AI transcript
0:00:02 Yeah, actually call him right now and put on speakerphone
0:00:09 Yo Preston you’re live on the podcast right now
0:00:25 All right, we’re live Sean I’ve got a weird thing for you. Do you remember like 12 months ago?
0:00:31 I told you about Craig Fuller. You know who Craig Fuller is. Yeah, he’s a freight waves, right?
0:00:32 Yeah, so freight waves
0:00:36 it’s a data product for people like guess who are freight brokers something like that and
0:00:42 They’re pretty big for some reason if you go they run their company like they’re publicly traded and that you can Google them and see all
0:00:45 The revenue and profit and so I don’t know the exact numbers
0:00:49 But you guys can just Google a freight waves revenue and they put out like quarterly statements, which is interesting
0:00:54 But it’s like a large like 60 or 80 million dollar a year software business or subscription data business anyway
0:01:01 Craig is an interesting entrepreneur and I told you about how he bought this thing called flying magazine
0:01:04 and what he did was he was a big fan of flying and
0:01:09 He’s wealthy on paper, but I don’t know how wealthy is liquid and so I think this was like a big deal for him
0:01:15 But he bought flying magazine and then he also bought a seven million dollar like
0:01:20 300 acre plot of land in Tennessee and was turning that into basically a flying club
0:01:26 where you it’s kind of like a country club where you like an own-a-home on a golf course except now you own it around an airplane strip and
0:01:31 An airplane hangar and they use the magazine to sell plots of land
0:01:34 It was like a neighborhood and basically they were like you could buy a house
0:01:39 It’s gonna be it’s you know the middle of this neighborhood is basically the airstrip
0:01:44 So we’re gonna be able to take off if you if you like, you know either flying your own plane or private private flights
0:01:48 And so they were like we’re gonna that’s the vision. That’s the field of dreams
0:01:54 We’re gonna start doing this and I think it was working extremely well. I have an update. I will tell you how it’s going
0:02:00 so Craig has now acquired 30 or sorry 44 different magazines and
0:02:08 They are gonna do roughly 50 million dollars this year with 18% EBITDA and it’s his prediction by
0:02:16 2030 this side business that he started he says I think we can get to a billion dollars in revenue with 30% profit margins
0:02:22 And so that’s an update on this guy what he’s doing and he tweeted out recently his quarterly revenue
0:02:29 I think last quarter Q4 of 2024 was 15 million in revenue and he’s doing it profitably and here’s what he does
0:02:33 So he finds an old title like an old magazine
0:02:39 Where it’s around a expensive hobby. So I think he has a boating one
0:02:45 He’s got I think he is even looking at like RC planes and RC cars and things like that
0:02:47 so where there’s an expensive hobby
0:02:53 And he uses this thing that he calls negative cack meaning people pay for the magazine
0:02:56 And so that is how he acquires a customer. Of course
0:03:00 They are paying for the magazine not him trying to advertise to get the the user
0:03:04 And then he goes I want to create commerce products to sell
0:03:08 To the audience and so the media businesses pay for the company
0:03:14 They pay for the audience creations and then they help bootstrap other businesses that I can sell to this audience
0:03:16 and at this point
0:03:19 He’s buying companies for three to five times evita, which is
0:03:24 I think that’s pretty cheap, but it’s a dying. It’s a dying medium. So maybe that’s not that cheap
0:03:26 It does require some sophistication in order to like turn them around
0:03:32 But it’s really fascinating that he’s pulling this off and this is his side like his side hustle
0:03:35 This is his side business. His main business is freight waves
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0:04:15 Well a couple questions. So he bought this personally not it’s not a part of freight waves
0:04:16 No, it’s its own thing
0:04:21 So that’s why I said it was like kind of a big deal for him because I don’t know craig’s personal situation
0:04:25 But I don’t think he’s sold any of freight waves other than taking on venture capital to build the company
0:04:29 This is wildly impressive. So first of all, it’s called fire crown
0:04:33 So fire crown dot com and you could go to their brand section
0:04:37 You can see all the things that they bought fire crown great name. They’ve got 44 brands
0:04:40 You’re right. Basically. It’s a bunch of things about private flight
0:04:45 It’s a bunch of things about boating and sailing and fishing and yachting and wakeboarding
0:04:49 And then there’s things like classic toy trains garden railways
0:04:51 trains.com
0:04:57 And then some like astronomy stuff as well looks like so this is a lot of the things that he he rolled up
0:04:59 he must have found a
0:05:05 A kind of repeatable rinse and repeat models says here that he buys them for three to five x e but as his typical range
0:05:07 and
0:05:11 Was he using debt? Was he using revenue from the business? What was he our cash flows from the business?
0:05:15 How was he buying? I think he got a bunch of friends to invest, but I don’t know exactly
0:05:17 He’s going to come on the pot. I asked him to come on to explain this strategy
0:05:22 But what he did was there’s a bunch of companies that own tons and tons of magazine titles. So
0:05:26 Meredith corporation owns and owns like Martha Stewart magazine
0:05:28 and then I think there’s like
0:05:34 Rodale and then there’s Bonner and there’s all these companies that are like old family companies that have been in business since the 30s
0:05:38 or 40s whatever and they’ve got these publications that are just sitting there and they’re like
0:05:41 Just take them
0:05:44 And and so he could buy them like five or ten at a time or you know
0:05:48 I think he’s tweeted out that he’s bought like 13 the other day and so he buys them in bulk a little bit
0:05:55 I mean, this is super impressive the the side hustle that’s now 50 million a 50 million a year profitable
0:05:58 Really really specific
0:06:03 You know expensive hobby magazines and then basically has a better business model sounds like right?
0:06:07 So it sounds like the old business model was it’s a media business. So we make money on the media
0:06:09 He’s like no, no, it’s a media business
0:06:12 So we’re going to use media to acquire customers for a much more valuable
0:06:19 Business model, you know, for example with the flying thing, you know, they’re selling these homes on this plot of land
0:06:21 For like a couple million bucks each
0:06:26 So I think you said what seven million bucks to buy that that 300 acre plot of land something like that. Yeah
0:06:31 So roughly, you know, uh, let’s even round it up 10 million bucks to buy the thing
0:06:35 But then they’re selling each home at 2 million bucks. They sold 50 homes, right?
0:06:37 Just rough numbers
0:06:41 I don’t know how many they sold but they sold enough that it’s worthwhile and it’s a beautiful place a piece of land and
0:06:49 On flying magazine. They’re also if you follow Preston Holland, he’s the CEO of flying magazine. Yeah, he’s brokering jets
0:06:51 He’s selling jets. He’s like right
0:06:56 Yeah, on twitter he goes we’ve got this jet for sale. It’s seven million dollars
0:07:01 He’s a good dude. We text all the time and I’m like, he almost gets me to buy a plane
0:07:05 Like I’m like, dude, do you stay away from me, man? I’m not gonna buy a plane just because you uh, you know
0:07:06 You made a funny joke in this day
0:07:11 Dude, Nick Hubert. I’m gonna do it. This is a Hampton plug Nick Hubert and and Craig are in the same Hampton group
0:07:17 They bought a plane. They bought a plane together. And so the now Nick owns a plane. I guess they like
0:07:19 I don’t know how you buy a plane together if they did it
0:07:24 But they but Preston’s selling these like 10 million dollar jets online. It’s on twitter. It’s crazy
0:07:30 Nick shared the economics of buying these small planes. By the way, uh, we should we should ask him for permission to
0:07:35 To share the numbers like we bought it for x. Here’s how much it costs to do each flight
0:07:39 Here’s how the rules work because it’s kind of a timeshare. It’s like him and six other guys or whatever bought the plane
0:07:40 and um
0:07:42 And so you pay for like the
0:07:44 The pilot and the fuel when you need it
0:07:45 But then you just pay like an ongoing basis
0:07:51 But then you got this tax benefit of buying a plane and so how how does it what does it all work out to?
0:07:55 What does the cost per flight ultimately work out to he’s he’s shared the numbers with me before
0:07:57 So we should uh, we should do a segment on here talking about that
0:08:01 But isn’t this crazy that this is this guy’s side thing and how amazing it is
0:08:04 It’s pretty it sounds like it’s about to be his main thing. It’s what I’m hearing
0:08:08 Well, what’s crazy here’s kind of a takeaway, which is all right
0:08:11 So most people couldn’t imagine this being their main thing
0:08:15 When you get into business like him and you have some success
0:08:18 With freight waves and you start seeing like how things work
0:08:24 It’s like you get these like weird like unlocking moments where you don’t see certain things as risk
0:08:27 So i’ve never bought a business before I see buying a business. I’m like that’s really risky
0:08:31 But he’s like no like I’ve done it enough times that I know how to unlock value
0:08:38 And I don’t think this is risky because we’re going to do this this this and this and it really is a confidence game as much as it is a knowledge game
0:08:40 Uh, but it’s pretty amazing. I’ve always been able to pull this off
0:08:47 I’m super impressed by this is one of my favorite kind of like uh businesses that you brought to the to the pod to the people’s attention
0:08:51 And uh, really really impressive what he’s done. So where do you think this goes?
0:08:54 What what do you think he’s going to do and and what does he do for the boating ones?
0:08:59 Like is he doing the same thing he’s selling boats or what is he doing to make the business work out of those?
0:09:05 I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think he knows yet. I’m not sure he hasn’t shared it publicly
0:09:08 But I guess you could do similar things where you have a marina
0:09:15 I mean, have you ever like no like my parents used to have boats and I know that they would spend like 500 to $1,000 a month on a
0:09:16 on a
0:09:20 Boat slip rental and it became it became a community where we would hang out and stuff like that
0:09:24 Something like that. I’m not sure what he’s going to do selling boats
0:09:27 I mean, I’m not sure how he’s going to pull it off, but there’s like plenty of options
0:09:31 Should we call this Preston guy right now? Just get him on here to uh to explain this
0:09:34 Yeah, actually call him right now and put on speakerphone
0:09:41 Yo Preston you’re live on the podcast right now
0:09:43 What’s going on?
0:09:50 Dude, we are talking about flying and we’re talking about firecrown and i’m blown away. I didn’t know about firecrown
0:09:56 I only knew about flying and sam is telling me about the the growth of this thing. I got two questions for you
0:09:58 Uh, number one when you guys started this
0:10:04 Was this the plan or you guys sort of stumbled into oh, wow, this might be bigger and better than we thought
0:10:08 So when crick called me
0:10:12 In 2021 it was a lifestyle side help basically side hustle
0:10:15 He’s like, hey, you want to come out? We run this
0:10:20 I asked him I was like, why are you buying a magazine? You know, I can’t tell last time I read a magazine and
0:10:25 He was like, well, it’s just going to be kind of like a side hobby freeways is really my business
0:10:26 but
0:10:31 Yeah, keep it small and uh, but if you if you know anything about Craig as a person
0:10:34 He can’t eat that’s not in his nature
0:10:39 So all of a sudden it you know, we started rolling stuff up as we saw opportunities and you know
0:10:43 Now it’s blowing up and see I mean we’re 257 employees
0:10:47 And there’s the side hustle has 250 employees. All right, amazing
0:10:51 And um, tell can you can you give a little bit of the a peak of the
0:10:55 Sam has a bunch of the numbers of fire come because I think Craig tweeted out
0:11:01 But can you talk about the thing you guys did where you basically bought the the land and then you started building a neighborhood on top of it?
0:11:05 So really what we did was we let the content inform
0:11:08 Uh, the commercial decisions that we made right so
0:11:14 We had an idea to kind of build an airport. We’re like, that’d be cool. Uh, you know
0:11:20 We there’s it’s hard to find hangar space around Chattanooga. And so, you know, as we’re looking at I always tell myself that too
0:11:22 Where’s the where’s the hangar space in Chattanooga?
0:11:30 Yeah, right exactly. Well, so we’ve got three airports and each of them have a waitlist of like seven to 10 years long
0:11:36 And so we’re like, well, I guess we’re gonna have to build an airport if we’re going to be able to get hangar space for any
0:11:38 Airplanes, you know that we
0:11:45 Get on demo or whatever build we wanted to build a media center on the runway and
0:11:49 You know every airport was like, yeah, good luck. It’s going to take at least 10 years
0:11:53 So we said, hey, let’s build her in runway to build a runway. We should
0:11:57 You know do something unique these flying communities are interesting
0:12:02 And we started writing about it and realized that like there’s really high performing content like
0:12:08 User, you know, you from a from a google analytics standpoint. It’s like, you know, we could see that the content
0:12:13 Being engaged with and we’re like, okay. People actually care about this. They care about air parks
0:12:18 So we said, okay. Well, let’s let’s go ahead and let’s build an air park. We announced it
0:12:20 on the land 1,500 acres
0:12:23 about 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee
0:12:31 And through advertising in our own magazine and said, all right. Well, this will probably be like a five to seven year project before we get started
0:12:33 Uh, you know, kind of underwriting
0:12:42 And we had we basically met our three year kind of pro forma in pre reservations in like the first three months
0:12:45 So you’re like, all right, there’s there’s definitely demand here
0:12:50 And so, uh, so yeah, so we’re set to break ground. We just finished, uh
0:12:54 Some regulatory stuff that the government loves to tell you
0:13:01 Where water should go and so we just finished that and uh are set to break ground probably here in the next 30 days
0:13:04 Can you give us a sense of the numbers? Uh, what can you share on the numbers?
