it again. The company that we're referring to, it's called Body spec. So the worst body and then SPEC body spec. And San just so you know, it looks like the price of these range from between $16,000 and $45,000.
- So yeah, it's not that bad. And they're in like a Mercedes Sprinter and they have like the car wrap. So maybe a hundred grand total. I think this is cool. I love this company. I don't know anything about their numbers, but I think it sounds so neat. It's so simple. The distribution is also good because they can partner with gyms. So they partner with CrossFit. They partner with trainers and they're basically like, Hey, you said it's a client. You know, you get 20 bucks out of the 50 bucks, like, like scan, you know, for the first for every first time customer that you send in. And so they have like kind of a built in referral system that makes a lot of sense.
- I'm actually shocked to learn that you're not like bullish on this because when I go I thought that you're showing I had the same when it's so rewarding like I'm pretty much working my ass off for literally Just to go from like 20% body fat to like 90.5% like I just think about that number of constant I think I'm just not the target demographic at all because I've always been Extremely into fitness, but I'm intrinsically motivated So I don't I'm not that person you know what I was gonna say though a partnership opportunity for them is future face
- because they're already charging people $200 a month for literally a digital subscription to a virtual trainer. And you can bundle in a lot of these other services and things like that. That to me feels like the demographic because the people I know that do FutureFit are the people that care about this stuff. They wanna see incremental progress, they wanna know their score constantly and they'll pay. I used FutureFit so. There you go. Good job. Everyone keeps trying to get me to use it. I'm like, I don't need this. Like I just, I'm very.
- very competitive with myself. I have a Peloton, which you can see in the back. And I've always been a huge runner. And my mom actually won this like four years ago. And at the beginning, I didn't use it a lot. And now I've been doing a lot more cycling during the pandemic, because I hate running with a mask. And I've gotten so much better at the Peloton, but I'm always trying to beat my own score. I don't need to know, I remove the leaderboard and stuff. I don't care about that, but it's my own score. One of your portfolio companies is called Tempo. Sean, have you tried the Tempo? It's awesome. It is so awesome. It is so awesome. Have you not tried this? I haven't tried it. You showed me the videos you had in your garage, you still haven't.
- I bought one. Okay, so I like they sponsored us. So I got paid money to use their machine And then I moved and they freaking took it back. I'm so mad on my guys Just leave let me have it They took it back after I used it and I was like on the number one I was at the time very very Fit into that hit hit stuff and I was in shape And I was like number one of the category and I kept working my butt off to do it and I just bought one the other day I think I paid $1,800 it took eight weeks to get delivered and this for the listeners is called tempo fitness or something just Google tempo fit and It's basically like Peloton but for weightlifting
- And for high intensity interval training, it is so awesome, so addicting. I like in building my workout routine strictly around tempo. It's like a mirror, like the mirror thing, so it's freestanding. It's not like tonal. We have to wall mount it. And it has, I think, 185 or close to 200 pounds of weights. And it's got these amazing instructors that do all kinds of these hit workouts. We had one of the original beta units in our office. And I was pretty much the only one that used it. But I used it all the time. I don't have room for it now. But Sean, when our office reopens, you'll have to come in and try it. I love to. It sounds pretty good. I remember Sam, the video looked cool. I would say that the actual design of the box, I don't know if you had like kind of an earlier version or what, it wasn't as slick as like what a peloton or mirror and what not looks like. It's not entirely slick, but I actually think they're making it in there. But it has a sensor on it. So it like, it could tell if you're lifting the weights and it counts it for you. So it's kind of hard to cheat. That's great. But it's like a cabinet where they store the weights. And I think a lot of people actually already have the weight. So I wish they would sell it to me just so I don't have to use their weights.
- Well, it uses computer vision to not only count the reps, but it checks your form. So let's say you're doing a curl and you're only going 80% up, it'll call that out. If you're doing a lunge and your knee is going over your ankle, and so part of the weight counting involves their own weights, but all the other stuff, it's essentially creating a dot matrix of your body. So it's anonymized, but it can tell exactly what your form is. So it's like a real time personal trainer there, plus this celebrity trainer who's doing the class for you. It's pretty freaking cool. You got to get one, son. It's worth it. But there is another downside. It's $50 a month for a subscription. They all are, though. I think that's crazy. That's so expensive. And it's so expensive. I cannot believe that. I think it's way too expensive. It's cheaper than a gym membership. Yeah, I know. You do that logic. You got my money. I'm paying for it, but I feel like it's not for the price of a cup of coffee a day.
- You could transform your body. Yeah, it's just, by the way, it's $10 a month. Well, think about the value you get from that versus essentially, in my opinion, future fit is paying for accountability. So you're paying $200 a month for a person on the other end to sort of care about you. I get it, but I know what this costs them. I know, I already bought this $2,000 machine. Give me a year, at least. They don't make a ton of money on the hardware part. They're making money on the subscription. Well, look, I'd stop using logic on me. It just let me be angry. That currency is not accepted yet. We're like a vending machine. As long as you keep buying it. As long as you keep paying for it, I'm okay. I'm okay with removing logic.
- You know, I'm paying for another great one that you guys should look at is our gada. You guys know we're too famous now. We only use free shit that people give us. We don't pay for anything anymore. You know how it works. The more popular and rich you get, the less you play for anything. So I don't pay for anything. I actually stopped giving out my address because I was getting so much free shit and I was like, wait, maybe I shouldn't give out my home address to these like strangers on Twitter. So now I'm like, no, thank you. I'm going to get one of those celebrity YouTube repeal boxes and be like, you know, just send it to my manager. Send it to my. Hey, I would love to send you X, Y and Z and you say, yeah, I just gave them bands address. Like, hey, will you share? Right, right. I just give them a dress now. I'm like, give Ben all the free shit. And they're like, well, you're not in Brooklyn. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I have a house in Brooklyn. You can send me all the stuff you don't want to, especially if anybody wants like women to test stuff. Send it to me.
- I'm sure you got you. I've seen your portfolio companies are badass. You probably have so much great stuff. Yeah, no, follow me at zellby.substack.com, Z-E-L-B-Y. It's called Three Things. Every Sunday, I publish three business ideas. And they're, I would say, somewhat well researched and thought through, but they're all fun. And they cover pretty much every topic you can imagine. And then also, if you like unsexy businesses, I do a podcast called Unsexy. And I just talk to founders building in super random niches, like chemical marketplaces or companies that are growing the growth media for lab grow meat.
- just super random stuff, but I find it fascinating. You're like our sister from another mother. Honestly, when I heard the podcast, really early days, I was like, Oh my God, these are my people. Yeah, you're great. Thank you for coming on. All right. See everyone.

Brainstorming The Best Business Ideas To Start In 2022 with Noah Kagan [U_t4gI5Gib4].txt

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- So last year we had our highest day Black Friday was our highest day almost two million dollars in that one day Are we ready to roll and we roll bro you got to take that hat off though I can't see you Alright, I was just trying to I wanted to wear a costume of so I can see like a little bit more spicy You're good like that. I couldn't see your eyes. Do you um I Do you have a ice bath? Yeah, I have a cold have you not jumping in our cold tub? So is it called cold plunge? Yeah, the cold plunge that I have one to and What is your opinion of it so far? I? Like it I like it I use it about twice a week. I use it Monday morning for coffee Is basically my wake-up thing and then I'll use it Wednesday's after workout. What's interesting though? There's a book I think called endurance. Yeah, I love that and they basically are love it Look there's a book and I think what they said was that Scientifically doesn't do anything. Yes, and so that's why I have like a problem with cold plunge Which is the actual product is amazing like if you want to be cold that it's a good one It stays like 39 degrees all the time, but It doesn't I'm almost certain that it doesn't do anything and Some people say it impacts your brain if it does anything, but like there's still even conflicting research on that I think the big thing that I like about it is that it makes me feel tough. Yeah It makes me feel it makes me feel good about myself I'm like no, you're not tough man. You're weak and I don't know I don't really have that self-talk in my head, but I go into this thing and I was like Do ten and then when I'm about to get to ten I'm like you could do 15 and then I just feel proud of how long you said and I get out and I'm like um It varies maybe like a minute two minutes. I did five minutes at 39 degrees and it was Incredibly painful that's what it said online to do so I did it and I was just like I was legitimately in pain like Like a like more pain than I've ever felt just to exercise How'd you feel about yourself? I felt tough. I felt I felt tough Yeah, so like I understand why it works, but I'm still looking for like peer-reviewed research It shows that it works and I've not found it and so that's why I was asking how you thought about your cold plant because I heard you had to say I got a jump in here because I'm a cold-plunched spokesman. They're the one sponsor for my podcast So I got a wow for their honor here. So the thing I take the cold-plunched product Where both it's awesome. I have it too. Here's the thing Here's where you're wrong though the thing that you're right about is there's no research that shows that it is Good for recovery and that's what everyone says they use it for his recovery And it's just like not accurate that it's it's actually better to use heat therapy for recovery been cold but like some of the brain stuff there is like more research there as well as like Some of the other benefits around like mood and Like like have you heard this brown fat cell storage stuff like that Yeah, but it Yeah, I hear you. I think it kind of works. I'm still I'm still a need to be convinced I Think about it is like it's a workout for your nervous system like it improves a lot of stuff that way But it's just not good for recovery I Guess I would actually pitch the opposite salmon Ben where lately. I've been really into baths That's just like been my go-to so like I have I throw I got these bath bombs Eloh CBD in it up a light of candle and then I'll either put on a podcast or I'll read but that lately I mean men especially men because women have gotten they knew about this they just didn't want to tell us But like I literally just came from a pedicure if men are not pampering themselves Look if you're working hard I'm saying if you're like putting in the work you're working out You're doing this stuff at the job like take a little time for that R&R man go jump into a Not relaxing at all for me like I don't want someone digging into my nails Rose Oh my god. I did the I did the American flag. That's awesome. No. It's honestly It's fun. We're living once on this planet. Have a good time. All right, let's talk about You came on last time. I personally thought the episode was only gonna do okay I'm telling you I got tons of people at DM me Ben says that people thought it was pretty good I thought people thought it was great, but for this one You have a list of one tooth like eight eight bullet point, but there's a ton of ideas here Oh, and me and also people criticized me because I didn't introduce you So this is no Kagan no runs this company. He's founded it and is now the CEO of AppSumo It's like Groupine for nerds. It's quite large. I think last time you said 80ish million in revenue Mitchell just said you guys now have 165 employees. That's amazing and you also do a Content so you you have this sick blog called okay dork which I've read for like 10 years and you have your YouTube Which now has 250,000 subscribers. I think right? Almost 300,000 minutes. It's unbelievable YouTube.com. That's okay. It's unbelievable That's sick And I remember you doing it years ago just like on your phone. It was kind of lame. It wasn't lame It was just like you aren't trying and then like you started trying two years ago. I think right? Yeah, that was an interesting journey when COVID hit two years ago I was just shirtless at home with my iPhone and I was like I just felt good about what was going on And I felt like I could help and so I just started recording on my phone and uploading it and so you know in all the people that are listening Your show a lot of money start businesses is like just do now not how you know something Mitchell I talk about which is just get going so I just uploaded that and from there now There's a team of I don't know maybe six people will spend about half a million dollars I'm just the team this year at you know from just me doing shirtless in my house talking about how to get your business going your confidence But uh the and so the reason why you're able to spend why you're able to lose money is because you are Somehow it drives traffic and awareness to app sumo, which is like your main thing But does the ad does the ad sense or the YouTube ad at all covered the cost? Actually it just started so What was fascinating and by the way a lot of people know me because I worked at Facebook. I worked at mint.com So it's a little bit of what people heard about me. So this year. Let me just pull up our stats right now So the first last year we spent I mean I think around 400k I can look how much we made so just getting it going really Just getting it's an investment. It's like a lot of these things fortunately We had a sumo's are our bank roller last year on ad since we made $121,000 to 800 and 40 year one In our year first hardcore year of having a team around yeah, that's really good It's surprising this year is actually but here's the thing This is gonna blow your mind and I think this is a really kind of good good lesson for business We put out 800 and I think 49 videos Three of them basically generated all this money which ones And that's kind of one that's sad either a we suck at making videos Or b you know a lot of businesses you keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going Don't aren't all the channels like that though I think it's a lot of business like a power lab distribution. It's like a few things do a lot of the significance So the three videos that made all of the money the first one was I went and knocked on doors in Austin We just released asking millionaires. We just released it, but that came out towards the end of the year And drove a lot of our money asking crypto millionaires how to invest 5,000 bucks and then asking NFT millionaires how to invest a thousand more or less those three videos Made us the year and that was after 100 and almost 50. That's crazy. Do you um Do you so do you think you're all surpassed your 500,000 you think you'll break even on ad sense this year? Yeah, our goal is not that our goal is around a subscriber growth, but this year I think will lose the budget wise it looks like we'll lose around 200,000 dollars Just depends how ads do, but I'm basically not not really optimizing around that. That's crazy I uh I did a call with this lady who has a bunch of YouTube channels and she was telling me it's Her and a six-person team. I can't say her name But she said that they're doing a million dollars a month in profit from YouTube just YouTube Yeah, it's crazy just YouTube. Are you guys? I think the thing with YouTube YouTube is slept on same. I mean TikTok is another one It's a different type of audience But you guys have up your your YouTube game yourselves I feel like almost every business out there or if you were broke and you're in any country in the world and you have nothing to do This is the easiest, freest business anyone so I just signed up to monthly.com has this course with Casey Neistat Did you see that so Casey Neistat has a course where every day he gives you a lesson on YouTube videos And I bought it for like three hundred dollars and I'm loving it. It is really really cool What if what are some of the takeaways? Well, so it's only three days in and so but like in the first or second lesson He just walked around his office. He goes I'm gonna show you how I find cool stories and he's just walking around and he goes Oh, that's a cool idea. You guys hear that beeping That's a truck backing up and that ruins like it makes it really hard for me to record throughout the day I'm just gonna make a video on that or he'll walk by a guy selling fake Louis Vuitton purses and he goes Oh, that's a cool idea. Let's create a video on how to buy a fake purse in New York City And so he's just like walking down the street coming up with ideas and you're like look I'm gonna create these are just small silly ideas, but I'm gonna execute them really well So in the next series he's gonna show us how he's actually gonna execute these small ideas. That is awesome. How to cool right? I love that you're still learning. Well, no, I mean I think people Assume that once you get to certain sizes like you I would assume you don't but I love that you're still curious and you're exploring how to improve your craft Yeah, I don't know anything about video. I've been making videos for my own YouTube just for fun But I'm trying to learn So anyway, it's a cool curve. It's a cool course. It was only like three hundred dollars Yeah, I mean it is kind of crazy when you think about the things we spend on and the potential value upside you can get out of it Like the downside you lost 300 the upside I mean how much could this make you or you know also could from an enjoyment level and I was like I can use the stuff that I'm learning just in the podcast I think How much like what if you noticed are observed in your own YouTube channel? I know for my first known you definitely you guys have been looking to grow it seems like a few things are I think what I've learned Is that like things that like don't seem like big ideas, but that can be kind of boring? Can do really well? So for example, I bought the house the lot next to me and I just like film a video on like here's just a here's a video of the house I'm just walking out my phone here's why I think it could be a good investment Here's why it might be a bad investment and I just posted that on my personal channel And I didn't have any subscribers. Oh, I sent you that video And it uh it got like three four five thousand views But like a lot of comments and I was just amazed that people cared it was my first video I was amazed that people care about little things that are small that are part of your daily life that you don't really think about And so I think what I'm learning with Casey when I'm learning with my stuff is that small stuff That you think about throughout the day more likely than not a lot of other people think about that and they'll find it interesting enough to watch You know what I mean yeah, I've always I always think about that with restaurants where they sell their cook Books like people want to see what happens in the kitchen and you'd be surprised what people want to yeah, so anyway It's a cool course. Uh you want to talk about Mudwater I do in a second one other thing. I'm curious is what have you noticed because I think I don't know This one appears as well What have you noticed about the YouTube channel versus your TikTok channel in terms of the audience