0:13:08 So like, you know, how much you guys buy the land for how’d you finance this whole like big construction endeavor?
0:13:15 Yeah, for sure. So the uh, we bought the acreage around $1,500
0:13:18 150 in uh an acre
0:13:22 Um, so it was it was really cheap land. It’s also in an opportunity zone
0:13:27 So there’s a lot of tax incentives for making investments in that area
0:13:29 um, and then we are
0:13:37 We’ve taken $25 million of pre deposits. So that’s people basically sending us a percentage of the deposit
0:13:43 You basically funded it through the pre the the deposits kind of like how tesla does with the trucks and all that before they
0:13:48 Before they build the trucks they they take the deposits and they use that to basically finance the the manufacturing
0:13:54 Now if you if you’ve got those deposits, it’s it proves to the banks you can go to the bank and basically
0:13:58 Say, okay, look, we’ve got you know, $25 million of
0:14:00 of these lots pre sold so like
0:14:08 You know that represents future cashals of $25 million and they say, oh, okay. So let’s say, you know using round numbers
0:14:12 Let’s say round one of infrastructure costs. I don’t know 10 or 15 million dollars
0:14:18 The bank’s gonna go. Okay. Well, you’ve got 25 million dollars represented of future sales
0:14:23 Um, so that you know, 10 to 15 million dollars of phase one infrastructure
0:14:25 Is a super low risk bet for them
0:14:32 Nice and then are you guys, um bootstrapped or did you raise money to buy all these magazines? How did you do it?
0:14:38 Yeah, so we have we’ve been really fortunate, you know, since we’ve got some private capital behind us
0:14:42 Um, it’s patient which is really key, right? It’s not venture
0:14:49 It’s uh, it’s more, you know patient capital that says, okay, you know, we’re gonna take a 15 year time horizon
0:14:51 20 year 30 year time horizon
0:14:56 Um, and then actually go and grind this thing. So we we got some capital behind us
0:14:59 but we didn’t have to go raise, you know venture or
0:15:04 You know private equity or anything like that. That’s kind of you know, we don’t have a ticking time
0:15:10 Basically, we don’t have a ticking time bomb waiting for us to sell in seven or 10 years that have hundreds valuation
0:15:15 Is that you know, you talked about the google analytics. Is this actually a print business or is it?
0:15:23 It’s a online, you know a media site a blog that has print as like a vanity piece. Which what what is the business actually?
0:15:27 So when we buy these when we buy these media assets
0:15:33 Uh, what we have to do is we Joe in it and it really is a shift in mindset
0:15:37 And a shift in product velocity at a lot of these companies
0:15:44 We are we tend to buy print magazines that happen to have a website where it’s like, okay
0:15:46 We check our print content and then we post it online
0:15:52 Uh, and so, you know when when you go in you require these you kind of have to you know
0:15:57 Level set with everybody and say look, you know digital is its own product
0:16:00 And it’s kind of you know, we we split out the peonels, right?
0:16:04 So digital has its own peonel and print has its own peonel and we make peonel
0:16:10 We know we make print a product as opposed to the core business if that makes sense
0:16:15 Gotcha. Um, so it’s like and and the other thing here’s the thing and it’s and look
0:16:20 We came in, you know, Craig and I day one. We’re like, all right. We’re killing print because like
0:16:25 I don’t know Sean Sam. I don’t know if you guys have a lot of print magazines, but like
0:16:32 I didn’t I don’t have I don’t have a lot of print magazine subscription. Let’s just you know, not
0:16:35 I’m 30 years old like I you know, that’s that’s not how I consume media
0:16:41 And so, you know, we went in to shut down print, but there’s something about being in print and
0:16:46 Neil Vogel talks about this at Don Dash Meredith as well that he’s had a similar experience
0:16:48 So it’s not you know, this is not a unique perspective
0:16:53 Like we’re not the only ones that are thinking this but there’s something about having a long
0:16:58 A feeling of longevity and a perception of longevity in having a print product
0:17:02 Whether that’s with advertisers or it’s with audience or readers
0:17:09 That you just don’t get with a blog. You don’t it doesn’t feel and you know, you think about a brand like Dwell
0:17:16 Is a great example like they have a print magazine and it for some reason feels more legitimate than
0:17:21 Architectural blog xyz.com right because it has a magazine
0:17:25 So it’s like we we use it as kind of a staying power
0:17:28 But you know, we also recognize the like the world’s going to show
0:17:34 Yeah, you also mentioned you like you leave the you hustled your way to get the magazine in every like
0:17:39 Private chartered plane right just to get get the right rich people to be reading the thing
0:17:42 Because you like left it on the table in those planes. Is that right?
0:17:47 Yeah, exactly. So we we send them on the non-solicited
0:17:52 To a lot of fbos across the country some are solicited, you know, there’s about
0:17:56 1800 or so that are solicited that we’ve got an agreement with the distribution company
0:18:02 But the other ones are not solicited but they they feel like we’ve created a product that has so much value
0:18:07 That they feel as though it’s something that they want to display on the tables people go and pick them up
0:18:10 and I mean we’ve had conversations with
0:18:14 You know some pretty wild folks that were like, oh, yeah
0:18:19 I was in the fbo and I read your magazine and I want to collaborate on your real estate project
0:18:21 And so it’s like
0:18:25 Okay, like how do you how do you quantify like an ROI on that like and you know
0:18:29 Hard to like do your last touch attribution except for like, oh, yeah
0:18:32 You read about our project in our magazine that we put in the fbo
0:18:37 And now we have, you know, really cool partners, uh, you know on the real estate project
0:18:44 Gotcha. Well, Preston you’re the man. This is a crazy business. Thanks for uh, the on the on the spot call in
0:18:47 Yeah, man. Long time listener first-time caller, so
0:18:55 First-ever caller we’ve ever had first-ever caller actually. All right, man. Take care. All right. See you man. That was awesome
0:19:01 All right, we changed the show. Um, that was cool. I like him
0:19:06 All right. Well, I mean we got our information. That’s awesome. Congratulations to krega presid
0:19:10 I’m happy that he was transparent. Yeah, really cool. Uh, all right. What else we got
0:19:16 You got one. You got one. Yeah, let me do one. Okay. Let’s stick to the print. Let’s stick to the print idea
0:19:19 uh, but take a different angle so
0:19:22 The new york times
0:19:27 The new york times when you think about it, you think this prestigious newspaper. It’s all about the news
0:19:31 They want you to think it’s all about the truth. That’s their marketing
0:19:37 The new york times has more in common with zynga than it does the truth. The new york times is a games company
0:19:43 And um, this is the the numbers behind the new york times and their gaming products is pretty amazing
0:19:47 So I don’t know. Do you ever play their games? I I’m a supply paying subscriber to their games
0:19:51 Well, I know they have wordle and I played that one. They bought wordle
0:19:52 um
0:19:55 The guy had made like the guy like made wordle for his girlfriend or something like that
0:19:58 Then it took off and then they ended up buying it. But like I have a
0:20:05 22 days 22 day streak going right now on the crossword puzzle on the mini crossword and how much you pay
0:20:09 I think it’s like 6.99 a month or something. And what’s the revenue on that?
0:20:12 Take a guess
0:20:14 100 million dollars
0:20:16 Uh a lot more than that
0:20:18 So the new york times just in q4
0:20:24 Their digital only subscribers was 289 million, which is almost all their games
0:20:28 It’s a little bit of their cooking product as well, but it’s like mostly their games revenue
0:20:30 And so that’s 300 million in the quarter
0:20:37 Uh, they’re they’re uh gaming basically has pushed their annual subscriptions over a billion dollars a year for the first time ever
0:20:43 And they released this chart that was basically like the new york times bundles. So you have
0:20:47 The news you have their cooking section their cooking product
0:20:51 You have the athletic which is their sports the sports thing they bought and then you have games
0:20:54 So take a look at that that chart right there. You could see that games
0:21:00 You know a few years ago a few years ago games was roughly 15 percent of time spent
0:21:05 Now it’s over 50 percent of the time spent in their bundle is on the games product
0:21:11 Which is pretty wild that’s more time spent on games than on news it has overtaken news
0:21:13 And so you have this thing that is
0:21:15 Um, just fascinating
0:21:21 It was like, you know, they used to in the newspaper have a little crossword section a little sudoku section
0:21:25 And what they did was as they transformed the product they unbundled it
0:21:31 They made it a standalone thing and what’s cool about it is almost every game on my phone is just trying to like
0:21:33 it’s like
0:21:36 Needy is that how do I take all of your time and all of your money?
0:21:39 And the new york times thing is works way different. It’s you have one a day
0:21:43 There’s one mini crossword a day one crossword a day and one
0:21:47 You know one word all day you do that every day
0:21:49 Every day me and my daughter do it together
0:21:51 We play wordled together and then I do the crossword on my own
0:21:56 The crossword the mini crossword literally takes under one minute like my average time is about 57 seconds to finish this thing
0:21:58 It’s a very short game
0:22:01 And so i’m able to like play a game and have that dopamine hit without it like
0:22:06 Taking away from my life by being like, oh great now i’m the hours on this. Hey, baby
0:22:12 What’s it starts with an e what’s the disease that brought down chipotle in 2009?
0:22:15 Oh, you’re right ebola. That’s it
0:22:21 Yeah, well she plays wordled with the and uh she gets to type and then I come up with the words and um
0:22:24 And so you know these the games are really fun
0:22:26 It’s a really well done app
0:22:31 And it’s shocking to me how successful this thing has been and so I want to just read you a couple things
0:22:35 So it says basically a few years ago the time spun off cooking crossword offerings to standalone products
0:22:39 Meaning you could subscribe to either without being a new york times new subscriber
0:22:40 seemed like an odd choice
0:22:43 Because the internet already had millions of games and millions of free recipe apps
0:22:49 But what they did was they just digitized decades of old crossword puzzles and old cooking recipes that they already had
0:22:52 So this is kind of like remnant inventory that they weren’t using
0:22:57 And they took that stranded asset and they turned it into like a viable asset a live asset
0:23:02 And then they just like modernize this they put it in an app. They made it like work really well
0:23:03 and um
0:23:08 Super simple app and it basically breathed new life into the company the company has grown like crazy. So now there’s like
0:23:13 Over what now between crossword and cooking check this graph out
0:23:17 Should we just start calling the new york times a gaming company? Yeah, exactly
0:23:21 Yeah, you guys weren’t those great games. Did you got like a sick blog that you talk about like the trump trial?
0:23:23 I love that too side hustle. Yeah
0:23:27 I love that little blog you guys got going to have over and this was in 2020
0:23:28 So this is years ago
0:23:32 They had 1.3 million paying subscribers that paid on average
0:23:34 You know $40 plus a year
0:23:40 On the on the games and cooking product, which is mostly games and they’re not alone. So that so that’s the new york times
0:23:43 Then I saw um, you know, I opened up the youtube app
0:23:47 I don’t do you use the youtube app because I opened it up and I saw something very new use that. Yeah
0:23:50 Did you see their new games product?
0:23:51 Look at this
0:23:53 If I open up youtube
0:23:56 Oh my god games and it says play now
0:24:02 And you don’t have to download anything, right? So it’s like I click play and now i’m just i’m gonna be in this game
0:24:05 And this is a popular mobile game this this thing called states
0:24:08 Um, it’s like a little like risk type of game
0:24:13 And so they have like 20 of these games. It says instant games. No no downloads
0:24:19 So youtube’s doing it now and then linkedin the other day announced linkedin games
0:24:23 So I have three three games on top of linkedin. There’s like a wordle variant
0:24:27 There’s like a whatever there’s like they they took popular games. They just kind of made their remix of it
0:24:33 And if anybody needs engagement like a real engagement, it’s linkedin right linkedin’s got a billion users
0:24:36 and you know, but like
0:24:41 There’s not a lot of good content on on linkedin to do but this is cool because they basically made it where they have their
0:24:43 Sudoku they have their trivia
0:24:48 They have their word game and basically you can you can see how other people in your company do so it’s like
0:24:53 They already have the social graph of who’s in your company and who are you connected to
0:24:57 So when you play the game you can see how you compare to people you already know
0:25:03 Because they already have that social layer built in of like, you know, kind of competing amongst your who do you think they
0:25:05 stole this from because like imagine
0:25:06 imagine like
0:25:12 Um the the meeting where they’re bringing this up. It’s like, uh, hey Sharon. You got any ideas. Uh, what if we
0:25:18 Call it linkedin influencers and we get famous people to post. Ah, I’ve been there down that and then this other person’s like, hey
0:25:23 Charlie, what do you got? What if we just put like risk in the feed of linkedin?
0:25:25 Do you know what I mean? Like how would you justify doing that?