and the growth and the Oh, so let me tell you about the TikTok thing So I have a TikTok, but I don't actually like post on it I mean I did once or twice but like it has no views So we did this thing I was texting you about this we did this thing where on the podcast like three weeks ago We said we're gonna get five thousand dollars to maybe at least one up to three people and it's gonna be a combination of If we like your videos and how many views they have and we told people to go to our YouTube chop up the videos and post it So far the hashtag that we asked people to use has gotten 30 million views in three weeks Yeah, 30 million views sounds too easy go on so These kids it's mostly like these like 19 to 20 year olds like one kidding college at Michigan He is one of the guys I'm gonna start talking to him and they create he created a handle called like MFM minis and He started posting our videos and he like would animate them and he has gotten multiple videos over a million views and you know fat fire I Made a Podcast where I talked about how much I love fat fire the subreddit which I found through you and he made a video about that And it got so many views that fat fire made an announcement on their subreddit that said we've been overwhelmed with new applicant or new Subreddit people and we got 30 thousand people in one day all from the TikTok video where we're me Sam Parr is talking about that fire All right, that's wild man. So do you think most people business used to try to do this TikTok stuff? No, I don't I not most But definitely some right now of everything that I've seen it's the fastest way to grow an audience For sure without it that Yeah, I guess I've always I've been hesitant because the quality of the audience in terms of young engagement Yeah, well something just a young right the young is the future to some extent It's like YouTube. I feel like the quality of the people that are like really into it and they're available Junior newsletter they want to comment and I feel like TikTok is just kind of consumption I think that YouTube is a much higher quality. I all I think podcasts like for a long time even though we like my whole life was Podcasting I was like I would shit on it. I'm like this is not that cool and And now I've changed because I'll see I get recognized now like three or four times a week and It's because they like listen to my voice for 45 minutes They like think that they know you and so they built they people get kind of intimate with you So it's do you get recognized from YouTube? I Got recognized yeah, it was cool. Yeah sometimes I love it man. I mean the whole part of the journey is that like I This weekend I went to a squash tournament That used to all those hilarious and And it was because this guy watches you know is up soon what economy's watching the videos and I was I was during the Pedicure day was one of the guys from our company and I was like man That's why I do social media to some extent like it really provides a cool magnet and Window not off the window, but away to just like connect with really interesting people Yeah, I think it's awesome, but even if it's that not money like it's a great thing. Yeah, I think it's badass So I'm gonna continue to do it. Can I um Yeah, so basically Noah has this sheet that he sent me it's got a list of a ton of things Can I just read off and ask questions? I actually want to ask you about chrome extensions because They're like I'm like nerding out on chrome extensions right now. Have you ever even made one? I've bought one so we have one right you have one so on here So I tweeted out so this is a mutual friend of ours by the way But I can't say who it is they were considering buying a company and it was a chrome extension and it was two people Who were doing $25 million a year in sales With their chrome extension Um, it's pretty crazy and then Grammarly you know Grammarly Yeah, Grammarly I think is like a $20 billion company at this point Grammarly does like 800 million in revenue That is what I like these sleeper ones that people kind of just like don't do Grammarly is the best man It started by this guy named Max who's I think he's from like the Ukraine and he's a lives in Canada And he's a he's a hardcore engineer and I asked him at hustle kind of backstage like that they and they bootstrapped it And they raised a funding they raised a hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation And I was with them backstage and I was like dude that's amazing So you're like almost a billionaire now he goes yeah, it's pretty cool like the business is way bigger than then then no anything Like be like smirk, but he was real low keys like yeah, it's cool the business is way bigger than most people realize like it's gonna be huge And it was awesome. So Grammarly is a good business. What what's your chrome extension? Leo dot IO do so it's kind of similar to that momentum one which I think is pretty popular It's the main one when you open up a tab it has like a nice background. I think that taking a step back on these chrome extensions. I think what's interesting About your tweet which was like this chrome is gonna make 25 million or these is what are things that not everyone else is paying Attention to that you can acquire for not a market rate like I think ultimately that's how you can have a lot of success in business But that's specifically for for marketing a lot of what I look for So when we launch sumo.com I actually bought probably about five million installs I think give or take five minute installs of WordPress plugins So I bought like some of the most popular WordPress plugins around way which ones I Mean I have to pull up our list now, but the biggest one was Google Analytics So it was like a million person. I had it. Yeah, so it was Google and a litigator We bought WP fonts we bought a construction page. So basically what I did Yeah, so we scraped the the thing that it's not just copying this because now people are more aware of it But what you're looking for is like one can you get structured data? So we went to the WordPress directory and you could get all their rankings So I got all the rankings and then I sorted it by ones that were not updated recently So I said which ones had the most installs that no one's taken care of and I would just email them and say hey You haven't taken care of it I'll pay you for it and because there's not a market for it You can get a cheaper price and then I just sent a blast email to a lot of these people and picked up millions of installs And that drove a significant amount of sumo.com Did you even pay more than six figures for any of them? For the Google Analytics one they had a million souls. I paid a hundred K. Wow, that's crazy, isn't it? That was the most expensive one. I could pull up my price could that could that Google so for the people listening WordPress If you don't use word, I mean WordPress is used by like three-fourths of the internet or half a half of like the top 10,000 websites and they have this like crazy Database of all types of apps that you could plug use or plugins. It's amazing and Sumo was a email capture plugin Yeah, I found our list we had a lot of I bought all-in-one favicon just a bunch of random ones And then we would rebrand them and then cross promo to sumo.com within WordPress And I was thinking I would do the same and the thing was is there there's not like These websites where people are buying and selling them and a lot of these guys weren't monetizing It was just hobbies and so I think in marketing and business You got to look for something that's a problem that other people haven't identified and that's also why about the Chrome extension I bought it for I think 20 I bought it for 25,000 for 40,000 installs Active installs on Chrome, but with that one we could not monetize it at all We tried like paid features. We tried ads to it. We tried to grow it And we were not as successful so I pretty much lost almost all the money on that. How much what's the CPM on ads for a chrome plugin? you know I don't remember what it was but it was abysmal and It wasn't something that we were able to grow dramatically like I thought we could like the WordPress stuff was really cheap Like we were getting that stuff super cheap back. That's crazy. There's this guy like I think it's this guy who I bet you You definitely know I think it's named site. What's the same side is less than starts with the B side and he owns this thing called Awesome what's it called? It's called awesome core for something He owns WP beginner. He's like the WordPress underground mafia. He owns a lot of WordPress blog Let me explain the story the story that I know it as so basically he's only he's young He's I think he's from Pakistan and he's only like 28 or something or 29 and he started this thing called WP beginner, which is a WordPress a site on WordPress So if you like how to install blank on WordPress he'll show up number one It gets like five or ten million unique some month a ton a ton of unique some month and Using his blogs he would see which plugins would get the most install so he would say like here are all the best like Forms for WordPress or here's all the best like font plugins for WordPress and he would just see which are the best He would buy the best ones and then just promote him extra hard on WP beginner and at this point I bet you he makes 50 million dollars a year and all of his WordPress stuff I wouldn't be surprised. I mean I love these industries that like everyone's sleeping on Like I think that that WordPress stuff is really interesting It's probably is still a decent category what's fascinating though is the other side of the same So I actually try to do the same strategy in Shopify apps so I went over to Shopify and we were launching Sumit.com on Shopify and I was like man, I'll just go buy all these people over there What was interesting was that a lot of the people on Shopify were a little bit more savvy and they had recurring revenue So they were like we want 10x the price where like 10x price of their revenue where the WordPress plugins They weren't really making money so I was like hey, I'll pay one cent for every active install you have so I was getting them for very very cheap But the Shopify ones like I couldn't I literally couldn't buy almost so our friend Andrew Wilkinson Bought a couple of them and he rolled them up and eventually took it public and it currently It's in it's public on the Canadian stock exchange right now probably for six hundred million dollar market cap It's called we commerce and they do like I think a thirty million dollars a year in revenue just off Shopify apps The Shopify ecosystem was interesting I mean it's interesting if you can create something really easily and other people can copy you really easily And then you don't control the payments It's it was a whole wild experience in there to Shopify controls all the money you don't you have to wait for your your grandpa to give you your Nichols and they control the whole the whole thing so we were like let's get the hell out of this world Yeah, we commerce looks like 535 Canadian which is what like a hundred million American on at that Yeah, like what's the conversion of monopoly money to USD I think it's I think it's almost one to one. Um, what a So are you bullish your into chrome shit chrome plugins? I've pulled no I'm not as excited about that I think what's what's interesting is like what are the areas that are either super early on? That like savvy people haven't gotten into so like for example one of the older stories for me was Facebook newsfeed ads So look for these ad channels or places that not a lot of people are like kind of all paying attention to when you So this account no one was doing it and we went bonkers on it and that was a huge driver At AppSumo for a lot of our growth because it was just so much cheaper because not everyone If you're paying if you're playing in the market, you're gonna pay market rate and that's not how you're gonna What did you use to get clicks for on Facebook? Let me pull it up pennies Yeah, I mean I wouldn't say his pennies But it's definitely like dollar email subscribers and then like low ten figures for paying customers and now I think AppSumo I'd have to pull up our dashboard But I mean I think we're paying like $60 for paying customer now. It's so expensive when we start so we got to like 200,000 subscribers just through blogging and then we started doing paid marketing and I think we paid a dollar 50 When we sold it might have been like four dollars And if I had a guess now I wouldn't be surprised if it's six dollars to eight dollars Yeah, I still think there's opportunity. I mean the opportunities are always there It's just that you have to be creating you have to look so like for me I was thinking about this recently like if I was trying to grow a newsletter I probably would go try to sponsor like super micro people on TikTok and YouTube like these guys that are guys and girls that are like Sub 10,000 subs like it like if you're your channel has like 966 subscribers like you'd be a perfect person Because you have like an engaged audience you're super smaller. You don't know how much money you're supposed to be making and the fact that I'm giving you Attention It's kind of like what I did at mint.com. We've done this with AppSumo Mitchell and our team is doing it with AppSumo currently I think that's still a really affordable way Let me ask you a creative way to get a lot of notes about mint so mint you were like the one of the first hires there right? Yeah, number four and mint eventually at the time it sold for like 120 million dollars or two million dollars or something like that right? Yeah, one step and at the time that was considered massive It's still a lot of money, but like particularly then it was like it might as well have been a billion and I Love mint it sucks now though like I don't like mint totally why what would you do differently if you were running the show now? Oh, wow, I mean Aaron was running the show to be clear and he was really impressive I got to give him props when he started it and I want to talk about this because I think your audience I don't know I've been thinking about this line I think it resonates with your audience Aaron worked alone in his room by himself for six months building a prototype and Then came out and convinced the world to come check out this product And I just have a lot of admiration respect for people like him like we have an intern George He's living in my guess. I bet he works that didn't get working move from Miami Or sorry, why why? To live in he was living in another room his desk was an Amazon box Right now his desk is my washer and dryer. That's awesome, right? And he's like I mean the the point is I think with Aaron Padsers well as you know these people as well as myself I was living on floors with my own basement. There's something to be said for like the sacrifice and the dream And I have a lot of respect for Aaron and George and you know even back in the day with where I was at getting all this stuff started With mint I think I mean look at how big some of these these finance look at plaid Right, so we used another company before plaid was ever a thing and plaid is now Tendling I think some of the stupidest companies that are big that I don't get is like Brex or ramp They're like credit card branded companies. They're like ten billion dollars. Why don't you understand that? It's pretty simple They just convince you to sign up for the credit card and they split the 1% fee with master card and all your spending I Know but the fact that that's a ten billion dollar industry. I mean it's just kind of it doesn't seem like there's a lot of value Add, but it's almost similar to the mint thing which is they took a product that existed which was this bank information and they they printed it up So I think mint could have been a much larger role the VCs were definitely disappointed when mint sold out I thought mint was gonna sell for that price. That's why I left early. Why why did you think it was gonna sell for that price? I Thought the vision for it's always interesting to think about people's visions like mark's vision at Facebook was always this big and It's interesting to see different people and like how big they're thinking and Aaron thought big, but it was like hey, we're gonna sell credit cards and we're gonna sell people turbo tax and I was like, okay, this at best scenario is gonna sell for half a billion It just in terms of how big that that company could actually be and I just did the math to think about why on one percent So max I'll get five million dollars pre-tax which post-tax means I'll get two million and I was like I think you know in four years do I do I think I can generate two million dollars for myself and so I was willing to take that bet did a That's that's kind of interesting because I don't I don't think that I think that big I mean I would say like most people would think one $500 million is a pretty big exit. What would what could be a done differently to think bigger? I mean what would a bigger example be? And so limit let me be clear. I don't care Like I don't care what people's visions are per se and everyone should have whatever dream they want like if your dream is to make 5,000 a month or 500 a month or I'm not hating on anybody's dream It was just I think there's look at how many how big fintech spaces today Right like platter loan just almost got bought by Visa for seven billion You have Robinhood, which is whatever 15 billion So what mint did which was really interesting was it acquired a lot of customers really cheap I Think if they didn't sell it to into it as early there would have been a lot of different avenues that they could have parlaid This audience of young people who are interested in personal finance into a lot of different avenues At the same time though dude if someone came to you and you know you did take that you did take it which is a good thing too Well, you can make No, I mean he was definitely educated, but he had a chance to cash out I think he cashed out 30 to 50 million bucks And I don't see I think he like moved to some like remote area New Zealand and he's just living there Yeah, well, he started like a ambulance company like a software for ambulances or something like that but like it errant he's a creative guy. He actually tried to start a and a Sky subway system That's crazy so like in cities like in Austin instead of like having an underground subway it would be an air-based subway Oh, yeah, he's just crazy creative like but look I think everyone's got to figure out what it is They want their own life to be like there's no bad or we're selling out stuff I guess lately I've been just thinking about like with this one period of time we have here on earth like how interesting do we each want to make it? Yes, but I will play double's advocate. It's also How hard do you want to grind so like do you want to like because I think that in order to make in order to make cool shit? I can't decide how I feel at the moment actually for the longest time I was like dude in order to make something huge and something amazing You got to just lock yourself in a room for like three years like you just have to grind now My thinking is I think you actually only need to do that early on and then you can somewhat let up So where's your opinion on that? Do you have to grind like all the time in order to make something happen? Or do you think that you can you could have a little bit more balance because if you have to grind all the time that's just exhausting I only have that so many times in my life Yeah, I mean I don't know I guess I'm just trying to think at different examples like for me if you would have told me when I started up So I'm like hey, no, you'll be a millionaire, but it's gonna take ten years. I probably went to have started sure and Most of the people that I've seen like one of my buddies is now making eight figures as an investor It took him probably about 10 to 15 years to get to that place And so the reality I was thinking about today like there's one of our guys who I we got pedicures today He's on the sales team and I was like look you can be as big of a life in a career as you want it to be It's just like what path you want to take that on and are you willing to put in the work? But I honestly I think I kind of think the opposite Sam I don't I think of like what I'm doing with that sumo and YouTube it doesn't feel like a grind like I'm actually like your podcast What you're doing now? Is this feel like a grind most of time? No, but it doesn't feel great all the time like some days I'm like, oh, I don't feel like being happy like I'm gonna like here's an example Sean my co-host who's out with covid. He's late every single time. He's five minutes late every single time Every once in a while. It'll put me in such a bad mood that I don't want to record and on those days I'm like I fuck it hate this. I don't want to do this. I got to like snap out of this mood and mean it good So anyway, it's not always fun I Mean I think about my buddy Adam Gilbert. It's like the times that you don't want to show up is when it counts Like I think about that a lot of times when I'm like it's the things you're doing when no one else is watching that matters And that's like going to the gym and no one wants to do it or like last night at 730 I didn't feel like doing a podcast But I'm you know, it was like okay. They need to get done And I think that you know that'll help you separate whether you want to get some of the things in life you want or not Like are you willing to sacrifice and for how long and I think I don't know I was thinking about this equation like I wonder if there's a time time sacrifice Equal success equation Plus a little bit of unhappiness and if you could do that for some period of time you'll get success I think it's it's the way that I the question I asked myself is what am I willing to pay in order to achieve blank? So like to me that like what am I what what's what price am I gonna pay in order to get to To this particular goal and I asked myself am I willing to pay that price and sometimes I am sometimes I'm not So like at the current at my current stage in life It's do I want to grind for a long time on a software company in order to achieve X amount of money and I'm like no I don't want to pay that price at the moment Maybe like in the future I would and for sure when I was younger I would but not at the current point in my life I think with all this stuff it's better to be not to be naive and just get going well Just find the things that you're curious about like if it's you know You're your your audio at or Benji and be like look I like making these audio shows. I'm just gonna go for it or lately You know like I've been really enjoying app sumo work Or doing the YouTube stuff and it's better just not almost not think about it because I think you'll psych yourself out Like one of the stories we were talking about on the sheet was like this mud water guy. Yeah, what? And this guy just had like a Dude this is a crazy Yeah, I mean it's just it's basically indian chai tea you heard it indian chai Dude, it's delicious. I love yeah, you have a really good video of I watched the video of you testing it out and I bought it because of that Oh, oh, yeah, cool and um, I wasn't fawn sir It wasn't a fillator anything. It was just this guy with one product, which I always find really fascinating I think a lot of us get so excited to have like 18 business ideas But Apple mud water a lot of other people are making a significant amount of money just with one thing and so he was having it And he was at an agency Just a regular day job and I think everyone should get a day job or get some basic income And then he I think what's fascinating Was what's the problem you have and what's a big-ass category? And like coffee is one of the biggest categories in the world and so I love that he kind of said All right, well, what's the angle against them and he created his own version literally? I think buying products off Amazon and just mixing himself together How's it going? He's not like some coffee What's that? I think he's I mean last we heard it was a $60 million revenue, which Revenue is always different than profit as I'm sure you you know But it's just fascinating that he found one product line and did great branding and just really went hard on that $60 million is so much money it makes 60 it does 60 million in sales. That's crazy I wouldn't be surprised if it's more I think what you know when you're thinking about business ideas number one What's problems that we have ourselves? That's always just like the easiest way that I try to solve it for me like one problem I had recently was like I'm trying to be a doomsday prepper same and I want like a doomsday I want a doomsday prepper in a bomb. Same like I just do we had a total episode all that clearly you read Tucker Max's article we had a total I did see his I could see his article This is like this is a little bit before because we had our snow pockles same I don't look at the generators already because I know it's I'm