0:25:28 So I don’t know if they acquired a company that was doing this
0:25:30 or if they um
0:25:36 Or if there was just like I imagined some product manager that looks like he’s just got back from nom and he’s like
0:25:38 I had an idea and I got it through
0:25:42 I got the I got the I got my manager to approve my manager’s manager
0:25:47 We went all the way up to the product org and went through the committee and it happened
0:25:50 They all said yes, I get to launch this thing and like in six months it’s gonna die
0:25:54 But I actually think there’s actually a good opportunity
0:25:59 I think that if somebody built the third party linkedin games app, like I don’t know fully
0:26:02 I haven’t explored the linkedin api and like what’s all possible
0:26:06 But if you can hook in and if you can build a game on top of linkedin
0:26:11 That’s just like a total greenfield opportunity and linkedin will buy it if you do a good job
0:26:14 if you build the actual games product that’s getting engagement there and
0:26:19 You don’t have to invent the game just steal the games and you’re basically just saying proven game
0:26:24 And new new social graph. Um, and that’s that’s the whole business model here
0:26:31 That’s pretty insane. I did not see that they were doing this and that is actually quite smart linkedin is the the behemoth
0:26:34 That somehow always works and so it’s quite wise that they’re doing this
0:26:37 And you know the one that the one that I don’t believe in is netflix is doing games
0:26:42 I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like they have a games thing in like there’s a trivia game
0:26:43 You can play in netflix
0:26:46 But also if you go to the app store and you search netflix as the game producer
0:26:52 They have like 50 game titles is like pretty insane. How many mobile games that they have I don’t understand this
0:26:58 I don’t think it’s gonna work. I don’t understand the tie between this but you know, basically secrets out
0:27:01 It’s like, you know games make a lot of money and people use it all the time
0:27:07 Um, maybe we too should be in the games market and that’s wild. That’s what they’re trying to do
0:27:13 Uh, that’s awesome kudos to those guys. I’ve I’ve not seen that. I will um, let me do a quick thrill of the show
0:27:16 I want to I want to promote something. I’m going to try and make it extra
0:27:17 Thrilly
0:27:21 Have you ever thought while you’re building stuff you think to yourself?
0:27:22 Am I doing this right?
0:27:27 Like I remember being in san francisco and I thought well, you know, shan’s got a fancy office
0:27:30 therefore we have to have a fancy office or
0:27:36 You know this particular ceo said you have to focus on this one thing. So I have to focus on this one thing
0:27:43 So to grow hampton we came up with this podcast called money wise and money wise is basically like a personal finance podcast
0:27:48 But for high net worth people and I’ve done eight or nine of the episodes as like the temporary host
0:27:53 And I want to tell you what my biggest takeaway which is to get wealthy or even to spend the money once you’re wealthy
0:27:56 There’s no one way that people are doing it
0:28:00 There’s a lot of different ways that people are doing it and I’ve already like recorded
0:28:06 I think 12 or 15 of these and I had to do nine already for the the um first season
0:28:10 Dude, it’s it first of all it’s insane that people reveal all this information
0:28:13 So we basically what we do is we have people come on
0:28:16 And they reveal their income their expenses
0:28:21 Exactly what their portfolio looks like and then like we’ll dive deep on one topic like parenting or are they anonymous
0:28:24 Or they put their name on it. I have to listen to it half and half
0:28:29 So sometimes they’re anonymous and what we do is we change the name and we we actually change the voice
0:28:33 And so there’s a bunch of people who you who you know of that have been on but they changed the voice
0:28:37 but then sometimes like the guy from simple modern came on and he’s completely
0:28:41 Open about it and he’ll say here’s exactly how much I have in my bank account
0:28:46 Here’s what we have in my index or in my portfolio. Here’s how much income I have
0:28:51 It’s insane that people reveal this amount of information. It’s almost scary. And so
0:28:58 My big takeaway is one there’s no one way to do it two. I’m shocked that people reveal all this information
0:29:05 And number three the more money you get the more intentional you have to become because these people will make literally a hundred million dollars
0:29:10 And they don’t spend any of it and they’re like, I don’t even know what to do with this money. What’s been a
0:29:14 Lesson learned either in
0:29:15 Probably in the spending side
0:29:21 So how what is what something somebody said about how they spend that you were like, oh, that’s a good idea
0:29:24 That’s a cool intentional way of going about this. We talked about giving money away last time
0:29:26 You can’t use that one use a different one
0:29:31 So I I firmly believe that owning more than one home is a massive pain in the ass
0:29:36 And that’s a dream that people want to have they want to have a second or third or sometimes fourth home
0:29:42 That a lot of these people have I think that is a huge right pain in the ass place the word home with problem
0:29:47 It’s like I have a second problem in Tahoe. I have a third problem in florida that I go visit once a year
0:29:49 nice problems
0:29:52 Dude, it’s such a pain in the ass is to have that and and
0:29:58 Unilaterally people seem to regret having multiple homes and so being intentional about spending money
0:30:04 It seems like a huge deal one rich person one of the very few rich people things that I think is totally worth it
0:30:05 flying private
0:30:10 Uh, I think that is the one thing where it actually might live up to the hype when people I think buying a plane
0:30:12 Sorry, Preston. I don’t know if that’s worth it
0:30:16 But I think charting a jet as much as you can would absolutely worth it
0:30:20 And uh, so we’re doing this podcast whatever it’s called money wise. You guys should look it up
0:30:22 I’ll tell you quick quickly
0:30:26 I uh, I had this premise to make a hit podcast. I think you need one or more of the following
0:30:32 You either need great production. You need great delivery. You need a unique perspective
0:30:34 So unique perspective is like lebron james talking
0:30:38 Great delivery is typically like comedians and then great production is like
0:30:42 Serial or whatever like these like wandering things
0:30:45 My gap in the market that I wanted to exploit was the first one
0:30:49 I think you and I do number two and number three and I wanted to do number one
0:30:51 And so so far it appears to be working
0:30:56 So if you’re a creator, those are the three the three ways I think to do a podcast
0:31:01 And that’s my little pitch on money wise. Congrats. That’s a good good thriller show. I liked it
0:31:02 Um
0:31:07 All right, let’s do let’s do some other ones. Do you have another good one or can I do my ai camera one real quick?
0:31:10 Do your ai camera one because I have something funny to tell you. All right ai cameras
0:31:11 so
0:31:14 I play in this basketball league in san francisco
0:31:19 Shout out to ruben torrenberg who who hosts this league’s been hosting it for like 10 years and um
0:31:22 It’s basically it’s called sf tech hoops
0:31:26 I think it’s called and basically it’s like people from the tech industry that like to play play basketball
0:31:28 and
0:31:29 for a long time
0:31:34 Ruben basically he runs the league with some real heart and I really appreciate that meaning
0:31:41 He makes the teams. He has the league. There’s the table stakes. What you expect teams jerseys referee scoreboard great
0:31:47 But then what he does is every week he writes an email recap with gifts and whatever and he basically team one took on team three
0:31:52 They were led by sam par. He scored 13 points and he had a great buzzer beater blah blah blah
0:31:57 But then in the second half. This is what happened. So he writes these great updates from the commission
0:32:01 He writes his own like internal newsletter for the thing. The second thing he does is he
0:32:05 Films it he used to film it basically put two tripods with the iphone on each side
0:32:07 And he would try to afterwards go through and cut a highlight
0:32:10 And highlight is a really generous term because you’re talking about
0:32:13 out of shape tech dudes
0:32:16 Like I made a game-winning shot last week and in my head
0:32:20 And if you asked anybody that I talked to afterwards, this was fucking
0:32:25 Jordan against the calves in 89 or whatever. You know, I was I was flying through the air
0:32:32 You know hit the shot at the buzzer. It was amazing. It was like just and then I watched the clip and I was like
0:32:38 Uh, like you could literally you couldn’t fit a book under my feet where I jumped. I was like, this is ridiculous
0:32:42 This looks slow. This looks terrible. This is like a game loser not a game winner
0:32:46 So highlight is a little bit generous, but either way he puts the you know
0:32:51 The tlc into to running this league. So he just bought this new thing that
0:32:53 is a game changer
0:32:58 And he bought this ai based camera call. I think it’s called vio. There’s a and there’s a bunch of these
0:33:00 There’s like four companies doing this but veo check this out
0:33:03 Basically, it’s one camera
0:33:07 That you uh, it’s a like a smart camera that you post on a tripod tripod
0:33:12 And it does a couple of very basic things things that sound trivial but make a huge difference
0:33:16 So he used to have two iPhones because you needed to record both sides of the court
0:33:21 And basically for one iPhone half the time when when everybody runs to the other side of the court
0:33:22 It’s just empty
0:33:26 And so then he could never have like a full video of the game because he couldn’t get the camera to follow it
0:33:30 Right, you’d have to hire somebody to manually like swivel their head
0:33:35 And do this but now with ai basically it’s one camera that just tracks the ball at all times
0:33:37 So this works in soccer it works in basketball works in football
0:33:39 It just it just tracks the ball and the players
0:33:43 It just keeps everything in the center of the frame without having to have a human doing
0:33:45 The second thing it does is it uploads it all to the cloud
0:33:49 The third thing it does is it live streams at all which is cool because now people can watch your games
0:33:51 Which is like, you know friends and family can watch games
0:33:53 Um the fourth thing it does is it could try to cut highlights
0:33:55 So it could basically try to identify
0:33:58 A cool moment and then cut the highlights or keep track of stats
0:34:01 It’s just getting better and better. These are all software updates from here
0:34:03 The hardware is just camera
0:34:08 With the center with enough, you know enough of a chip inside that can connect it to the internet connected to the ai software
0:34:15 And so these companies are crushing it like he bought it raised over a hundred million dollars in funding and it’s like some european company
0:34:19 Um, there’s four or five competitors all of them have raised raised a bunch of money
0:34:22 And I think they’re all doing really well. So I noticed this at our game
0:34:27 Um, and then my brother-in-law who’s got a kid that that plays like competitive soccer
0:34:30 She’s like, you know seven years old and I was like, dude, have you seen this thing?
0:34:34 He’s like bro, it’s on every field like this is like you can’t go to youth soccer now
0:34:40 And not like every single field has one of these and so I think the same way that you know, steve jobs had like the vision
0:34:44 Oh, I think it was jobs or maybe it was bill gates, but it was like a computer on every desk
0:34:48 I think it was gates is a computer on every desk was that it was the goal a personal computer
0:34:52 And I think now it’s going to be basically a camera on every field
0:35:00 All right, it’s like every single high school every single middle school every au game every, you know travel team
0:35:04 They’re going to use these things because why not well somebody’s going to make the investment one time
0:35:09 They’re really it’s not one time. So uh, all right, so for the the most popular version
0:35:15 It’s a thousand dollar one-time expense and then it’s 130 dollars per month. Yeah the most expensive one
0:35:18 I think there’s like cheaper ones than that. I don’t think you have to get the the crazy one
0:35:23 But yeah, like it though that price is going to go down like the thousand dollar hardware is going to go down
0:35:26 But the you know 100 a hundred bucks a month is going to stay there
0:35:29 But if you’re like a team or really you don’t even have to buy it per team
0:35:31 It’s like the league needs to have right
0:35:36 So it’s like the the venue needs to have it and I just predict that every venue is going to have these
0:35:40 Like they will guess whoever wins is going to get these into every single field every single court
0:35:45 And it’ll just be that way tennis wrestling like every fringe sport
0:35:50 There’s people who want to watch it’s the family the friends the athletes themselves and their coaches
0:35:57 And um, there’s enough motivation to do this their website is so good that it makes me want to play soccer
0:35:58 It’s sort of like
0:36:01 It’s sort of like gopro where I like
0:36:06 The the footage is awesome that like I got to get into snowboarding right now
0:36:08 Just so I can go and like live a life worth recording
0:36:11 Dude, that’s how I felt when you were talking about the magazine stuff
0:36:16 I was like, yeah the wind blowing through my hair my hair as I’m on this boat. Yeah, maybe I do want that lifestyle
0:36:22 Yeah, do I want to be a boater? Uh, that’s how I feel when I when I go to their website. This is a this is awesome
0:36:26 Be I’d shocked at how large this is. I guess it’s not a surprise
0:36:30 But it sort of is a surprise that there’s multiple companies that have raised nine figures to build this
0:36:32 I think these are doing, you know
0:36:37 50 million plus a year in revenue minimum, um, you know, the leaders of this space
0:36:41 I don’t know the exact numbers but like ballparking. I would I would be surprised if it was under that
0:36:46 This is absolutely insane. I never in a million years would have thought that this would become a thing
0:36:48 I have the opposite opinion, which is
0:36:56 This is an obvious idea. It’s obvious that it’s working, but it’s not obvious that like no, I think this was obvious before dude when
0:36:59 Like why didn’t you start it?