afraid. Yeah, I just got mine What did what how much did you spend like a thousand dollar generator? It was a thousand thinking about getting to do those generators are not that strong They only charge like four things like they can only use on like I'm just gonna basically have a generator to a tent and then when the doomsday comes just like come knock on my tent Dude, I would love a doomsday in a box. I'm so on board The problem is is that a lot of the doomsday stuff They assume that you live in like the country and I'm like no I need like the urban version of this so like tell me like how do I store water? How do I like like should I have a gun or should I not have a gun? What type of generator what do you use the generator for all that type of stuff? Yeah, I mean I think coming back to what we're talking about It's like with mud water and you know business ideas. It's just like one just go to the things that you need help with Right, and then just start thinking all right Well, how you know how do I do that today? Right, so you if for this doomsday idea to go hit up you I hit up Neville I hit other friends in Austin say hey, I'm starting to put together a thing Do you want something like this and see if I can get anyone to buy into it before I start and then from there if that works Then maybe launch a Shopify site Or just start doing YouTube content around that. Yeah, you just wire cutter for the end of the world Honestly that it's a huge category especially like nowadays like all the stores are out Think people are a little bit more aware that that can have we have this friend named Ryan dice and Ryan dice started digital Marketer, which is like a pretty sizable business that does all types of stuff and he owned a conference that he sold for a lot of money But pre pandemic like two years before the pandemic. He owned a website called like survival something Oh, yeah, it was I forget what it was called and had he who would have known but had he held on to it Torald's like COVID times it would have been sold for so much more because now it's so much more popular but he had this website and It talked all about uh Like article it was basically articles and affiliates on like which flashlight to buy like for the end of the world and I'm almost positive that he sold it for around the eight figure range That's Remember that site what was it called I guess I don't remember the exact thing Survival something so I remember seeing it. I'm like. Yeah, that's shady me too. I thought it was not. No. I want it Yeah, it wasn't shady. It was just I didn't understand it I think sometimes I'll dismiss people or dismiss businesses about that when I think I'm back to like business ideas I'm like one person businesses like I was thinking about the crypto space as well and are just all this stuff It's like you don't have money and you can't buy it. You can always just document it Just go review it like you said It's like your idea be the wire cutter of these different categories be the tick tocker or youtuber or whatever that is What's the best selling product ever for AppSumo Go on the digital side dude. I'll also tell you another business idea. I would love someone to start I'm gonna pull up our forever list. Hold on. I'm literally just I'm pulling up our back end The top product of all time and this is a shocker probably yes if you had any sort of stickers Okay, Ben do you have a thought I have no guess no nothing maybe fun. Let me see something about photos photos are fonts maybe There it is so our top cell ever So last year we had our highest day black Friday was our highest day Almost two million dollars in that one day on black Friday, which we paid out half of that At least half of that to creators which is fucking wild The top product Oh, this is interesting top product was a video editor So a lot of video content. So if you want to get a video editing the second one was photos What I'm just looking at what are some other interesting trends like oh, have you guys? Do you ever invest in companies just because you're able to look at the apps in most stats? So that's something we've gone back and forth here's another well taking a step back I know a lot of your people want you know to make their first million and beyond here's another product category tools for agencies But if you think about what that really is so that I can't say the product is like it's his private numbers But basically stuff to help agencies manage their project management But the real thing What's a tangential bit what's another example that you so like? So like basically a sauna for agencies Yeah, like click up Like something like a click up like a click up I'll turn it if we have a lot of that on app. So but anyways the point that's interesting about that is and this is this Actually surprised me when I came back to work it up. So I'm always What are things that you can sell that help people make money? Well, our friend Neville Has says a slightly different he says Well because Neville has a course and he's like well I sell this course and people like it But like really what I'm learning is like when someone gives me money for a course I'm just putting them to work and if you're really wanting to make a lot of money I would just do the work for them and charge them And that's how we explained it which is similar but uh, so what are some of the other top ones on AppSumo Yeah, I'm looking them up. So dude the so one photos stock photos is a sleeper I'm shocked at how many people want like stock audio stock photos stock video Secondly is video editing which if you're not technical that's probably harder to do This is this is the area that like This blew up a lot last year and it's still going which is all this gpt3 auto content stuff so auto ads auto writing Um So like copy dot ai alternative the best in copy so we've loaded writer happy scribe Um Looking up the other major ones around that You Those are just some of the ones that I'm just like shocked at how well they've done But I mean I think cool part about sumo and like people to check it out It's like there's a lot of new products that you honestly can just check out what's getting popular and then make some type of alternative or make Training around those types of whatever invest and stuff based off the absolute data. Oh Um You know, I've actually invested differently So we've talked about this over the 11 years of the company like hey They're doing well instead of us taking a split of the sales. What if we took equity instead? And I would have liked I mean dude think about this We've promoted hopping there eight billion dollars. We promoted you to me mix panel optimisly mail chimp fresh I mean if we took some splits it would have It'd be a different trajectory for our company, but it's just not something we've done I do it differently. I invest in the companies that we use in our company Sure like so like lately what's At last he and I went invested so when we were building Shopify apps five years ago I was like I don't know if our shopify apps are gonna work But I'll put ten thousand dollars in Shopify stock when it just started so if our app suck I think to stop if I think we'll probably work in that shop if I stock now is like 60k But at last he and HubSpot I bought a lot of HubSpot stock once we started transitioning a lot of our team to HubSpot But I think where I just think about is like where do I have an advantage or understanding that other people may not? Yeah, I how many products have you guys Promoted on epsimo like hundreds or thousands A thousand that I mean even in 11 years. I think right now on epsimo. We have 11,000 products Um Yeah, it's definitely gone a little wild as we come a software marketplace. That's crazy, but 10,493 products, so when we um like years ago or a couple years ago We had zoom was one of our advertisers and this was before they went public and And the ad crushed it. It was so good and we were like damn dude people love this product. They love zoom And we ended up buying stock right before or right at IPO and it like knocked it out the park I think there is like interesting stuff where you can where you can see like and you You can see interesting information because you're like WPBeginner because you're like epsimo because you're like the hustle and you can see inside of this stuff Yeah, it's like in for everyone out there It's like where do you have an advantage like where you maybe you're in discord all day So you know what the NFTs are gonna be popping Maybe it's gonna be out there on Twitter world So you know like the different stocks or different people that are talking about different things I think just finding some advantage or like area that you can get You know an unfair competitive advantage. What other ideas interest you? I'm trying to think of it just like uh The stuff lately. I mean that's interesting me is basically like three or four areas one I mean I still think software is gigantic. What specifically there's just so many what's that? specifically um I mean for me content creation is definitely the area that I've spent a lot of time in so like I would love software And like how do you figure out which topics are gonna be popular? Like we spend I don't know how many people hours probably like 10 hours a week Just to figure out which video to make each week And so there's got to be more Optimized way to do that. I think with app sumo It's the same kind of an idea like we have a team of I think around four people That full-time just try software all across the internet. What they're only job Yeah, they're they're called like LDRs like I don't know what their titles are anymore. They don't tell me But their little job is like go to product hunt go to Google go to Twitter or go to all these like beta list Go to all these different sites Try the different software all across the internet and then see which ones are worthy to get you know blasted on app Sue and calm and so that that feels like that should actually be a software solution So I think a lot of it is just like what are the things we're doing manually that we could automate? So for me topics is big finding product for app sumo is big I'm super excited about you know, I think a lot of people are crypto space. So One of the things that I'm looking for is like how do you scrape Twitter and Reddit and find the new next thing before everyone else so kind of like a Google trends or like a discovery thing for these crypto NFTs How do you do that now? I don't got it. I mean it's just too hard manually right now What I do is that I text my friend who basically just spends 16 hours a day doing NFTs I'm like which one are you buying so like a few days ago. I bought a hippo Did it work? Did I tell you about I bought a five thousand dollar was it how much was it? I'm just I spend on that. I think I know it's only almost $2,000 hippo But it's part of a casino So if you as the casino makes money if you own one of the NFTs you get a cut of the casino rake So Sean it feels like a scam to John created an email list the other day and he called it the milk road and And I don't know I don't know if it's daily or if it's weekly But Sarah's been getting it and loves it and it's all about crypto and he tries to talk about like the latest and greatest from a trustworthy Point of view and it's it's pretty great the milk road is awesome. That's a great idea The milk road. What is he recommending? I haven't read it yet because I don't like crypto But Sarah's been reading it and like he'll just say like people are tweeting out like so the weird thing about crypto and NFTs is like it's on Twitter It's like in groups that like you have to be like on the inside to know what's legit and so there's like these like stupid discourse groups just discord groups and Like these weird tweet Twitter folks where you got to like know who to follow and he'll be like Blank is tweeting about blank. That's interesting because of and then he'll explain And so it's kind of interesting. I think what I think was just about a lot of these side hustle ideas and we put together like top ones around Crypto if you're poor meaning like if you want to be in a crypto, but you have nothing you know money like there are a lot of ways to do it And one of them is just documenting a lot of this stuff Right like you could start a newsletter just like researching and putting out like hey, here's things that are interesting that I'm seeing about it And eventually that's how you do become an expert in these different areas. How many the other good? No, how many coaches do have in your life? Oh right now Not as much so