0:37:03 Well, because the idea this idea has been around for a long time. So for example in nba stadiums
0:37:08 they there’s like an enterprise version of this called second spectrum and
0:37:13 There’s a company called synergy sports that basically there’s like cameras that they install in the
0:37:19 Um, in the aba venue that tracks all the players and all the motion and it keeps track of certain specific advanced stats for the teams
0:37:26 And so this idea of like, oh, wow, couldn’t you either install cameras or use computer vision to
0:37:31 To track stats. That’s that’s interesting. Then there was flow flow sports
0:37:36 Which is basically live streaming niche sports like, you know, jujitsu competitions wrestling competitions
0:37:41 And they were doing tens of millions a year in revenue. Yeah, their office is here is in austin and I’ve been to it and it’s sick
0:37:46 It’s really cool. It’s a big company and you for those those are for more official competitions
0:37:52 Like, you know, the texas state, you know, karate championships or whatever not like, you know
0:37:57 Little susie’s soccer game, which like, you know, susie’s parents and grandma and whatever want to be able to watch
0:38:00 Like back in college. I remember, um, my my roommate trevor
0:38:06 He would always watch his little sister’s basketball games and he’d be on his computer and he’s watching this greeny
0:38:13 Footage and I’m like, who the hell’s streaming this ninth grade girl’s wyoming basketball regular season game
0:38:15 and he’s like
0:38:21 He’s like I pay for this thing because like we pay and then this guy films it and then he’s, you know, he uploads it later
0:38:22 It’s not live stream
0:38:25 But he pay uploads it later and I watch the shitty footage
0:38:30 But like I really want to see my sister’s play like that matters to me. I’m willing to pay like my price sensitivity
0:38:33 It’s like I will pay the equivalent of a netflix monthly subscription
0:38:36 But instead of giving me like all the world’s best content
0:38:42 I get my my niece’s games and it’s like there’s an emotional reason to do that. So this idea was around for a long time
0:38:44 I’ve noticed this
0:38:45 but
0:38:47 It needed a technology inflection
0:38:51 And it needed the ai camera where you don’t have to hire somebody the quality is now good enough where it’s actually fun to watch
0:38:56 You can live stream it record it cut highlights all that shit. And so now I feel like the idea
0:38:58 it’s an idea whose time has come and
0:39:02 We were I was talking to my buddy luke about the ai
0:39:08 Like the ai wave. He’s in my like ai tutoring group where we we like learned about ai together every week once a week
0:39:11 And he’s like, you know, whenever there’s a new technology shift. He goes
0:39:14 I always think back of what he was I asked the question
0:39:19 What is the restaurants on the uh menus on the internet of this wave like a menus on the internet
0:39:23 What do you mean? He goes well when the internet first came out the very first obvious startup idea was like
0:39:26 Well, let’s just take like restaurant menus and put them on the internet
0:39:30 He’s like before we could do doordash and online ordering like all the next gen shit
0:39:34 The first thing you do is you just put the menus on the internet just a picture of the menu
0:39:39 And he’s like for every tech wave. There’s always like the like very obvious
0:39:44 It’s kind of not where the thing is going to go, but it’s like immediate value add no brainer like
0:39:48 Wave one of what people do on these apps. It’s like for for the iphone
0:39:52 Remember it was like the beer app the flashlight app the calculator app
0:39:57 Like that was the menus on the internet and now with ai there’s some things like this that are like the menus on the internet version
0:39:59 Of what you can do with with ai
0:40:03 All right, if you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you
0:40:06 You my friend are nosy
0:40:12 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about how much money people make how much money people spend
0:40:16 How much money businesses make you want to know all of this people’s net worth all of it?
0:40:21 Well, I’ve got good news for you. So my company hampton. We’re a private community for CEOs
0:40:25 We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information
0:40:27 Like how much money they’re paying themselves
0:40:30 How much money they’re paying a lot of their employees what their team?
0:40:35 My bonuses are what their net worth is what their portfolio looks like we ask all these questions
0:40:39 But we do it anonymously and so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information
0:40:43 So if you really cannot google you can’t find anywhere else and you could check it out at joinhampton.com
0:40:48 Click the report section on the menu. Click the salary and compensation report
0:40:53 It’s going to blow your mind. You’re going to love this stuff. Check it out now back to the pod
0:41:01 So you’re AI tutoring person. It’s now warped into a studying group. Oh, yeah, bro. It’s growing. What is it?
0:41:07 I don’t want to tell you it’s like fight club. It’s like fight club with no fighting
0:41:09 Just green sharing on zoom
0:41:14 But is it like a group of you who meet and you just come like with the homework and questions?
0:41:16 it’s
0:41:21 Three of us who people I think are awesome that I wanted an excuse to hang out with so it’s me
0:41:25 It’s Matt Masio and it’s my buddy Luke and I’m like I wanted to hang out with these people more anyways
0:41:29 They’re also in AI. They’re investing. They may be, you know start companies in the space whatever
0:41:32 And it was like, hey, let’s just do this together that way
0:41:36 It’s a little study group where you cut, you know, you see something and then one person says something
0:41:39 And then the other person pushes back and is like, well, I don’t know
0:41:43 What about this and it everybody gets a little smarter for for doing it
0:41:46 What are your biggest takeaways now with AI then because I don’t know much about it
0:41:52 So sam altman recently said something he goes there’s two types of companies in AI
0:41:55 There’s the companies that
0:41:57 Can’t wait for us to release a new model
0:42:03 And there’s these companies that can’t sleep at night knowing we’re going to release a new model meaning he’s like we’re going to crush you
0:42:06 They’re not saying this but the way they’ve architected their business is
0:42:11 If we make gpt 5 better than gpt 4 and we improve a bunch of capabilities
0:42:16 The model gets smarter it gets better at doing all the things he’s doing which he’s like, by the way, that’s exactly what’s going to happen
0:42:19 duh like insane to bet against that he’s like
0:42:22 They risk being like, you know
0:42:27 You know blown up like, you know, they’re they become obsolete when that happens
0:42:32 I’m pretty sure he goes we’re going to steamroll them. Yeah, he goes. Well, they will those companies will get steamrolled
0:42:33 yeah
0:42:35 Which is not a good thing
0:42:43 That is amazing. So then the other companies he’s like the other companies are begging us can’t wait for the next model to come out
0:42:47 Because it’s just going to make their product better. So what’s an exit? So then the group we were talking through like, okay
0:42:51 What does that really mean? Who are the companies that fall into group a and fall into group b?
0:42:54 And there’s an interesting discussion around that but I’ll just give you like a simple example
0:42:56 Let’s say you’re some company that
0:43:02 You do transcription translation and whatever in, you know, four companies
0:43:05 that are com
0:43:07 But not rev.com. So rev.com says
0:43:12 Pay us rev.com is a good example of the steamroll type of company. So it’s basically it’s like got it pay us
0:43:15 We do transcription really good. We have human transcribers. They’re great
0:43:18 It’s like, well, guess what? It’s going to be better than the human transcribers gpt5
0:43:20 It’s going to be awesome and it’s going to be way cheaper than rev.com
0:43:25 It’s going to like drive your price to zero and be better. So that’s like rev.com is in trouble
0:43:30 um, then you have a company that’s like cool, we do transcription translation in the context of
0:43:35 This certain healthcare thing this workflow where doctors need to transcribe their notes on the go
0:43:39 And it needs to be really high fidelity and today that transcription is done by a human
0:43:43 But like whatever it’s like they have a full like enterprise workflow
0:43:47 And if the transcription capabilities get better, they’re like awesome a product got better
0:43:52 But the product was like open ai is never going to build the thing that integrates in with the
0:43:58 The doctors, you know, like, um, whatever, you know, healthcare record system that they use like
0:44:01 They embed themselves in a workflow
0:44:08 And that’s like 90 of the product and the 10 improvements to the the ai that the transcription the translation
0:44:09 But whatever it is
0:44:12 If those get better great our product got more effective
0:44:15 But it didn’t make our product obsolete because we have this 90 that we’ve built around it
0:44:21 that are that is really specific to a certain use case certain workflow and um
0:44:24 And so we’re we can’t wait for the next model to come out
0:44:29 Versus maybe other companies like rev.com or companies that are like we’re like open ai
0:44:34 But we’re better at like, you know, here’s an example of a company. I think is at risk
0:44:41 You know, um, these companies that do voice text to voice. So like, you know, 11 labs one play ht is another it’s like
0:44:47 Basically, they’re like we’re better than like we can do ai you type in a thing and we can create a human sounding ai
0:44:50 And we’re going to fine-tune our model to do that
0:44:54 But then open ai releases like every every month they just release a new thing
0:44:57 It’s like, yeah, we have text to voice now. Check it out. Here’s the demo and the demo is awesome
0:45:02 It’s like it’s only going to get better and then it’s going to become a standard api for anybody to use to use text to voice
0:45:07 It’s like I think those companies that are trying to be like we have our own proprietary model
0:45:11 Our own fine-tuned use case they’re going to really struggle because
0:45:14 They can’t compete with the behemoth
0:45:16 How are you taking advantage of this then? Uh
0:45:20 From a business point of view or are you I would say
0:45:23 On the investing side, I’m much more
0:45:30 Measure twice cut once right now meaning i’m not spraying and preying a bunch of checks into a bunch of random ai companies
0:45:32 I think it’s really hard to figure out right now
0:45:39 Which companies actually have legs also they’re all really overpriced. So I have this combination of really high price really low traction
0:45:43 um product is really good in a demo but not really good in production and
0:45:47 I don’t know if they’re going to become obsolete due to open ai. So there’s a bunch of problems there
0:45:49 It’s like actually a better bet was just like in the stock market
0:45:56 Just buy companies that have like a massive advantage when it comes to ai’s go buy nvidia buy facebook buy buy a bunch of stocks that are
0:45:59 Going to benefit from ai whether they’re not just like
0:46:04 A one random startup that i’m hoping is the one out of a thousand startup that becomes enormous
0:46:08 well, that’s what uh morgan stanley put up this report and they said um they go uh
0:46:11 Uh ai is going to be a big deal
0:46:17 Unfortunately, we well not unfortunately, but we think that it’s going to impact big companies who are already established
0:46:21 It’s just going to make them significant. You’re going to get there’s going to be more value in making those companies better than
0:46:25 There is starting new companies exactly and we actually and they actually said marketing
0:46:27 and the reason I thought it was cool is because uh
0:46:33 I own stock in a in a marketing technology company and they’re like we think that marketing technology and that type of stuff sales force
0:46:35 How’s about whatever that’s going to be the biggest?
0:46:38 Sector that’s going to use this shit to to grow well
0:46:41 I think it’s good. I think it’s a safer bet and it’s a more obvious bet
0:46:46 I don’t I don’t think that investing in startups right now is a bad idea. I just meant no
0:46:49 Uh, it’s really hard right now and it’s unclear to me
0:46:53 And I haven’t put in the time to get a lot of clarity on which which I don’t have a bunch of startups
0:46:57 I’m like these are going to be winners in this space. I just haven’t been able to get that level of clarity yet
0:47:03 So it’s like measure twice got once meaning first. I’m like, let me just learn this in more depth. Let me use all these tools
0:47:07 Which is what we do. So like in these sessions, we will just be like cool
0:47:11 Here’s a tool that could do x and then I he’s like you drive and I go and I start
0:47:15 Trying to build a thing that’s going to be useful in one of my businesses
0:47:17 Are you paying this person? Yeah, still
0:47:19 Dude, this is so smart
0:47:21 because we did it as a group
0:47:26 Like the sessions are more fun and it’s like a pretty valuable network of people to be really tight with right?
0:47:28 Like which is ultimately what you want
0:47:33 You want the thing to be so mutually beneficial that the financial outcomes of the thing are so secondary
0:47:37 Like the primary should be the session is fun and these people are awesome
0:47:40 And I get to hang with these people these people I get to basically, you know
0:47:44 Iron sharpens iron with these people right now. That’s like what I wanted this to get to
0:47:48 So I feel really good about that. Dude, that’s so smart more people should do this
0:47:50 I mean, I used to do this with book clubs
0:47:53 But if I had a very specific interest like you have right now
0:47:58 And even if it’s just a temporary thing that lasts six or 12 months, that’s the way to go. It’s so smart
0:48:02 That’s such a smart thing for you to do. Well, the smartest people I think always did the second crypto
0:48:04 I know people were doing this early on
0:48:05 you know
0:48:09 I remember hearing these like sessions about south by southwest where
0:48:12 I forgot whose room it was but it was like everybody used to go up to
0:48:14 Garrett camp’s room
0:48:18 And at south by southwest there’s like 15 people that were all kind of like loose friends like this
0:48:20 But like a lot of mutual respect
0:48:24 And it wasn’t like a paid party or some like event with sponsors. It was like no dude like
0:48:27 We’re here to basically talk about everybody
0:48:30 He should have opinions on where they think the puck is going and then they would debate
0:48:33 And that’s how Matt Masio actually got in with Chris soccer
0:48:36 So I was like, who is this motherfucker that has like really interesting things to say
0:48:39 It’s like he’s the agent at cAA in Hollywood
0:48:42 Like this guy should be in the tech world and he recruited him from there
0:48:46 And this is where like, you know, they were there’s a lot of the guys who invested in uber early on
0:48:49 like Garrett and
0:48:53 Travis were in the room and they were you know talking about uber at the time and gary v was in the room
0:48:56 And there’s all like this is legendary story. I have no idea what actually happened
0:49:00 But I remember hearing these stories and being like I need to get into rooms like that
0:49:04 What is a room like that? How do I make a room like that if I either need to get in or I need to make a room like that
0:49:09 What was the story of the room? Well, I just told told you. Yeah, Ari
0:49:12 Was that the second time this episode Sean copped an attitude with me?
0:49:16 Well, I’m like, I told you the story. You’re like, well, so what happened? I’m like, well, that’s this
0:49:18 I told you everything I know bro. I don’t know anything else
0:49:23 Does zoom have like a bitch slap animation that I could use I know they got a thumbs up
0:49:26 Yeah, you know, we could do the thumbs up and it like starts bubbling hard behind you
0:49:28 Did they got a middle finger one of those?
0:49:35 Does that work? That’s the second time. I apologize. I’m a little sassy today
0:49:39 I could be caddy on Wednesdays. I know I’m my bad
0:49:45 Um, I apologize. Is that the pod? Do we wrap up there? I guess, uh, I think I need to go work on myself
0:49:50 I think I’ll meditate
0:49:52 All right, that’s the pod
0:49:56 Feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
0:50:02 I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let’s travel never looking back
0:50:04 (upbeat music)
0:00:09 Yo Preston you’re live on the podcast right now
0:00:25 All right, we’re live Sean I’ve got a weird thing for you. Do you remember like 12 months ago?