I have a CEO coach So there's a guy I've been working with named Ken Coleman out of the Bay Area What's what's the what's that? Torch or is it he's just an independent so Ken's like old school like he's not tweeting he's not on YouTube He's just been around Silicon Valley in a lot of these different kind of companies And a lot of his stuff is very like It's like really obvious euphemisms like leaders Noah leaders lead Like Yeah, he's great that he's great The coaches of it and then I like a CEO advisor. So this guy named Raj who works that indeed he's phenomenal He's a little bit more operational so I go to him with different people that were Like yo, here's things that I'm seeing today. What do you think I should be doing about it? And so him I have a Hebrew coach right now. I'm looking for a squash coach I've been really getting into squash. It's actually that's kind of been a harder coach to find so I Um, you like you've always been into coaches and you've always done less I would have always done lessons and so like you've always you've always had like flight lessons or like Oh, yeah, I think you used to do boxing and so after we started boxing on Friday So after I talked to you I started hiring coaches and coaches are pretty sick So I've got a bunch of them now and they are badass is absolutely upped All my most all my coaches are fitness related But like if I do want to learn something I always hire a coach now. It's 100% the way to go Dude, I'm glad that's cool to hear that man. So you have you have fitness coach well for your boxing I have like a boxing. Yeah, and like we both like and so he's because I'm like trying to fight and Like prepare for a real match and so he's like helping me and then I have a fitness coach as well And then for a little while I did my body tutor, but I have a different nutritionist now. So yeah, I like I'm all about coaches I Think we're for people especially if you don't have money to do something like that. It's it's more also like how do you get someone to hold you accountable? Right at the end of the day like one of the things that I found really I was just having accountability buddy So if you're trying to start a hustle if you're trying to be healthy If you can't afford a coach like that's an easy way to find someone to just help you make sure that you you're going on your How do you use like maybe it's in your hustle Facebook group? What do you use to track all your all your stuff that you have going on? Like you have Two or four coaches at any point you've got your work. You've always got shit going on. Do you have some weird way that you track all this? I Think the I mean I just have most of my stuff is just automatic So I don't really have to track it meaning that like every Friday like my calendar is pretty much as Automatic as possible and I think I've talked about some past like it's color coded Right, so every Friday at 10 a.m. is boxing so that's just automatic and then generally flying Is gonna be every other week and that's yellow. So that's one of my learning and then Hebrews on Thursdays Therapy's Wednesday every other Wednesday at 11 that's yellow. So yellow is my learning category I do squashy steamy where we place squash and go to the steam room That's not really with a coach But I think if you can have more things on autopilot soon off to think about it Then you don't have to track it the only thing I think I actively Aggress not aggressively, but I've tracked for 15 years is my personal finance. What do you would you so every single? I use a spreadsheet everywhere. You go to I think on yeah, okay door calm. Where's my money? It's literally just like what's my assets with my liabilities? And then what are some action items? I want to take in the next 30 days. Do you when you're tracking any of that? Do you count? Privately held stock is anything And then we can talk about app sumo KPIs because there's some interesting stuff how we track there and then the YouTube tracking so more business related stuff In my net worksheet. I only track the cost basis So I don't track like how do you have evaluation? No, no, so I literally just track how much I invested in so I invested in like circle invested in buffer vested in elementee Huckberry I only invest in companies I use. I don't invest in anything. I don't use And so I just tracked that like I put $10,000 and that's just what it is I don't track like the appreciation on that at all buffers and interesting companies so buffer when I was when so a lot of People who listen to this show are young when I was like younger when I was younger when I was 24 25 Buffer was the most badass company because they did this thing where they revealed all of their revenue and at the time that was like Revolutionary like some small-time bloggers were doing it but buffer started doing it but their company has totally stalled hasn't it? Like their revenue that's a tough one like $25 million every single year for like the last three years Yeah, I invested him because I love Leo love Joel there I mean, they're very innovative at the time I think what people don't give like Zuckerberg and some of these people credit for is how do you stay relevant and consistent same with Tim Ferris Like how do you stay relevant for 15 years It's very easy to come out hot But to actually kind of have that stuff How does that do it? You know for anyone out there? Well, I think for anyone it's just like you have to stay consistent with it and you have to kind of keep Staying on that edge over your little bit uncomfortable I think with buffer there's they basically my guess is that they hit a market Saturation of how valuable that is for people to pay for their tweets. Yeah, I'm looking at the revenue It's gone down since 2019 Yeah, I mean, I think they have it. Well, here's the interesting thing They've gone down but Canvas a $40 billion company and it's pretty much the exact same thing Canva different is the same thing is buffer Are you on drugs? What are you talking about Canva is amazing Canva It's the same thing. It's how do I create content that I can then share or post another places But I think where they evolved past buffer which buffer was like I'm gonna help you make your content for tweeter Twitter or Facebook Which really would make a difference and then Canva's like well What if we can help you make these templates that you can just use in social media? But as well through a lot of other categories And so I think that's kind of like market size is where they I think iterated better than but not iterated But picked up better market same as I'm similar. We got lucky with this mama is gonna be buffer Just canvas gonna be one of the most valuable Publicly traded companies. I think in the world when they go public Dude have you seen their numbers? They've just crossed a billion in revenue and it's like doubling Really? Canva is killing it man. They raised money at a 40 billion dollar valuation because they grew the revenue from 500 million to a billion in a year It's on a tear man. Canvas amazing. That is bonkers man. Wow. It's crazy What's crazy is the founders are husband and wives and they bootstrapped it for a long time And so the husband and wife trio or a couple is worth like 15 or 20 billion dollars right now big good for them It's not good for that Canva is a crazy story. We're gonna have to cover a camera time because they We should one does I have no idea how they grow it so fast One thing I do want to come back on Sam. I was talking to Mitchell on the back end One thing I do in tracking that when I've told people they're always trying to pretty interesting is like I do monthly life in reviews Don't do this every month Yeah, it's actually been I mean, it's kind of dude. So every month and this I've done this now for about seven years And it's basically an email I sent to Tyne and Nick Gray and my buddy Jimmy and Leo And you basically just review your past month and you I actually started sending it to like my brother My buddy Johnny and a lot of a few other close friends, but it's pretty fascinating to track what's happened in a month and It's been fun to go back super like years ago to see what was happening in my life But it's also interesting to be like, okay, look at all the photos for the month What happened in the month? What can I understand about myself and then what do I want to have upcoming in this in for me January? What do you but I think that's been one so what all what I'll do reveal that email? I'm gonna copy that so you you have Yeah, so I'll just tell you so let me do it So I don't share my photos, but basically what I'll do is I'll pull up my photos From December look through December to the end and I'm like damn a lot of hap a lot of stuff happened versus what I think happened I'll start the so let me just start the December one. I put December was a fucking month six out of ten It may not be my greatest, but maybe was actually better than I think and then I'll start the email with what are the things I said I was gonna do December and how did I do against them? So a few of them was like at peace with my drinking and My I was not at peace with my drinking. I said I'd go to a nine years game, which I did Lock in my 2022 bucket list, which I did and then I'll just try to do like a little bit more of a stream of consciousness Reviewing of how the month actually went about themes work travel family I've tried it with categories and I've tried also just free flowing. There's not whatever works for you I think the important thing here is having like a group of people that you can send it to that don't even have to give you feedback Like they don't you don't need their opinion, but it's just like here's my life How's your life and if you want opinions you can ask would you ever make that pen? Also? This is way too raw to make public. It's like Um, such good kind of like I would love to like the region I mean I'll send you I'll send you the December one just don't share it But it's just like well, I'm just saying like I'm thinking like what I do that as a blog It's pretty cool the end of your reviews for a lot of people the reason why I started thinking about Syed recently that guy the warp WP beginner guy is because he has this end of your review and I always love reading his end of your review I didn't really see I'm looking up Um some of this stuff has like we did this like wild therapy out in Mexico on the beach, which was just like psychedelics So most of it is just really sensitive Yeah, but I don't know if I'd want to make a public. I'll send you ask about that really quick And then we'll wrap up but did that stuff make a difference? Just don't do in psychedelic therapy which I don't I told a story about how I almost did at one time, but I got kicked out of the group Did it get down This lady used to work at Lehman brothers She was like work at the banks that like helped destroy America at one point and She got mad at us for talking about money too much and like she was saying how like her medicine needs to be free for the world But was making me pay $2,000 and I was like lady you realize how like country or how like hypocritical you are Like you're talking about like how capitalism ruins everything, but you like you worked at Lehman brothers and Like you're making me pay you two grand to do drugs with you like come on like don't act like you're shit Don't stink and she kicked me out of the group so I didn't get the I didn't get to actually do it with her You couldn't have yourself improvement. Yeah, I didn't she didn't let me do drugs with her I do want to and Mitchell was Mitchell's messaging me's like yo you got to do your favorite purchases or website Wait, but tell me really quick did the therapy work? So I did a lot of different therapy like I've done I wasco which I put her I put that article out that went viral on a viewer Yeah, I if I remember correctly the takeaway was like it was cool like it made somewhat of a difference But like it wasn't that great Um No, it's definitely impactful. It's just intense. I mean I think what you know There's a lot of different ways to eat a Reese's peanut butter cup. Why I always think the it was Ellis D therapy and I Think the main theme that I took away from that specific experience Well a theme in general for me is like how much should we have life be super predetermined? Like I want to go make this much money or I want to go on this vacation versus how much should we just let the day like unfold and I think that's where that was definitely a theme I was trying to just understand I think the big theme from that soon specific experience is