0:00:31 I told you about Craig Fuller. You know who Craig Fuller is. Yeah, he’s a freight waves, right?
0:00:32 Yeah, so freight waves
0:00:36 it’s a data product for people like guess who are freight brokers something like that and
0:00:42 They’re pretty big for some reason if you go they run their company like they’re publicly traded and that you can Google them and see all
0:00:45 The revenue and profit and so I don’t know the exact numbers
0:00:49 But you guys can just Google a freight waves revenue and they put out like quarterly statements, which is interesting
0:00:54 But it’s like a large like 60 or 80 million dollar a year software business or subscription data business anyway
0:01:01 Craig is an interesting entrepreneur and I told you about how he bought this thing called flying magazine
0:01:04 and what he did was he was a big fan of flying and
0:01:09 He’s wealthy on paper, but I don’t know how wealthy is liquid and so I think this was like a big deal for him
0:01:15 But he bought flying magazine and then he also bought a seven million dollar like
0:01:20 300 acre plot of land in Tennessee and was turning that into basically a flying club
0:01:26 where you it’s kind of like a country club where you like an own-a-home on a golf course except now you own it around an airplane strip and
0:01:31 An airplane hangar and they use the magazine to sell plots of land
0:01:34 It was like a neighborhood and basically they were like you could buy a house
0:01:39 It’s gonna be it’s you know the middle of this neighborhood is basically the airstrip
0:01:44 So we’re gonna be able to take off if you if you like, you know either flying your own plane or private private flights
0:01:48 And so they were like we’re gonna that’s the vision. That’s the field of dreams
0:01:54 We’re gonna start doing this and I think it was working extremely well. I have an update. I will tell you how it’s going
0:02:00 so Craig has now acquired 30 or sorry 44 different magazines and
0:02:08 They are gonna do roughly 50 million dollars this year with 18% EBITDA and it’s his prediction by
0:02:16 2030 this side business that he started he says I think we can get to a billion dollars in revenue with 30% profit margins
0:02:22 And so that’s an update on this guy what he’s doing and he tweeted out recently his quarterly revenue
0:02:29 I think last quarter Q4 of 2024 was 15 million in revenue and he’s doing it profitably and here’s what he does
0:02:33 So he finds an old title like an old magazine
0:02:39 Where it’s around a expensive hobby. So I think he has a boating one
0:02:45 He’s got I think he is even looking at like RC planes and RC cars and things like that
0:02:47 so where there’s an expensive hobby
0:02:53 And he uses this thing that he calls negative cack meaning people pay for the magazine
0:02:56 And so that is how he acquires a customer. Of course
0:03:00 They are paying for the magazine not him trying to advertise to get the the user
0:03:04 And then he goes I want to create commerce products to sell
0:03:08 To the audience and so the media businesses pay for the company
0:03:14 They pay for the audience creations and then they help bootstrap other businesses that I can sell to this audience
0:03:16 and at this point
0:03:19 He’s buying companies for three to five times evita, which is
0:03:24 I think that’s pretty cheap, but it’s a dying. It’s a dying medium. So maybe that’s not that cheap
0:03:26 It does require some sophistication in order to like turn them around
0:03:32 But it’s really fascinating that he’s pulling this off and this is his side like his side hustle
0:03:35 This is his side business. His main business is freight waves
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0:04:15 Well a couple questions. So he bought this personally not it’s not a part of freight waves
0:04:16 No, it’s its own thing
0:04:21 So that’s why I said it was like kind of a big deal for him because I don’t know craig’s personal situation
0:04:25 But I don’t think he’s sold any of freight waves other than taking on venture capital to build the company
0:04:29 This is wildly impressive. So first of all, it’s called fire crown
0:04:33 So fire crown dot com and you could go to their brand section
0:04:37 You can see all the things that they bought fire crown great name. They’ve got 44 brands
0:04:40 You’re right. Basically. It’s a bunch of things about private flight
0:04:45 It’s a bunch of things about boating and sailing and fishing and yachting and wakeboarding
0:04:49 And then there’s things like classic toy trains garden railways
0:04:51 trains.com
0:04:57 And then some like astronomy stuff as well looks like so this is a lot of the things that he he rolled up
0:04:59 he must have found a
0:05:05 A kind of repeatable rinse and repeat models says here that he buys them for three to five x e but as his typical range
0:05:07 and
0:05:11 Was he using debt? Was he using revenue from the business? What was he our cash flows from the business?
0:05:15 How was he buying? I think he got a bunch of friends to invest, but I don’t know exactly
0:05:17 He’s going to come on the pot. I asked him to come on to explain this strategy
0:05:22 But what he did was there’s a bunch of companies that own tons and tons of magazine titles. So
0:05:26 Meredith corporation owns and owns like Martha Stewart magazine
0:05:28 and then I think there’s like
0:05:34 Rodale and then there’s Bonner and there’s all these companies that are like old family companies that have been in business since the 30s
0:05:38 or 40s whatever and they’ve got these publications that are just sitting there and they’re like
0:05:41 Just take them
0:05:44 And and so he could buy them like five or ten at a time or you know
0:05:48 I think he’s tweeted out that he’s bought like 13 the other day and so he buys them in bulk a little bit
0:05:55 I mean, this is super impressive the the side hustle that’s now 50 million a 50 million a year profitable
0:05:58 Really really specific
0:06:03 You know expensive hobby magazines and then basically has a better business model sounds like right?
0:06:07 So it sounds like the old business model was it’s a media business. So we make money on the media
0:06:09 He’s like no, no, it’s a media business
0:06:12 So we’re going to use media to acquire customers for a much more valuable
0:06:19 Business model, you know, for example with the flying thing, you know, they’re selling these homes on this plot of land
0:06:21 For like a couple million bucks each
0:06:26 So I think you said what seven million bucks to buy that that 300 acre plot of land something like that. Yeah
0:06:31 So roughly, you know, uh, let’s even round it up 10 million bucks to buy the thing
0:06:35 But then they’re selling each home at 2 million bucks. They sold 50 homes, right?
0:06:37 Just rough numbers
0:06:41 I don’t know how many they sold but they sold enough that it’s worthwhile and it’s a beautiful place a piece of land and
0:06:49 On flying magazine. They’re also if you follow Preston Holland, he’s the CEO of flying magazine. Yeah, he’s brokering jets
0:06:51 He’s selling jets. He’s like right
0:06:56 Yeah, on twitter he goes we’ve got this jet for sale. It’s seven million dollars
0:07:01 He’s a good dude. We text all the time and I’m like, he almost gets me to buy a plane
0:07:05 Like I’m like, dude, do you stay away from me, man? I’m not gonna buy a plane just because you uh, you know
0:07:06 You made a funny joke in this day
0:07:11 Dude, Nick Hubert. I’m gonna do it. This is a Hampton plug Nick Hubert and and Craig are in the same Hampton group
0:07:17 They bought a plane. They bought a plane together. And so the now Nick owns a plane. I guess they like
0:07:19 I don’t know how you buy a plane together if they did it
0:07:24 But they but Preston’s selling these like 10 million dollar jets online. It’s on twitter. It’s crazy
0:07:30 Nick shared the economics of buying these small planes. By the way, uh, we should we should ask him for permission to
0:07:35 To share the numbers like we bought it for x. Here’s how much it costs to do each flight
0:07:39 Here’s how the rules work because it’s kind of a timeshare. It’s like him and six other guys or whatever bought the plane
0:07:40 and um
0:07:42 And so you pay for like the
0:07:44 The pilot and the fuel when you need it
0:07:45 But then you just pay like an ongoing basis
0:07:51 But then you got this tax benefit of buying a plane and so how how does it what does it all work out to?
0:07:55 What does the cost per flight ultimately work out to he’s he’s shared the numbers with me before
0:07:57 So we should uh, we should do a segment on here talking about that
0:08:01 But isn’t this crazy that this is this guy’s side thing and how amazing it is
0:08:04 It’s pretty it sounds like it’s about to be his main thing. It’s what I’m hearing
0:08:08 Well, what’s crazy here’s kind of a takeaway, which is all right
0:08:11 So most people couldn’t imagine this being their main thing
0:08:15 When you get into business like him and you have some success
0:08:18 With freight waves and you start seeing like how things work
0:08:24 It’s like you get these like weird like unlocking moments where you don’t see certain things as risk
0:08:27 So i’ve never bought a business before I see buying a business. I’m like that’s really risky
0:08:31 But he’s like no like I’ve done it enough times that I know how to unlock value
0:08:38 And I don’t think this is risky because we’re going to do this this this and this and it really is a confidence game as much as it is a knowledge game
0:08:40 Uh, but it’s pretty amazing. I’ve always been able to pull this off
0:08:47 I’m super impressed by this is one of my favorite kind of like uh businesses that you brought to the to the pod to the people’s attention
0:08:51 And uh, really really impressive what he’s done. So where do you think this goes?
0:08:54 What what do you think he’s going to do and and what does he do for the boating ones?
0:08:59 Like is he doing the same thing he’s selling boats or what is he doing to make the business work out of those?
0:09:05 I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think he knows yet. I’m not sure he hasn’t shared it publicly
0:09:08 But I guess you could do similar things where you have a marina
0:09:15 I mean, have you ever like no like my parents used to have boats and I know that they would spend like 500 to $1,000 a month on a
0:09:16 on a
0:09:20 Boat slip rental and it became it became a community where we would hang out and stuff like that
0:09:24 Something like that. I’m not sure what he’s going to do selling boats
0:09:27 I mean, I’m not sure how he’s going to pull it off, but there’s like plenty of options
0:09:31 Should we call this Preston guy right now? Just get him on here to uh to explain this
0:09:34 Yeah, actually call him right now and put on speakerphone
0:09:41 Yo Preston you’re live on the podcast right now
0:09:43 What’s going on?
0:09:50 Dude, we are talking about flying and we’re talking about firecrown and i’m blown away. I didn’t know about firecrown
0:09:56 I only knew about flying and sam is telling me about the the growth of this thing. I got two questions for you
0:09:58 Uh, number one when you guys started this
0:10:04 Was this the plan or you guys sort of stumbled into oh, wow, this might be bigger and better than we thought
0:10:08 So when crick called me
0:10:12 In 2021 it was a lifestyle side help basically side hustle
0:10:15 He’s like, hey, you want to come out? We run this
0:10:20 I asked him I was like, why are you buying a magazine? You know, I can’t tell last time I read a magazine and
0:10:25 He was like, well, it’s just going to be kind of like a side hobby freeways is really my business
0:10:26 but
0:10:31 Yeah, keep it small and uh, but if you if you know anything about Craig as a person
0:10:34 He can’t eat that’s not in his nature
0:10:39 So all of a sudden it you know, we started rolling stuff up as we saw opportunities and you know
0:10:43 Now it’s blowing up and see I mean we’re 257 employees
0:10:47 And there’s the side hustle has 250 employees. All right, amazing
0:10:51 And um, tell can you can you give a little bit of the a peak of the
0:10:55 Sam has a bunch of the numbers of fire come because I think Craig tweeted out
0:11:01 But can you talk about the thing you guys did where you basically bought the the land and then you started building a neighborhood on top of it?
0:11:05 So really what we did was we let the content inform
0:11:08 Uh, the commercial decisions that we made right so
0:11:14 We had an idea to kind of build an airport. We’re like, that’d be cool. Uh, you know
0:11:20 We there’s it’s hard to find hangar space around Chattanooga. And so, you know, as we’re looking at I always tell myself that too
0:11:22 Where’s the where’s the hangar space in Chattanooga?
0:11:30 Yeah, right exactly. Well, so we’ve got three airports and each of them have a waitlist of like seven to 10 years long
0:11:36 And so we’re like, well, I guess we’re gonna have to build an airport if we’re going to be able to get hangar space for any
0:11:38 Airplanes, you know that we
0:11:45 Get on demo or whatever build we wanted to build a media center on the runway and
0:11:49 You know every airport was like, yeah, good luck. It’s going to take at least 10 years
0:11:53 So we said, hey, let’s build her in runway to build a runway. We should
0:11:57 You know do something unique these flying communities are interesting
0:12:02 And we started writing about it and realized that like there’s really high performing content like
0:12:08 User, you know, you from a from a google analytics standpoint. It’s like, you know, we could see that the content
0:12:13 Being engaged with and we’re like, okay. People actually care about this. They care about air parks
0:12:18 So we said, okay. Well, let’s let’s go ahead and let’s build an air park. We announced it
0:12:20 on the land 1,500 acres
0:12:23 about 45 minutes outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee
0:12:31 And through advertising in our own magazine and said, all right. Well, this will probably be like a five to seven year project before we get started
0:12:33 Uh, you know, kind of underwriting
0:12:42 And we had we basically met our three year kind of pro forma in pre reservations in like the first three months
0:12:45 So you’re like, all right, there’s there’s definitely demand here
0:12:50 And so, uh, so yeah, so we’re set to break ground. We just finished, uh
0:12:54 Some regulatory stuff that the government loves to tell you
0:13:01 Where water should go and so we just finished that and uh are set to break ground probably here in the next 30 days
0:13:04 Can you give us a sense of the numbers? Uh, what can you share on the numbers?
0:13:08 So like, you know, how much you guys buy the land for how’d you finance this whole like big construction endeavor?
0:13:15 Yeah, for sure. So the uh, we bought the acreage around $1,500
0:13:18 150 in uh an acre
0:13:22 Um, so it was it was really cheap land. It’s also in an opportunity zone
0:13:27 So there’s a lot of tax incentives for making investments in that area
0:13:29 um, and then we are
0:13:37 We’ve taken $25 million of pre deposits. So that’s people basically sending us a percentage of the deposit
0:13:43 You basically funded it through the pre the the deposits kind of like how tesla does with the trucks and all that before they
0:13:48 Before they build the trucks they they take the deposits and they use that to basically finance the the manufacturing
0:13:54 Now if you if you’ve got those deposits, it’s it proves to the banks you can go to the bank and basically
0:13:58 Say, okay, look, we’ve got you know, $25 million of
0:14:00 of these lots pre sold so like
0:14:08 You know that represents future cashals of $25 million and they say, oh, okay. So let’s say, you know using round numbers
0:14:12 Let’s say round one of infrastructure costs. I don’t know 10 or 15 million dollars
0:14:18 The bank’s gonna go. Okay. Well, you’ve got 25 million dollars represented of future sales
0:14:23 Um, so that you know, 10 to 15 million dollars of phase one infrastructure
0:14:25 Is a super low risk bet for them
0:14:32 Nice and then are you guys, um bootstrapped or did you raise money to buy all these magazines? How did you do it?
0:14:38 Yeah, so we have we’ve been really fortunate, you know, since we’ve got some private capital behind us
0:14:42 Um, it’s patient which is really key, right? It’s not venture
0:14:49 It’s uh, it’s more, you know patient capital that says, okay, you know, we’re gonna take a 15 year time horizon
0:14:51 20 year 30 year time horizon
0:14:56 Um, and then actually go and grind this thing. So we we got some capital behind us
0:14:59 but we didn’t have to go raise, you know venture or
0:15:04 You know private equity or anything like that. That’s kind of you know, we don’t have a ticking time
0:15:10 Basically, we don’t have a ticking time bomb waiting for us to sell in seven or 10 years that have hundreds valuation
0:15:15 Is that you know, you talked about the google analytics. Is this actually a print business or is it?
0:15:23 It’s a online, you know a media site a blog that has print as like a vanity piece. Which what what is the business actually?
0:15:27 So when we buy these when we buy these media assets
0:15:33 Uh, what we have to do is we Joe in it and it really is a shift in mindset
0:15:37 And a shift in product velocity at a lot of these companies
0:15:44 We are we tend to buy print magazines that happen to have a website where it’s like, okay
0:15:46 We check our print content and then we post it online
0:15:52 Uh, and so, you know when when you go in you require these you kind of have to you know
0:15:57 Level set with everybody and say look, you know digital is its own product
0:16:00 And it’s kind of you know, we we split out the peonels, right?
0:16:04 So digital has its own peonel and print has its own peonel and we make peonel
0:16:10 We know we make print a product as opposed to the core business if that makes sense
0:16:15 Gotcha. Um, so it’s like and and the other thing here’s the thing and it’s and look
0:16:20 We came in, you know, Craig and I day one. We’re like, all right. We’re killing print because like
0:16:25 I don’t know Sean Sam. I don’t know if you guys have a lot of print magazines, but like
0:16:32 I didn’t I don’t have I don’t have a lot of print magazine subscription. Let’s just you know, not
0:16:35 I’m 30 years old like I you know, that’s that’s not how I consume media
0:16:41 And so, you know, we went in to shut down print, but there’s something about being in print and
0:16:46 Neil Vogel talks about this at Don Dash Meredith as well that he’s had a similar experience
0:16:48 So it’s not you know, this is not a unique perspective
0:16:53 Like we’re not the only ones that are thinking this but there’s something about having a long
0:16:58 A feeling of longevity and a perception of longevity in having a print product
0:17:02 Whether that’s with advertisers or it’s with audience or readers
0:17:09 That you just don’t get with a blog. You don’t it doesn’t feel and you know, you think about a brand like Dwell
0:17:16 Is a great example like they have a print magazine and it for some reason feels more legitimate than
0:17:21 Architectural blog xyz.com right because it has a magazine
0:17:25 So it’s like we we use it as kind of a staying power
0:17:28 But you know, we also recognize the like the world’s going to show
0:17:34 Yeah, you also mentioned you like you leave the you hustled your way to get the magazine in every like
0:17:39 Private chartered plane right just to get get the right rich people to be reading the thing
0:17:42 Because you like left it on the table in those planes. Is that right?
0:17:47 Yeah, exactly. So we we send them on the non-solicited
0:17:52 To a lot of fbos across the country some are solicited, you know, there’s about
0:17:56 1800 or so that are solicited that we’ve got an agreement with the distribution company
0:18:02 But the other ones are not solicited but they they feel like we’ve created a product that has so much value
0:18:07 That they feel as though it’s something that they want to display on the tables people go and pick them up
0:18:10 and I mean we’ve had conversations with
0:18:14 You know some pretty wild folks that were like, oh, yeah
0:18:19 I was in the fbo and I read your magazine and I want to collaborate on your real estate project
0:18:21 And so it’s like
0:18:25 Okay, like how do you how do you quantify like an ROI on that like and you know
0:18:29 Hard to like do your last touch attribution except for like, oh, yeah
0:18:32 You read about our project in our magazine that we put in the fbo
0:18:37 And now we have, you know, really cool partners, uh, you know on the real estate project
0:18:44 Gotcha. Well, Preston you’re the man. This is a crazy business. Thanks for uh, the on the on the spot call in
0:18:47 Yeah, man. Long time listener first-time caller, so
0:18:55 First-ever caller we’ve ever had first-ever caller actually. All right, man. Take care. All right. See you man. That was awesome
0:19:01 All right, we changed the show. Um, that was cool. I like him
0:19:06 All right. Well, I mean we got our information. That’s awesome. Congratulations to krega presid
0:19:10 I’m happy that he was transparent. Yeah, really cool. Uh, all right. What else we got
0:19:16 You got one. You got one. Yeah, let me do one. Okay. Let’s stick to the print. Let’s stick to the print idea
0:19:19 uh, but take a different angle so
0:19:22 The new york times
0:19:27 The new york times when you think about it, you think this prestigious newspaper. It’s all about the news
0:19:31 They want you to think it’s all about the truth. That’s their marketing
0:19:37 The new york times has more in common with zynga than it does the truth. The new york times is a games company
0:19:43 And um, this is the the numbers behind the new york times and their gaming products is pretty amazing
0:19:47 So I don’t know. Do you ever play their games? I I’m a supply paying subscriber to their games
0:19:51 Well, I know they have wordle and I played that one. They bought wordle
0:19:52 um
0:19:55 The guy had made like the guy like made wordle for his girlfriend or something like that
0:19:58 Then it took off and then they ended up buying it. But like I have a
0:20:05 22 days 22 day streak going right now on the crossword puzzle on the mini crossword and how much you pay
0:20:09 I think it’s like 6.99 a month or something. And what’s the revenue on that?
0:20:12 Take a guess
0:20:14 100 million dollars
0:20:16 Uh a lot more than that
0:20:18 So the new york times just in q4
0:20:24 Their digital only subscribers was 289 million, which is almost all their games
0:20:28 It’s a little bit of their cooking product as well, but it’s like mostly their games revenue
0:20:30 And so that’s 300 million in the quarter
0:20:37 Uh, they’re they’re uh gaming basically has pushed their annual subscriptions over a billion dollars a year for the first time ever
0:20:43 And they released this chart that was basically like the new york times bundles. So you have
0:20:47 The news you have their cooking section their cooking product
0:20:51 You have the athletic which is their sports the sports thing they bought and then you have games
0:20:54 So take a look at that that chart right there. You could see that games
0:21:00 You know a few years ago a few years ago games was roughly 15 percent of time spent
0:21:05 Now it’s over 50 percent of the time spent in their bundle is on the games product
0:21:11 Which is pretty wild that’s more time spent on games than on news it has overtaken news
0:21:13 And so you have this thing that is
0:21:15 Um, just fascinating
0:21:21 It was like, you know, they used to in the newspaper have a little crossword section a little sudoku section
0:21:25 And what they did was as they transformed the product they unbundled it
0:21:31 They made it a standalone thing and what’s cool about it is almost every game on my phone is just trying to like
0:21:33 it’s like
0:21:36 Needy is that how do I take all of your time and all of your money?
0:21:39 And the new york times thing is works way different. It’s you have one a day
0:21:43 There’s one mini crossword a day one crossword a day and one
0:21:47 You know one word all day you do that every day
0:21:49 Every day me and my daughter do it together
0:21:51 We play wordled together and then I do the crossword on my own
0:21:56 The crossword the mini crossword literally takes under one minute like my average time is about 57 seconds to finish this thing
0:21:58 It’s a very short game
0:22:01 And so i’m able to like play a game and have that dopamine hit without it like
0:22:06 Taking away from my life by being like, oh great now i’m the hours on this. Hey, baby
0:22:12 What’s it starts with an e what’s the disease that brought down chipotle in 2009?
0:22:15 Oh, you’re right ebola. That’s it
0:22:21 Yeah, well she plays wordled with the and uh she gets to type and then I come up with the words and um
0:22:24 And so you know these the games are really fun
0:22:26 It’s a really well done app
0:22:31 And it’s shocking to me how successful this thing has been and so I want to just read you a couple things
0:22:35 So it says basically a few years ago the time spun off cooking crossword offerings to standalone products
0:22:39 Meaning you could subscribe to either without being a new york times new subscriber
0:22:40 seemed like an odd choice
0:22:43 Because the internet already had millions of games and millions of free recipe apps
0:22:49 But what they did was they just digitized decades of old crossword puzzles and old cooking recipes that they already had
0:22:52 So this is kind of like remnant inventory that they weren’t using
0:22:57 And they took that stranded asset and they turned it into like a viable asset a live asset
0:23:02 And then they just like modernize this they put it in an app. They made it like work really well
0:23:03 and um
0:23:08 Super simple app and it basically breathed new life into the company the company has grown like crazy. So now there’s like
0:23:13 Over what now between crossword and cooking check this graph out
0:23:17 Should we just start calling the new york times a gaming company? Yeah, exactly
0:23:21 Yeah, you guys weren’t those great games. Did you got like a sick blog that you talk about like the trump trial?
0:23:23 I love that too side hustle. Yeah
0:23:27 I love that little blog you guys got going to have over and this was in 2020
0:23:28 So this is years ago
0:23:32 They had 1.3 million paying subscribers that paid on average
0:23:34 You know $40 plus a year
0:23:40 On the on the games and cooking product, which is mostly games and they’re not alone. So that so that’s the new york times
0:23:43 Then I saw um, you know, I opened up the youtube app
0:23:47 I don’t do you use the youtube app because I opened it up and I saw something very new use that. Yeah
0:23:50 Did you see their new games product?
0:23:51 Look at this
0:23:53 If I open up youtube
0:23:56 Oh my god games and it says play now
0:24:02 And you don’t have to download anything, right? So it’s like I click play and now i’m just i’m gonna be in this game
0:24:05 And this is a popular mobile game this this thing called states
0:24:08 Um, it’s like a little like risk type of game
0:24:13 And so they have like 20 of these games. It says instant games. No no downloads
0:24:19 So youtube’s doing it now and then linkedin the other day announced linkedin games
0:24:23 So I have three three games on top of linkedin. There’s like a wordle variant
0:24:27 There’s like a whatever there’s like they they took popular games. They just kind of made their remix of it
0:24:33 And if anybody needs engagement like a real engagement, it’s linkedin right linkedin’s got a billion users
0:24:36 and you know, but like
0:24:41 There’s not a lot of good content on on linkedin to do but this is cool because they basically made it where they have their
0:24:43 Sudoku they have their trivia
0:24:48 They have their word game and basically you can you can see how other people in your company do so it’s like
0:24:53 They already have the social graph of who’s in your company and who are you connected to
0:24:57 So when you play the game you can see how you compare to people you already know
0:25:03 Because they already have that social layer built in of like, you know, kind of competing amongst your who do you think they
0:25:05 stole this from because like imagine
0:25:06 imagine like
0:25:12 Um the the meeting where they’re bringing this up. It’s like, uh, hey Sharon. You got any ideas. Uh, what if we
0:25:18 Call it linkedin influencers and we get famous people to post. Ah, I’ve been there down that and then this other person’s like, hey
0:25:23 Charlie, what do you got? What if we just put like risk in the feed of linkedin?
0:25:25 Do you know what I mean? Like how would you justify doing that?