like how do I let more joy in my life? Right like my word of the year is smile like I always got an intent Yeah, like to have an intent or something the year and for me smile just like yo Just enjoy it right. We're all gonna die someday just like Enjoy the grind enjoy getting to chat with you today Which yeah, I was like this is probably the highlight of my day. I have a buddy coming at 630 But I was like I really want to talk to Sam today like I'm looking forward to it. Can So that was the main theme from that experience. I think there's a lot of ways to learn about ourselves I think you know MDMA or LSD therapy regular therapy journaling There's a lot of different ways, you know, whatever is calling people at the right time. What are your? All right, Mitchell was telling telling he also told me this or he wrote it in the thing about best stuff To buy for under $100 you and I are the same in that we buy lots of crap Just because like we're up we're both obsessed with gadgets By the way, you sent me over so I told Noah's gonna go camping and he sent me over this massive Tupper container with like all these gadgets There was candy in there that expired in like 2012 Like I went camping any the gadgets in there. I went yeah, I went camping I used your lantern and I used like one of the flashlights and a headlamp and I saw I found some Swedish fish or something like that But it like expired like years ago I'm wearing a sour patch kid guy now. That's what it was. Sorry. It was sour patch kids. It was it was it was it was it was that type of candy yeah Hmm Different purchase. I don't know. It's gonna pull up some of the different things that I bought that I'm like man I like these don't use them a lot Let's start with a clunk. So the coal plunge. I didn't buy it. I was gifted it. It was expensive as shit It was like five grand But in my opinion if you want to be cold it it's a pretty cool gadget I Like it I just I guess the question is that like I think retail is 5k. I pay so this I think you'll appreciate this I hit them up and I said hey, I'm a social media influencer, which I find I Say that as a mockery. I didn't actually say that. I was like hey I'm interested in your product. Can I actually just pay cost and then I'll promote it because I figure like I want to support them as a business So I think for people out there that want to get free crap like just pay cost You get it a lot cheaper and you can promote it if you like it. That's good. I Like it, but I don't know is it worth 3k Try not I like my I've been using the bathtub in the hot tub a lot more often you have a lot of you had a hot Dude, here's a thing that I think people are sleeping on but some people are using it have you used Apple air tax I just got one. They're pretty great dude They're like secretly amazing like I throw to my luggage and in my backpack So if it ever gets lost in like travel or someone ever jacks my backpack There's like a little secret tag in there dude I've been using tiles for years, but the tiles are only okay the air tags are what's the difference? I never use those just the interface and how loud the beep is Oh, that's it. Yeah, just just those two things They're pretty dude. You can actually I haven't messed with 3D printers too much But Tynin he puts out a dude. Tynin's gear list if you don't check out Tynin calm's gear list Definitely one of the top gear lists ever like in front of that the P T Y N a N calm So his gear list is awesome. He has like a lot of USB stuff and like what's the smallest charger to be using? But he what you can do which is crazy on Etsy. This is a really neat hack You can buy a 3D printed thing where you can put an Apple air tag and then secretly attach it to any of your bikes So if you're a biker for like 15 bucks you can buy a secret thing that it attaches to your water bottle and known Well, or no, it's there so you have a tracker on any of your expensive bike. Oh, that's sick But does the air test so the air tag only works so if it's hidden within Bluetooth of a an iPhone Of any iPhone that I think that's where there's a little bit of like controversy, but it's any Apple device That's the how they're easy. All right. I think there's an internet connection or Bluetooth mesh I think it was Bluetooth Which is kind of like fucked up if you think about it bonkers right Dude, well, I mean there's these stories where like someone put it on someone's car and they're tracking them home I think that's obviously like that's messed up But I think just the technically like it's just a fun tool to start playing with and just start experimenting with all right So if you got dude, you know what I've gotten really into tea Why I'm like I don't know man. I've been into like Chinese tea so I bought a Snowpeak bottle It's called snowpeak is the brand. It's like super good for like travel and stuff and then I buy It's called a guy one. I can't believe I'm talking about this publicly. I don't know just so nerdy It's like what creepy white dudes do um I mean you want these guy ones you have like a little Chinese tea ceremony and it's really inexpensive You can go to Ali Express buy it for like 10 bucks And I bought a travel one actually so you have one for home Which you can buy an Ali Express for like literally 10 bucks or from Keith titanium You can buy a guy one. That's for camping. That's like 200 bucks So when I travel I'll bring tea around and I get it from this place in the Bay area called old ways tea Well, yeah old ways teet.com. That is definitely been something I'm way more hyped on and I've definitely been drinking a crap ton more tea this year A good thing that I bought recently which I'm almost positive you have as well. What brand chair do you have? I think this is an autonomous same. We have the exact same one so So basically these chairs that I was looking at they're like $1,500 like a fancy chair like a I think really an air on I think it's called it's like 1200 to 2g's They're really expensive and so autonomous is a new startup that's making chairs and desk supplies And it's basically as good. I think as the really fancy one, but for like 350 bucks Yeah, these are definitely affordable one thing I'm one thought I've had Sam is like what if you bought in your life that you're like man, this is luxurious I Was trying to think of things that I'm like like I bought this Levi's jacket because it's getting cold in Austin It's got the little fur it was an $89 And I probably looked for a coupon and I'm like yo, this is like I look like a cowboy like a real cowboy This is obviously kind of joke And so I was just trying to think like what are other items in my life where I'm like man I can't believe how rich I am even though it's not that expensive and definitely that Is an example dude. Amas. Oh, you have these Amazon basic moccasins. I got those because are you actually? Yeah, that's good Those are 20 bucks. I'm like I walk around the house. I'm like who's a king who's the gig? I love that of one thing that we do at my house is we do Costco socks and We'll buy like 50 pairs and just never match socks again And then at the end of a at the end of like half the year or so We just throw away all the the socks and get new ones because like if they wear out or if because I hate matching socks and So I hate you know like it's just stupid. Why do I gotta like spend all this time like putting them in a ball together? Like just give me like a huge bin where they're all the same and I'll just grab two It's stupid matching socks is stupid. I'm I take a stand against that and so anyway I just don't match socks anymore and so that's my splurge is I I spend like $200 a year and I just get fancy new socks also another thing that I do that's pretty amazing is I do the same that same thing but with X it officially now to underwear So like you know like you know when you put underwear on and there's like a pair That's always like the last to be used because like the band is all stretched out or you just like don't like it Or it's like staining or it looks ugly like you're just not about it So I just threw all those away And I only bought one style one color but like 30 pairs And I spent like $500 to do it because X officially now to underwear is like 20 to 25 dollars a piece Do I only wear sacks underwear? I think it's the same kind of same kind of thing It but it's got the whole little ball holder stuff. I like those two I like sacks. They're a good brand and they don't stretch out as fast But they still do wear out a little bit. I definitely feel pretty luxurious and I'm do you ever mess with Lou lemon socks? Yeah, I'm all about anything Lou Lou lemon Dude Lou lemon socks like these no show socks because they always other only they don't always get holes in them No, I'm just like frustrated about that, but the Lou lemon ones Home what other stuff you bought they like yo this is right and I do want to spend at least five minutes and then we're gonna end here I want to spend five minutes like how do we grow your podcast? Let's like brainstorm like I know that's me You're aiming to do so let's do one or two of these items and like I don't let me all right Let's do that now. Let me take the numbers now. So in December. We did a right about two million views I think or two million downloads of which like I think 600,000 was on YouTube and the rest so 1.4 million was just people going on to iTunes or Spotify Okay, so what's your what's your current goal? Do you have a goal this year around the the audience or podcast? Yeah, I think three three million Consistently getting at least three million downloads a month would put us in like the top like five business podcast in the country What what's been the biggest thing that's helped you grow it? This is like the way I'm just trying brainstorm with you What's helped you get the biggest Delta and new subscribers? So one of the shitty parts about podcasting is that I've done a lot of growth stuff It's been crazy hard to grow it and so the biggest thing that's done Well is we've just invested more time and more energy into good content. So Sean and I like prepare we research a ton Our our chemistry has gotten better. So that's just like one big category of just like improved content The second thing that we've done that's starting to work really well is we're buying ads on other people's podcasts And so we've learned this strategy from Jordan Harbinger Jordan Harbinger has 15 million downloads a month of course He's in like a big category. It's just like in culture I think it's the category he's in and he basically spent $900,000 in this first year buying ads on other people's podcasts And that's how we got big Okay, um, you should sponsor okay my podcast or I'll just put you I mean you're coming on next week for free Well, I'll just question. Yeah, I mean how many downloads I guess what does you get? I think it's about 10,000 in episode dude. So like We're a little bit bigger than that now, but like just getting to 10,000 is really hard Podcast would do agree our podcast the hardest thing he's ever tried to grow That's why I backed out of it. That's what I want to YouTube dude It's so hard, but it's super sticky like every podcast that we launch is gonna get at least 50,000 every episode We'll get at least 50,000 views. I think All right, here's like one simple thing that I don't know why you don't do on your I think one of the ways to think about one It's always easy to get people to come from medium to medium So podcast sponsoring means they come for one show together. It's super easier. How can you don't promote your podcast or newsletter on YouTube? Well Not so like I went to your but what do you mean the podcast? Well, no, so think about it as like a gateway drug so Someone on another podcast is highly likely to go to a different podcast because you already know that their behavior wise They're there sponsoring podcast is a great one getting on other people shows is a great one But you're getting like you had a video recently where you got How are retired over 20 million by each 31 had a has 140,000 views? But in the description there's nothing that says check out my newsletter my podcast Yeah, that's stupid. We should do you're right. That's low hanging fruit that we should have solved. I would think that's a pretty easy one and then On your about page on YouTube you don't link to the podcast really? Are you sure? It says website. Well, it says website. Where does that go? Yeah, I mean, I guess that's okay. It's this website Twitter Instagram Facebook. I might want to actually just put the link for podcast I would also consider I mean this might be