0:25:28 So I don’t know if they acquired a company that was doing this
0:25:30 or if they um
0:25:36 Or if there was just like I imagined some product manager that looks like he’s just got back from nom and he’s like
0:25:38 I had an idea and I got it through
0:25:42 I got the I got the I got my manager to approve my manager’s manager
0:25:47 We went all the way up to the product org and went through the committee and it happened
0:25:50 They all said yes, I get to launch this thing and like in six months it’s gonna die
0:25:54 But I actually think there’s actually a good opportunity
0:25:59 I think that if somebody built the third party linkedin games app, like I don’t know fully
0:26:02 I haven’t explored the linkedin api and like what’s all possible
0:26:06 But if you can hook in and if you can build a game on top of linkedin
0:26:11 That’s just like a total greenfield opportunity and linkedin will buy it if you do a good job
0:26:14 if you build the actual games product that’s getting engagement there and
0:26:19 You don’t have to invent the game just steal the games and you’re basically just saying proven game
0:26:24 And new new social graph. Um, and that’s that’s the whole business model here
0:26:31 That’s pretty insane. I did not see that they were doing this and that is actually quite smart linkedin is the the behemoth
0:26:34 That somehow always works and so it’s quite wise that they’re doing this
0:26:37 And you know the one that the one that I don’t believe in is netflix is doing games
0:26:42 I don’t know if you’ve ever seen like they have a games thing in like there’s a trivia game
0:26:43 You can play in netflix
0:26:46 But also if you go to the app store and you search netflix as the game producer
0:26:52 They have like 50 game titles is like pretty insane. How many mobile games that they have I don’t understand this
0:26:58 I don’t think it’s gonna work. I don’t understand the tie between this but you know, basically secrets out
0:27:01 It’s like, you know games make a lot of money and people use it all the time
0:27:07 Um, maybe we too should be in the games market and that’s wild. That’s what they’re trying to do
0:27:13 Uh, that’s awesome kudos to those guys. I’ve I’ve not seen that. I will um, let me do a quick thrill of the show
0:27:16 I want to I want to promote something. I’m going to try and make it extra
0:27:17 Thrilly
0:27:21 Have you ever thought while you’re building stuff you think to yourself?
0:27:22 Am I doing this right?
0:27:27 Like I remember being in san francisco and I thought well, you know, shan’s got a fancy office
0:27:30 therefore we have to have a fancy office or
0:27:36 You know this particular ceo said you have to focus on this one thing. So I have to focus on this one thing
0:27:43 So to grow hampton we came up with this podcast called money wise and money wise is basically like a personal finance podcast
0:27:48 But for high net worth people and I’ve done eight or nine of the episodes as like the temporary host
0:27:53 And I want to tell you what my biggest takeaway which is to get wealthy or even to spend the money once you’re wealthy
0:27:56 There’s no one way that people are doing it
0:28:00 There’s a lot of different ways that people are doing it and I’ve already like recorded
0:28:06 I think 12 or 15 of these and I had to do nine already for the the um first season
0:28:10 Dude, it’s it first of all it’s insane that people reveal all this information
0:28:13 So we basically what we do is we have people come on
0:28:16 And they reveal their income their expenses
0:28:21 Exactly what their portfolio looks like and then like we’ll dive deep on one topic like parenting or are they anonymous
0:28:24 Or they put their name on it. I have to listen to it half and half
0:28:29 So sometimes they’re anonymous and what we do is we change the name and we we actually change the voice
0:28:33 And so there’s a bunch of people who you who you know of that have been on but they changed the voice
0:28:37 but then sometimes like the guy from simple modern came on and he’s completely
0:28:41 Open about it and he’ll say here’s exactly how much I have in my bank account
0:28:46 Here’s what we have in my index or in my portfolio. Here’s how much income I have
0:28:51 It’s insane that people reveal this amount of information. It’s almost scary. And so
0:28:58 My big takeaway is one there’s no one way to do it two. I’m shocked that people reveal all this information
0:29:05 And number three the more money you get the more intentional you have to become because these people will make literally a hundred million dollars
0:29:10 And they don’t spend any of it and they’re like, I don’t even know what to do with this money. What’s been a
0:29:14 Lesson learned either in
0:29:15 Probably in the spending side
0:29:21 So how what is what something somebody said about how they spend that you were like, oh, that’s a good idea
0:29:24 That’s a cool intentional way of going about this. We talked about giving money away last time
0:29:26 You can’t use that one use a different one
0:29:31 So I I firmly believe that owning more than one home is a massive pain in the ass
0:29:36 And that’s a dream that people want to have they want to have a second or third or sometimes fourth home
0:29:42 That a lot of these people have I think that is a huge right pain in the ass place the word home with problem
0:29:47 It’s like I have a second problem in Tahoe. I have a third problem in florida that I go visit once a year
0:29:49 nice problems
0:29:52 Dude, it’s such a pain in the ass is to have that and and
0:29:58 Unilaterally people seem to regret having multiple homes and so being intentional about spending money
0:30:04 It seems like a huge deal one rich person one of the very few rich people things that I think is totally worth it
0:30:05 flying private
0:30:10 Uh, I think that is the one thing where it actually might live up to the hype when people I think buying a plane
0:30:12 Sorry, Preston. I don’t know if that’s worth it
0:30:16 But I think charting a jet as much as you can would absolutely worth it
0:30:20 And uh, so we’re doing this podcast whatever it’s called money wise. You guys should look it up
0:30:22 I’ll tell you quick quickly
0:30:26 I uh, I had this premise to make a hit podcast. I think you need one or more of the following
0:30:32 You either need great production. You need great delivery. You need a unique perspective
0:30:34 So unique perspective is like lebron james talking
0:30:38 Great delivery is typically like comedians and then great production is like
0:30:42 Serial or whatever like these like wandering things
0:30:45 My gap in the market that I wanted to exploit was the first one
0:30:49 I think you and I do number two and number three and I wanted to do number one
0:30:51 And so so far it appears to be working
0:30:56 So if you’re a creator, those are the three the three ways I think to do a podcast
0:31:01 And that’s my little pitch on money wise. Congrats. That’s a good good thriller show. I liked it
0:31:02 Um
0:31:07 All right, let’s do let’s do some other ones. Do you have another good one or can I do my ai camera one real quick?
0:31:10 Do your ai camera one because I have something funny to tell you. All right ai cameras
0:31:11 so
0:31:14 I play in this basketball league in san francisco
0:31:19 Shout out to ruben torrenberg who who hosts this league’s been hosting it for like 10 years and um
0:31:22 It’s basically it’s called sf tech hoops
0:31:26 I think it’s called and basically it’s like people from the tech industry that like to play play basketball
0:31:28 and
0:31:29 for a long time
0:31:34 Ruben basically he runs the league with some real heart and I really appreciate that meaning
0:31:41 He makes the teams. He has the league. There’s the table stakes. What you expect teams jerseys referee scoreboard great
0:31:47 But then what he does is every week he writes an email recap with gifts and whatever and he basically team one took on team three
0:31:52 They were led by sam par. He scored 13 points and he had a great buzzer beater blah blah blah
0:31:57 But then in the second half. This is what happened. So he writes these great updates from the commission
0:32:01 He writes his own like internal newsletter for the thing. The second thing he does is he
0:32:05 Films it he used to film it basically put two tripods with the iphone on each side
0:32:07 And he would try to afterwards go through and cut a highlight
0:32:10 And highlight is a really generous term because you’re talking about
0:32:13 out of shape tech dudes
0:32:16 Like I made a game-winning shot last week and in my head
0:32:20 And if you asked anybody that I talked to afterwards, this was fucking
0:32:25 Jordan against the calves in 89 or whatever. You know, I was I was flying through the air
0:32:32 You know hit the shot at the buzzer. It was amazing. It was like just and then I watched the clip and I was like
0:32:38 Uh, like you could literally you couldn’t fit a book under my feet where I jumped. I was like, this is ridiculous
0:32:42 This looks slow. This looks terrible. This is like a game loser not a game winner
0:32:46 So highlight is a little bit generous, but either way he puts the you know
0:32:51 The tlc into to running this league. So he just bought this new thing that
0:32:53 is a game changer
0:32:58 And he bought this ai based camera call. I think it’s called vio. There’s a and there’s a bunch of these
0:33:00 There’s like four companies doing this but veo check this out
0:33:03 Basically, it’s one camera
0:33:07 That you uh, it’s a like a smart camera that you post on a tripod tripod
0:33:12 And it does a couple of very basic things things that sound trivial but make a huge difference
0:33:16 So he used to have two iPhones because you needed to record both sides of the court
0:33:21 And basically for one iPhone half the time when when everybody runs to the other side of the court
0:33:22 It’s just empty
0:33:26 And so then he could never have like a full video of the game because he couldn’t get the camera to follow it
0:33:30 Right, you’d have to hire somebody to manually like swivel their head
0:33:35 And do this but now with ai basically it’s one camera that just tracks the ball at all times
0:33:37 So this works in soccer it works in basketball works in football
0:33:39 It just it just tracks the ball and the players
0:33:43 It just keeps everything in the center of the frame without having to have a human doing
0:33:45 The second thing it does is it uploads it all to the cloud
0:33:49 The third thing it does is it live streams at all which is cool because now people can watch your games
0:33:51 Which is like, you know friends and family can watch games
0:33:53 Um the fourth thing it does is it could try to cut highlights
0:33:55 So it could basically try to identify
0:33:58 A cool moment and then cut the highlights or keep track of stats
0:34:01 It’s just getting better and better. These are all software updates from here
0:34:03 The hardware is just camera
0:34:08 With the center with enough, you know enough of a chip inside that can connect it to the internet connected to the ai software
0:34:15 And so these companies are crushing it like he bought it raised over a hundred million dollars in funding and it’s like some european company
0:34:19 Um, there’s four or five competitors all of them have raised raised a bunch of money
0:34:22 And I think they’re all doing really well. So I noticed this at our game
0:34:27 Um, and then my brother-in-law who’s got a kid that that plays like competitive soccer
0:34:30 She’s like, you know seven years old and I was like, dude, have you seen this thing?
0:34:34 He’s like bro, it’s on every field like this is like you can’t go to youth soccer now
0:34:40 And not like every single field has one of these and so I think the same way that you know, steve jobs had like the vision
0:34:44 Oh, I think it was jobs or maybe it was bill gates, but it was like a computer on every desk
0:34:48 I think it was gates is a computer on every desk was that it was the goal a personal computer
0:34:52 And I think now it’s going to be basically a camera on every field
0:35:00 All right, it’s like every single high school every single middle school every au game every, you know travel team
0:35:04 They’re going to use these things because why not well somebody’s going to make the investment one time
0:35:09 They’re really it’s not one time. So uh, all right, so for the the most popular version
0:35:15 It’s a thousand dollar one-time expense and then it’s 130 dollars per month. Yeah the most expensive one
0:35:18 I think there’s like cheaper ones than that. I don’t think you have to get the the crazy one
0:35:23 But yeah, like it though that price is going to go down like the thousand dollar hardware is going to go down
0:35:26 But the you know 100 a hundred bucks a month is going to stay there
0:35:29 But if you’re like a team or really you don’t even have to buy it per team
0:35:31 It’s like the league needs to have right
0:35:36 So it’s like the the venue needs to have it and I just predict that every venue is going to have these
0:35:40 Like they will guess whoever wins is going to get these into every single field every single court
0:35:45 And it’ll just be that way tennis wrestling like every fringe sport
0:35:50 There’s people who want to watch it’s the family the friends the athletes themselves and their coaches
0:35:57 And um, there’s enough motivation to do this their website is so good that it makes me want to play soccer
0:35:58 It’s sort of like
0:36:01 It’s sort of like gopro where I like
0:36:06 The the footage is awesome that like I got to get into snowboarding right now
0:36:08 Just so I can go and like live a life worth recording
0:36:11 Dude, that’s how I felt when you were talking about the magazine stuff
0:36:16 I was like, yeah the wind blowing through my hair my hair as I’m on this boat. Yeah, maybe I do want that lifestyle
0:36:22 Yeah, do I want to be a boater? Uh, that’s how I feel when I when I go to their website. This is a this is awesome
0:36:26 Be I’d shocked at how large this is. I guess it’s not a surprise
0:36:30 But it sort of is a surprise that there’s multiple companies that have raised nine figures to build this
0:36:32 I think these are doing, you know
0:36:37 50 million plus a year in revenue minimum, um, you know, the leaders of this space
0:36:41 I don’t know the exact numbers but like ballparking. I would I would be surprised if it was under that
0:36:46 This is absolutely insane. I never in a million years would have thought that this would become a thing
0:36:48 I have the opposite opinion, which is
0:36:56 This is an obvious idea. It’s obvious that it’s working, but it’s not obvious that like no, I think this was obvious before dude when
0:36:59 Like why didn’t you start it?