more of a stretch But I would consider do you strategically try to really intentionally grow YouTube and or TikTok pick one of those probably YouTube and Then really think of that as a way to get people to your newsletter Which is like the first step to getting them onto your podcast? No, it's been the other way around Like lately we go for it my first million has become like almost its own brand I think yeah, here's what I think's gonna happen. I Think in the future like in within one to three years Me and Sean and HubSpot I think what we're gonna do is sell the podcast or do some type of licensing deal There's like no reason for me to think this other than just like I think that we're gonna do some type of crazy Like there's a world where we would do a crazy licensing deal. I'm true. How does that's a public company? So I'm not actually just so everyone knows I'm just fucking guessing like I'm not there's not based on anything The HubSpot maybe would do a thing where in three or five years We do some type of licensing deal with like Spotify or whatever You know kind of like the call her daddy? Podcast that you know what that podcast is call her daddy. Yeah, so they do a licensing deal for 60 million dollars over three years And I think there's a world where we would do that With like Spotify or one of the other big public platforms And I think that's like that is a creative at home, but why did you say getting people to Come on to your to like grow the YouTube channel or TikTok is not worth it Or not as important you were like yeah, it's not good like what do you mean there? I? Well, what we have found is that I think it's better to grow to send people straight to the podcast because if they click subscribe then they're notified whenever there's a They're notified whenever there's a new episode You know what I mean no yeah, but don't you think like the amount of people available on the YouTube that are like hey I want to hear more about this Then come I mean think about how much like Joe Rogan got found because of YouTube well and the second answer to that is I mean we're trying it's fucking hard if we're trying I'm like that the efforts if you look at our YouTube page look at our videos like The efforts there like they just don't get that many views all the time It just is taking a long time. I mean how many views look at our YouTube? How do you think it's going? It might be an Recommendations yeah, I would say it's going okay at best Okay, so I think what you're doing is you're uploading podcast to YouTube You're not actually creating content that people watch on YouTube Right, so if you look at it at our channel like YouTube okay to work The content is like made for YouTube so the two things that I would I would tell your team Here's what I would recommend you to do over the next like three months Look at your CTR like the click the rate of all these different videos and that'll basically show you if you're picking the right topics And then I as well your thumbnail is the baseline If you could hit a 5% CTR you're you're doing very well You're doing very very well. So like would you say three to five is decent? I mean three is decent. I think you want to get to five you want to be like hitting a really high number so like our recent like Awesome videos are hitting five So I would I would basically just start tracking your CTR you click the rate on these things and the second thing You want to be this is just the start with this stuff is that I think this is a way of expanding the pie That people find out about you and then they're like oh in your description about page go to the newsletter Go to the podcast which I would just update your top 10 videos here You don't need to do all of them but do them moving forward the second thing is your your average view duration So the the haestahmanage one had it's a two hour video There's a reason it got 26,000 views. It's because it's long as hell and I'm guessing your average view duration was like 20 minutes How many does that have 20,000? 26,000 wow Where you know the serial killer got busted through 23 and me one. I don't know how that's relevant to people making a million it's not put that on your own channel Bro, come on quick up. I may for all this stuff. I You're who's in charge. I don't know anymore Well, anyways, I think the second thing is just look at your average view duration do the same thing Just look at a line graph So like how are we trending and don't worry about super optimizing just worry like each month or so Can we try to get both those numbers moving in an upward direction? Any other thing you were able to do that was that anything else we should do I? Mean your your thumbnails aren't really How I'm pretty sure we're using your thumbnail guy Yeah, it might be the thumbnail guy, but you're like how much are you actually spending to make a great thumbnail? So like every one of our thumbnails now we go and do custom photos So at 430 I'm literally it's the third time going out with a photographer to take a thumbnail for the same video Dude, that's so much work. Isn't it? Isn't that crazy? There's so much work to make it like a YouTube video. I just dismiss it as like oh, you're just fucking around It's so much more work than I thought Yeah, to be good. I mean, I don't know I'm not gonna say some cliche shit anything great is worth working Do you feel like an idiot though on the side of the street doing this face where you're like hands on your head I do like freaking out about the 2022 stock market now. It's gonna go down Well, I think I mean the other thing with no It's honestly enjoyable and I find it kind of like a science It's like a game where like it's a game where you in that a sense like how do I win this game and doing that It gives me an advantage. So you hell yeah, I want to do it and I find it enjoyable I think you know topics you should also just kind of consider the topic you're putting out on YouTube like how much do authors make? It's not something that I think people are really like gonna immediately stop and drop everything to watch But like salon a billionaires right now crypto and NFT and stuff like that How do your riches is always popular on YouTube? But do not make the decision out of specific content We're just like whenever we talk. We're just gonna chop. We just chop shit up So like it what we could do is like have pre-planned topics that we think would go get popular on YouTube It's just a little bit harder to do that naturally in a conversation, but I think we can do it But yeah our goal like I'm predicting the future We're gonna get to like the three million range by the end of the year and once there I think we're gonna be end up being like one of the big I think we'll be like in the Dave Ramsey Tim Ferriss category inside the next year and a half Here's it. Yeah, we can end up one thing I find fascinating is there's people who are huge on YouTube that no one knows but a lot of people know who Tim Ferriss is Yeah, something I've just been reflecting on what does that mean? Well, he's been in the game forever and he also what entered the game when the world was smaller So like in the niche of like tech and startups there and this whole like make money online thing There weren't that many people on it and there weren't that many people who are famous for it And he was definitely one of the first that was famous for it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean yeah, that's a it's a world good spirit It's also getting known in your niche like I have a friend who's popular in the spear fishing category. How popular I think What's that? It's got like a few hundred thousand followers on TikTok. He's got a full-time business now. It's called Sick cast cast It's called pop group here for nerds. I want to be a spear fish influencer This guy's cool as shit man. If you're one of those spear fishing, but I think what fasting is to me about him is like He's on TikTok. He just does this You know you talked about this in the beginning where you documented your house. He likes Spear fishing and he likes fishing and so he just started videoing it put on TikTok got like I think he's how many followers They haven't tick-tock in YouTube. I think he's got like 200,000 cast and spirit 289 that 285,000 followers He texted me yesterday. I don't want to say his revenue, but he's got a you know not a seven figure But a pretty healthy business selling spear fishing gear now So I think instead of getting big at Tim where maybe people are smiling I want to be known or I'm an expert. I got impostor syndrome Just like do the thing you're already excited about document that and I think people will be shocked that they can make a lot of money doing it Like my brother he has insurance claims for hospitals. I tell you about this no So when you go to the hospital you get a bill and the hospital has to fight with the insurance company about how much to pay Yeah, so he reviews the bill to optimize to make sure that the insurance company pays the full amount Okay, so you can be like no, they didn't need to do this procedure. They need to do this and now he's So I think one of the things is what do you have in your day job that you can make a business out of and so he's exploring how to help Individuals optimize that well not optimize but reduce their medical bills So if you got a medical bill and it's like 5,000 or 1,000 10,000 healed review it for free And then it maybe take a cut if he's able to reduce him out. I'm only that that's actually a great idea There's this company called buyer.co and And my friends started it and it was called negotiating as a service and they would negotiate anything on your behalf and take a percentage of the savings and The company sold to ramp so if you go to buyer.co it redirects to that website the company you said you don't like ramp and It's not that I hate him. It's something to do and buyer The guy who started is like I sold out too early, but I didn't have any money and it was like a cool way to make money But he was like I this could actually be great I would do like a negotiating negotiating as a service and have my health bill be one of the big ones Another great company's called do not pay and they're doing this but for a variety of different things. Oh, yes I like do not pay Yeah, do not pay the the robot lawyer. There's also like vendor.com Then there's like a similar one you give your bills and negotiate and they just take a cut of whatever they say dude I love those services. I love no players wins win wins win win no one's down like QuickBooks or a not quick in Turbo Tax Mint Yeah, turn to tax a little it's free. It's free. It's free. Guess what if you really wanted it's paid But they don't take money from you. They just take a percentage of your refund Yes, which I like yeah, that's fair So I do want to say though dude honestly for your show because other people out there are trying to do it I think obviously you said go on other people's shows podcasts. I think optimize these low other these other platforms and We're going hard on the TikTok thing the tiktok thing definitely has worked But has it driven people? I think ultimately it sees it helping me with my goal is it driving people to the podcast? Unfortunately, I have no idea that's another shitty part about podcasts is it's hard to know what works because I can look at my charts and see how many downloads We have it won't tell me how they heard about us It's not like Google analytics where I can see like the person who bought this came from Google because they searched blank on this type of phone Have you done URL genius? No, we've done chartable is that the same thing? Well URL geniuses I think we use this on our show sometimes it's app. URL gene dot us it's deep linking So it'll link deeply into the podcast on Spotify I don't know if it does iTunes as well and then you could track I think how those clicks are actually looking so you can put that on TikTok or put that out on the YouTube world I didn't know about that all right. I'll look into that All right Samuel we're gonna wrap up seeing you dude. Thanks for doing this you look good. Thanks for having me Did how many people reached out from the last one it got Ben? Message me he said it got 65,000 or 70,000 views Really yeah, dude you guys are man. I told you the first time I ever came on your show I had like an ex this girl I went on a day with was like I can't believe you're on the show Yeah, he messaged me so he got 65,000 views or download. I think this one Thank you for having me man. This is excellent. All right. We're talking a little bit talk soon