0:37:03 Well, because the idea this idea has been around for a long time. So for example in nba stadiums
0:37:08 they there’s like an enterprise version of this called second spectrum and
0:37:13 There’s a company called synergy sports that basically there’s like cameras that they install in the
0:37:19 Um, in the aba venue that tracks all the players and all the motion and it keeps track of certain specific advanced stats for the teams
0:37:26 And so this idea of like, oh, wow, couldn’t you either install cameras or use computer vision to
0:37:31 To track stats. That’s that’s interesting. Then there was flow flow sports
0:37:36 Which is basically live streaming niche sports like, you know, jujitsu competitions wrestling competitions
0:37:41 And they were doing tens of millions a year in revenue. Yeah, their office is here is in austin and I’ve been to it and it’s sick
0:37:46 It’s really cool. It’s a big company and you for those those are for more official competitions
0:37:52 Like, you know, the texas state, you know, karate championships or whatever not like, you know
0:37:57 Little susie’s soccer game, which like, you know, susie’s parents and grandma and whatever want to be able to watch
0:38:00 Like back in college. I remember, um, my my roommate trevor
0:38:06 He would always watch his little sister’s basketball games and he’d be on his computer and he’s watching this greeny
0:38:13 Footage and I’m like, who the hell’s streaming this ninth grade girl’s wyoming basketball regular season game
0:38:15 and he’s like
0:38:21 He’s like I pay for this thing because like we pay and then this guy films it and then he’s, you know, he uploads it later
0:38:22 It’s not live stream
0:38:25 But he pay uploads it later and I watch the shitty footage
0:38:30 But like I really want to see my sister’s play like that matters to me. I’m willing to pay like my price sensitivity
0:38:33 It’s like I will pay the equivalent of a netflix monthly subscription
0:38:36 But instead of giving me like all the world’s best content
0:38:42 I get my my niece’s games and it’s like there’s an emotional reason to do that. So this idea was around for a long time
0:38:44 I’ve noticed this
0:38:45 but
0:38:47 It needed a technology inflection
0:38:51 And it needed the ai camera where you don’t have to hire somebody the quality is now good enough where it’s actually fun to watch
0:38:56 You can live stream it record it cut highlights all that shit. And so now I feel like the idea
0:38:58 it’s an idea whose time has come and
0:39:02 We were I was talking to my buddy luke about the ai
0:39:08 Like the ai wave. He’s in my like ai tutoring group where we we like learned about ai together every week once a week
0:39:11 And he’s like, you know, whenever there’s a new technology shift. He goes
0:39:14 I always think back of what he was I asked the question
0:39:19 What is the restaurants on the uh menus on the internet of this wave like a menus on the internet
0:39:23 What do you mean? He goes well when the internet first came out the very first obvious startup idea was like
0:39:26 Well, let’s just take like restaurant menus and put them on the internet
0:39:30 He’s like before we could do doordash and online ordering like all the next gen shit
0:39:34 The first thing you do is you just put the menus on the internet just a picture of the menu
0:39:39 And he’s like for every tech wave. There’s always like the like very obvious
0:39:44 It’s kind of not where the thing is going to go, but it’s like immediate value add no brainer like
0:39:48 Wave one of what people do on these apps. It’s like for for the iphone
0:39:52 Remember it was like the beer app the flashlight app the calculator app
0:39:57 Like that was the menus on the internet and now with ai there’s some things like this that are like the menus on the internet version
0:39:59 Of what you can do with with ai
0:40:03 All right, if you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you
0:40:06 You my friend are nosy
0:40:12 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about how much money people make how much money people spend
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0:40:48 Click the report section on the menu. Click the salary and compensation report
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0:41:01 So you’re AI tutoring person. It’s now warped into a studying group. Oh, yeah, bro. It’s growing. What is it?
0:41:07 I don’t want to tell you it’s like fight club. It’s like fight club with no fighting
0:41:09 Just green sharing on zoom
0:41:14 But is it like a group of you who meet and you just come like with the homework and questions?
0:41:16 it’s
0:41:21 Three of us who people I think are awesome that I wanted an excuse to hang out with so it’s me
0:41:25 It’s Matt Masio and it’s my buddy Luke and I’m like I wanted to hang out with these people more anyways
0:41:29 They’re also in AI. They’re investing. They may be, you know start companies in the space whatever
0:41:32 And it was like, hey, let’s just do this together that way
0:41:36 It’s a little study group where you cut, you know, you see something and then one person says something
0:41:39 And then the other person pushes back and is like, well, I don’t know
0:41:43 What about this and it everybody gets a little smarter for for doing it
0:41:46 What are your biggest takeaways now with AI then because I don’t know much about it
0:41:52 So sam altman recently said something he goes there’s two types of companies in AI
0:41:55 There’s the companies that
0:41:57 Can’t wait for us to release a new model
0:42:03 And there’s these companies that can’t sleep at night knowing we’re going to release a new model meaning he’s like we’re going to crush you
0:42:06 They’re not saying this but the way they’ve architected their business is
0:42:11 If we make gpt 5 better than gpt 4 and we improve a bunch of capabilities
0:42:16 The model gets smarter it gets better at doing all the things he’s doing which he’s like, by the way, that’s exactly what’s going to happen
0:42:19 duh like insane to bet against that he’s like
0:42:22 They risk being like, you know
0:42:27 You know blown up like, you know, they’re they become obsolete when that happens
0:42:32 I’m pretty sure he goes we’re going to steamroll them. Yeah, he goes. Well, they will those companies will get steamrolled
0:42:33 yeah
0:42:35 Which is not a good thing
0:42:43 That is amazing. So then the other companies he’s like the other companies are begging us can’t wait for the next model to come out
0:42:47 Because it’s just going to make their product better. So what’s an exit? So then the group we were talking through like, okay
0:42:51 What does that really mean? Who are the companies that fall into group a and fall into group b?
0:42:54 And there’s an interesting discussion around that but I’ll just give you like a simple example
0:42:56 Let’s say you’re some company that
0:43:02 You do transcription translation and whatever in, you know, four companies
0:43:05 that are com
0:43:07 But not rev.com. So rev.com says
0:43:12 Pay us rev.com is a good example of the steamroll type of company. So it’s basically it’s like got it pay us
0:43:15 We do transcription really good. We have human transcribers. They’re great
0:43:18 It’s like, well, guess what? It’s going to be better than the human transcribers gpt5
0:43:20 It’s going to be awesome and it’s going to be way cheaper than rev.com
0:43:25 It’s going to like drive your price to zero and be better. So that’s like rev.com is in trouble
0:43:30 um, then you have a company that’s like cool, we do transcription translation in the context of
0:43:35 This certain healthcare thing this workflow where doctors need to transcribe their notes on the go
0:43:39 And it needs to be really high fidelity and today that transcription is done by a human
0:43:43 But like whatever it’s like they have a full like enterprise workflow
0:43:47 And if the transcription capabilities get better, they’re like awesome a product got better
0:43:52 But the product was like open ai is never going to build the thing that integrates in with the
0:43:58 The doctors, you know, like, um, whatever, you know, healthcare record system that they use like
0:44:01 They embed themselves in a workflow
0:44:08 And that’s like 90 of the product and the 10 improvements to the the ai that the transcription the translation
0:44:09 But whatever it is
0:44:12 If those get better great our product got more effective
0:44:15 But it didn’t make our product obsolete because we have this 90 that we’ve built around it
0:44:21 that are that is really specific to a certain use case certain workflow and um
0:44:24 And so we’re we can’t wait for the next model to come out
0:44:29 Versus maybe other companies like rev.com or companies that are like we’re like open ai
0:44:34 But we’re better at like, you know, here’s an example of a company. I think is at risk
0:44:41 You know, um, these companies that do voice text to voice. So like, you know, 11 labs one play ht is another it’s like
0:44:47 Basically, they’re like we’re better than like we can do ai you type in a thing and we can create a human sounding ai
0:44:50 And we’re going to fine-tune our model to do that
0:44:54 But then open ai releases like every every month they just release a new thing
0:44:57 It’s like, yeah, we have text to voice now. Check it out. Here’s the demo and the demo is awesome
0:45:02 It’s like it’s only going to get better and then it’s going to become a standard api for anybody to use to use text to voice
0:45:07 It’s like I think those companies that are trying to be like we have our own proprietary model
0:45:11 Our own fine-tuned use case they’re going to really struggle because
0:45:14 They can’t compete with the behemoth
0:45:16 How are you taking advantage of this then? Uh
0:45:20 From a business point of view or are you I would say
0:45:23 On the investing side, I’m much more
0:45:30 Measure twice cut once right now meaning i’m not spraying and preying a bunch of checks into a bunch of random ai companies
0:45:32 I think it’s really hard to figure out right now
0:45:39 Which companies actually have legs also they’re all really overpriced. So I have this combination of really high price really low traction
0:45:43 um product is really good in a demo but not really good in production and
0:45:47 I don’t know if they’re going to become obsolete due to open ai. So there’s a bunch of problems there
0:45:49 It’s like actually a better bet was just like in the stock market
0:45:56 Just buy companies that have like a massive advantage when it comes to ai’s go buy nvidia buy facebook buy buy a bunch of stocks that are
0:45:59 Going to benefit from ai whether they’re not just like
0:46:04 A one random startup that i’m hoping is the one out of a thousand startup that becomes enormous
0:46:08 well, that’s what uh morgan stanley put up this report and they said um they go uh
0:46:11 Uh ai is going to be a big deal
0:46:17 Unfortunately, we well not unfortunately, but we think that it’s going to impact big companies who are already established
0:46:21 It’s just going to make them significant. You’re going to get there’s going to be more value in making those companies better than
0:46:25 There is starting new companies exactly and we actually and they actually said marketing
0:46:27 and the reason I thought it was cool is because uh
0:46:33 I own stock in a in a marketing technology company and they’re like we think that marketing technology and that type of stuff sales force
0:46:35 How’s about whatever that’s going to be the biggest?
0:46:38 Sector that’s going to use this shit to to grow well
0:46:41 I think it’s good. I think it’s a safer bet and it’s a more obvious bet
0:46:46 I don’t I don’t think that investing in startups right now is a bad idea. I just meant no
0:46:49 Uh, it’s really hard right now and it’s unclear to me
0:46:53 And I haven’t put in the time to get a lot of clarity on which which I don’t have a bunch of startups
0:46:57 I’m like these are going to be winners in this space. I just haven’t been able to get that level of clarity yet
0:47:03 So it’s like measure twice got once meaning first. I’m like, let me just learn this in more depth. Let me use all these tools
0:47:07 Which is what we do. So like in these sessions, we will just be like cool
0:47:11 Here’s a tool that could do x and then I he’s like you drive and I go and I start
0:47:15 Trying to build a thing that’s going to be useful in one of my businesses
0:47:17 Are you paying this person? Yeah, still
0:47:19 Dude, this is so smart
0:47:21 because we did it as a group
0:47:26 Like the sessions are more fun and it’s like a pretty valuable network of people to be really tight with right?
0:47:28 Like which is ultimately what you want
0:47:33 You want the thing to be so mutually beneficial that the financial outcomes of the thing are so secondary
0:47:37 Like the primary should be the session is fun and these people are awesome
0:47:40 And I get to hang with these people these people I get to basically, you know
0:47:44 Iron sharpens iron with these people right now. That’s like what I wanted this to get to
0:47:48 So I feel really good about that. Dude, that’s so smart more people should do this
0:47:50 I mean, I used to do this with book clubs
0:47:53 But if I had a very specific interest like you have right now
0:47:58 And even if it’s just a temporary thing that lasts six or 12 months, that’s the way to go. It’s so smart
0:48:02 That’s such a smart thing for you to do. Well, the smartest people I think always did the second crypto
0:48:04 I know people were doing this early on
0:48:05 you know
0:48:09 I remember hearing these like sessions about south by southwest where
0:48:12 I forgot whose room it was but it was like everybody used to go up to
0:48:14 Garrett camp’s room
0:48:18 And at south by southwest there’s like 15 people that were all kind of like loose friends like this
0:48:20 But like a lot of mutual respect
0:48:24 And it wasn’t like a paid party or some like event with sponsors. It was like no dude like
0:48:27 We’re here to basically talk about everybody
0:48:30 He should have opinions on where they think the puck is going and then they would debate
0:48:33 And that’s how Matt Masio actually got in with Chris soccer
0:48:36 So I was like, who is this motherfucker that has like really interesting things to say
0:48:39 It’s like he’s the agent at cAA in Hollywood
0:48:42 Like this guy should be in the tech world and he recruited him from there
0:48:46 And this is where like, you know, they were there’s a lot of the guys who invested in uber early on
0:48:49 like Garrett and
0:48:53 Travis were in the room and they were you know talking about uber at the time and gary v was in the room
0:48:56 And there’s all like this is legendary story. I have no idea what actually happened
0:49:00 But I remember hearing these stories and being like I need to get into rooms like that
0:49:04 What is a room like that? How do I make a room like that if I either need to get in or I need to make a room like that
0:49:09 What was the story of the room? Well, I just told told you. Yeah, Ari
0:49:12 Was that the second time this episode Sean copped an attitude with me?
0:49:16 Well, I’m like, I told you the story. You’re like, well, so what happened? I’m like, well, that’s this
0:49:18 I told you everything I know bro. I don’t know anything else
0:49:23 Does zoom have like a bitch slap animation that I could use I know they got a thumbs up
0:49:26 Yeah, you know, we could do the thumbs up and it like starts bubbling hard behind you
0:49:28 Did they got a middle finger one of those?
0:49:35 Does that work? That’s the second time. I apologize. I’m a little sassy today
0:49:39 I could be caddy on Wednesdays. I know I’m my bad
0:49:45 Um, I apologize. Is that the pod? Do we wrap up there? I guess, uh, I think I need to go work on myself
0:49:50 I think I’ll meditate
0:49:52 All right, that’s the pod
0:49:56 Feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to
0:50:02 I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let’s travel never looking back
0:50:04 (upbeat music)
Episode 592: Sam Parr ( https://twitter.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) break down the economics of luxury hobby magazines, make a prediction about Ai cameras, and explain how to find the next tech wave.
Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe – http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5
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Show Notes:
(0:00) Craig Fuller’s field of dreams
(5:12) $50M side hustle
(9:16) We call to find out EXACTLY how he did it
(19:02) The New York Times is a gaming company
(23:27) Idea: Third party LinkedIn games developer
(27:00) How rich people spend money
(29:00) The myth of the second home
(30:57) Ai cameras
(36:31) Prediction: A camera on every field, every court
(38:31) How to find the next wave: What’s the next menus on the internet?
(40:41) How to avoid product obsolescence
(44:09) “Measure twice. Cut once”
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Links:
• FreightWaves – https://www.freightwaves.com/
• FLYING Magazine – https://www.flyingmag.com/
• Firecrown – https://firecrown.com/
• Veo – https://launch.veo.co/
• Grab HubSpot’s free AI-Powered Customer Platform and watch your business grow – https://clickhubspot.com/fmf
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano