0:00:00 – And by the way, you know how I know
0:00:02 this is a great episode?
0:00:04 ‘Cause I feel like I need to get off this
0:00:05 and go do these ideas right now.
0:00:06 Like I don’t even want to finish this episode.
0:00:08 I want to go do one of these things right now.
0:00:10 That’s how I know this is a banger.
0:00:12 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:15 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:17 ♪ I put my all in it like the days of ♪
0:00:19 ♪ On the road let’s travel never looking back ♪
0:00:21 – Have you guys ever heard this idea
0:00:26 that the Australian accent is just drunk English accent?
0:00:29 Because like Australia was populated
0:00:32 by all like the criminals or the drunkards from England
0:00:35 and that the accent in Australia
0:00:37 is just a drunk London guy.
0:00:39 – Still far off.
0:00:41 There’s a great Paul Graham blog post
0:00:43 that I don’t know if you guys have read called Cities.
0:00:45 I think it’s called Cities and Ambition.
0:00:46 And he has this concept in it.
0:00:49 He says that every city whispers something to you.
0:00:51 Every city is whispering something.
0:00:55 So he’s like, you know, maybe it’s in LA, right?
0:00:57 The whisper that’s there for you
0:00:59 is, you know, become somebody, right?
0:01:00 Become like sort of known,
0:01:03 become a power player, a famous person basically.
0:01:04 You’re not famous enough.
0:01:06 And in Silicon Valley, he says,
0:01:08 the whisper is you’re not ambitious enough
0:01:10 because the status symbol here
0:01:13 is not who’s the most beautiful or the most famous
0:01:15 or even the most rich, to be honest.
0:01:15 The status symbol is like,
0:01:18 who’s doing the big mission here, right?
0:01:21 Who’s like the AI guys now, they’re the highest status.
0:01:24 Even if you have a really amazing,
0:01:25 if you’re the CEO of Workday
0:01:28 and you’re like, dude, I got a $80 billion company over here,
0:01:30 you’re low status compared to the, you know,
0:01:32 the guy who’s trying to make, you know,
0:01:34 the next version of an LLM.
0:01:36 And so he says, New York whisper something.
0:01:38 He basically is like, you should think about
0:01:39 which cities you want to live in
0:01:40 because that’s what’s going to get whispered
0:01:42 to you all the time.
0:01:44 I don’t know what it would be for Austin, I’m curious.
0:01:45 You guys, Sam, you’ve lived there.
0:01:47 What’s the Austin whisper?
0:01:48 – The Austin whisper is,
0:01:53 how do you live a fit life on your own terms,
0:01:55 which means like being very balanced.
0:01:58 So Austin is very much a balance.
0:02:01 So how do you work six hours a week, go for walks,
0:02:04 be with your family, wake up early, be healthy.
0:02:06 Austin is a place of balance, I think.
0:02:08 – George, what’s the Dubai whisper right now?
0:02:11 – Is it like a, like, you’re poor?
0:02:13 (laughing)
0:02:17 – There’s definitely a little bit of that.
0:02:20 Like I never thought I would have ended up being in Dubai
0:02:22 for a little bit of time,
0:02:25 but it was during COVID and the second lockdown came along.
0:02:27 And I wanted to go to the mountains by myself
0:02:30 and Chris, my friend from Modern Wisdom, said come to Dubai.
0:02:33 And I was like, I grew up reading like Richard Dawkins,
0:02:34 Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens.
0:02:36 I’m scared of going to like an Islamic country.
0:02:40 And Chris gave me the ultimate reply of don’t be a virgin, come.
0:02:43 And I went for two weeks, stayed for three years,
0:02:48 but it’s a very unique, weird, bizarre, fascinating place.
0:02:49 – That’s great.
0:02:50 All right, let’s jump in.
0:02:53 So you have, you knew that we love business ideas
0:02:54 and I’ll give you two things.
0:02:56 You wrote an intro for yourself, I’m gonna read it,
0:02:57 but I think you didn’t do yourself justice.
0:03:00 So you said, you know, I’m excited to come on.
0:03:02 You said, I don’t have crazy high stakes,
0:03:04 huge exits of my business.
0:03:06 I’m more of a mum’s basement writing ideas online,
0:03:09 coming up with weird ideas and essays kind of guy.
0:03:12 So, you know, I have some ideas, some business ideas
0:03:14 and opportunities, but I have a lot of philosophies
0:03:16 and frameworks.
0:03:17 I think that’s great.
0:03:18 You also didn’t do yourself full justice.
0:03:20 You have a great marketing agency.
0:03:22 So you have a successful business there.
0:03:25 Also, you’re not just a kid in the basement writing essays.
0:03:26 You’re a kid in the basement writing essays.
0:03:29 They get read by everybody from, you know,
0:03:31 Joe Schmoe to Elon Musk.
0:03:33 Elon’s been retweeting you a lot lately.
0:03:35 And I think that’s a good sign, bro.
0:03:36 You’ve made it.
0:03:37 – I appreciate that.
0:03:39 You’re killing the British syndrome out of me.
0:03:40 So I do appreciate that.
0:03:42 – What happens when Elon retweets you, by the way?
0:03:44 Do you get like a lot of traffic?
0:03:46 – Yeah, I get quite a lot of traffic.
0:03:47 I mean, the one thing I did notice of,
0:03:50 I’ve reached like hundreds of millions of people on Twitter
0:03:52 and I’ve never had one DM from a girl.
0:03:55 And then Chris Williamson started sharing my videos
0:03:57 on Instagram and it changed a little bit.
0:04:00 Like it’s all men tech, things on Twitter, like that.
0:04:02 But yeah, you do get quite a lot of traffic.
0:04:05 The notifications bell does start to break a little bit.
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0:04:44 All right, so let’s start with business ideas.
0:04:46 What have you got for us?
0:04:47 What are the opportunities, ideas,
0:04:49 little half baked startups
0:04:51 that you’re in your mind right now?
0:04:53 – Yeah, so as Sean kind of mentioned,
0:04:55 I run the ad professor account.
0:04:57 So people won’t know that on Twitter as well.
0:04:59 We make some of the best ads online.
0:05:02 I’m obsessed with, from an advertising angle.
0:05:05 And all my business ideas, think of the advert first.
0:05:07 And then I kind of work from that.
0:05:10 So the first business idea that I think would be pretty cool
0:05:13 that I’ve always wanted to do, but I’ve never got round to
0:05:15 is essentially, I know you guys love person
0:05:18 outing tests, like the personality test business model
0:05:22 that exists, it’s quite an easy find out about yourself.
0:05:24 Everybody’s fascinated by it,
0:05:26 even if a lot of it is pseudoscience.
0:05:30 And I’ll never forget the day I’m in the car with my mom.
0:05:31 Hope she don’t mind me telling the story.
0:05:33 I’m in the car with my mom, my dad’s there,
0:05:35 my brothers are there, my mom’s heavily dyslexic.
0:05:37 So she doesn’t want to do the personality tests,
0:05:38 but she wants me to read it for her.
0:05:40 And then she’s answering.
0:05:42 So I’m reading out the question of,
0:05:45 I don’t like to get into arguments and she’ll be like,
0:05:47 oh, I heavily disagree.
0:05:49 And then me and my dad are like, no, heavily agree.
0:05:52 So quickly realized that personality tests are often
0:05:55 answers that you want to be true about yourself
0:05:57 versus the actual reality.
0:06:00 And this kind of idea of a self-awareness test
0:06:02 where the personality test, you potentially fill out,
0:06:05 but everybody in your close circle, so in your wife,
0:06:09 your parents, your business partner fills out
0:06:10 and you have a note there.
0:06:12 Reason why I like this idea is it’s a little bit
0:06:13 of a lot of collusion.
0:06:15 You’ve got one stacking on personality tests
0:06:18 that have always worked, but two, the social graph effect,
0:06:20 and then three, the advert angle of being able
0:06:23 to run adverts directly on,
0:06:24 find out what your wife thinks about you.
0:06:26 The question I would have is,
0:06:29 is it a bit of a business, do you like it?
0:06:30 – It is a great idea.
0:06:32 I’ve been talking about tests like this.
0:06:37 I have like a notebook of like, what’s the new IQ test?
0:06:39 The five languages test.
0:06:40 And I’ve been really fascinated,
0:06:44 could you run a Facebook ad funnel to one of these businesses?
0:06:45 ‘Cause I think most of the people who do this,
0:06:46 they do it like a book funnel,
0:06:49 which is like the slowest old way of doing things.
0:06:53 They write a great book about the love languages thing
0:06:54 and then in it, like Strengths Finders,
0:06:56 they write a book and then in it,
0:06:59 they give you like a code or whatever to go take the test
0:07:01 and you go pay for the test.
0:07:03 But I love this for the reason you just described
0:07:05 the viral factor.
0:07:07 Can I tell you a story of why I think this might work?
0:07:10 So when I first moved to Silicon Valley,
0:07:11 I worked for this guy, Michael Birch,
0:07:14 and he had built a social network called Bebo,
0:07:16 that he sold for $850 million.
0:07:17 But before he built Bebo,
0:07:20 he built a social network called Ringo,
0:07:21 that was the same exact thing as Bebo,
0:07:24 but just like 12 months earlier,
0:07:27 that he sold for like $2 or $3 million.
0:07:30 And what he did was he built Ringo, it started to grow.
0:07:32 He didn’t know, he couldn’t keep up with the server costs.
0:07:34 He didn’t know how, like at the time, there was no Facebook.
0:07:36 Like he didn’t know how social networks
0:07:37 were ever gonna make money.
0:07:39 So he was at a meetup and a guy offered him
0:07:43 like four million bucks for it and he’s like, done.
0:07:44 Then he worked for that guy
0:07:46 and they had a quiz company called Tickle.
0:07:48 And Tickle was basically like,
0:07:52 it started out more on the Myers-Briggs like intellectual tests.
0:07:53 – Then it just became everything.
0:07:55 – Then it became what breed of dog are you?
0:07:57 And turns out what breed of dog are you?
0:07:58 Was way more viral than like,
0:08:01 what is your life passion supposed to be, right?
0:08:03 There’s like harder, more introspective tests.
0:08:05 People wanted the, what dog are you?
0:08:06 And so what dog are you went really viral?
0:08:08 They sold Tickle for $100 million to Monster.
0:08:13 So he was like, holy shit, quizzes are this amazing viral thing.
0:08:17 ‘Cause people want, like you said,
0:08:19 their favorite subject is themselves.
0:08:22 Then they’re curious to know the answer, where do I land?
0:08:25 And then when they’re done, they post or they share
0:08:27 where they landed and other people say, ooh,
0:08:28 that’s what you are, I wonder what I am.
0:08:29 And they go take it as well.
0:08:32 So the only difference he made between Ringo,
0:08:34 the thing that was growing kind of fast
0:08:38 and sold for four million and Bebo, which grew really fast,
0:08:41 a million users in nine days, the first nine days,
0:08:44 the only change he made was that when he launched Bebo,
0:08:47 it was a copy paste of Ringo, but with one difference.
0:08:48 Instead of filling out a profile,
0:08:50 you just started off with a personality quiz,
0:08:53 which was the best, I think it was called the best friend test.
0:08:55 It was how well do you know me?
0:08:56 So you would answer questions about yourself
0:08:58 and then other people would try to,
0:08:59 and you would say, you would send it to your friends
0:09:01 and be like, see how well you know me.
0:09:03 And then it would show you who knows you the best
0:09:04 and you would kind of compete.
0:09:06 And when after they would fill yours out,
0:09:07 like I’m guessing how well I know you,
0:09:10 then I would fill my own out and I would send it back to you.
0:09:13 And so it went super viral off this one mechanism.
0:09:15 And so the thing you described,
0:09:16 I think would work really well
0:09:18 because it is a how well do you know me,
0:09:20 but your version was how well do I know myself?
0:09:22 But I think the real question there actually is,
0:09:24 what do other people think about me?
0:09:27 Which is probably the biggest question that I have
0:09:29 is what do other people think about me?
0:09:32 And can I kind of anonymously find that information out?
0:09:37 – So Sean, do you remember like six episodes ago,
0:09:39 that you were talking about going to Victoria
0:09:43 and how someone said they did this like-
0:09:43 – Jack scheme.
0:09:47 – Yeah, they did this like executive coaching thing
0:09:49 where you do a quiz and it tells you about yourself.
0:09:51 So I loved that.
0:09:52 And turns out with Hampton,
0:09:55 we have access to thousands of executives.
0:09:58 And so we were thinking about, should we integrate this?
0:10:01 And so we’re currently testing it actually with like-
0:10:02 – That’s a smart idea.
0:10:05 – Three or four customers where what we’ve done
0:10:07 is we’ve created a quiz like you’ve described, George,
0:10:11 where it talks about like whatever you’re asking your mother,
0:10:14 like these questions of like what’s your opinion of yourself
0:10:15 for these questions.
0:10:20 And then you actually send it to 20 different co-workers,
0:10:22 wife, husband, whatever.
0:10:24 And then you get the results and we have put together
0:10:25 this presentation to help you improve.
0:10:27 And maybe it’s a product that would charge thousands
0:10:28 of dollars for.
0:10:30 – George, do you know about this?
0:10:31 Like the thing we’re talking about,
0:10:32 have you ever heard about this?
0:10:33 – No.
0:10:35 So this guy basically does this for executives
0:10:39 and it’s like a 360, like basically brutal honesty,
0:10:40 punch in the face.
0:10:42 So that’s the idea is like,
0:10:45 he charges, I think like 30 grand for this.
0:10:47 You pay $30,000 to take this test.
0:10:48 And what they do is they go interview.
0:10:49 It’s not just a quiz.
0:10:52 They go and actually like sit down, talk, interview your wife,
0:10:55 your business partner, your people who manage you,
0:10:57 people who you manage, all this stuff.
0:11:00 And they then come back to you with like,
0:11:01 here’s like the truth.
0:11:02 Here’s where you’re amazing.
0:11:05 Here’s maybe where you rub people the wrong way.
0:11:07 And here’s, you know, something that’s, yeah,
0:11:09 whatever they give you that, that feedback.
0:11:10 I don’t know how great it is,
0:11:13 but the two people I know who have done it were both like,
0:11:15 yeah, this was massive for me.
0:11:16 Now they were both also in that phase
0:11:18 where they sold their company for hundreds of millions
0:11:20 of dollars and needed a little bit of direction
0:11:22 and purpose and wanting to indulge.
0:11:23 It’s a luxury item.
0:11:26 – They are a thirsty person asking for water.
0:11:27 – Yeah, exactly.
0:11:29 But hey, Hampton is a group of thirsty people
0:11:30 asking for water.
0:11:32 So Sam, my prediction is,
0:11:33 I think you will either double
0:11:36 or triple the lifetime value of your customers
0:11:37 if you integrate this thing.
0:11:39 I think that is a genius idea, Sam.
0:11:41 – So George, you got any more tips for me?
0:11:44 (laughing)
0:11:45 – So people, what I like about this
0:11:48 is it rides a few societal means as well.
0:11:50 You’ve seen the gurus on Instagram chat
0:11:52 about self-awareness.
0:11:54 But what does that actually mean?
0:11:56 And show me where that grows calling.
0:11:58 And what does self-awareness actually mean?
0:12:01 Whereas this, it’s a quite a bit of a practical way
0:12:03 of seizing self-awareness.
0:12:07 And I remember there’s a line from Daniel Kahneman
0:12:08 who wrote “Thinking Fast and Slow.”
0:12:12 So he’s the ultimate cognitive behavioral researcher,
0:12:13 a Nobel Prize winner.
0:12:15 Every cognitive bias you can think of
0:12:17 came largely downstream of Daniel Kahneman.
0:12:19 He’s the Godfabra.
0:12:21 And his overwhelming lesson was that
0:12:23 essentially all that research taught him nothing.
0:12:25 And the only thing it taught him was
0:12:27 it’s much easier to see mistakes in other people
0:12:28 than to see it in yourself.
0:12:30 And this is that kind of idea, right?
0:12:33 That other people, we don’t notice we have bad breath,
0:12:36 but other people can realize within seconds.
0:12:38 We don’t realize we’re dating the wrong partner
0:12:40 till 20 years in horrific divorce,
0:12:42 but your best friend sees it in two minutes.
0:12:45 So there is something about when your ego’s removed from it
0:12:47 and other people see things a lot clearer than you can.
0:12:50 – Wasn’t his other takeaway was that
0:12:51 he was like, at the end of his life, he was like,
0:12:54 “Oh, I think I was wrong.”
0:12:57 I think a bunch of this research,
0:12:58 he like did this book and it was amazing.
0:13:02 He goes, “I think we got a lot wrong about that.”
0:13:03 – Is that true?
0:13:04 Is that what happened?
0:13:05 – Is that what happened, George?
0:13:07 It was something like that where he like,
0:13:09 it’s like, you know, we said these like five theories
0:13:12 and like these three, I think actually are wrong.
0:13:14 – There’s a few, he definitely got wrong,
0:13:16 but there’s a few funny ones of where
0:13:18 he talks about planning fallacy.
0:13:20 And even knowing planning fallacy
0:13:22 doesn’t prevent planning fallacy.
0:13:23 So even the guys that came up with the idea
0:13:26 of planning fallacy, when they were putting in research
0:13:30 of how do we teach planning fallacy to kids at schools
0:13:33 or to any curriculum, they even, they underestimated
0:13:35 how long it would take for the curriculum
0:13:36 of planning fallacy itself.
0:13:39 So just because you know the cognitive biases
0:13:40 doesn’t mean you can escape them.
0:13:41 – What is that?
0:13:42 What’s the planning fallacy?
0:13:44 – The planning fallacy is this idea
0:13:48 that if you say, I’m gonna achieve X within a month,
0:13:50 it will probably take two months.
0:13:52 And no matter how long, and even being aware
0:13:54 of the planning fallacy doesn’t prevent it
0:13:55 from not happening.
0:13:57 So you constantly, it takes three times as long
0:13:59 as you think it will and costs twice as much.
0:14:02 Which is interesting when you read Elon’s biography,
0:14:03 I wonder if that’s one of the reasons
0:14:06 why he just always sets absolutely absurd deadlines.
0:14:08 Because he knows that even with that fact
0:14:09 and then it’s still going to be later than you think.
0:14:11 – Well, that’s what I was gonna ask you.
0:14:13 So is the way to fix that, that you make
0:14:15 stupidly ambitious goals, and then like if it’s
0:14:17 where you shoot for the stars, and if you miss,
0:14:19 you land on the moon type of vibe?
0:14:20 – That’s what he does.
0:14:22 I think there’s definitely something to that,
0:14:24 but I wonder if you can actually bullshit yourself
0:14:26 to that level, I don’t know.
0:14:28 – Yeah, the other, I think the other way to do it
0:14:29 is you burn the boat, so you make it where
0:14:30 it has to get done.
0:14:32 There is no way for it to spill over.
0:14:34 Like it’s not physically possible,
0:14:36 because that’s when the sort of the remarkable
0:14:37 things happen, right?
0:14:40 Like, you know, it’s when he runs out of money
0:14:42 and the last rocket has to take off.
0:14:44 It can’t explode like the previous three.
0:14:46 That’s the rocket that actually went
0:14:47 because he’s actually out of money at that point.
0:14:50 There is no other way.
0:14:52 And I think there’s a lot of remarkable stories
0:14:54 of people when they’re actually backed
0:14:55 into a corner and there’s no out.
0:14:58 That’s when they’re able to perform the miraculous.
0:14:59 They’re able to do what seemingly
0:15:01 couldn’t have been done before.
0:15:02 You said something interesting
0:15:03 I want to go back to real quick.
0:15:05 You said, when I think about businesses,
0:15:08 I start with the advert, which is the ad,
0:15:10 and you work backwards to the business.
0:15:13 So, explain that more, ’cause I think it’s really smart.
0:15:14 What do you mean by that?
0:15:17 Or maybe what’s an example of that?
0:15:21 – I’ve helped so many founders with their advertising.
0:15:25 And the amount of them will spend years on their idea
0:15:28 and then realize there’s no distribution for this thing.
0:15:30 It just isn’t distributed native.
0:15:34 So, I always think from the compression algorithm.
0:15:36 I know we spoke about this, Sean,
0:15:41 of like a sticky idea, which is essentially all adverts,
0:15:43 like good adverts themselves are a sticky idea,
0:15:46 which is essentially the following algorithm
0:15:50 of total amounts of emotion times number of people
0:15:52 that can understand it.
0:15:55 And that is what makes ultimately a good advert.
0:15:57 And if I can’t compress it down,
0:15:59 ’cause people talk about an elevator pitch,
0:16:00 it’s almost like the ad pitch, right?
0:16:02 Can you compress this thing down
0:16:05 to a person who doesn’t give a fuck about you,
0:16:06 scrolling in their feed?
0:16:09 And then immediately going,
0:16:11 “I’m gonna give money towards this.”
0:16:12 That two-second snapshot.
0:16:14 And I think if you can’t compress that down,
0:16:17 it needs more work.
0:16:22 – You have an idea on here.
0:16:24 And the sentence that you’re gonna reply with
0:16:25 when I ask what your second idea is,
0:16:27 it’s just the most ridiculous sentence
0:16:28 that will ever be said on this podcast.
0:16:30 So, what’s that one?
0:16:31 – Yeah. – Number two.
0:16:33 – Number two.
0:16:34 Sean already knows me quite well,
0:16:36 so he knows I’m an absolute weirdo, Sam,
0:16:40 but obviously first impressions down ruining it for you.
0:16:41 – I love weirdos.
0:16:42 This is great. – Cool.
0:16:43 – This is exactly what I’m about.
0:16:47 – So, sex is going to potentially die
0:16:49 as a reproductive mechanism.
0:16:52 So, if we just go through the history of sex,
0:16:56 so if you could imagine a chart of sex to baby ratio
0:16:58 from like the 1500s.
0:16:59 So, you have the first official condom
0:17:01 that came in in 1855.
0:17:03 There’s talk that it was actually in the 1500s,
0:17:04 people using animal parts,
0:17:06 but I’ve never heard that. – Condom as we know it.
0:17:07 The condom as we know it now.
0:17:08 – Like a sheep intestine.
0:17:09 – Yeah.
0:17:11 – Now, that’s the dropship in store right there, right?
0:17:13 (laughing)
0:17:16 And then the morning after pill came in the 1920s,
0:17:18 and then full effecting like the 1970s.
0:17:21 So, if you can imagine number of times having sex to baby,
0:17:24 it’s going like this with time, it’s completely plummeting.
0:17:27 What I think is looking more and more likely with,
0:17:30 and another, we talk about advert first approach,
0:17:31 I think you spoke about this before, Sean,
0:17:34 when you look at different technologies coming in,
0:17:36 so you’ve obviously got IVF,
0:17:39 you’ve got biobanks with lots of genetic data,
0:17:42 you’ve got phenotype tests, genotype tests.
0:17:44 I think you’re already seeing this
0:17:46 with my friend, Jonathan,
0:17:48 has a company that they’re going to be watching
0:17:49 probably about next year,
0:17:51 that essentially, particularly for wealthy people,
0:17:53 then I think it will trickle down society
0:17:55 where you have 10 embryos,
0:17:58 and they can basically map now, okay?
0:18:00 If you want to avoid diabetes,
0:18:03 Crohn’s disease, cancer, et cetera,
0:18:06 we recommend this embryo selection,
0:18:08 and then obviously it’s going to probably get weirder
0:18:11 with time, whether that’s height, eye color, IQ,
0:18:12 things like that.
0:18:15 So we’re really on the precipice of this,
0:18:17 and all you’re going to need is a few people
0:18:20 with being able to crunch the data,
0:18:23 and it’s going to be a wild couple of years.
0:18:24 – So that’s actually pretty convincing,
0:18:26 because Sam’s right, when I read this,
0:18:28 he said we’re one of the last generations
0:18:29 to be created via sex.
0:18:31 I was like, I don’t know what the hell
0:18:33 he’s talking about, test two babies,
0:18:35 and then, but when you just made that case,
0:18:39 I got to admit, it went from George’s nuts to,
0:18:41 oh, he’s right, which is basically that like,
0:18:45 we already have the tech now to basically have a baby,
0:18:48 to create a baby without having sex.
0:18:49 Cool, IVF does that all the time.
0:18:51 And then when you say, well, what’s the benefit?
0:18:53 The benefit is selection, right?
0:18:57 So first it’s de-selection of horrible diseases.
0:18:59 Who can argue against that?
0:19:01 Then you have pro-selection, which is,
0:19:04 do you want the blue-eyed, smarter, taller?
0:19:05 Like, what do you want, right?
0:19:06 The higher likelihood chance, right?
0:19:08 And let’s say that science is making
0:19:10 that more and more possible over time.
0:19:12 Seems like that’s where the puck is going.
0:19:14 At that point, are you going to be the parent
0:19:16 who’s like, nah, I’m crap shooting it.
0:19:18 I’m just rolling the dice.
0:19:20 I’m just going to go do the animal way.
0:19:22 We’re going to in and out this burger animal style.
0:19:23 We’re just going to go do it,
0:19:24 and then whatever happens happens.
0:19:28 Whereas all your friends and neighbors are the ones,
0:19:30 you know, hand-picking best babies out of test tubes
0:19:33 to say, we want the embryo that’s going to be
0:19:36 the healthiest, the most sort of setup to thrive.
0:19:39 It seems like you’re at a disadvantage
0:19:41 if you’re going to go choose the old-school way, right?
0:19:45 It’s driving stick when the world moves to automatic.
0:19:47 – When I read the sentence, George, I was like,
0:19:50 when George is going to love the Earth,
0:19:51 when it comes back down to reality,
0:19:53 like once he leaves the Mars,
0:19:55 because you’re going to love Earth, it’s great.
0:19:56 – We have water in here.
0:20:00 – Yeah, but then I realized, hey, guess what?
0:20:03 I had my child via IVF, so–
0:20:06 – I wasn’t going to say it, but Sam, did this.
0:20:08 – Exactly what you are describing.
0:20:10 – I did it, my friend.
0:20:14 Yeah, and listen, we did it because there’s a gene
0:20:18 that runs in our blood that we didn’t want to pass on,
0:20:20 and we did it.
0:20:22 Mission accomplished, we eliminated that gene.
0:20:23 We got rid of the target.
0:20:24 – The two sexy gene, dude?
0:20:25 – Yeah.
0:20:26 – You got rid of that?
0:20:27 Damn.
0:20:28 (laughing)
0:20:31 Being beautiful is causing too many problems for you.
0:20:35 – Yeah, we wanted our kids to be 5’8″, and it worked.
0:20:39 And so, yeah, I did the exact thing you’re talking about.
0:20:41 – I’m going to get rid of the British self-doubt.
0:20:43 I think, I guess there’s two types of people that hear this.
0:20:47 There’s one type that goes, this is really weird.
0:20:48 Why would anybody ever do this?
0:20:51 And the second type goes, oh my God,
0:20:53 I’ve been so worried about this family hereditary condition
0:20:55 for so, so long, of course.
0:20:56 So the first people, if you actually hear that,
0:20:58 I think that you’re probably quite lucky
0:20:59 that you don’t have it.
0:21:01 But anybody who has, I’ve got a few different
0:21:03 family chronic conditions.
0:21:04 And as soon as I heard this, I was like,
0:21:07 oh, if I could not see my child go through pain
0:21:09 that I’ve seen other family members go through,
0:21:12 whatever money this takes, goes back to Sean’s point,
0:21:14 work backwards from the Facebook ad.
0:21:17 Like, are you concerned about ABC, diabetes,
0:21:21 Crohn’s disease, insert, condition, funnel right there?
0:21:23 And immediately, you can see how you can have very wealthy
0:21:25 people paying a lot of money for that.
0:21:26 And with time, the unit of economics
0:21:28 will go down further and further.
0:21:30 – And it also makes sense because people are waiting.
0:21:33 Like, I’ve got so many friends who are in their 30s,
0:21:36 late 30s, and they’re wanting to have their first kid
0:21:38 because they’re yuppies and they focused on career
0:21:39 for a long time.
0:21:40 And then you get in your late 30s and you’re like,
0:21:42 shit, my parts aren’t working as they’re supposed to.
0:21:46 Like, I could use a little help to make this happen.
0:21:49 It’s so, so much more common than I ever thought.
0:21:50 – So, funny story.
0:21:52 So we were doing the podcast with somebody
0:21:56 who’s super, super wealthy, like a billionaire.
0:21:58 And before we did the pod, I wanted to meet the person.
0:22:00 So I went to their house, hung out with them,
0:22:01 got to know them a little bit.
0:22:02 Ben was with me.
0:22:04 And we, so we hung out, it was great.
0:22:06 We had a long conversation about a bunch of different
0:22:09 subjects, business, tech, life, blah, blah, blah.
0:22:11 And somewhere along the way, this person was like,
0:22:12 they mentioned, oh yeah, we, you know,
0:22:14 I have this many kids and I’m expecting it.
0:22:15 We’re expecting our next one.
0:22:17 We’re like, oh, congratulations.
0:22:18 Anyways, we leave.
0:22:19 And so when we’re leaving the house, we, you know,
0:22:22 say bye to everybody, you know, meet the family, say bye.
0:22:24 Afterwards, I’m like, Ben, so what’s the,
0:22:25 what were your big like notes?
0:22:26 What were your takeaways?
0:22:27 So what did we learn?
0:22:29 Wow, we just got this amazing access to this person.
0:22:32 None of this was recorded, but like we can learn from this.
0:22:34 What, what did we learn?
0:22:36 And I had like all these like business nuggets.
0:22:38 Like, oh, he mentioned this growth tactic.
0:22:41 Oh, he said, this was the reason why that thing succeeded.
0:22:42 And Ben goes, and look at his notes.
0:22:45 He goes, oh, I found the ultimate luxury item.
0:22:47 I was like, wait, like his car or what are you talking about?
0:22:50 And cause he had showed us his garage of cool cars.
0:22:54 And he’s like, no, surrogate.
0:22:56 I was like, what, because when we were walking out,
0:22:58 we saw his wife and he said like,
0:23:00 we’re expecting a baby next month,
0:23:02 but his wife is not nine months pregnant.
0:23:03 Fucking clubbo.
0:23:05 He’s like, that’s amazing.
0:23:07 He’s like, that is gotta be, he’s like, right?
0:23:09 That’s gotta be the ultimate luxury item.
0:23:11 It’s like, you don’t have to go through
0:23:15 like this like incredible body, you know, experience
0:23:17 to carry and then birth this baby.
0:23:18 That’s the ultimate luxury.
0:23:20 And so I started laughing at that.
0:23:22 And I thought, he’s kind of right.
0:23:23 I think there is.
0:23:25 I so disagree with you on that.
0:23:25 You disagree that what?
0:23:27 That it’s a luxury item?
0:23:29 Or that everybody wants it?
0:23:31 No, I think, I don’t want, I mean, look,
0:23:33 it’s a bunch of dudes talking about shit
0:23:34 that we ain’t gonna experience.
0:23:35 But like-
0:23:36 Dude, I could barely form a sentence.
0:23:37 I called it a body transformation.
0:23:38 Yeah.
0:23:40 (laughing)
0:23:42 I have three kids and I still don’t really understand
0:23:42 what’s going on.
0:23:45 Yeah, but no, I think that’s like a necessary thing
0:23:48 to go through in order to bond with your kid.
0:23:49 So I don’t-
0:23:50 That’s like saying, if you’re adopted,
0:23:51 you’re not gonna have a bond.
0:23:54 I think there’s a lot of new ones to that.
0:23:55 But George, what do you think?
0:23:59 I mean, I like these things because I don’t-
0:24:01 Tell me your opinion on what we should do
0:24:02 with women’s bodies.
0:24:04 (laughing)
0:24:05 Yeah, put me on the spot there.
0:24:07 Okay, I’ll give you like a different angle to this.
0:24:11 When I, so my wife wanted to deliver naturally,
0:24:13 so no medication, no nothing.
0:24:14 And I was like, are you nuts?
0:24:15 Why are you trying to do this the hard way?
0:24:16 She’s like, no, that’s what I want to do.
0:24:18 So we went to this birthing class,
0:24:21 giving birth the natural way.
0:24:24 By far the most like scarred into my brain,
0:24:27 you know, three hours I’ve ever been in.
0:24:30 And one of the things that I raised my hand at one point
0:24:31 ’cause it’s like 90 minutes in
0:24:32 and they’re just describing
0:24:34 what seems like voluntary torture.
0:24:37 And I’m like, hey, I just gotta ask like,
0:24:39 is this what most people do or?
0:24:42 And she’s like, no, I think she said 80 something percent,
0:24:45 85% of people choose an epidural.
0:24:47 And I was like, makes sense to me.
0:24:50 And epidural is also kind of a newer technology, right?
0:24:52 Like so for, you know, hundreds of years,
0:24:53 there was no such thing as an epidural,
0:24:56 but once you have the option to have a baby
0:24:59 that without, you know, being able to feel all of the pain
0:25:01 and the delivery and the labor,
0:25:03 obviously a lot of people opted into that.
0:25:05 And so there’s a whole bunch of like birth businesses
0:25:08 that are like, you know, the epidural is a birth business.
0:25:09 Like after we had our baby, they’re like,
0:25:10 do you want to freeze the cord blood
0:25:11 and like eat the placenta?
0:25:12 And I was like, I don’t know what you’re talking about,
0:25:15 but like no to the eating, freezing, what’s that for?
0:25:17 They’re like, well, if your kid ever has a thing
0:25:20 and they need a, you know, stem cells,
0:25:22 this is like super rich thing of stem cells on a cool.
0:25:23 So how does this work?
0:25:25 And they go, well, we’re going to take the cord
0:25:26 right when the baby’s born
0:25:29 and this might save your baby’s life someday,
0:25:30 but we’re just going to freeze it
0:25:32 and you’re going to pay us, you know, a couple of thousand
0:25:35 dollars now and then like $500 a year for now
0:25:37 until the end of the time.
0:25:38 And I was like, okay, yes,
0:25:40 but also how do I go buy one of these businesses?
0:25:41 Because this is the most incredible business
0:25:42 I’ve ever heard of.
0:25:45 You’re playing on parents fear at a time
0:25:47 when all of their loving dolphins are kicking up
0:25:48 and they’re like, okay, my purpose in life
0:25:50 is to protect this baby.
0:25:52 And then it’s a set it and forget it.
0:25:56 You know, the tens of thousand dollar subscription
0:25:57 for a thing that you’re just going to,
0:26:00 the ultimate insurance policy for your kid.
0:26:02 That has to be the best business I’ve ever heard of.
0:26:04 – That’s good.
0:26:05 – So if anyone has one of those out there,
0:26:07 I’m still actually looking to buy them.
0:26:08 I’ve never seen one for sale,
0:26:09 which I think is another signal
0:26:11 that it’s a very good business.
0:26:13 – 100%
0:26:16 – What’s the selling eyes is art thing?
0:26:18 – Yeah, so this is one thing I know
0:26:19 is whilst I was traveling around Europe.
0:26:22 Have you guys seen this store?
0:26:24 Let me pull it up.
0:26:25 So again-
0:26:26 – How old are you, George?
0:26:29 – I’m 30, just turned 30.
0:26:30 – Yeah, good energy.
0:26:31 I like energy.
0:26:33 – This is called an indicator of interest from Sam.
0:26:34 Sam starts to ask like-
0:26:35 – What’s up?
0:26:36 – Yeah, what’s up?
0:26:38 (laughing)
0:26:40 – Before we do that, let’s talk.
0:26:41 (laughing)
0:26:43 And then you pass the first 20 minutes of the pod
0:26:45 where it’s like, does this person have anything interesting
0:26:46 to say to now like, wait,
0:26:47 I need more of this guy in my life?
0:26:51 – The second, the second a British guy says whilst.
0:26:54 I’m like, you have my attention.
0:26:57 (laughing)
0:26:58 That’s my favorite word.
0:27:00 – Oh, okay.
0:27:01 So can you guys see this?
0:27:05 So for the people who are listening, your eye for art.
0:27:09 So in Amsterdam right now, I walk past this store.
0:27:13 I walk past the store and in the outside of the store,
0:27:15 there’s this thing where you kind of lean into a telescope
0:27:18 and reflecting back from the telescope is your eye.
0:27:19 And what’s fascinating,
0:27:21 I’ve got relatively nice eyes
0:27:23 that don’t get many compliments on them blue eyes.
0:27:24 – You can say that again, George.
0:27:25 – There you go.
0:27:26 (laughing)
0:27:28 You’re gonna get me blushing too much, Sam.
0:27:31 So you then have certain friends of yours
0:27:33 that are probably beautiful eyes
0:27:34 that get compliments all the time.
0:27:37 What’s actually fascinating, similar to the personality test,
0:27:39 when you zoom in to someone’s eye,
0:27:41 even if they’ve got the ugliest eyes in the world,
0:27:42 they’re beautiful.
0:27:44 So like my eye, I was like, wow, this is incredible.
0:27:48 You can even do it where couples partner their eyes.
0:27:49 And this is one of the fastest growing companies
0:27:50 out of Europe right now.
0:27:51 Like it’s growing really, really fast.
0:27:52 – Did you do this?
0:27:54 – I did do it, yeah.
0:27:57 Me and my girlfriend got the eyes scanned.
0:27:58 – Is it like on the wall behind you?
0:27:59 Where is it at?
0:28:01 – No, no, no, it’s not on the wall behind me.
0:28:02 I’m getting in my mom as a gift.
0:28:03 – Is it a print or digital?
0:28:04 What do they do?
0:28:05 What do they give you?
0:28:06 – You can print it,
0:28:08 and then you can do big blow-ups on the wall.
0:28:10 And they charge quite a lot for these things.
0:28:12 It’s like 200 to 300 quid.
0:28:13 – And the reason why you like this
0:28:15 is because you’re all about distribution
0:28:17 and you were walking down the street,
0:28:18 you saw the storefront,
0:28:19 you can look into this thing
0:28:21 and they show you a picture of it
0:28:22 and then you pay money to buy it.
0:28:26 – And the sticky idea is emotion times market, right?
0:28:28 So this is everybody’s the market
0:28:30 and the emotion I think is pretty strong in this.
0:28:32 – Yeah, it’s so personalized to them
0:28:34 and it looks beautiful.
0:28:35 – Dude, and you can buy like,
0:28:37 you can buy like a necklace or a ring
0:28:40 or something of your wife’s like eye print.
0:28:41 – Correct.
0:28:42 – This is awesome.
0:28:44 There’s probably no repeat purchase here,
0:28:46 but this is awesome as a one-time thing.
0:28:48 – And it’s so much more beautiful.
0:28:49 Even if you think you’ve got boring eyes,
0:28:50 when they zoom into that level,
0:28:51 it’s like seeing the universe.
0:28:52 You go, oh my God,
0:28:55 this is its own mini universe inside of me.
0:28:56 – I notice on their landing page,
0:28:58 they don’t have very many, you know,
0:28:59 boring black guys like mine.
0:29:02 So it’s all like beautiful greens
0:29:04 and blues and hazels.
0:29:05 – I think you’d be surprised.
0:29:07 I think you’d be surprised to quit Brennan Sharbley.
0:29:10 I think when you get under that, it’s crazy.
0:29:11 – Well, I’m definitely curious.
0:29:12 Like I definitely would want to do this.
0:29:13 If this was around me,
0:29:14 I would definitely want to do it.
0:29:18 I would certainly do it with my wife or my kids
0:29:20 ’cause it’s just like a thoughtful,
0:29:22 it’s a thoughtful, cool thing rather than like,
0:29:24 you know, same old, same old.
0:29:26 – So one of the innovations I’d like to see
0:29:30 is could you distribute this online?
0:29:33 So with smartphone cameras getting better and better,
0:29:36 is there a bit of ability and like AI scanning images?
0:29:37 Is there something there?
0:29:39 Or is it that you send a little device
0:29:40 that sits on the camera
0:29:41 that gives even more definition
0:29:43 so they could do it at home?
0:29:43 On all of a sudden,
0:29:45 you can imagine the advert first.
0:29:47 – Oh dude, if you could do this with an iPhone.
0:29:49 – How beautiful your eyes are.
0:29:50 Bull global market amigurum.
0:29:51 – All right, I’m gonna send this
0:29:52 to somebody to try to make this.
0:29:53 – Dude, this is awesome.
0:29:55 I just texted this to my wife.
0:29:56 I said, “Hey, let’s go.”
0:29:57 – To Europe.
0:29:58 – This is awesome.
0:30:00 No, they have a New York location.
0:30:02 If you click find gallery,
0:30:04 they have galleries all over the world.
0:30:05 – So George, you said this business is doing well.
0:30:06 What do you know about them?
0:30:08 – Doing really well.
0:30:10 From when I went into the store,
0:30:11 I was like, this ticks all my,
0:30:13 like the lot of pillows are effect right here,
0:30:14 it’s taking all my boxes.
0:30:17 And they said it’s like one of the fastest growing startups
0:30:18 in America.
0:30:20 They opened 150 locations in last year
0:30:21 or something like that.
0:30:23 So it’s growing like bananas.
0:30:23 – You guys wanna hear something?
0:30:26 So the other day, have you guys seen this?
0:30:28 It’s mostly women.
0:30:29 And it’s this thing on TikTok
0:30:30 where you go to this place
0:30:32 and they hold up colors to your face
0:30:35 and they tell you your color palette.
0:30:36 What’s that called?
0:30:40 Color scale or color grade or like,
0:30:43 so it’s like a noun where it’s like, hey, what’s your blank?
0:30:44 I forget what it’s called.
0:30:45 But anyway, my wife wanted to,
0:30:47 she saw an ad on TikTok for it
0:30:48 and she was like, this looks cool.
0:30:50 And I was like, I’ll go and you pay $100.
0:30:52 And they rented this tiny,
0:30:56 like it’s like a huge closet basically.
0:30:57 And you just sit there
0:30:58 and they just hold up a shade to you.
0:30:59 And they go, no, not that one.
0:31:02 – Is it for clothes or for makeup orage for everything?
0:31:03 – It’s for, and at the end,
0:31:05 you get this thing and it says,
0:31:07 you are this one, whatever,
0:31:09 like there’s like 18 categories,
0:31:13 which means this makeup, this clothing color,
0:31:16 this, all these colors, these are your colors.
0:31:19 And it basically, like for me, it was like,
0:31:21 it’s all women, it’s like Margot Robbie.
0:31:24 Like it just said, like some other white lady who that’s like,
0:31:26 she is also an example of this person.
0:31:29 And so you should wear clothing in the wintertime
0:31:31 that are these colors in the summertime, these colors,
0:31:33 whatever, but it’s a brick and mortar thing
0:31:35 that has been franchised out.
0:31:37 Similarly, I mentioned to this business
0:31:38 and I was like, how many of these a day do you have?
0:31:41 She’s like, I’m packed, I’ve got 14 a day
0:31:43 and each one has paid $100.
0:31:45 And I give HQ, like the headquarter company,
0:31:47 half of it or something like that.
0:31:48 – What was it called?
0:31:49 What’s the name of it?
0:31:50 – Yeah, and I think I went,
0:31:51 I think the place that I was called,
0:31:54 the place that I went, it was called the color lab
0:31:56 or something like that where it’s like,
0:31:58 sign me up and I taught,
0:32:00 and it had the same type of stick as this one, George,
0:32:02 where it was like a brick and mortar.
0:32:03 It was franchised.
0:32:04 – It’s like Dexa.
0:32:05 – Yeah, there was like a thing outside
0:32:07 and you’re like, yeah, of course,
0:32:09 I have to know like what color I am,
0:32:11 otherwise I’m gonna be ugly.
0:32:12 It totally got me.
0:32:15 Have you seen this guys on like TikTok or Instagram?
0:32:16 It’s mostly like a women thing.
0:32:17 – I’ve heard of the trend,
0:32:20 the color analysis type of thing.
0:32:22 And I don’t know, George,
0:32:23 you probably know the fancy word for these things,
0:32:27 but there’s like, so there’s the concept of consumerism, right?
0:32:28 Which is like, you know,
0:32:30 how Americans basically feel like
0:32:32 we need to buy certain things.
0:32:34 We need to like, I’ll give you the example.
0:32:38 A friend who lives in India came over to visit
0:32:40 and they go, yeah, India’s really changed.
0:32:40 One of the things is like,
0:32:41 India feels like America.
0:32:42 We’ve become consumerized.
0:32:44 He’s like, you know, before,
0:32:48 he’s like, Indians used to have one max, two pairs of shoes.
0:32:51 He’s like, but now it’s normal to feel like you need
0:32:52 like 10 pairs of shoes.
0:32:53 You need like all the different colors and all that.
0:32:55 It’s like, that’s not a real need,
0:32:57 but it starts to embed itself in culture.
0:32:59 It’s like, you almost convince yourself
0:33:02 that you need this much stuff.
0:33:04 You need to buy more things.
0:33:06 And I think that there’s like this personal consumerism,
0:33:08 which is around, you need to know X about yourself.
0:33:10 You need to know your quantified health.
0:33:11 You need to know your color grade.
0:33:13 You need to know your personality test.
0:33:15 And I think you can just keep selling into that.
0:33:17 There just seems to be an increasing amount
0:33:19 of consumerism around the self too,
0:33:22 not just around material things in your house.
0:33:25 – Yeah, I don’t know the specific thing for it,
0:33:27 but it’s this idea of the infinite consumer abyss.
0:33:30 You stare into it and it stares back into you.
0:33:31 – Dude, look at this guy.
0:33:32 The infinite consumer abyss.
0:33:34 Just off the dome.
0:33:36 That is why this guy is the guy.
0:33:39 – If we’re gonna have an infinite consumer abyss,
0:33:43 I’m getting red ’cause according to Lily’s color lab,
0:33:46 that’s, those are my colors.
0:33:47 – Wait, so you did this?
0:33:49 Or you made it sound like your wife did this?
0:33:50 – Well, she was like, let’s do this.
0:33:51 And I was like, I’m in.
0:33:52 Here’s $200.
0:33:54 – Let’s just plural.
0:33:56 (laughing)
0:33:57 – Like, let’s find out our colors.
0:33:59 – So what’s your color?
0:34:00 – I don’t know, dude.
0:34:01 I didn’t use any of it.
0:34:03 (laughing)
0:34:04 I don’t know.
0:34:07 I just went to experience what it was all about.
0:34:08 I don’t know.
0:34:10 – Sam Lilac Par, let’s go.
0:34:11 – I just wear blue and black anyway.
0:34:14 It was, that was, that’s my color.
0:34:15 – All right, let’s do the,
0:34:17 let’s do these other two ideas ’cause I’m curious now.
0:34:19 By the way, you know how I know this is a great episode?
0:34:21 ‘Cause I feel like I need to get off this
0:34:23 and go do these ideas right now.
0:34:24 Like, I don’t even wanna finish this episode.
0:34:26 I wanna go do one of these things right now.
0:34:27 That’s how I know this is a banger.
0:34:29 All right, so let’s do number four.
0:34:30 Mold cleanup as a service.
0:34:31 What do you mean by this?
0:34:36 – Yes, so one big meme slash wave
0:34:38 that I was noticing in America
0:34:40 is people becoming more and more concerned
0:34:41 about mold in their house.
0:34:43 – Yeah, people freak out about that in Austin,
0:34:44 particularly.
0:34:46 – Yeah, 70% of houses in America
0:34:47 apparently have mold in them.
0:34:49 Obviously it varies in terms of the amount,
0:34:52 but downstream effects of autoimmune conditions,
0:34:56 severe health issues, asthma, et cetera, et cetera.
0:34:59 Working backwards from the ad first,
0:35:01 find out if you have mold in your house.
0:35:03 Like, a horrific image of the mold
0:35:08 and horrific insights into the damage that mold can do.
0:35:10 You could sell the visits for free
0:35:12 and people are ripping up their houses,
0:35:14 spending tens of thousands of dollars,
0:35:15 hundreds of thousands of dollars,
0:35:18 because if it’s your home and you have poison in it,
0:35:21 the friends that I have that are renting
0:35:23 are literally moving out of the house.
0:35:25 They’re not sticking around now.
0:35:28 So if you actually own the home, it’s even stickier.
0:35:31 I like it from an ad perspective, a health perspective.
0:35:33 If you could partner with a big like health influencer
0:35:35 that’s your chief influencer officer
0:35:37 that could just chat about mold all day
0:35:40 and just run the funnel of find out for free
0:35:43 and then sell them all the services on the back end.
0:35:44 Similar to what Maric Health has done
0:35:46 for blood optimization, but doing it in the house.
0:35:48 I think there’s a lot of money to be made
0:35:49 riding that wave.
0:35:52 I know Sean you chart about one chart businesses.
0:35:53 If you put mold in Google Trends,
0:35:56 it’s just every year like steadily getting bigger
0:35:57 and bigger and bigger and bigger.
0:35:59 – I love that for a bunch of reasons.
0:36:01 So what was that you said?
0:36:02 30% of houses have mold?
0:36:03 – 70%.
0:36:04 – 70%.
0:36:07 Okay, so that is also killer hook for the ad, right?
0:36:10 75% of the houses have mold.
0:36:12 Find out for free if yours does.
0:36:16 Type in your address and we’ll send out a person for free
0:36:17 to go diagnose.
0:36:19 And if you know that 70% have something
0:36:22 then your conversion, even if 10% or 5% of those people
0:36:25 are gonna spend a few thousand dollars
0:36:27 getting rid of the mold, that’s pretty good.
0:36:29 You could target high value areas.
0:36:31 You could also just run this as lead gen only.
0:36:34 So people who do mold servicing
0:36:36 probably are not great at Facebook ads.
0:36:38 And so you could just be the great at Facebook ad part
0:36:40 and then farm out all the leads
0:36:42 to the mold companies all around the country.
0:36:45 So that seems like a really good part of this business.
0:36:46 And then the last thing is like,
0:36:50 there are so many people that have undiagnosed health issues.
0:36:52 So maybe it’s like fatigue,
0:36:54 maybe it’s a bad allergies, whatever’s going on.
0:36:56 And you can’t find the root cause of these.
0:36:58 And I think this is why something like gut health
0:36:59 has taken off in such a big way.
0:37:00 ‘Cause it seems like one of these like,
0:37:01 yeah, if your gut’s screwed up
0:37:03 then everything downstream is gonna be screwed up.
0:37:06 And it could explain 15 different health conditions.
0:37:10 And so same thing, like if your environment is toxic
0:37:12 then that could explain 15 different conditions
0:37:13 that you might have.
0:37:16 And who’s gonna argue that, no, I wanna keep it toxic
0:37:18 once you find out that they are.
0:37:19 We had a pest control guy come to our house
0:37:22 and he’s like, yeah, see that little nook under the house?
0:37:25 That means you have mice and rats that are under the house.
0:37:27 And even if you’re not seeing them in the house
0:37:28 they’re here, they’re at your house.
0:37:31 Would you like me to seal this and like play some traps
0:37:33 and I can come by every month and spray?
0:37:35 I was like, cool, here’s $300 a month, go for it.
0:37:39 And that’s a $300 month subscription that I’m on now
0:37:43 for the vague possibility that there’s like a mice,
0:37:45 like, you know, my eroded problem at our house.
0:37:49 – So here’s the deal.
0:37:53 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:37:54 It was called The Hustle.
0:37:55 And it was a daily newsletter at scale
0:37:57 to millions of subscribers.
0:37:59 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:38:03 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:38:06 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:38:08 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:38:09 building out the tech for the platform
0:38:10 and selling ads.
0:38:13 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:38:16 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:38:20 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:38:21 If you want to grow your newsletter,
0:38:22 if you want to monetize a newsletter,
0:38:24 they do all of the stuff that I had
0:38:26 to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:38:28 So check it out, beehive.com.
0:38:32 That’s B-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:38:36 – What you’re going to learn, George, moving Austin,
0:38:39 is that like it’s like the most health-conscious city
0:38:40 I’ve ever been to.
0:38:41 And some people are pretty extreme,
0:38:44 but it’s kind of exciting to be around those extreme people.
0:38:49 And I know people who have a Berkeley water filter
0:38:51 for their entire home.
0:38:53 And I started researching it.
0:38:56 Have you guys ever seen the inside of a water heater,
0:38:58 like a water tank?
0:38:59 They’re horrible.
0:39:00 – Disgusting.
0:39:01 – It’s horrible.
0:39:02 You see that?
0:39:04 – There’s a picture of somebody literally just holding
0:39:08 two fistfuls of what just looks like either mold,
0:39:11 or fungus, or just like mulch of some kind.
0:39:14 – And so I saw one of these videos
0:39:16 where they just cut open a water tank,
0:39:18 like a water tank for the water heater.
0:39:20 – It’s called a water heater tank autopsy.
0:39:23 – It looks like what you would see
0:39:25 with like an old coffin that you woke up open up
0:39:27 with just like a bunch of like rotted skeleton bones.
0:39:29 Like it’s just like, what the hell is this?
0:39:30 I don’t even know what this is.
0:39:32 And it makes you like crawl.
0:39:35 And so I remember seeing this and I’m thinking,
0:39:37 is my water heater like this?
0:39:38 Are my pipes like this?
0:39:40 I have to get one of these Berkeley water filters.
0:39:43 I need one of these things.
0:39:44 And this is very similar.
0:39:47 And the differences is I think getting mold out of your home
0:39:50 is either, it’s actually quite hard,
0:39:51 or in some cases it’s impossible.
0:39:54 I think like, I don’t know if the problem,
0:39:56 I’m not sure if that problem in many cases
0:39:57 can actually be solved.
0:39:59 Getting a new water heater,
0:40:03 getting a water filter at your house, much more solvable.
0:40:06 Particularly like my in-laws live in New York City
0:40:08 where these buildings are built in the ’50s.
0:40:10 It’s a lot of times the similar pipes
0:40:12 or the water that goes through New York City.
0:40:14 It’s like pipes have been around for a long time.
0:40:18 And I remember seeing these videos of these like water heater,
0:40:21 like where they cut them open and do autopsy.
0:40:23 And I’m like, yeah, I’m never drinking water
0:40:25 for many of this shit ever again.
0:40:30 Like, and I was like, I need to find some places to replace this.
0:40:34 That is in line with what you’re talking about.
0:40:39 There may be even more of a pungent ad.
0:40:41 – Yeah, that’s a good one.
0:40:42 Should we move on to the next one?
0:40:43 – Yeah.
0:40:44 – All right, let’s do this last one.
0:40:47 So your final idea, I think is a really fun one
0:40:49 ’cause it’s not even a business,
0:40:50 it’s like a country-level idea.
0:40:54 Like, you should be the CMO of the UK.
0:40:56 Explain this idea.
0:40:59 – Yeah, I like how when Bellagy went from like crypto currencies
0:41:00 and now trying to build his own country.
0:41:01 And you have, I mean,
0:41:02 think about companies this entire time.
0:41:05 People out here think of countries and…
0:41:07 – I don’t, the city’s whisper, right?
0:41:08 He’s in Silicon Valley for too long.
0:41:09 It’s like, you need to be more ambitious.
0:41:10 You’re starting companies.
0:41:12 Oh, that’s cute.
0:41:12 I start countries.
0:41:19 – So one of my reflections as they coming from the UK
0:41:22 and we spoke about it to begin with on experiencing America
0:41:25 and despite all the political shenanigans
0:41:30 that America has attending 4th of July in Nashville.
0:41:32 And I’m going, this is wild.
0:41:34 Like, there’s flanks everywhere.
0:41:36 There’s people chanting, you were safe.
0:41:37 You were safe, you were safe.
0:41:39 Everyone’s on the streets.
0:41:41 So I was at the end of the day chanting USA
0:41:43 and then people were going, you can’t do that.
0:41:45 That’s why we’re chanting ’cause we got rid of you guys.
0:41:47 And anyway, I then reflected on it
0:41:51 and I realized that I’ve never met an American
0:41:54 that doesn’t celebrate their national day in some regard.
0:41:57 And then I realized I’ve never met a Brit
0:41:59 that does celebrate their national day.
0:42:03 And then I realized I’ve never met a Brit
0:42:06 who even knows the day of their national day.
0:42:08 – Well, because you guys have been like the bosses,
0:42:10 like there is no independence day.
0:42:13 You were like the colonizer, right?
0:42:14 – Exactly.
0:42:15 So that’s one of the issues with it.
0:42:17 So the irony is, by the way,
0:42:19 the national day is St. George’s Day.
0:42:22 I’m English called George and I had to Google it.
0:42:24 It’s April the 23rd.
0:42:26 In England, there’s no flags anywhere.
0:42:28 You can’t have national pride.
0:42:31 And I do think part of it is the colonization side.
0:42:33 Also St. George is like, who was this guy?
0:42:36 Whereas of independence day, you had a clear enemy.
0:42:38 So thinking from an advert perspective,
0:42:39 who is St. George?
0:42:42 It’s the Slater Dragon, nobody cares.
0:42:45 And essentially cancelling St. George’s Day
0:42:47 and creating Dunkirk Day.
0:42:50 So the Britain’s finest hour,
0:42:51 we’ve made a lot of mistakes,
0:42:54 but Britain’s finest hour was where we escaped,
0:42:57 Hitler’s Germany, 400,000 men were Churchill,
0:42:59 all of Britain came up together,
0:43:00 sending the boats across.
0:43:03 And literally the only reason the country exists
0:43:04 and we’re not speaking German.
0:43:06 And I, arguably, Adolf Hitler doesn’t conquer
0:43:08 the whole of Europe, it’s because of this day.
0:43:09 So there’s an enemy.
0:43:10 No matter where you stand politically,
0:43:12 Adolf Hitler, number one enemy
0:43:14 when it comes to that ad strategy.
0:43:15 And make it the most British day imaginable.
0:43:18 So from midnight to 12 p.m.,
0:43:21 you can complain, moan, drink tea,
0:43:24 talk about what’s wrong in the past, present and future.
0:43:28 But come 12 p.m., get the RAF in the sky,
0:43:29 get kids dressed as,
0:43:31 like if you look at the number of British icons,
0:43:35 Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, John Lennon,
0:43:37 like there’s so many icons of history
0:43:38 that the world should be grateful for.
0:43:39 And I think you could add billions
0:43:41 to the tourist economy of the UK
0:43:44 and unite a difficult nation for at least an afternoon.
0:43:47 – Sign me up, my friend, this is awesome.
0:43:47 – Dude, this is amazing.
0:43:49 – There we go.
0:43:51 – Like we get an oasis, by the way,
0:43:53 just announced they’re going on tour.
0:43:54 – They’re going to that.
0:43:55 – Yeah.
0:43:59 – He’s like Darwin, Shakespeare, Sam’s like, oh, oasis.
0:44:01 – Liam Gallagher, honestly, playing Wonderwall
0:44:03 would not be a bad idea.
0:44:06 That might be the official song of Dunkirk Day.
0:44:08 – There we go.
0:44:11 – So you posted this, did anybody like hit you up?
0:44:13 Did you get some like, you know, a p.m. in the DMS?
0:44:14 What happened?
0:44:17 – Who, the, I mean, who’s the, like–
0:44:20 – I don’t know, Harry Reachout, who’s supposed to reach out?
0:44:23 – Not yet, not yet.
0:44:24 I’m not gonna, I’m gonna keep on getting the drum
0:44:26 for a while, but it’s one of those things.
0:44:31 – You should run ads to your essay, to your blog post,
0:44:34 targeting specifically, as hyper specific as you can.
0:44:36 – The zip code of a royal family.
0:44:38 – 10 grand of ad spend, and I’m pretty sure
0:44:40 you’re gonna get a meeting at the palace.
0:44:43 We’re here to discuss.
0:44:43 – Let’s do it.
0:44:45 Let’s do it, Dunkirk Day.
0:44:46 (laughing)
0:44:50 – That’s fantastic, that is like a funny conundrum
0:44:52 that England is in when it’s like,
0:44:54 well, you guys have been the man for so long,
0:44:55 but there’s not really like a,
0:44:57 like started from the bottom,
0:44:59 now we’re here type of story.
0:45:01 It’s more like, you’ve been the man for so long,
0:45:03 and now you’re like in Forrest.
0:45:05 So like, that’s like pretty good longevity.
0:45:07 – Well, the thing is, you need the brand, right?
0:45:10 So like, I bet if I walked outside right now,
0:45:14 and I went to like, you know, just like a nearby,
0:45:17 I don’t know, if I went to Home Depot,
0:45:19 and if it was a busy day at a Home Depot,
0:45:22 I feel like if me, if I could get two other people with me
0:45:24 to start chanting USA,
0:45:27 I’m pretty sure the whole store would just start arbitrarily,
0:45:29 not on a July 4, just start chanting USA,
0:45:31 ’cause there’s such a pride,
0:45:34 and USA has like, the brand is really, really strong, right?
0:45:36 It’s like freedom number one, right?
0:45:38 There’s the American dream.
0:45:41 There’s like sort of the pride of America,
0:45:45 whereas like, I think, what would the country stand for?
0:45:47 So you were like, drink tea and wine,
0:45:50 which is like, okay, that’s like, you know, humorous in a way,
0:45:52 but like, what would be the thing?
0:45:54 Would it be like, would it be creativity?
0:45:55 Would it be art?
0:45:56 What would be the thing that’s like,
0:45:57 we can hang our hat on of like,
0:45:59 we’re the best at this, the British pride.
0:46:02 What is the British pride about?
0:46:04 – I think from first principles,
0:46:06 the reason why Independence Day works
0:46:08 is because there’s an enemy that you escaped.
0:46:11 And just using creating an enemy,
0:46:13 again, talk about advertising tactics earlier,
0:46:15 a great out of that angle.
0:46:19 But the enemy of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany
0:46:20 can unite is the only thing
0:46:22 that can unite this country, I think.
0:46:25 So, and then just go through the like,
0:46:27 whatever you wanna pick, you wanna pick literature,
0:46:29 you wanna pick the Industrial Revolution.
0:46:32 Like, we’ve got some classic hits in the library.
0:46:33 We’ve got a lot.
0:46:35 – I think I have an answer to my question,
0:46:37 to my own question that adds on what you just said,
0:46:42 which is the UK is sort of like the Harvard of countries.
0:46:44 It is Ivy League.
0:46:45 It is prestige.
0:46:46 It is old money.
0:46:48 It is old history.
0:46:49 It is we’ve been here forever.
0:46:52 And the great minds have come from us.
0:46:55 I think that’s the branding, which is like,
0:46:58 the US is more like, I don’t know, a big state school.
0:47:00 It’s a bit of a party school, right?
0:47:04 And whereas, you know, we’re more USC,
0:47:08 whereas the UK is more Harvard Yale Princeton
0:47:10 in its vibe and its brand.
0:47:13 And so it’s got that old luxury, old money,
0:47:17 old prestige brand, which is like, it’s elevated.
0:47:19 And I think that’s part of,
0:47:20 well, that’s what I would lean into more.
0:47:23 It’s not like modern and super high tech.
0:47:25 I would lean into the other side on the branding.
0:47:28 – One of my favorite ad campaigns, George of all time,
0:47:30 it was in the ’70s.
0:47:33 It was a Rolex campaign.
0:47:37 And it would show a picture of Dwight Eisenhower,
0:47:38 the general during World War II,
0:47:41 and then the president of America giving a speech
0:47:43 to troops and he had a Rolex on.
0:47:48 And then it showed an admiral of a great shit,
0:47:50 like giving directions to his folks.
0:47:51 And he looks like he’s going to war
0:47:52 and he’s wearing a Rolex.
0:47:55 And then I think it’s so JFK wearing a Rolex
0:47:57 while he was like talking to cash show
0:47:59 or something like amazing, whatever.
0:48:03 And the headline was the men who control the destinies,
0:48:07 the men who control the destiny of the world wear Rolex.
0:48:10 And it’s one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time
0:48:13 because it makes me associate Rolex with prestige
0:48:16 and doing something, not just being elite,
0:48:19 but actually flexing that muscle.
0:48:22 And I’ve never seen a good idea on how to reuse
0:48:25 this ad campaign that I love so much.
0:48:28 But this might be the one where it’s like,
0:48:30 the people who have given the world art
0:48:32 or the people who have kind of helped shape
0:48:34 the destiny of the world or British, whatever.
0:48:37 But that’s one of my favorite ad campaigns of all time.
0:48:41 – Yeah, I think the copy is if you were here tomorrow,
0:48:42 you’d be wearing a Rolex.
0:48:44 And he does different variations of that.
0:48:45 I’ve broke that one down a few times.
0:48:47 It’s so hypnotic.
0:48:49 But even that lineback, if you were here tomorrow,
0:48:53 you would wear a Rolex with like an image of the White House.
0:48:58 Therefore, aspiration association of the White House,
0:49:01 it puts you, so it puts you in it.
0:49:02 That is hypnosis.
0:49:05 If you spoke to a hypnotist about a sentence,
0:49:07 that sentence is all literal hypnosis.
0:49:10 Like for example, there’s a Porsche one that I love, Sean.
0:49:14 And it says too small to get laid in,
0:49:16 but you’ll get laid the second you get out of it.
0:49:18 It is a picture of a Porsche.
0:49:19 – Or the New Balance one, right?
0:49:23 The only shoe worn by high fashion models in London
0:49:25 and dads in Ohio.
0:49:26 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that one.
0:49:28 – That’s like such a good one.
0:49:29 – Like I said, we’ve broken down a lot of these
0:49:30 on the ad professor.
0:49:32 So like one of the Porsche ones is,
0:49:34 honestly now, did you spend your youth dreaming
0:49:37 about someday owning a Nissan or a Mitsubishi?
0:49:38 – Yeah.
0:49:39 – That’s good.
0:49:41 (laughing)
0:49:45 You may get lost, but not in the crowd.
0:49:46 – That’s another good Porsche one.
0:49:48 – If this car doesn’t excite you,
0:49:50 check your pulse, you may be dead.
0:49:52 So yeah, there’s so many,
0:49:53 like if you go to the ad professor on Twitter,
0:49:55 we’ve got so many of them.
0:49:57 – So we should talk about the ad professor real quick.
0:50:01 So you have this marketing agency and to grow it,
0:50:02 I thought you did a brilliant thing,
0:50:05 which is you created this anonymous account on Twitter,
0:50:05 the ad professor.
0:50:07 And I think you didn’t tell people at the beginning
0:50:08 that that was you, right?
0:50:10 – Nobody knows to this day, really.
0:50:11 – Well, we just–
0:50:12 – There you go.
0:50:15 – Breaking news, Scoop came out the closet.
0:50:17 Yo, YouTube thumbnail, George Mac comes out,
0:50:20 reveals his truth, we got it.
0:50:23 – Yeah, people won’t click on that, they already know.
0:50:26 – So he creates the thing, the ad professor,
0:50:27 and all he does is just give.
0:50:31 It’s like, I love ads, which you do and you collect them.
0:50:32 And so you just started threading.
0:50:34 Here’s just badass ads.
0:50:36 And then in that, people start DMing you.
0:50:39 And from what I understand, it’s a better salesman
0:50:41 than any sales guy you could have hired
0:50:42 to go out and pitch for business.
0:50:43 Is that true?
0:50:45 Can you talk a little bit about that?
0:50:49 – Yeah, we also then create ads for brands.
0:50:53 So we did one that tried to reach like 30 million people.
0:50:54 It’s like 23 different ads of ads
0:50:56 that we’ve created from Ryanair.
0:50:58 So we did a Tesla one of–
0:51:01 – But you’re saying is you created ads on spec,
0:51:02 meaning you pretended Tesla was your client.
0:51:04 And here’s the ad we would make for you, Tesla.
0:51:06 Here’s the ad we would make for you, Ryanair.
0:51:08 And you just did those, those also went viral
0:51:11 ’cause you really did a good job of that, right?
0:51:12 – Exactly.
0:51:13 So like the Tesla one was,
0:51:17 it takes I think like 3.4 seconds to read this ad.
0:51:20 The same time it takes a Tesla to go to another 60.
0:51:20 – This is great.
0:51:22 And it’s a picture of a Tesla driving off.
0:51:23 This is a really cool website.
0:51:26 – So you do that and then people just start sliding
0:51:27 into your DMs wanting to work with you guys?
0:51:29 Or how do they even know?
0:51:30 ‘Cause you don’t even say I have an agency, by the way.
0:51:32 You don’t do heavy calls to action on this.
0:51:34 Or am I wrong?
0:51:35 – A little bit like plug at the end,
0:51:36 but it’s always value thirst.
0:51:41 And I think that model of who you went to school with
0:51:42 and knowing people that way
0:51:44 versus just making dope things online
0:51:45 and people seeing the ads
0:51:48 and realizing that those poor shouts from the 70s
0:51:50 still have relevance today
0:51:53 and trying to create ads that are just super sexy.
0:51:54 There’s this weird, like I discovered it
0:51:56 via looking at ad horn on Reddit.
0:51:59 And there’s like hundreds of thousands of communities
0:52:02 dedicated to people chatting about ad porn
0:52:04 and then creating the ad professor off the back of that.
0:52:08 But yeah, nobody knew it was me until today, I guess.
0:52:09 – Does this make good revenue?
0:52:11 – We do, okay.
0:52:12 – And how many people who work with you?
0:52:13 – Dude, they’re great.
0:52:14 Say the name of your agency, by the way,
0:52:15 so that people can go find you guys.
0:52:18 – Yeah, that’s just, I just go to adprofessor.com.
0:52:20 Sam was mentioning the website then.
0:52:22 We have about 40 people give or take.
0:52:24 – Wow. – Yeah, this is awesome.
0:52:27 And this is a really cool, I would like to use you guys.
0:52:28 – Thank you.
0:52:30 – I’m sold, like when I go to this website,
0:52:31 I’m like, “This is cool.”
0:52:34 And I’ve followed that Twitter handle.
0:52:35 I thought it was really cool.
0:52:37 – All right, we are gonna split this.
0:52:39 So that was part one of an episode with George Mack.
0:52:41 That was ideas, ideas, ideas.
0:52:43 I thought he had some bangers in there.
0:52:45 The next part we’re gonna do is his frameworks,
0:52:46 which is actually what he’s more known for.
0:52:49 This guy has published essays and tweets that are,
0:52:51 he gets retweeted by Elon Musk like once every week.
0:52:54 So he has some really awesome ideas and frameworks
0:52:57 that he has curated or uniquely come up with.
0:52:58 We’re gonna talk about those.
0:53:01 That’s all part two with George Mack, The Big Ideas.
0:53:03 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:53:06 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:53:09 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:53:12 ♪ On the road let’s travel never looking back ♪
0:53:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:04 All right, I’m going to tell you something. So I have a family now and do you have a will?
0:00:06 Weird flex. All right. Yes, I do have a will.
0:00:11 Okay. So once I have a family, like you start getting into the will stuff, right?
0:00:14 And it’s kind of been screwing with me.
0:00:19 And I read a story last week that has maybe changed my life.
0:00:25 And I think that if only a couple of listeners actually buy into what I’m buying into,
0:00:28 this could be like the most like life changing thing that we’ve ever done on this podcast.
0:00:30 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:36 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like the days off on the road.
0:00:37 Let’s travel.
0:00:43 So in the 1800s in Sweden, there was this guy named Alfred and Alfred was an inventor.
0:00:47 And he had a little bit of success where he started inventing some like a bunch of small stuff.
0:00:51 But then when he was like 30 or 40, he had something that changed his life.
0:00:55 So we basically found out that nitroglycerin, if you mess with it in a certain way,
0:00:56 you can make it explosive.
0:00:58 And thus was the creation of dynamite.
0:01:00 And so it made him incredibly rich.
0:01:01 So we got super rich.
0:01:05 He was worth something like the equivalent of two or three hundred million dollars in today’s money.
0:01:09 And towards the end of his life, his brother Ludwig died.
0:01:15 And when his brother died, someone ran an obituary for Alfred on accident.
0:01:16 They used the wrong brother.
0:01:21 And the obituary started with the merchant of death is no longer.
0:01:25 And they go on to explain how Alfred created dynamite and how it was
0:01:28 revolutionized the way people were murdered.
0:01:31 Now, whether that story is true or false, that’s actually offered to debate.
0:01:34 No one has disproved it, but there’s like people like, I’m not sure if that’s actually true.
0:01:37 But that’s the story.
0:01:40 And afterwards, Alfred changed his life.
0:01:42 He goes, that’s that’s ridiculous.
0:01:44 I can’t be known as the person who is the merchant of death.
0:01:45 I have to change this.
0:01:50 And so two years before he died, he decided to rewrite his will.
0:01:56 And he left 95 percent of his assets towards a foundation where he created the rules
0:01:59 and the rules were I’m going to give and this is I’m using today’s money,
0:02:01 but it’s it’s the equivalent money back then.
0:02:06 I’m going to give one million dollars to the person who impacted humanity the most.
0:02:09 The category that I want to start with is peace.
0:02:11 But after peace, we’re going to do a few other categories.
0:02:14 We’re going to do peace, we’re going to do chemistry, economics and literature.
0:02:17 And thus became the Nobel Peace Prize.
0:02:23 And to this day, it’s lasted for, you know, 130 years where they now have like
0:02:26 six hundred million dollars in assets.
0:02:29 And the whole point of the foundation is we invest enough money.
0:02:34 So we are always able to give something like the equivalent of a five million dollars
0:02:38 a year to some type of person who has impacted the world the most.
0:02:43 And winners have been like Marie Currie, Martin Luther King, Ernest Hemingway,
0:02:45 like a lot of these like pretty like groundbreaking people.
0:02:51 And in a way, this contest, it’s encouraged like, I don’t think there’s too many people
0:02:54 that are doing stuff, stuff just to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
0:02:58 But in the back of their head, they’re like, yeah, like that would be amazing.
0:03:01 If like, I can like discover something and like, you know, that’s like the ultimate goal.
0:03:03 Like to get a Nobel Peace Prize, like that’s like the greatest thing ever.
0:03:09 All right, let’s take a quick break to talk about our sponsor today, HubSpot.
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0:03:40 And so it kind of changed my life.
0:03:44 By the way, did you know that story, that dynamite story in the Merchant of Death?
0:03:45 Not the specifics.
0:03:47 I had heard Peter Thiel was talking about this with Joe Rogan,
0:03:49 like the sort of whitewashing of a reputation.
0:03:51 And they were talking about Epstein.
0:03:53 They were talking about Bill Gates and Rogan brought up.
0:03:55 He’s like, that’s how the Nobel Prize happened.
0:03:56 And then he’s like, have you heard that?
0:03:58 Peter is like, yeah, he is, you know, the dynamite guy.
0:04:00 But I didn’t know anything beyond that.
0:04:00 So that’s actually pretty cool.
0:04:03 I didn’t know the Merchant of Death obituary story.
0:04:07 So the truth of it is that like dynamite actually wasn’t used to kill that many people
0:04:08 because of the way it worked.
0:04:09 Like TNT killed a lot of people.
0:04:12 But like, so like open up caves for mining and shit.
0:04:16 Right. It was like, so that’s where like the story is like, you know, who knows?
0:04:18 But we don’t let the truth get in the way of good story.
0:04:22 Yeah. But what is true is that the Nobel Peace Prize has worked.
0:04:25 Like it’s encouraged people and like through incentives to do stuff.
0:04:27 Sorry. So explain the money side of this.
0:04:29 So he left how much money to this.
0:04:31 And then is it just been draining from that pot?
0:04:34 Or does new money get injected into the Nobel Prize?
0:04:36 Because it’s a million dollars per prize, right? Is that right?
0:04:38 Yeah. And there’s five per year.
0:04:42 And like one year during the World War two, they were like, we don’t have peace.
0:04:43 So we’re not going to give a peace prize.
0:04:45 And so they like this didn’t give a prize.
0:04:48 And so but in general, every year for the last 120 years, they’ve done this.
0:04:52 And so the money right now, it’s six, this is all public.
0:04:53 So you can see it.
0:04:55 They have six hundred and twelve million dollars.
0:04:59 It made a 10.7 percent return on capital in two thousand twenty three.
0:05:02 It’s invested in equity funds, hedge funds.
0:05:06 And the way that it’s set up, according to his will, was make sure that the money
0:05:09 never runs dry so we can always give.
0:05:12 We can always give this away for potentially hundreds of years. Right.
0:05:15 And so there’s like an organization, I think.
0:05:16 And you can see what their expenses are.
0:05:20 I think their expenses to run this thing are like three or eight million.
0:05:24 I forget exactly a single digit millions per year to operate.
0:05:27 And then they give away roughly five million dollars per year.
0:05:29 And is this like Forbes 30 to 30?
0:05:32 Or like how legit are the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize now?
0:05:34 I’ve never paid too much attention to it.
0:05:40 Do you have a sense of like, is this high signal or is this like a hijacked thing
0:05:42 that now is is not high signal anymore?
0:05:45 So my opinion is very high signal.
0:05:48 So Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Marie Currie,
0:05:50 like these like legit people have done it.
0:05:52 Now, there have been a few times where they’ve made mistakes.
0:05:57 So, for example, now they have a rule where they actually want to give the award
0:06:01 a couple years after the person made the discovery, because in 1926,
0:06:05 they gave the award to someone who created this enzyme that cured cancer.
0:06:07 And obviously that wasn’t true.
0:06:10 But like six months after they discovered it, they thought it was true.
0:06:13 And then the other criticism is they have a liberal bias.
0:06:16 And so they’ve given one to Barack Obama, they’ve given one to,
0:06:19 I believe, an Israeli guy once like a peace award.
0:06:22 And then the people who side with Palestine are like, what the hell?
0:06:24 That’s right, there’s no peace.
0:06:25 So there’s criticism sometimes.
0:06:27 But in general, it’s very well regarded,
0:06:32 although a lot of people criticize it as being too academic or too liberal.
0:06:35 But I think it’s like as legit as it could be.
0:06:37 And what’s your take on this?
0:06:38 So awesome story.
0:06:40 So here’s my take.
0:06:44 My take is that this prize set up is awesome.
0:06:46 And let me give you a few examples of this.
0:06:51 So inspired by the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, there was this guy named Raymond
0:06:55 Ortiz, I think his name is, or let’s call him Orteg, Raymond Orteg.
0:07:01 And so he was like, hey, these planes that we’ve created are pretty amazing.
0:07:03 But we’re not doing like too many great things with them.
0:07:07 He goes, I’m going to offer $25,000 to anyone out there who can fly
0:07:09 from New York City to Paris.
0:07:12 This was in 1919, you know, for $25,000, that’s like $500,000 today.
0:07:16 And like eight people signed up and seven of them failed.
0:07:18 And in fact, five of them died.
0:07:20 Now, who’s the one person who made it?
0:07:21 Charles Lindbergh.
0:07:24 And the year after Charles Lindbergh did his flight,
0:07:28 it says that airline passengers before he did it that year were 5,000.
0:07:31 A few years after, 300,000.
0:07:33 And it completely changed the airline industry
0:07:36 because it made like a big hoopla and a big deal, whatever.
0:07:40 Then inspired by that prize, this guy named Peter Diamandis.
0:07:42 Is that his name? Yep.
0:07:46 He created this thing called the X Prize, where he was like, I offer $10 million.
0:07:50 I think the rules were anyone who can fly a rocket into space,
0:07:52 bring it back down.
0:07:54 And two weeks later, it goes right back into space.
0:07:57 So like reusable rockets and Elon Musk at the time.
0:07:59 I think SpaceX was two years old.
0:08:04 He said the X Prize basically helped create the commercial space industry.
0:08:06 It showed that you didn’t have to be a giant aerospace company
0:08:07 to make progress in space.
0:08:11 And it definitely influenced the direction I took with SpaceX.
0:08:14 So this was like a big deal for like space.
0:08:20 And now the genius of the X Prize was that you by putting up 10 million.
0:08:22 And I think it became 20 million for the prize.
0:08:28 People would like a bunch, 20 teams would invest two million each
0:08:31 in trying to develop the thing to win the 10 million dollar prize.
0:08:34 And so you would get 40 million invested for a 10 million prize.
0:08:40 So it was a kind of a genius way to spur innovation and investment.
0:08:42 So not just people who want to win the prize, because that’s obvious,
0:08:44 put a prize up, people will try to go win it.
0:08:47 But actually in the act of winning it, more dollars got poured in
0:08:50 because they saw a clear return and the math worked out where,
0:08:52 oh, wow, I get leverage.
0:08:55 My 10 actually becomes 100 invested in this mission
0:08:57 if I get enough interest around it.
0:09:00 Along with the PR, along with the the want to just win
0:09:02 and to make this exciting.
0:09:03 And so it works.
0:09:06 And so now there’s a SpaceX prize that Elon has funded,
0:09:10 where it’s 100 million dollars for someone who, if by 2030,
0:09:14 they can remove a certain amount of carbon from the planet or something like that.
0:09:15 And so it’s still ongoing.
0:09:17 Here’s another example.
0:09:18 So you know what DARPA is?
0:09:19 Have you heard of DARPA?
0:09:21 It stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
0:09:22 Have you heard of that?
0:09:24 Yeah, weren’t they like responsible for creating the internet?
0:09:25 They’ve done a bunch of stuff.
0:09:30 And so in 2003, they created this thing called The Grand Prize.
0:09:35 And the idea was we have a 150 mile road trip or like a route.
0:09:40 And the first person who can create an autonomous vehicle
0:09:45 that can drive that route wins one million dollars and a hundred and six teams
0:09:46 or something that applied.
0:09:48 And for a little while, no one did it.
0:09:49 But then a team did it.
0:09:52 And that’s when the first time we ever used the lidar,
0:09:56 which is a type of self driving technology that all the cars or many of the cars have.
0:09:58 It was already existed, but it was applied to cars for the first time ever.
0:10:01 And so it was very successful.
0:10:04 And then there’s actually a guy who I think maybe you might know this guy.
0:10:06 His name is Nat Friedman.
0:10:08 He’s a really good guy to follow.
0:10:08 A really interesting guy.
0:10:10 He’s doing a lot of stuff with AI investing right now.
0:10:12 And I know about this prize that he’s got.
0:10:13 It’s really cool.
0:10:15 I believe it’s.
0:10:16 What’s the right phrase?
0:10:18 Is it Herculanean text?
0:10:22 So basically, I think it was like one of the there’s an explosion in, I think, Italy.
0:10:25 You know, the Suvious prize, Suvious.
0:10:31 Yeah, the Mapasuvius exploded and all of these ancient Greek texts got basically ruined.
0:10:34 And he puts up a prize to where if you can create,
0:10:36 you basically have to use machine learning.
0:10:41 If you can create this algorithm that can help him decipher parts of the text,
0:10:42 he’ll give you a prize.
0:10:46 Yeah, so it’s like a scroll that is like been almost sealed.
0:10:48 You can’t unscrew it and just read it.
0:10:53 So what they’re using is computer vision to try to analyze it from the outside.
0:10:57 And just from like the little bits you can see and try to figure out what was written.
0:11:00 I think this is going to be like the earliest written text or something like that.
0:11:01 I forgot. I don’t know the details.
0:11:02 I think somebody could go look this up.
0:11:06 But I remember hearing about this and thinking, wow, this was so cool.
0:11:08 Like he he sort of found this thing.
0:11:11 Nobody was going to be nobody was going to justify the investment
0:11:13 they would take to see this because you also don’t know what’s inside.
0:11:16 You don’t know if there’s anything interesting inside, necessarily.
0:11:19 And he decided to fund this competition.
0:11:22 And I guess what happened recently was somebody figured out how to read a bit of it.
0:11:25 Actually, they had like a breakthrough in the Seavius Prize
0:11:28 where somebody figured out how to read a little bit of the thing from like
0:11:31 some stupidly simple technique of computer vision.
0:11:35 Yeah. And so it’s still a thing, by the way, and like people are still getting after it.
0:11:39 And then the last thing is there’s this thing called Kaggle Kaggle competitions
0:11:43 where it was a startup that raised 12 million dollars.
0:11:45 It was eventually bought by Google.
0:11:50 According to their website, they’ve had 19 million engineers compete in their competitions.
0:11:52 And if you’re a company, you could put a bounty out there.
0:11:54 And people will compete to win it.
0:11:57 So, for example, you remember Microsoft Connect,
0:12:01 like the camera that you put on your Xbox and it could like watch you play
0:12:05 and somehow interact with that, I believe, was heavily developed by one of these competitions.
0:12:08 But then they do other things for HIV research and things like that,
0:12:14 where this gamifying system has actually contributed to like big important problems.
0:12:17 And so all of this to say.
0:12:19 When you’re thinking about or when I’m thinking about when I die,
0:12:22 what will happen to money, you know, you think about giving away to family,
0:12:24 you think about just like traditional giving away.
0:12:27 And you just you just wire it to someone and hope they do well.
0:12:33 I’m incredibly fascinated and interested in these competitions.
0:12:34 And they don’t all need to be huge.
0:12:36 I think there’s one guy who you particularly like Aubrey de Grey,
0:12:38 where he has a twenty five thousand dollar a year.
0:12:41 If you come with some interesting breakthrough on longevity,
0:12:44 he will give you twenty five grand and then you get you get to go meet with him.
0:12:47 Right. And so sometimes they’re huge. Sometimes they’re not huge.
0:12:54 But I think this is like so much more leverage and the publicity and the wanting to win.
0:13:00 It seems so much more better for society to do a contest.
0:13:04 And it’s also more work, but then just giving, you know what I mean?
0:13:06 Hundred percent.
0:13:09 So I love this topic and there’s a bunch of interesting angles.
0:13:11 By the way, can I read you the just the Visuvian thing?
0:13:12 Because I think it’s pretty fascinating.
0:13:13 Yeah, yeah.
0:13:16 They were able to take four passages with 140 characters
0:13:19 each and get eighty five percent of the characters readable, recoverable.
0:13:22 And is it just someone’s like grocery list?
0:13:24 Exactly.
0:13:27 And they use, you know, AI, blah, blah, blah.
0:13:30 I don’t know all the the details of this.
0:13:33 He did a good podcast with Ben Thompson.
0:13:34 I’m sure technically that’s where I heard him talking about this.
0:13:36 I wish if I knew we were talking about this, I could have looked it up.
0:13:39 But I heard this like six months ago, I was getting a haircut.
0:13:40 I thought it was pretty fascinating.
0:13:42 So what did the shroll say?
0:13:44 So you get a haircut when you have earbuds in your ears.
0:13:48 I won’t go to a barbershop if they don’t let me listen
0:13:51 to something while I’m getting my haircut. Oh my God, all right.
0:13:52 Like, if they try talking, I’m just like,
0:13:54 and nothing.
0:13:57 So you can’t hear it.
0:14:00 And by the way, it falls out like four times during every haircut.
0:14:01 And I’m like, oh, sorry, can you get that?
0:14:03 And they’re like, dude, this is annoying.
0:14:06 That’s why I started having a guy come to my house and just do it there
0:14:08 so I could just listen on blast.
0:14:10 But then I felt kind of weird because he was also listening to these
0:14:13 like old Max Levchin talks from like 2002.
0:14:15 And he’s like, who is this?
0:14:17 Why is he talking about like the future of the Internet?
0:14:21 I’m like, yeah, yeah, it’s before the Internet was like that huge of a deal.
0:14:24 God, that’s so rude.
0:14:24 But whatever.
0:14:29 Well, we’ll go back to the scrolls.
0:14:32 It’s like going to a sports bar and I don’t want to talk to the bartender.
0:14:32 I want to watch the game.
0:14:34 That’s what I’m trying to do.
0:14:36 Right. I’m the customer.
0:14:38 The customer experience that they want.
0:14:42 So it says to date, our efforts have managed to unroll
0:14:44 and read about five percent of the first scroll.
0:14:46 So that’s like, you know, the amount of headway that they’ve made so far.
0:14:49 The the general subject of the text is pleasure,
0:14:53 which properly understood is the highest good in their philosophy.
0:14:55 The two snippets are talking about, I guess, talking about pleasure.
0:14:58 So one author thinks as to in the case of food,
0:15:00 we do not right away believe things that are scarce
0:15:03 to be absolutely more pleasant than those that are abundant.
0:15:05 I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s basically a philosophy text.
0:15:06 OK, so that’s pretty cool.
0:15:09 So can I tell you about my take on this?
0:15:11 So early on in the podcast,
0:15:13 I think I had one of the ideas, which was SpaceX,
0:15:16 or sorry, the XPRIZE for companies.
0:15:19 And I basically realized that a lot of companies,
0:15:22 when I when I was inside of Twitch, after we got acquired, I was like, man,
0:15:25 we had this whole situation where they were trying to build things internally,
0:15:28 but they didn’t have like the best team on it.
0:15:29 They didn’t have like the best focus on it.
0:15:31 They didn’t have their highest sense of urgency.
0:15:34 Then you have startups that are often like really high caliber teams,
0:15:38 small groups of people, super high urgency, super high motivation.
0:15:39 It’s their baby.
0:15:41 So they they treat it like life or death, whereas in a company,
0:15:42 you’re not going to treat that way.
0:15:44 And I thought, well, in the end,
0:15:48 we ended up getting acquired for like, you know, small, medium acquisition.
0:15:51 And I was like, you know, if I had just known upfront
0:15:53 that they would be willing to pay for this,
0:15:56 we could have just built it better and faster, knowing that, hey,
0:15:58 there’s a eight finger payday on the other side of this.
0:16:00 And they would have also happily been like, cool,
0:16:04 whoever can make the best version of this, you get this money.
0:16:06 And we don’t have to fund internally the product development
0:16:08 and have one shot on goals.
0:16:11 I was like, why wouldn’t a company just said ten million bucks
0:16:14 for the person who could build the bet, the team that could build the best X.
0:16:18 And then when and the conditions are when if you hit it,
0:16:19 we have the first right to buy it.
0:16:21 You can’t sell it to anybody else.
0:16:23 We get to hire you and the team and you guys get it.
0:16:26 We’ll come on for for it basically earns out over two years.
0:16:28 And, you know, here’s the scope of what we want.
0:16:32 So you’re not guessing, oh, will will Facebook want to buy us?
0:16:34 It’s like, no, no, Facebook’s telling you what they want.
0:16:38 And then you get 25 teams to go try to be the winners of that prize.
0:16:41 Because, hey, you actually don’t need maybe venture capital.
0:16:42 You’re like, hey, we’re going to take nine months
0:16:44 and try to build this thing and try to win the prize.
0:16:46 Right. And I feel like that should exist.
0:16:48 I’m surprised that that doesn’t exist.
0:16:49 That was the first idea.
0:16:52 Second is I actually tried this.
0:16:55 So did I ever tell you about the the prize we created for Milk Road?
0:16:59 No. So when we were doing the Milk Road, we were like, all right,
0:17:03 it’s pretty clear that in crypto, there’s like, you know, the the money use case,
0:17:07 which is, hey, just like save your money in Bitcoin or a currency
0:17:09 that is not that cannot inflate.
0:17:11 It’s not designed for inflation.
0:17:13 And so I get that use case.
0:17:14 But then people were talking about Web 3.
0:17:15 It’s going to change everything.
0:17:18 You’re going to have all these apps, decentralized apps, social,
0:17:21 social decentralized apps where you own your content, all this crazy stuff.
0:17:24 Right. But nobody actually had built any of them.
0:17:27 It was just like a bunch of VCs talking about it in circles.
0:17:29 Our lame white papers, whatever the hell that is.
0:17:32 All the papers and like insane funding, but like they didn’t build a prototype.
0:17:34 But nobody would use it, right?
0:17:35 So we we came up with the idea.
0:17:38 We were like, hey, how do we have Milk Road?
0:17:41 If we’re this crypto newsletter, we believe in crypto.
0:17:43 Why don’t we create our own little grant?
0:17:45 And so we created a grant called the milk money grant.
0:17:48 We’re like, this is not enough to get rich.
0:17:49 But it’s a little bit of milk money, right?
0:17:53 It’s enough where you can justify spending like two or three months on a project.
0:17:56 And it was one ETH, which at the time was like maybe two or three grand.
0:18:00 And so we had, I think, over like 2000 submissions.
0:18:02 And we said, you could build whatever you want.
0:18:04 It’s some use case or application of crypto.
0:18:08 And there was like so we ended up picking 10 or 12 people.
0:18:13 So we gave away probably what what is that like, you know, 36 grand.
0:18:16 And we just use our like ad revenue money to like pay that out.
0:18:19 We just treat it as an expense of the business.
0:18:20 And then we got to meet these people.
0:18:22 And they were super interesting, young, high caliber people
0:18:25 that were building really interesting things.
0:18:27 And even though they were probably already making more than two or three
0:18:31 grand in their job, it just felt like a road scholarship.
0:18:34 It felt like they got accepted, that they were getting paid to do something.
0:18:36 They had an excuse to go like scratch this itch.
0:18:37 And that’s the way we framed it.
0:18:38 We’re like, what’s an itch you want to scratch?
0:18:39 It doesn’t need to be the biggest project.
0:18:42 But something you want to see built that you want to use.
0:18:43 What would it be?
0:18:45 And then people built all kinds of things.
0:18:46 And it was a fantastic experience.
0:18:49 It was honestly really, really awesome.
0:18:51 And I forgot about it until now.
0:18:52 Actually, it’s something I want to do again.
0:18:55 I have a couple ideas of what I might do with it.
0:18:56 Do you want to talk about those or no?
0:19:01 I have a specific idea that I want to fund and I want to fund it.
0:19:04 And maybe it’s not even going to be that big of a business.
0:19:06 So it might be just like a philanthropic way.
0:19:08 But is my my version of the Young Hustlers grant.
0:19:12 So the other day, I was sitting around us thinking about my time in college
0:19:15 because I have a cousin who’s who just got accepted into college, two cousins,
0:19:17 actually, and they were like, what advice did you have?
0:19:19 And I was like, well, what do you want?
0:19:20 Do you know what you want or do you not know what you want?
0:19:23 If you don’t know what you want, you should just spend that time dabbling.
0:19:27 Go meet a bunch of people, try a bunch of things, do a shadow, a bunch of people.
0:19:30 Go try to figure out what what the menu even is and maybe what type of stuff.
0:19:32 Do you like seafood? Do you like steak, chicken, salads?
0:19:33 What do you what do you want?
0:19:35 And one of them was like, I know what I want.
0:19:37 I want to be an entrepreneur.
0:19:38 And I was like, cool.
0:19:41 He’s like, so that’s why I’m doing this like business program and whatever.
0:19:42 I’m like, awesome.
0:19:44 They’re not going to teach you how to be an entrepreneur in college.
0:19:46 That’s not what’s actually going to happen there, right?
0:19:47 I know what you’re thinking.
0:19:48 Same thing I thought.
0:19:52 If I go to school and I get a business degree, then I will you know how to run a
0:19:55 business and start a business and run a business is like, no,
0:19:57 that’s not at all what you’re going to get out of that.
0:19:58 So I said, here’s the best thing you can do.
0:20:02 I said, actually, this is something that every college campus could have this.
0:20:06 And I think it is the best college campus business that I can think of
0:20:07 for somebody like like me.
0:20:10 So if you listen to podcasts, maybe you’re wired like me or Sam.
0:20:13 And that is to create the onion for your campus.
0:20:18 So here’s the here’s why I know about you.
0:20:22 But when I was in college, like the campus paper was like a big deal.
0:20:25 Maybe now with, yeah, like smartphones being awesome in social media.
0:20:26 Maybe this is dead and I’m a boomer.
0:20:30 No, it’s still around because you love to read about yourself and your friends.
0:20:31 Yeah, exactly.
0:20:33 You want to know what’s going on on your campus, what’s the news,
0:20:35 what happened with your teams, etc.
0:20:38 Also, there was like, it’s like the procrastination element of it,
0:20:40 where there’s like the Sudoku and there’s like the crossword
0:20:42 and there’s shit you could do while you’re in class.
0:20:46 So the camp at my school at Duke, everybody read the Duke Chronicle.
0:20:48 And I never thought about it.
0:20:49 I didn’t even know who wrote it.
0:20:50 I didn’t even consider what was going on there.
0:20:52 But if I was smart, what I would have done to say,
0:20:55 I’m actually going to create a little business here on campus.
0:20:57 I’m going to create a newspaper.
0:21:00 But of course, first rule of business, different is better than better.
0:21:01 So I’m not going to create just another school
0:21:04 newspaper that’s reporting just the facts.
0:21:06 I’m going to create the onion for my campus.
0:21:08 So it’s basically a satirical newspaper.
0:21:09 This will teach me a bunch of skills.
0:21:11 So I’ll get the skills of creating a business.
0:21:12 How do you start a business?
0:21:14 I’ll get the skills of content creation.
0:21:18 So copywriting, humor, creating a content schedule, content pipeline,
0:21:23 hiring and firing people, getting ad sales and ad revenue, distribution.
0:21:25 How am I going to get people to read this?
0:21:28 Product differentiation, marketing, naming the thing.
0:21:31 And it’s the perfect type of business for college because it’s sandbox.
0:21:34 So I think one pressure a lot of people have when they’re in college,
0:21:34 they want to be an entrepreneur.
0:21:38 Is they try to think of businesses that are like the businesses
0:21:41 they read about on TechCrunch or like big money making things.
0:21:42 Yeah, I’m going to create the next big thing.
0:21:43 And that’s really hard.
0:21:45 And also, you’re a beginner, you’re a white belt.
0:21:47 So you don’t go look at the moves that black belts do necessarily.
0:21:50 Maybe like learn the best white belt moves and you need a white belt business.
0:21:53 For me, that was my sushi restaurant thing, my virtual sushi restaurant.
0:21:55 It was like the hot dog thing.
0:21:58 And then you’re like college, you know, like moves business or whatever.
0:22:03 Right. We had little like starter businesses that themselves are not meant to last.
0:22:06 But they teach you a whole bunch of like the core building block skills
0:22:10 that when you lump them together is this thing called business.
0:22:14 So you’re going to encourage them to create the onion for college.
0:22:17 Exactly. So I want basically people who are I don’t know
0:22:18 how many college kids listen to this, to be honest.
0:22:20 But if you if you are or you have a kid in college,
0:22:22 I want to hustle on every campus.
0:22:26 So like one hustler to create their version of the campus paper.
0:22:28 And I got to figure out the details,
0:22:31 but I’m down to basically put in some amount of money,
0:22:35 like 10 grand or 15 grand to like kickstart people on this thing.
0:22:36 I don’t think it’ll take much money.
0:22:40 I think 10 grand will be more than enough to start these on several campuses.
0:22:44 And I think they should become self-sustaining cash flow businesses from there.
0:22:47 And I think that the people who run these will be way far ahead.
0:22:51 And people don’t even know, like, for example, Barstool, you know, Barstool started.
0:22:55 A physical paper that he like gave to colleges, right?
0:22:58 Not colleges exactly, but yeah, in Boston, he would.
0:23:01 So it was basically a physical newspaper
0:23:04 that Dave would write under, I think, pen names.
0:23:06 And it was you can go find out the font is so funny.
0:23:08 It’s like comic sans on the internet.
0:23:12 I think he even bought or he reused other people’s newspaper,
0:23:16 like the free newspaper that you pull the the you pull out that piece of glass
0:23:19 and then you can grab one. You know what I’m saying?
0:23:20 Like, I mean, he bought it.
0:23:22 Let he I think he bought a few of his own.
0:23:26 And he like literally placed them on corners where it was like, you know,
0:23:27 like those free newspaper things.
0:23:30 And it was mostly a gambling newspaper.
0:23:32 It was like a gambling rag. He called it.
0:23:33 And what he would do is in the morning,
0:23:36 he would write the thing or whatever he’d get it printed, and then he would
0:23:39 or sorry, the previous night, he would write the thing, get it printed.
0:23:41 And then in the morning, he would rush into the subway.
0:23:44 And he’d just be handing it out to people getting on the subway in Boston
0:23:46 or getting on the whatever the underground is there.
0:23:48 And that’s how Barstool got its initial distribution.
0:23:50 And then he would hand them out all day.
0:23:51 Then he would go home.
0:23:55 He would be calling advertisers to try to get like enough money to print the thing
0:23:58 again, and then he would write the thing under all of his pen names
0:23:59 and work on his copywriting skills.
0:24:02 Then he would go get them printed and figure out a manufacturer product.
0:24:04 And the next day, he would go distribute it again.
0:24:06 And over time, he got like other people to hand them out
0:24:08 and other people to write the thing and other people to do the ad sales.
0:24:11 And it became Barstool, which is this like, you know,
0:24:14 many hundreds million dollar company for Dave.
0:24:15 But that’s how it started.
0:24:18 That’s amazing. Yeah, you should go.
0:24:21 The listener, you guys should go and Google and see the early ones.
0:24:22 It’s pretty hilarious.
0:24:24 So I’m thinking about after this, I’m going to put up a Google Doc.
0:24:25 That’s that’s my call to ask.
0:24:28 I’m going to put up a Google Doc, figuring out what are my actual rules
0:24:30 and who am I looking for and how to apply.
0:24:32 We’re in the show notes of this thing.
0:24:35 I’m just going to make an open doc anybody can can read and submit to.
0:24:38 And I’m going to think of a name because I think the name matters.
0:24:39 And I’m also going to I’m going to treat it like a franchise.
0:24:42 So every campus will have like the same naming convention.
0:24:44 And then we’ll share the learning.
0:24:47 So if you’re the kid at Northwestern, you’re going to be able to
0:24:50 in some kid at Duke comes up with a good distribution idea.
0:24:52 We’re just going to make one group chat where like all the people
0:24:55 are like kind of sharing what’s working and what’s not.
0:24:56 And I’m really curious to see what happens.
0:24:58 And to me, this is my version of like the lemonade stand.
0:25:02 It’s like the slightly superior lemonade stand type of business
0:25:03 that I think would be great.
0:25:05 I wish I had done this in college.
0:25:10 So I’ll take my bow because I have successfully, potentially rather
0:25:14 proven that this idea might be one of the bigger ones that we’ve ever talked about.
0:25:17 It’s it actually is quite exciting.
0:25:21 Even like when you’re talking ten ten thousand dollars
0:25:24 and a newspaper, which is like a silly thing, but it’s awesome.
0:25:26 Like that’s awesome.
0:25:29 And that’s kind of the point with this is like these things,
0:25:32 when you repackage charity or whatever you want to call this
0:25:35 into a game, it kind of makes it exciting.
0:25:37 It makes it fun. It makes it cool.
0:25:40 Yeah, what’s the name for this sort of action philanthropy, right?
0:25:43 It’s like it’s not charity for the completely impoverished,
0:25:47 but you are giving people both inspiration, maybe capital and an excuse
0:25:51 to go and better their lives or improve their lives, live up to their potential,
0:25:52 like take the next step.
0:25:54 Is there a name for this where you’re not?
0:25:57 It’s not starving kids in Africa, but it is,
0:26:00 you know, kind of broke college kids who now have something to get excited about.
0:26:02 What what would you is there a name for something like that?
0:26:03 I got to think about it.
0:26:06 But I would in my head, I’ve been calling it incentivized philanthropy.
0:26:09 That’s that’s too that’s too much of a mouthful.
0:26:10 So we have to think about it.
0:26:13 What this really comes down to is
0:26:18 just a slight differing incentivization has like massive
0:26:21 difference in the in the outcome versus just giving versus
0:26:24 not only one of you are going to get this and you all got to get after it.
0:26:27 So there’s a few versions of this, by the way, that I’ve thought about in the past one.
0:26:31 So when the Teal Fellowship came out, I thought it was genius.
0:26:34 Peter Teal basically had this point of view that universities are a bubble
0:26:39 and that we they have this halo, this umbrella
0:26:41 where you can never criticize a university college.
0:26:44 What education? It’s the most important thing for our kids.
0:26:46 How dare you? I thought it was crazy when I heard about it.
0:26:48 He’s like, education might be the fifth thing that they do.
0:26:50 And he called it. He said, education is a bundle.
0:26:51 And I forgot what he bundled it as.
0:26:54 But he was like, it’s an insurance policy for the parent.
0:26:57 You give them you make sure your kid gets this degree because that is a
0:27:00 my kid’s not going to fall through the cracks of society insurance.
0:27:02 He’s like, and then it’s a filtering process.
0:27:06 So he’s like, for companies, they don’t care what you learned at Harvard.
0:27:09 But if Harvard did a good job filtering, then I already know I’m picking from,
0:27:12 you know, the the smarter end of the crop when it comes to hiring.
0:27:14 So it’s a filtering bundle.
0:27:16 It’s a social social piece.
0:27:17 That’s part of the bundle.
0:27:18 Then there’s the education component.
0:27:19 That’s part of the bundle.
0:27:22 And he had like five or six things that he’s like, together, those are all part of it.
0:27:25 He’s like, what’s going to happen is people are going to unbundle the bundle.
0:27:29 And so what he did was he came out and said, I think universities are such a waste
0:27:33 that if you’re a high potential person, I will come out with the Teal Fellowship.
0:27:37 I will pay you 120 grand, I think it was to drop out of college.
0:27:40 And if you’re in college, I’ll pay you to drop out.
0:27:43 And Peter Teal, for all of his like
0:27:47 very unsmooth, uncharismatic ways of speaking,
0:27:50 the guy’s kind of a master of communication.
0:27:52 If you just don’t make him speak,
0:27:57 you know, give a talk and you’re not looking at the the poetry of it.
0:28:03 The if you if you read an article about his presentation and see the quotes,
0:28:04 it’s the best. It’s the best.
0:28:06 And he, by the way, Peter, he literally has speed traders.
0:28:10 So when he has a point, he’ll go on tour and he’ll give his speech.
0:28:12 Universities are a bubble.
0:28:14 And it’s not that he just said that off the cuff.
0:28:16 It’s like he has a point of view that actually the universities,
0:28:17 there’s something going on with them.
0:28:23 And it’s they’re sort of a a a a a a weird thing going on.
0:28:23 And that’s what he does.
0:28:27 And then the speech writers are like, so are you saying that universities are a bubble?
0:28:30 Yeah. Nailed it.
0:28:32 Cool headline. All right, what’s the what’s the subhead, right?
0:28:34 And so he gets it basically workshopped himself and his team.
0:28:36 And then he literally goes on tour.
0:28:37 He’s done this a couple of times.
0:28:40 He did it with the zero to one thing, which is that and he does.
0:28:42 He uses a provocative statement.
0:28:43 So he says universities are bubble.
0:28:46 Something that he knows is going to basically it’s a head turner.
0:28:53 You’re saying or you think MBA students are have negative impacts on new companies.
0:28:57 Yeah, or he’ll say by the time the MBAs are in, the alpha is gone, right?
0:29:00 Like once the MBAs are flooding into a space, the opportunity is gone.
0:29:03 But the bigger one that he did was when he did his book zero to one,
0:29:06 he went on tour instead of saying by my book, I’m Peter Teal.
0:29:07 I’ve had a great business success.
0:29:09 You know, I’ve shared some of my lessons.
0:29:10 Was it competition is bad?
0:29:12 Competition is for losers.
0:29:15 Yeah. And he’s like, oh, this idea in capitalism that, you know, competition,
0:29:16 it brings out the best in us.
0:29:18 No, competition is for losers.
0:29:21 He said the only goal of a business is shoot for monopoly monopoly.
0:29:22 I thought that’s illegal.
0:29:24 You literally get broken up if you’re a monopoly.
0:29:25 And he’s like, exactly.
0:29:27 So he finds the head turning thing.
0:29:29 And when he has it, he builds like a pretty convincing case.
0:29:35 So he did this with the Teal Fellowship and he paid kids to drop out of school.
0:29:38 Like, wow, what a what’s the worst influence you could have on my child
0:29:41 is convincing them to drop out of school, drop out of their education.
0:29:42 How many kids a year do it?
0:29:43 Do you know?
0:29:47 I remember I hosted them at my office.
0:29:49 I think the first or second year of the Teal Fellowship.
0:29:51 And there was like 20 kids in it ish.
0:29:56 There was like one of the like 19 year olds or 18 year olds were like at my office.
0:29:57 And I was like, hey, who are you guys?
0:29:59 What are you doing? They’re like, oh, we don’t know.
0:30:00 It was super disorganized, by the way.
0:30:01 And Peter Teal was not there.
0:30:03 All right. So I apply.
0:30:07 I apply and one of Peter Teal’s team members selects however many people you
0:30:10 said, six or eight people, they wire you the money.
0:30:14 And they just said, do they say, come back to me with three months with a thing?
0:30:15 No, no, you at the time, I don’t know what it is now.
0:30:17 But at the time you would get accepted.
0:30:19 You would drop out, they’d give you the money.
0:30:22 You would come to San Francisco and you would participate in the batch.
0:30:24 And so you live there.
0:30:26 I don’t know if you live together, but they were all.
0:30:27 I mean, they all shut up in my office.
0:30:29 So there was definitely there for at least a period of time.
0:30:31 I’m not sure if it was the whole program or what, but it was pretty open ended.
0:30:32 And it was long.
0:30:35 Does 100 grand go towards starting your company or is it
0:30:37 $100,000 plus three months of rent?
0:30:40 It’s a two year, $100,000 grant for young people who want to build
0:30:42 new things instead of sitting in a classroom.
0:30:44 Nice. 20 or 30 people per year.
0:30:46 You’ve got to be 22 or younger to do it.
0:30:48 You’ll need to drop out in order to have it.
0:30:50 You don’t have to move to San Francisco.
0:30:52 And an idea is enough.
0:30:54 That’s that was the idea of it.
0:30:56 It’s been going for, I don’t know, 10 years now.
0:30:58 So here’s some of the notable recipients.
0:31:03 So the CEO and founder of Dillon Field of Figma, which is a 50
0:31:06 billion dollar company, I think is it tens of billions of companies.
0:31:10 Then there’s Oyo Rooms, which was like a hotel style startup out of India
0:31:13 that also was worth many, many billions.
0:31:17 There’s Austin, Austin Russell, the guy who created Luminar Technologies,
0:31:20 which I think he became the youngest billionaire ever.
0:31:21 It was like self driving technology.
0:31:26 And then, of course, the founder of Ethereum, which is a, who knows,
0:31:30 hundreds of billions of dollars value creation thing.
0:31:31 Then there’s the founder of Loom.
0:31:33 I didn’t know that, which was a startup that was
0:31:34 required for hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:31:37 The Josh Browder from Do Not Pay, which I love.
0:31:40 And then there’s like other things that I don’t even know about
0:31:43 because maybe they’re not for profit, but there’s like a guy who created
0:31:45 a software to detect Parkinson’s disease.
0:31:48 And then there’s a handful of like recipients like that, where maybe
0:31:50 they’re behind the scenes doing amazing stuff.
0:31:54 So I guess that’s been a very, he probably didn’t do it for money.
0:31:56 But if you wanted to, there was a return on it.
0:32:01 But there’s definitely a return on like, I encouraged value creation.
0:32:02 Right. Oh yeah.
0:32:05 I mean, if even one of those, if just Ethereum had come out of it,
0:32:08 I mean, smashing success, if just Figma had come out of it,
0:32:09 smashing success, right?
0:32:12 So those are like the two power law winners of the thing.
0:32:15 By the way, go to muskfoundation.org.
0:32:17 Because I just saw that Elon Musk was the biggest donor.
0:32:20 He donated, I think, two million dollars to that Vesuvian challenge.
0:32:23 So Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman put up two million to pay.
0:32:27 And the Musk Foundation put up two million to describe what you see.
0:32:32 All right. So muskfoundation.org, it’s a website with no design.
0:32:36 It’s a blank piece of paper with five bullet points.
0:32:41 And it says muskfoundation grants are made in support of renewable energy,
0:32:46 human space exploration, pediatric research, science and engineering education,
0:32:50 development of artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
0:32:51 That’s it.
0:32:53 It’s like a Hello World page. Yeah.
0:32:59 Yeah. It’s basically a hundred words bullet pointed on a white piece of paper.
0:33:05 And this is one of the like extreme like, you know, money talks, wealth whispers thing.
0:33:08 Yeah, I call them sexy indifference.
0:33:14 Like that’s what we’re going to call this where you want people to know that you don’t care.
0:33:18 But you also want them to know that you don’t care because you’re cool.
0:33:20 So I’m going to call it sexy indifference.
0:33:22 It’s the homeless billionaire paradox, right?
0:33:23 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:33:28 The difference between a homeless man and a billionaire at face value is so small.
0:33:30 In San Francisco, you will not be able to tell the difference, right?
0:33:36 It’s in the takeaway being sometimes you could just be sexy and different in the very beginning
0:33:37 and you become successful.
0:33:38 Like you could just like it.
0:33:40 But so we’re going to call it sexy indifference.
0:33:47 I saw a LinkedIn the other day that was no profile photo, one line bio, one job experience,
0:33:49 twenty six years owner.
0:33:53 And I was like, here’s a man who’s going to leave a lot of money for his children.
0:33:55 You can tell you that right now.
0:33:57 I don’t know anything about this company name.
0:33:59 Never heard of this guy.
0:33:59 I can tell you right now.
0:34:01 This guy’s going to leave a lot of money to his children.
0:34:05 You don’t get twenty six years owner, no profile photo linked in.
0:34:08 That’s that’s like such a high signal thing to do or at worst.
0:34:12 He owns a really nice lake house or again, he’s broke.
0:34:13 It’s homeless. We don’t know.
0:34:18 Actually, it could go either way, but it’s one way or the other.
0:34:21 By the way, I bought the Peter Thiel shirt from the Joe Rogan podcast.
0:34:23 I’m going to wear it next week on the pod.
0:34:25 It was like a hundred and twenty dollar shirt, right?
0:34:32 The all white mesh net Peter Thiel shirt from from Saks was that?
0:34:36 And just I’m just teasing it right now subscribe on YouTube
0:34:38 and you’ll get to see me wearing that.
0:34:40 I don’t think it’s made for hairy people.
0:34:42 Mesh usually is not a great choice for us.
0:34:46 But yeah, I think my ID will go up like six or seven points if I wear it.
0:34:49 You’re going to look like human Velcro with all these like little threads sticking out.
0:34:58 I saw people talking about his shirt.
0:34:59 I thought it was pretty funny.
0:35:04 He he also had the the Nazi haircut, which is like totally in,
0:35:08 which is like you you do like a high fade, a high fade.
0:35:10 And he looked good.
0:35:12 Yeah, it looked good. I thought he looked great.
0:35:14 He looked great weathered.
0:35:19 But other than that, he seems to be on like kind of a bit of a rejuvenation kick.
0:35:22 Well, I mean, he’s like he’s like fifty six.
0:35:25 He’s all right. He can he can look fifty six, but he looks great.
0:35:27 He looks a little bit younger than fifty six.
0:35:33 But if you’ve heard of cool contests like this or even a cool name for what this is called,
0:35:37 tweet at me. I’m at the Sam Park because this stuff is very fascinating to me.
0:35:40 And I’m trying to understand like the economics of it because I think I might actually do it.
0:35:44 All right. If you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you.
0:35:47 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:35:50 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about,
0:35:55 how much money people make, how much money people spend, how much money businesses make.
0:35:57 You want to know all of this people’s net worth, all of it.
0:35:59 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:36:02 So my company, Hampton, we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:36:06 We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information,
0:36:10 like how much money they’re paying themselves, how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees,
0:36:14 what their team, my bonuses are, what their net worth is, what their portfolio looks like.
0:36:17 We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously.
0:36:20 And so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information.
0:36:22 So if you really cannot Google, you can’t find anywhere else.
0:36:27 And you could check it out at joinhampton.com, click the reports section on the menu,
0:36:29 click the salary and compensation report.
0:36:31 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:36:32 You’re going to love this stuff.
0:36:34 Check it out. Now back to the pod.
0:36:38 So are you going 50/50 with me on the MFM scholarship?
0:36:41 I’m not willing to commit to that yet.
0:36:42 But I’m trying to do it.
0:36:45 Look, I’m a slower person than you.
0:36:48 I’m thinking like the PAR family, like where where it’s going to go.
0:36:52 But oh, dude, the PAR floor, you use a golf pun.
0:36:54 It’s pretty. Yeah, I got to figure out something.
0:36:56 What did you call it? Par for the par for.
0:37:00 But I can’t decide if you want to go cheeky or like extra serious.
0:37:03 Like when you look at the Nobel Peace Prize, like they’re wearing like those
0:37:05 like the suits with the tails, you know what I mean?
0:37:08 Well, you know how it is. You know what you’re going to do.
0:37:12 You’re going to go cheeky on the front end, deadly serious on the execution.
0:37:14 I feel like that’s you.
0:37:15 I think that’s what we might do.
0:37:19 But I like I told we had the conversation with like a with my wife.
0:37:22 I’m like, I because like we actually have to sign documents.
0:37:24 And I’m like, should we do something like this?
0:37:26 And what do what are we going to do?
0:37:27 What are we going to do right now?
0:37:30 I’m I’m dude, I was I’m obsessed with like single motherhood because like
0:37:33 have you ever has your wife like whenever you got to like be a single parent
0:37:37 for the day, like when your wife’s gone or whatever, I’m like, this is impossible.
0:37:38 Yeah, it’s impossible.
0:37:40 It’s not like how do you it actually can’t be done.
0:37:43 So that’s my yeah.
0:37:46 So I’m like, if you’re a single mother, how do you get ahead?
0:37:48 Like, you know, if you want to like it, so it’s like a cycle.
0:37:51 So anyway, I’m think I’m like obsess it at that problem right now.
0:37:55 I’m trying to figure out how to how we could contribute to making
0:37:56 their those people’s lives better.
0:37:58 All right. What do you want to do?
0:38:03 I’ll give you a simple, useful lesson learned from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
0:38:05 OK.
0:38:08 Somebody asked Elon about hiring.
0:38:11 They go, Elon, when you do interview people still and when you interview them
0:38:13 for hiring, what do you ask them?
0:38:15 How does Elon Musk filter for great talent?
0:38:17 Have you ever seen what he said?
0:38:21 No, I well, I’ve heard one thing where he says, if I’m talking to someone
0:38:24 and I am like, you know, every once in a while, like 45 seconds in,
0:38:26 you can be like, oh, this is a bad match.
0:38:28 He’s like, I just act on that.
0:38:30 So like a 60 seconds in, I’ll just be like, hey, I don’t want to talk anymore.
0:38:33 And he just walks away.
0:38:35 It’s like his version of like getting a haircut with headphones in.
0:38:38 Yeah, let me.
0:38:40 He’s like, no.
0:38:43 So what he said was, tell me about the toughest problems you’ve dealt with
0:38:45 and how you dealt with those at your last company or project.
0:38:47 He goes, I like this question because it filters out.
0:38:50 It filters out candidates who haven’t actually done anything.
0:38:53 And you can ask them very detailed questions about it, and they will know the answer.
0:38:56 Whereas the person who was not actually responsible for doing the thing
0:38:57 won’t know the details.
0:38:59 And so it’s a very quick filtering mechanism.
0:39:01 Other questions that came from other people.
0:39:05 So Steve Jobs used to ask, why are you here?
0:39:08 And so he’s like, I want to understand their motivation.
0:39:09 Why are you even?
0:39:11 Why do you why are you here for this interview?
0:39:11 Why this company?
0:39:12 Why this job?
0:39:16 Why you is the most important thing that Steve Jobs said?
0:39:21 I know that Jeff Bezos asked a question about, do you consider yourself a lucky person?
0:39:25 I was going to say I interviewed with Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb.
0:39:29 And he was like the last person in just 15 minutes.
0:39:33 And the only question he asked me was on a scale of one to 10, how lucky are you?
0:39:34 And what did you say?
0:39:35 I said, I’m a nine.
0:39:38 I go, you know, I’m lucky for a variety of reasons and explain them.
0:39:41 And then I said, I don’t know if it’s luck or what it is, but like,
0:39:42 I seem to get my way a lot.
0:39:44 And he and I go, why’d you ask that?
0:39:49 And he said, well, because if luck’s real, I want to be around lucky people.
0:39:52 And even if it’s not real, I want to be around people who tend to get their way.
0:39:54 Yeah, exactly.
0:39:56 And I was like, all right, that’s I guess that’s good.
0:40:02 So Dan Rose, who worked for Bezos in the early days, I think like 1999 to 2006.
0:40:05 So he’s a fun person to read about.
0:40:08 Yeah, he’s a good follow on on Twitter as well, because he shares some good
0:40:10 like personal stories from the Bezos era.
0:40:12 So it’ll be like in 99.
0:40:16 We were struggling with this and we were sitting at our office in the stairwell
0:40:17 because we didn’t have time to make desks.
0:40:18 It’s like, oh, nice.
0:40:22 So he goes, Jeff Bezos, favorite interview question was, are you a lucky person?
0:40:26 It was a great way to filter for optimists and people who manifest success.
0:40:29 He goes, if you’re a successful, optimistic person, the humble leader,
0:40:32 right answer for this starts with, I’m the luckiest person on earth.
0:40:34 I’ve worked really hard to get where I am.
0:40:37 But a lot of things had to go right for me and I’ve taken full advantage of my luck.
0:40:40 That’s essentially like not the exact words, but that is the crux of what you
0:40:44 want them to say, which is I’ve worked really hard, but it took a tremendous amount
0:40:47 of luck and I take advantage of lucky breaks when they present themselves to me.
0:40:51 And he goes, sorting for optimistic people is a good proxy for leadership
0:40:52 potential and likelihood of success.
0:40:55 Perceiving yourself as lucky is a proxy for optimism.
0:40:58 Basically, people will always tell you they’re optimistic about things,
0:41:00 but they won’t always say that they’re lucky.
0:41:03 So it’s kind of like a stealth question to get at the optimism thing.
0:41:05 He goes, the humility part is also important.
0:41:07 It’s easy to filter out false humility.
0:41:10 Humble brags are very obvious when you ask follow up questions.
0:41:13 He goes, this isn’t the only question, but it’s a conversation starter.
0:41:16 It opens the door to someone’s personality beyond their resume.
0:41:17 There’s two wrong answers.
0:41:21 Number one, no, I’ve never really gotten lucky, but I’ve been able to overcome
0:41:23 and outwork all the bad things that happened to me.
0:41:26 And no, I never needed luck because I’m better, smarter, stronger,
0:41:28 faster than everybody else.
0:41:33 And there’s a third answer, which is like, no, I’ve been pretty unlucky.
0:41:36 Yeah, in which case it’s like, I don’t want to be around unlucky people.
0:41:38 Yeah, like, I don’t want to be around you.
0:41:40 Yeah. And that’s what Joe, that’s what Joe told me.
0:41:44 He was like, if you’re really lucky, you’re either luck’s real
0:41:46 in which case I want to be around you or you just make it work.
0:41:50 And if you’re, say, a one or two, you’re either unlucky if looks real.
0:41:51 I don’t want to be around that shit either.
0:41:54 Or you just think you’re a victim and I don’t want to be around that.
0:41:56 So that’s how he explained it to me.
0:41:58 Have you? And I thought it was weird, by the way.
0:42:00 I thought it was weird at the time.
0:42:01 Looking back, I think it was better.
0:42:03 I actually interviewed also at Google years ago.
0:42:07 They asked me like, how many days would it take you to, like,
0:42:12 clean the windows on like a skyscraper or something like that?
0:42:14 And I didn’t like that question.
0:42:16 I hated that question too.
0:42:19 One thing that interview questions, another way to think about them is
0:42:23 they’re meant to filter out certain people and they’re meant to pull in other people.
0:42:26 Right. So a great interview question will not just assess the person.
0:42:30 They will either attract or repel the wrong cultural fit.
0:42:32 And so I think one of the Google things is like part of the reason
0:42:35 I would hate that question is part of the reason they don’t want to hire me.
0:42:39 Right. Like they they want basically puzzle puzzle solving nerds.
0:42:41 And I heard this put really well.
0:42:44 So Max Levchin, I think was was the one that, you know, the creator of PayPal.
0:42:47 He was talking about he goes when I got acquired by Google.
0:42:51 I was like, how do they retain smart people here?
0:42:53 Because they’re trying to hire the most brilliant people on earth.
0:42:57 And then they’re telling them, go like tweak the knob on Google AdSense.
0:42:58 Go get us like a little edge.
0:43:02 It’s like not only is that soulless, but it is like literally
0:43:04 like almost the definition of a cog in the machine.
0:43:07 And he goes, the way they keep those people around is he’s like literally
0:43:11 in the bathrooms, they would have like really hard puzzles on the stalls.
0:43:13 And he’s like, they would give people like a crazy.
0:43:15 They had 20 percent time, which was like 20 percent time.
0:43:17 Just go work on whatever the hell you want.
0:43:19 It’s like they would have puzzles on the walls in the stall.
0:43:22 He’s like, because the actual work that we needed you to do would never like.
0:43:25 It’s not like mission driven enough.
0:43:29 It’s not hard enough to like intellectually stimulate you.
0:43:31 So they had all these other ways of intellectually
0:43:34 stimulate you and to coddle you like, we’ll do your laundry, we’ll feed you,
0:43:35 we’ll nurse you, we’ll need a bath.
0:43:37 Go ahead, there’s a bunch of bath over there on the right.
0:43:39 They would do everything they could to keep talent there.
0:43:43 And one of the things that he talked about was like, you know,
0:43:46 the PayPal mafia is probably the most successful
0:43:51 early group of people to come together in Silicon Valley, right?
0:43:54 They basically created, you know, they had Elon, they had Peter Teal,
0:43:56 they had Macs, they went on to create like, I don’t know,
0:44:00 10 plus billion dollar companies out of the like first 15 people there.
0:44:04 Yeah, like the the smallest things of the PayPal mafia was like a Yelp.
0:44:05 Yeah, exactly.
0:44:08 Like the guy Yelp is like, you know, sitting at the kids table with their.
0:44:10 Yeah. No offense, Jeremy, he’s a good dude.
0:44:14 So the thing with PayPal was they treated it.
0:44:16 They go, we’re trying to create a cult.
0:44:19 They go, the idea of diversity is not what you wanted to start up.
0:44:22 Now, you couldn’t really say this today, but they’re on the record
0:44:25 of saying this a long time ago, which is that you want a certain type
0:44:28 of person because that breeds a certain type of culture.
0:44:31 So you, you know, pick the culture and then you only want to attract
0:44:33 people that are going to like reinforce that culture.
0:44:37 And you want to like immediately like repel otherwise smart people
0:44:39 who would dilute that culture.
0:44:41 And so for him, I remember there was a famous one, which was they were
0:44:44 interviewing an engineer and the guy said, you know, they’re like,
0:44:46 what do you like to do outside of work?
0:44:48 And he’s like, I love playing basketball.
0:44:50 And they match like, I don’t want to hire this guy.
0:44:51 They’re like, what?
0:44:52 Cause he plays basketball.
0:44:55 He’s like, I’ve never met a great engineer who loves, who says he loves
0:44:56 to play pickup hoops.
0:44:58 He’s like, great engineers have other hobbies.
0:45:01 And he’s like, and he’s like, even if we’re wrong, it’s the thing that
0:45:05 Monish said on the podcast, Monish Pabrai said, when he met Warren Buffett,
0:45:07 he goes, Warren, you’re a great judge of people.
0:45:09 How do you do it, man?
0:45:10 How did you get your people radar so good?
0:45:12 He goes, I don’t think I have a good people radar.
0:45:15 He goes, what I have is a very tight filter.
0:45:19 He goes, so if you take me to a cocktail party and you let me talk to
0:45:20 a hundred people for five minutes each.
0:45:25 In that five minutes, I could probably take the worst five or seven people.
0:45:27 And I’ll tell you, these people are lousy.
0:45:27 Don’t hire them.
0:45:30 And the best five or seven people, I could probably tell you them.
0:45:35 He’s like, and then the other, you know, 85, 90 people, I don’t know.
0:45:36 I couldn’t make a judgment on them in five minutes.
0:45:37 It wasn’t obvious to me.
0:45:39 So I put them all in the no pile.
0:45:41 He goes, well, isn’t that like a little harsh?
0:45:43 You know, there was, there might be some great people in there.
0:45:47 He goes, yeah, but the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle
0:45:48 of life is so high.
0:45:52 The cost of discarding somebody who might be great is nothing.
0:45:54 It is so low comparatively.
0:45:58 He’s like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people.
0:46:02 Meaning you’re either obviously in or I put you in the too hard to tell bucket.
0:46:05 And I just lump you in with all the obvious nose.
0:46:08 And that was a non-obvious insight from Warren Buffett.
0:46:12 That’s a very, there are freaks like a Peter Thiel or Marcus
0:46:15 Zuckerberg who kind of nailed that harshness early on.
0:46:16 And then there’s normal people like me.
0:46:17 And I’m sure you were like this.
0:46:21 Where you find like a 22 year old and like, I don’t know.
0:46:22 Maybe they’re promising.
0:46:24 Maybe they were nervous at that interview.
0:46:26 Maybe they were this, maybe they were this.
0:46:28 And it feels good to give the underdog a shot.
0:46:33 Oftentimes that narrative isn’t, it doesn’t end the way that you’d like it to end.
0:46:38 Like the, like the people who that underdog narrative has worked have worked for me.
0:46:42 It’s someone like Steph Smith, where let’s hypothetically say she didn’t do well
0:46:45 in the interview, but she was so awesome because I saw her blog.
0:46:49 And I’m like, this person’s like quirky and interesting like that hypothetical
0:46:51 there as if anyone’s going to believe that was a hypothetical.
0:46:55 Well, no, what I mean is like, I think she, I don’t remember the interview.
0:46:56 I think she did great.
0:46:59 But like, I was into her because I just read her like, because I read her blog.
0:47:02 I’m like, oh, you have some type of it factor.
0:47:07 Now, maybe I wasn’t sure how that it factor could be deployed or used to my benefit.
0:47:11 Or whether it’s like, like if it was going to be used, like if she was actually
0:47:13 going to like just become the best at like blogging or if she’s going to become
0:47:15 the best, the best business woman, I’m not sure.
0:47:19 But there was some type of like kernel of like fire.
0:47:21 There was a fire where I’m like, I don’t know how I’m going to harness it.
0:47:22 Can you harness whatever?
0:47:23 But there was something there.
0:47:27 Whereas I’ve hired a lot of people who, who didn’t exactly have that.
0:47:28 They didn’t have a fire there.
0:47:32 But I was like, maybe it’s there and I make these stupid decisions.
0:47:37 And it doesn’t work because you want to be a good person or whatever.
0:47:39 And it doesn’t work.
0:47:40 What’s that phrase?
0:47:42 No good deed goes unpunished.
0:47:44 That’s how it felt with a lot of, with a lot of my hiring decisions.
0:47:47 Yeah, you don’t want to face the confrontation of it.
0:47:49 You don’t want to admit that you were wrong.
0:47:51 You don’t want to go back to square one and try to find somebody again.
0:47:54 You don’t want to admit to your team that you were wrong on this.
0:47:59 There’s a whole bunch of very understandable reasons why we make this mistake.
0:48:00 Did I tell you how much of trouble?
0:48:03 A lot of the, which a lot of the maybes ended up being maybes.
0:48:07 Like a lot of the maybe people ended up being like, like it was there.
0:48:08 I don’t know.
0:48:10 It was just in the end.
0:48:12 Yeah, it always an always stayed in.
0:48:14 All right, sorry, what are we saying?
0:48:16 I got a lot of trouble at Twitch because when I was there,
0:48:19 I tweeted out something that was very true for me and I think it’s true.
0:48:22 But the COO and others didn’t like it.
0:48:26 I said something to the effect of you always know in the first two weeks,
0:48:29 if someone’s going to be great, great people are great right off the bat.
0:48:31 They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks.
0:48:34 I’ve never seen or, you know, rarely ever will you ever see
0:48:38 somebody who turns out to be great that just was in the first two or three weeks.
0:48:39 And they yelled at you?
0:48:42 Yeah, they were like, that’s not I mean, different people started
0:48:47 at different pace, places and that, you know, that’s not basically they were kind
0:48:50 of they took it as almost like that’s too harsh.
0:48:54 And somehow it was like seen as like not diverse.
0:48:57 Like, oh, there’s a group of people who are slower to acclimate.
0:49:02 Who yell that you HR did and our COO responded to the tweet.
0:49:04 It was like, I do not like, you know, stand by this.
0:49:08 In fact, I’ve since then I’ve seen a bunch of other people say the exact same thing.
0:49:10 A bunch of other like, you know, successful people say the same thing.
0:49:13 So kind of in some ways validated this like opinion, how do you first
0:49:18 hand experience I had, which was that the great people show greatness very early on
0:49:21 first two weeks, I tend to know if this person could be a winner.
0:49:24 Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody can’t be a solid contributor
0:49:27 that had a slow first couple of weeks, but they’re never the ones who are great.
0:49:30 And great is all I’m really looking for.
0:49:31 Right. The Warren Buffett be a hard grader.
0:49:34 That is some of the best advice you can get.
0:49:38 How do you spell? Because that would be your reply to that.
0:49:41 Just a fart noise is like when they reply to you, like, you’re not supposed to do that.
0:49:44 It’s like, no, I just said my point exactly.
0:49:48 And then they’re like, what?
0:49:52 That’s a ridiculous thing to think, because the company was probably founded
0:49:55 on that principle, particularly, I don’t know, Emmett, but I’ve seen his interviews.
0:49:58 He seems like a particular, like pretty hardcore.
0:50:01 For sure, I imagine he was like that early on.
0:50:03 And so that company was probably founded with that principle in mind.
0:50:06 We have this all the time in my team.
0:50:11 So Ben, who’s my business partner, we will have some interaction with somebody
0:50:15 and he’ll be like, so what do you think of how that’s going with that person?
0:50:18 Like maybe it’s a company we invested in and then we like talk to the CEO
0:50:21 and then we’re like, I don’t really know exactly kind of why.
0:50:23 Like they’ve been really slow to take action
0:50:25 or they were saying all kinds of weird stuff that didn’t make any sense.
0:50:31 Or we hire somebody junior and then he’s like, how’s it going with what’s so and so so far?
0:50:34 And it’s like, dude, if you have to ask, you know, right?
0:50:36 Like that’s the first, first principle.
0:50:38 So you have to ask, you know, and I’ll say something pretty harsh.
0:50:39 I’m like, well, I don’t know.
0:50:43 We talked about doing these three things and then those three things haven’t happened.
0:50:45 And there’s been no update on them in a week.
0:50:48 So I don’t know how do you think it’s going, Ben?
0:50:50 And he’s like, yeah.
0:50:53 And he’ll usually say something because Ben, one of the great things about Ben
0:50:58 is Ben’s generous interpretation of almost everybody, like his wife will yell at him
0:51:00 and he’d be like, I mean, maybe I could have been a little more present.
0:51:01 Right. That’s his first reaction.
0:51:07 I think most people get to that, you know, but their first reaction is, you know,
0:51:08 somewhat, well, that’s unfair.
0:51:09 That doesn’t make any sense.
0:51:10 You did this, blah, blah, blah, right?
0:51:11 People get defensive, whatever.
0:51:12 He doesn’t really do that.
0:51:13 It doesn’t blame.
0:51:17 He gives a generous interpretation of people, which is why I think everybody loves Ben.
0:51:21 But at the same time in a company, like it’s a really harsh, hard way to run a company
0:51:26 because sometimes we’re like, Ben, like, so do you think we should be making excuses for
0:51:30 like, do you think like great people just like have all these excuses and reasons why
0:51:32 they’re not just like being great right now?
0:51:35 Or are they just great in spite of circumstances?
0:51:38 It’s like, obviously, great people are great in spite of circumstances versus
0:51:44 good people are bogged down in the 10 maybe reasons why they’re struggling right now.
0:51:50 And so I’m definitely, but that attitude that has served me in the workplace
0:51:56 doesn’t serve me outside of the workplace because, you know, having a generous
0:51:59 interpretation for people outside of work is a really awesome trade.
0:52:05 As a leader in a company, it tends to actually not work so well in the same way
0:52:07 that democracy is great.
0:52:09 Democracy inside a company where everybody gets a vote on what we’re doing
0:52:11 is not a great way to build a company.
0:52:14 Like companies are benevolent dictatorships when they win.
0:52:16 And you have to be comfortable being a benevolent dictator there.
0:52:19 But they might not work in other areas of your life.
0:52:20 Yeah.
0:52:24 And and that’s why a lot of the most successful people are fucking assholes.
0:52:27 You have to be the four times divorced or whatever.
0:52:31 Yeah, it’s because what makes you great at one thing can make you shitty on another thing.
0:52:34 All right, I enjoyed that conversation.
0:52:35 Is that the pod?
0:52:36 That’s the pod.
0:52:37 That’s the pod.
0:52:44 Sam, how many diapers you change in per day right now?
0:52:46 Personally, what’s your DPD?
0:52:49 Yeah, for the up until recently, it was here comes a line, by the way.
0:52:52 At least one a day divide by two.
0:52:54 Now it’s one every three days.
0:52:57 Wow, that’s pretty incredible.
0:52:59 Well, we have a nanny.
0:53:01 How how happy are you with the nanny?
0:53:05 Very, you know, a nanny tends to be a nanny for the whole family.
0:53:09 So like she does our laundry, she’ll cook a little bit, she’ll clean.
0:53:11 I usually work at the kitchen table with headphones in.
0:53:16 And so I’m always present, like every 30 minutes, I take my headphones out and I go and play.
0:53:18 So the nanny, my my goal was done.
0:53:21 Make sure my child does not have a Jamaican accent.
0:53:26 She threw a curveball in the end.
0:53:30 There was but your goal was for your kid to not have a Jamaican accent.
0:53:32 Like, I didn’t want someone else to do all of the raising of my child.
0:53:34 You know what I mean?
0:53:36 Oh, you did a copywriting move there.
0:53:37 That was nice. Yeah.
0:53:41 So if my kids, if Naomi ever says jam on, I’m going to be like, shit, I need to be involved.
0:53:44 Yeah, I’ve been working too hard.
0:53:47 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:53:53 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days on the road.
0:53:55 Let’s travel never looking back.
0:53:55 Bye.
0:54:05 [BLANK_AUDIO]

0:00:02 You said a couple interesting things, so let’s break this down.
0:00:03 We have no money, we’re bootstrapping.
0:00:05 Let’s get ourselves on GLG as experts.
0:00:08 I’m like, OK, my charge is $500 an hour.
0:00:09 She goes, no problem.
0:00:11 But we talked to someone after a few weeks,
0:00:13 and he goes, do you guys have research?
0:00:14 And we looked at each other.
0:00:16 We’re like, yeah, yeah, we have a report.
0:00:17 It’s $5,000.
0:00:19 So I was joked that was Ampush’s Angels round.
0:00:23 We raised $150,000 selling research reports to hedge fund
0:00:24 people.
0:00:25 It’s pretty sick.
0:00:26 That’s an amazing story.
0:00:27 And by the way, there’s eight of them
0:00:30 that have high eight or low nine figures in EBITDA.
0:00:32 The whole category has just crushed.
0:00:34 The two takeaways from this, by the way,
0:00:37 are sell to the rich, and then your way of figuring out
0:00:38 what they need was.
0:00:40 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:43 I know I could be what I want to.
0:00:47 I put my all in it like days off on the road.
0:00:48 Jesse, what up, dude?
0:00:49 How are you doing, man?
0:00:49 What’s up, guys?
0:00:51 I’m pumped to be on here.
0:00:52 Good to see you.
0:00:53 Where should we start?
0:00:55 You sent us a doc, had a bunch of cool ideas on it.
0:00:56 Which one do you want to start with?
0:00:58 Yeah, maybe some of the stuff we’ve
0:01:00 learned at GatewayX as we’ve been building new ideas.
0:01:02 I think the idea I’m most excited about,
0:01:04 which I think Sean, you and I have talked about,
0:01:06 is Ox Insights.
0:01:08 Sam, do you know about this business?
0:01:08 No.
0:01:10 What is Ox Insights?
0:01:11 Oh, dude, this is sick.
0:01:12 OK, tell us about this business.
0:01:14 You’re going to love it, Sam.
0:01:17 One of the things that as we’ve learned starting new businesses–
0:01:19 and some of them you guys probably know like Kehani, Sean,
0:01:21 you were a customer of it, it failed.
0:01:22 We stopped doing it.
0:01:24 And one thing I’ve learned sitting in this seat
0:01:27 is it’s really important to understand demand
0:01:31 and that there’s a customer who has a problem that you need.
0:01:32 And then goes like to stand up the thing.
0:01:34 With Growth Assistant, that’s what I did.
0:01:35 I already knew people needed it.
0:01:37 I just stood it up and immediately started to work.
0:01:41 And so I started my career in finance and consulting.
0:01:42 I went to Penn.
0:01:44 I got a million friends who were in private equity.
0:01:46 And after we sold Ampush, I would
0:01:50 get a call from one friend once a month without fail, who
0:01:52 worked at Blackstone or worked at TPG
0:01:54 or worked at one of these fancy private equity firms.
0:01:57 And they’d go, hey, I have this deal
0:01:59 in front of my investment committee.
0:02:01 It’s a billion dollar company.
0:02:03 And I’m getting asked all these questions
0:02:05 about their Google and Facebook ads, Jesse.
0:02:06 What if they don’t perform well?
0:02:08 Or how do we know they’re good at them?
0:02:10 And they’re asking me to look at the web traffic
0:02:11 and make some analysis.
0:02:13 Jesse, I have no idea.
0:02:14 And my investment kidney is not happy
0:02:17 because I can’t convince them to buy this business.
0:02:18 What should I ask them?
0:02:20 So the first few calls, I’m like, well, the same thing
0:02:21 any of us would do.
0:02:22 Well, go look at Google Analytics.
0:02:24 How many creatives are they testing?
0:02:27 And my fourth guy was like, dude, can you just do this for me?
0:02:30 And I’m like, me, I’m like, well, yeah, a couple hundred
0:02:31 thousand dollars I’ll do it for you.
0:02:32 And he’s like, oh, that’s it?
0:02:33 Yeah, done.
0:02:34 Let’s go do this.
0:02:38 All right, let’s take a quick break
0:02:40 because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot
0:02:40 has.
0:02:42 Now, they let me freestyle this ad here.
0:02:45 So I’m going to actually tell you what I think is interesting.
0:02:47 So they have this thing called the false spotlight,
0:02:48 showing all the new features that they released
0:02:49 in the last few months.
0:02:52 And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence.
0:02:55 I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but if you’re in HubSpot
0:02:57 and you have, let’s say, a customer there,
0:03:00 you can just basically add intelligence to that customer.
0:03:01 They estimate a revenue for that company.
0:03:03 How many employees it has.
0:03:05 Maybe their email address or their location
0:03:07 if they’ve ever visited your page or not.
0:03:09 And so you can enrich all of your data automatically
0:03:12 with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence.
0:03:14 They actually acquired a really cool company called Clearbit.
0:03:17 And it’s become Breeze, which is great because now it’s built in.
0:03:19 I always hated using two different tools
0:03:21 to try to do this. Now it’s all in one place.
0:03:24 And so all the data you had about your customers
0:03:25 now just got smarter.
0:03:26 So check it out.
0:03:27 You can actually see all the stuff they released.
0:03:28 It’s a really cool website.
0:03:31 Go to hubspot.com/spotlight to see them all
0:03:33 and get the demos yourself.
0:03:35 Back to this episode.
0:03:37 And so AUX Insights is essentially a private equity consulting
0:03:40 business that works for private equity firms,
0:03:42 specifically in the office of the CMO,
0:03:46 marketing related diligence and what’s called value creations.
0:03:47 Value creations after they buy the business,
0:03:49 they want you to spend time helping them put together
0:03:52 the strategy for how they grow the business.
0:03:55 And there’s businesses like Accordion, the cool example,
0:03:56 $300 million in revenue, $100 million in EBITDA.
0:03:58 It’s only a 12-year-old company.
0:04:00 They do the same exact business for Office of the CFO.
0:04:01 What?
0:04:02 So anything finance related.
0:04:03 Yeah, Accordion.
0:04:07 I mean, you can look at LEK is $800 million and $250 in EBITDA.
0:04:10 McKinsey has an over-billion-dollar business
0:04:14 just for private equity firms that’s got 55% EBITDA margins.
0:04:16 And when you say they’re Office of the CFO,
0:04:17 so let’s break this down.
0:04:19 So you said a couple of interesting things.
0:04:22 The first was, it’s a lot easier to succeed in business
0:04:24 if you first find the starving crowd.
0:04:28 So find the really hungry market versus how you and I,
0:04:30 Sam, like starter, at least I should just speak for myself.
0:04:31 I don’t know if you did the same thing,
0:04:34 but I would always be like, what’s a cool idea?
0:04:36 Or what’s something I could make?
0:04:38 Or what’s something that seems easy to do?
0:04:41 And it was easy at the start because it’s so familiar,
0:04:44 or it’s like just nearby, but I have no idea the demand.
0:04:46 Or the demand is all, another broke people like me.
0:04:48 So it’s gonna be really hard to sell and make money,
0:04:49 or I need so many customers to make money.
0:04:52 Whereas you’re like, well, let me work backwards.
0:04:54 Who are the richest people and the richest companies?
0:04:57 It’s like private equity, hedge funds,
0:04:58 that type of customer.
0:05:00 – They’re not price sensitive at all, they’re urgent.
0:05:02 – And they’re super rational.
0:05:05 They’re like, cool, if I can buy something for $100,000,
0:05:08 but it’s gonna help me make a $10 million decision,
0:05:11 great, you know, the math maths I’m in.
0:05:13 So they’re wealthy, they’re not as price sensitive,
0:05:14 they’re rational.
0:05:17 And in your case, you figured out what the need was
0:05:20 because you had one fortune at circumstance,
0:05:21 which was like, they were calling you
0:05:22 to ask you about this thing.
0:05:26 And you basically, so what you built was like a marketing
0:05:27 due diligence.
0:05:30 So they’re looking at a company, they need to know,
0:05:33 is there, are there digital ads performing very well?
0:05:35 Not so good, is there any red flags in here?
0:05:36 Any concerns?
0:05:38 In the same way that if I wanna go buy a company,
0:05:40 and I get a bunch of financial statements,
0:05:42 I might ask a super financially literate friend.
0:05:45 Yeah, like, hey, my accountant, can you look at this?
0:05:46 Can we do a quality of earnings?
0:05:48 Can we get some understanding of like,
0:05:50 are these numbers solid or not?
0:05:51 They are really financially literate,
0:05:53 but they’re not as Facebook ads, and Google ads,
0:05:56 and Pinterest ads literate as you are.
0:05:58 So you’re providing that diligence.
0:05:59 And then after they buy, then you’re like, cool,
0:06:02 and then we’ll help you like, we’ll show you some levers
0:06:04 that might be able to grow this thing
0:06:06 after you buy to create the value, right?
0:06:07 You should get background.
0:06:08 So you started and sold Ampush
0:06:11 for some tens of millions, I think, dollars, and then.
0:06:13 And then Visual Marketing Agency.
0:06:16 And then with that money, you went and started GatewayX,
0:06:18 which is almost an incubator.
0:06:20 Yeah, we call it a studio, and we told Coe.
0:06:23 Where you have started three or four or five businesses.
0:06:25 We started six, we’ve shut down two.
0:06:28 One is kind of going sideways, two have crushed it,
0:06:30 OX being one of them, and one is new.
0:06:31 Got it, okay.
0:06:32 And let me jump in and say two things.
0:06:35 What we call it at GatewayX in the studio, Sean,
0:06:39 is we have to have a unique insight and an unfair advantage.
0:06:40 I wanna build like, in 10 years,
0:06:43 I want this like holdcove studio thing
0:06:44 where we’ve got five to 15.
0:06:45 I don’t care what the number is.
0:06:47 Operating companies, they’re all profitable.
0:06:49 They’re compounding on top of each other,
0:06:51 and we’ve got this super cool culture of builders
0:06:53 basically inside of it.
0:06:55 – You don’t raise money at the start for them, right?
0:06:56 – We don’t raise money.
0:06:59 We tried it with Kahani, as you know, and it didn’t work.
0:07:00 Like it wasn’t, it just wasn’t for me, I shouldn’t say.
0:07:02 It was fine, it just wasn’t for me.
0:07:03 – What’s Kahani?
0:07:05 – Well, this is a great example of Sean’s point
0:07:07 of like a cool idea, so that you’re gonna think
0:07:09 the idea is cool, the second I tell it to you
0:07:11 in like a shitty idea of business.
0:07:12 I was like, look, e-commerce sites
0:07:14 look like they’re 10 years old.
0:07:16 And meanwhile, Instagram and TikTok
0:07:17 have got these like full vertical videos.
0:07:20 So let’s make a plug-in to let e-commerce companies
0:07:23 change themselves to look more like TikTok and Instagram.
0:07:26 So the first product was the little stories nav bar
0:07:29 at the top of every e-commerce site.
0:07:31 And we had it on Sean’s site, and I was like,
0:07:33 oh, it’s gonna, people are gonna engage with it.
0:07:34 The content’s gonna look bigger, it’s gonna,
0:07:36 and we launched it, and everybody,
0:07:38 people thought it was a really cool idea, right?
0:07:40 But nobody actually like, Sean.
0:07:41 – By the way, I thought it was an awesome idea.
0:07:43 In fact, I kind of still think it’s an awesome idea.
0:07:45 – It is a good idea, but it doesn’t solve
0:07:48 anybody’s problems, and nobody’s lining up for it.
0:07:50 And then we were like, oh, it’s improving your conversion.
0:07:51 But then it’s like, well, it’s not sure
0:07:53 it’s improving our conversion.
0:07:55 It kind of seems like people engage with it.
0:07:56 And then people are like, it’s kind of slowing my site down
0:07:57 or it takes me too much content.
0:07:59 They just ripped it off the site.
0:08:00 – Was it basically just a plug-in?
0:08:01 Is it a plug-in?
0:08:02 – Just a plug-in.
0:08:03 So I mean, we had a big vision for it, right?
0:08:05 You’d have landing pages and you could put your influencers.
0:08:08 I still think someone’s going to figure it out, but I sat there
0:08:10 and I was like, I got this other business, Growth Assistant.
0:08:12 And here’s a funny story, you guys will like this.
0:08:14 We go to Shop Talk.
0:08:15 And you know, Shop Talk matches you.
0:08:17 And I have one sales guy from Kahani
0:08:19 and one sales guy from Growth Assistant.
0:08:20 And they both do the matching thing.
0:08:22 The Kahani guy gets three meetings.
0:08:25 The Growth Assistant guy gets 25 meetings.
0:08:27 One selling like marketing talent in the Philippines.
0:08:30 And I go, man, is there’s ever a signal for like
0:08:33 solving a problem versus, you know, just a cool thing.
0:08:33 This is it.
0:08:35 And that was like one of the key decisions
0:08:36 where I was like, I don’t want to do this anymore.
0:08:38 – And with Aux, so with Kahani, he’s like,
0:08:40 yo, you want to invest?
0:08:40 We’d love to have you on board.
0:08:41 Here’s the deck.
0:08:42 And I’m like, looking at it, I’m like,
0:08:44 I kind of like the idea, but I’m not fully sold.
0:08:46 So I ended up not investing with Aux.
0:08:49 He half tells me the idea to text message.
0:08:51 And I’m like, I got to invest in this somehow, right?
0:08:53 Like even I was like, instantly I was like,
0:08:54 this shit’s going to work.
0:08:57 This is a great idea, much easier to solve.
0:08:59 And one really cool thing I had heard,
0:09:00 Jesse, can you talk about this?
0:09:03 Which is earlier when you were doing Ampush,
0:09:05 you signed up for GLG,
0:09:07 which is a like expert network
0:09:10 where basically rich dudes on Wall Street
0:09:11 will call you and be like, hey, nerd,
0:09:13 you know a lot about this biotech thing,
0:09:15 or you know a lot about newsletters.
0:09:18 – It’s like if a banker is about to take a company public,
0:09:20 like email software company public,
0:09:23 they want to talk to all types of users of email software
0:09:25 and ask them questions so they can have more conviction
0:09:26 in their decision.
0:09:27 – Yes.
0:09:28 And by the way, there’s eight of them
0:09:30 that all have like high eight or low nine figures
0:09:32 in EBITDA, to be clear.
0:09:35 There’s Guidepoint Global, there’s Alpha sites.
0:09:37 The whole category has just crushed.
0:09:40 – And it’s basically like if Brad Pitt called you
0:09:41 and was like, hey, you ever been
0:09:42 to this Italian restaurant in New York,
0:09:43 he’s going to take a supermodel there,
0:09:45 but you’ve been there and he’s like, how’s the parm?
0:09:46 And you’re like, that’s pretty good actually.
0:09:47 And then they’re like, cool, they hang up,
0:09:49 you don’t know why they asked you.
0:09:52 – And they pay you $1,000 for the feedback.
0:09:54 Well, here’s the story of GLG is hilarious.
0:09:57 So I don’t usually tell this part of the story,
0:09:58 but it starts earlier.
0:10:01 Young Jesse’s an associate at Goldman Sachs.
0:10:03 He decides, my best friend, who’s my co-founders,
0:10:05 hedge fund blew up during the financial crisis.
0:10:06 So he doesn’t have a job.
0:10:07 So he kind of sits around, he’s like,
0:10:08 I don’t want to get a job, Jesse.
0:10:09 I want to start something.
0:10:11 He gets me excited enough that I’m like,
0:10:12 all right, I want to start something too.
0:10:14 Let’s go start something in a few months.
0:10:15 I give my notice at Goldman.
0:10:18 They’re like, take 90 days, wind down.
0:10:19 And I was like, me, I’m like,
0:10:21 hey, do you mind if I use the firm’s resources
0:10:23 to research my future business idea?
0:10:24 And Goldman, by the way,
0:10:28 probably has a multimillion dollar subscription with GLG.
0:10:29 So we have an unlimited calls.
0:10:30 They don’t charge us per call
0:10:32 because at Goldman, they’re paying them so much money.
0:10:35 So me and my co-founder line up three phone calls a week
0:10:38 with like digital ad experts and lead gen people.
0:10:39 And we researched e-commerce.
0:10:41 Like you name the category.
0:10:42 We were talking to an expert in it
0:10:45 for like the 90 days before I left Goldman.
0:10:47 We also had all the sell side analysts come and tell us,
0:10:48 like, what are the internet trends
0:10:49 that we should be paying attention to?
0:10:52 So this was the research before Ampush started.
0:10:54 I’m 24, 25 years old.
0:10:57 Then I started Ampush.
0:10:58 Quinn Street, which you guys may or may not know,
0:11:01 is a publicly traded lead gen business.
0:11:02 It goes public.
0:11:03 And the same thing happens.
0:11:04 A couple of my hedge fund friends call me and go,
0:11:06 dude, isn’t this what you’re doing?
0:11:08 Like, and I go, well, here’s what you need to look at.
0:11:10 And here’s how their margins work.
0:11:10 And then I get the idea.
0:11:12 I’m like, we have no money, we’re bootstrapping.
0:11:14 Let’s get ourselves on GLG as experts.
0:11:16 So I call my old rep and I go,
0:11:19 hey, can I be an expert on your GLG?
0:11:20 Are they asking me?
0:11:20 And they go, yeah, we need someone.
0:11:23 I’m like, okay, my charge is $500 an hour.
0:11:24 She goes, no problem.
0:11:26 So now me and my co-founder are doing,
0:11:27 on the other side of the marketplace,
0:11:28 we’re doing five calls a week.
0:11:30 We’re making 25, you know, it’s good money.
0:11:32 But we talked to like someone after a few weeks
0:11:35 and he goes, do you guys have research
0:11:36 that you can put together?
0:11:38 Because the way you’re explaining is so helpful.
0:11:40 And we look at each other and we’re like, yeah, yeah,
0:11:41 we have a report.
0:11:42 It’s $5,000.
0:11:43 I’ll send you guys a report.
0:11:44 You can link to it.
0:11:46 It’s super outdated at this point.
0:11:47 It’s a 50 page report.
0:11:48 It’s gonna explain the lead gen industry to you,
0:11:51 tell you who the competitors are, blah, blah, blah, blah.
0:11:52 He’s like, yeah, I’ll take it.
0:11:55 So we basically spend four days all weekend
0:11:56 putting this report together.
0:11:57 And then GLG is like,
0:11:59 “Hey, we’re getting a lot of other questions
0:12:00 “about this report.
0:12:01 “Can you sell more of it?”
0:12:02 By the time it was all said and done,
0:12:03 we sold 30 of the reports.
0:12:05 So I always joke that was Ampush’s Angels round.
0:12:08 We raised $150,000 selling research reports
0:12:10 to hedge fund people.
0:12:11 – That’s insane.
0:12:13 – I don’t know if you heard on the pod,
0:12:16 but Anand from CB Insights did the same thing.
0:12:17 Did you hear his story?
0:12:19 He basically sold a PDF. – No, he’s smarter.
0:12:21 He turned into a huge business.
0:12:24 – Well, he started with the PDF and then he’s like,
0:12:26 you know, he’s trying to charge like $500.
0:12:27 And then he’s like, the best thing
0:12:28 that ever happened to us was my buddy was like,
0:12:32 “No, no, no, you need to charge like $12,000 minimum,
0:12:34 “$25,000 as your medium.”
0:12:36 And then I have a $100,000 option.
0:12:38 And he’s like, “Dude, it’s a PDF.”
0:12:39 Like, “Are you sure?”
0:12:40 (laughs)
0:12:41 – 100% right. – And that’s what they did.
0:12:42 And they made like 300 grand that year.
0:12:44 – It’s a giffin’ good.
0:12:44 – Yeah.
0:12:45 – All right?
0:12:48 If it gets more value when people think it’s more expensive.
0:12:50 I mean, that’s overpricing for AUX.
0:12:53 We charge $50,000 a week for a team of consultants.
0:12:57 And McKinsey, Bain and BCG charge $200,000 a week.
0:12:59 So our argument is we’re 75% cheaper than them,
0:13:02 but way better in our world of online marketing,
0:13:04 the world that we know extremely well.
0:13:07 – How come you don’t charge 71% more and say we’re better?
0:13:08 – That was, so one of the things I didn’t tell you
0:13:10 when my friends were calling me and I was like,
0:13:11 isn’t there someone who does this?
0:13:13 Why are you keep calling me about this?
0:13:14 And what they told us,
0:13:16 this is part of the market research was they said,
0:13:19 “Look, McKinsey, Bain and BCG are $200,000 a week.”
0:13:21 And they’re not practitioners of marketing, Jesse.
0:13:22 So they don’t actually know the answers.
0:13:25 And then every time we ask an agency,
0:13:27 agencies come back with recommendations
0:13:29 like change your match types
0:13:31 or do more lookalike audience or whatever.
0:13:32 And they’re like, we don’t know what the fuck
0:13:33 they’re talking about.
0:13:34 Like we don’t understand what they’re saying.
0:13:36 What they want is you do this
0:13:37 and this much revenue in EBITDA will come.
0:13:40 So a big part of our work is literally just translating
0:13:43 marketing levers into revenue in EBITDA terms
0:13:44 so that they can actually understand
0:13:46 what they’re gonna spend money on
0:13:47 or what the risk levers are in this.
0:13:49 – Do you run like fake ads?
0:13:53 Like a lot of people when they have a company,
0:13:54 they’ll be like, you know, we wanna make this product
0:13:56 but we’re not actually sure if anyone’s gonna buy it.
0:13:58 And so they make an ad for the product that doesn’t exist.
0:13:59 And sometimes the landing page will be like,
0:14:01 oh, you caught us a little bit too soon
0:14:03 but let us know if you want this, whatever.
0:14:04 – We’ve done it in value creation.
0:14:06 We haven’t done it in diligence.
0:14:08 Diligence is like, you’ve got four weeks
0:14:09 they’re trying to discern whether they wanna buy the business
0:14:11 and you’re just like, you have so much data,
0:14:13 you have to figure out what’s going on
0:14:15 and be able to give them a smart answer.
0:14:17 Value creation, you have 12 or 20 weeks sometimes,
0:14:18 depending on the engagement.
0:14:20 There we will definitely run experiments,
0:14:22 we’ll make ad changes, we’ll do all these things
0:14:23 and come back to them and say, hey, this is a good idea.
0:14:24 This is not a good idea.
0:14:27 – So to make this actionable, like even for me or Sean
0:14:29 or listener, what do you look for?
0:14:30 Like what can I look for in my business?
0:14:32 And I assume obviously this is only
0:14:34 if you are running digital ads,
0:14:36 Facebook and Google basically ads.
0:14:37 What can you look for to be like,
0:14:41 there’s opportunity here or this is stupid, shut it down.
0:14:43 – Yeah, I mean, we approach it in a few different ways, right?
0:14:45 One is top down, like we use Veros
0:14:46 and a couple of their third party data sources
0:14:49 and our own data to figure out benchmarks of the company.
0:14:50 So if you’re an e-commerce business
0:14:52 with you’re selling water bottles,
0:14:53 what should your click-through rate,
0:14:55 what’s your conversion rate by channel?
0:14:57 That’s our top down, we have kind of assessing
0:14:58 where they stand.
0:14:59 And so that’s just whatever,
0:15:01 you can get that data anywhere online.
0:15:04 And then the bottom up part of it is,
0:15:06 for example, for Facebook, right?
0:15:08 We’ll say like, is the account structured correctly?
0:15:10 Oftentimes there’s too many ads trying,
0:15:12 breaking the signal in too many different places
0:15:13 and it needs to be consolidated.
0:15:14 The other question we’ll ask is,
0:15:16 is their event match quality good?
0:15:18 Oftentimes these old school companies
0:15:20 owned by private equity,
0:15:22 they have like a three out of 10 match quality,
0:15:24 which means Facebook’s signal is super crappy for them.
0:15:27 And I bet Sean’s company and most startups have nine out of 10
0:15:29 ’cause they’ve like major date,
0:15:31 Facebook’s getting all the right data.
0:15:32 Then there’s all the creative stuff.
0:15:34 Are they, the easiest thing is almost as my performance
0:15:37 is bad, I’m go, how many creative do you test a week?
0:15:38 A week, what are you talking about?
0:15:40 Oh, we do two a month.
0:15:41 Well, yeah, of course your performance
0:15:42 is gonna be horrible, right?
0:15:44 So creative testing is one of the easiest levers to pull
0:15:46 in terms of improving Facebook.
0:15:47 And if a business that you’re looking to buy
0:15:49 has all of these things that they’re doing wrong
0:15:51 and they’re still succeeding,
0:15:54 and for you, you’re like, there’s opportunity here.
0:15:55 If they get this right,
0:15:57 you’re gonna be even better at providing this test.
0:15:58 Exactly, and size, right?
0:15:59 So the key deliverable,
0:16:00 the first five slides of every deck
0:16:03 are here’s the grade for every channel.
0:16:04 And then here’s the waterfall that says
0:16:06 what your current EBITDA,
0:16:08 and then if you improve the things
0:16:09 that we think in a pretty moderate way,
0:16:11 here’s what your EBITDA of the business could be.
0:16:14 And that’s the money chart for a private equity guy.
0:16:14 That’s pretty sick.
0:16:16 It’s a super cool business.
0:16:19 And honestly, like the validation that we’ve gotten,
0:16:20 like that’s the other cool thing
0:16:22 is one of my other tests for a business is
0:16:24 if in my discovery phase,
0:16:26 people start asking me to buy it,
0:16:27 I know I’m on to it.
0:16:28 Like that’s what happened with growth assistance,
0:16:29 that’s what happened with AUX
0:16:30 and early days of AMP push that happen.
0:16:32 I was like, hey, this is an idea we have.
0:16:33 We wanna get you offshore marketing people.
0:16:35 And they’re like, can I get one of those people?
0:16:36 And I’m like, oh, okay, we’re good.
0:16:37 Same thing with a private equity guy,
0:16:39 call us on my buddies and go,
0:16:40 here’s this idea we have, we wanna do this.
0:16:41 He’s like, oh, I actually have a deal right now.
0:16:42 Can you guys start looking at it?
0:16:44 That’s awesome.
0:16:45 How big is this business now?
0:16:46 Is it a year old?
0:16:47 Could you say like a year one?
0:16:48 – A year old, yeah, so it’s like five million.
0:16:50 It’ll do five million this year.
0:16:51 – That’s insane.
0:16:52 – Yeah, it’ll do five million.
0:16:54 And we, by the way, we invested one-tenth
0:16:55 of what we put into Kehani into it.
0:16:57 – And by the way, Sam, like I think the key,
0:16:59 ’cause you were like, what are the marketing levers?
0:17:01 And like he gave you like a,
0:17:02 as good as the answer you give,
0:17:04 not having like the thing you need is like,
0:17:06 doctor, what can I do to be better?
0:17:07 But here’s none of my data, none of my scans,
0:17:08 none of my notes.
0:17:10 It’s like, well, you should, I guess, you know,
0:17:11 and check on your health.
0:17:15 So the key here with this business though is it’s,
0:17:17 and he won’t say this, it’s not part of a sales pitch,
0:17:20 but like, it’s not that he has to be like this marketing
0:17:23 savant that’s gonna like find the genius levers.
0:17:26 These companies are really buying certainty.
0:17:28 And it’s CYA, right?
0:17:30 It’s why a lot of consultants get hired in the world,
0:17:31 is there’s a CYA component.
0:17:33 You’re doing a deal.
0:17:35 You need to understand that the thing you’re buying
0:17:37 doesn’t have any like, you know, horrible warts.
0:17:38 That’s the first piece.
0:17:41 And then, cool, what is a like best case,
0:17:43 base case, worst case kind of scenario
0:17:45 of what we can do to grow this thing.
0:17:47 And it’s not even like a specific tactic,
0:17:48 like, oh, change the audience segmentation.
0:17:51 But it’s like, we need a plan made by people
0:17:53 who know a lot about this.
0:17:55 And that’s enough to like kind of move the ball forward.
0:17:57 And then of course, like when you could go in
0:17:58 and you actually like do the shit,
0:17:59 you’ll figure it out case by case.
0:18:01 Like there’s not like, like you go to 100 e-commerce
0:18:04 companies and you could take the 10 smartest people
0:18:05 in Facebook ads and Google ads,
0:18:07 they’re gonna give you 10 different answers
0:18:08 for every single company.
0:18:10 Because one guy likes cost caps,
0:18:12 another guy likes ASC and other guy says,
0:18:13 simplify the structure and other guy says,
0:18:14 use all the new shit.
0:18:16 You know, another guy says, do this attribution method.
0:18:20 Another guy says this, there’s no real uniform answer
0:18:21 for like, how do you do,
0:18:23 how does this work better versus worse?
0:18:24 – Yeah, well, I’ll disagree.
0:18:27 Like I’ll show you, can I share my screen?
0:18:28 – Yeah, yeah.
0:18:30 – I mean, this is an example of the internal tool
0:18:32 or the internal like analysis to give you
0:18:36 the detailed answer, Sam, of like everything we look at
0:18:38 when we’re trying to assess and grade
0:18:41 inside of a private equity, right?
0:18:42 So there is top down, it’s bottom up,
0:18:44 how much spend is getting spent plays?
0:18:45 What’s campaign structure?
0:18:46 What’s how fast– – You made this?
0:18:49 – I mean, my team made this, yeah.
0:18:50 – That’s so cool.
0:18:51 – So this is what we go through and do.
0:18:52 And we’re gonna turn this into software
0:18:53 at some point, by the way.
0:18:55 – Any color coded Excel sheet were like,
0:18:57 ah, this is great.
0:18:59 I remember Steph Smith came on and showed me like
0:19:01 just like beautifully formatted Excel sheet.
0:19:03 I don’t think I even read anything that was in it.
0:19:04 But I was like, you’re great.
0:19:05 This is fantastic.
0:19:09 I’m such a sucker for formatting on an Excel sheet.
0:19:11 – Well, but and Sean’s right, which is like,
0:19:12 the other thing I would think about too,
0:19:14 that I think a lot of entrepreneurs miss
0:19:16 ’cause we were so caught up on ourselves is
0:19:18 the humanness on the other side of the table.
0:19:20 So you say private equity firm and you’re like,
0:19:21 oh yeah, private equity firm.
0:19:25 But what’s really happening is there’s a mid-level partner.
0:19:27 If they buy a business and Facebook blows up
0:19:30 in a year on them, it’s career limiting for them, right?
0:19:33 So the human being on the other side wants to go in
0:19:35 and sell this deal to their committee,
0:19:37 be able to put a good case together.
0:19:38 And the reason McKinsey and Bain
0:19:39 both built billion dollar business to doing this
0:19:41 is ’cause those people wanted to go look,
0:19:43 McKinsey says the market is big.
0:19:45 Now the dream is they go, look,
0:19:48 AUK says there’s X amount of EBITDA available in marketing
0:19:50 and look at the analysis they put together
0:19:51 that’s convincing of that.
0:19:53 – What percentage of the deals do you say it’s shit?
0:19:56 You’re like, no dude, like there’s no opportunity here.
0:19:58 – We’ve had, I mean, it’s a young business.
0:20:02 We’ve only done 20 projects, but let’s say on 25%,
0:20:04 we’ve said, you should stay the hell away from it.
0:20:06 I mean, one, there was just straight up fraud
0:20:08 in the SEO back linking
0:20:09 that they would have never spotted without us.
0:20:10 That was a huge win.
0:20:13 And I mean, they paid us, obviously they didn’t do the deal.
0:20:17 And then we’ve had a couple where we were not convinced
0:20:18 that there was as much leverage.
0:20:21 Like the management team puts together projections, right?
0:20:23 So they share projections in these things
0:20:25 and we look at those projections and we basically go,
0:20:27 dude, this person would have to be the best Facebook ad market
0:20:29 on the planet to hit these projections.
0:20:30 Like we think they can grow,
0:20:32 but we don’t think the projections they put together
0:20:34 are reasonable and we need to double click
0:20:35 and as they double clicked on that,
0:20:37 they lost excitement about the deal.
0:20:39 – Wow, what a cool business.
0:20:40 Good job.
0:20:41 – Thank you.
0:20:42 (laughing)
0:20:43 Much better than Kehani.
0:20:45 – So your thing was like kind of office for the CMO,
0:20:46 you talked about how accordion
0:20:49 and there’s the equivalent for the CFO side.
0:20:51 Can you talk about other businesses
0:20:54 that are like this a sell to the like ultra rich customers?
0:20:57 So let’s call it hedge funds, investment banks, whatever.
0:20:58 I heard you talk about a business
0:20:59 that I had never heard of called,
0:21:01 I think it was First Ring or First Raising.
0:21:02 – Rain.
0:21:03 – What is that?
0:21:05 That sounded very interesting.
0:21:06 – Well, the first thing I was telling people ago,
0:21:07 like who’s the richest man in New York?
0:21:09 Sam, who’s the richest man in New York?
0:21:12 – I don’t want to ruin your story.
0:21:12 – Okay, fine.
0:21:15 Ari, who’s the richest man in New York?
0:21:18 (laughing)
0:21:18 Do you think it’s–
0:21:20 – So long, here’s the homey guess.
0:21:21 – Here, the homey guess, I hedge fund guy.
0:21:22 – Some real estate guy.
0:21:27 – Yeah, Daniel Ock or Steve Schwartzman or whatever.
0:21:28 Nope, nope, nope.
0:21:29 It’s Michael Bloomberg.
0:21:31 It’s the guy who’s selling information.
0:21:32 And so sitting at Goldman,
0:21:34 I had this terminal we were paying $1,200 a month for
0:21:36 and they never negotiate price.
0:21:40 Every single terminal, they never do volume discounts.
0:21:40 And you’re like, damn,
0:21:41 this guy’s just, I mean,
0:21:43 they’re printing money in that business.
0:21:45 – It also helps that he owns the entire thing.
0:21:46 – He owns the entire thing,
0:21:48 but dude, whether he did or didn’t,
0:21:51 the thing makes like 5, 10 billion a year in a bit.
0:21:51 – It’s huge.
0:21:53 – It’s a ridiculous business, right?
0:21:56 And so I’m sitting there, I’m an entrepreneurial person
0:21:58 and my boss comes up to me and she goes,
0:21:59 “You got to set up First Rain, Jesse.”
0:22:01 And I’m like, “Oh, cool, what’s First Rain?”
0:22:03 And I’m like, looking through it.
0:22:05 And it’s like, pull the stock ticker
0:22:07 and get an alert to your inbox
0:22:08 when there’s news about this company.
0:22:10 And I’m like, this is just Google alerts.
0:22:14 She’s like, “What’s Google alerts?”
0:22:16 And I’m like, “What do we pay a month for this?”
0:22:19 She’s like, “Oh, we pay like $2,000 per license.”
0:22:22 And I’m like, well, our group is like 40 people.
0:22:23 Like we’re paying $80,000.
0:22:24 No, no, we got a discount.
0:22:25 It’s $50,000 a month.
0:22:28 We’re paying for this Google analytics thing.
0:22:29 I’m like, “What the fuck?”
0:22:32 And so, one of the categories for us now,
0:22:34 and again, remember, unfair advantage is very important.
0:22:36 I happen to have lots of friends in this world
0:22:37 ’cause of where I went to college.
0:22:39 Just whatever, unfair advantage.
0:22:40 – Where’d you go to college?
0:22:42 – I went to Penn.
0:22:43 – Fancy.
0:22:45 – The Wall Street training school.
0:22:46 So a bunch of my friends work at Hedge,
0:22:48 friends of private equity.
0:22:51 And these guys want information,
0:22:54 like that they’re willing to pay tons and tons
0:22:55 of money for everything.
0:22:56 They’re not price sensitive at all.
0:23:00 They can, ROI of everything, every decision they make.
0:23:01 ‘Cause that was what we got told about First Rain.
0:23:03 They go, “Oh, it’s $50,000 a month.”
0:23:05 But if it gets us one trade ahead of somebody else,
0:23:07 it’s paid for itself for the full year.
0:23:09 So because of the numbers they’re dealing in,
0:23:10 they can just pay anything.
0:23:13 Just like the $200,000 to diligence the project
0:23:16 for a half a billion dollar deal, it’s nothing for them.
0:23:19 So this category is a great one to sell into
0:23:21 and actually have another funny story you guys will like.
0:23:24 So on GLG, GLG has been like my life,
0:23:25 my savior in business.
0:23:29 What happened for me, I became like a regular,
0:23:30 take that term any way you want,
0:23:33 for hedge fund dudes for Facebook.
0:23:35 Every quarter, 10 same people would call me
0:23:37 and they would go, “How’s the quarter going, Jesse?
0:23:39 “Do you think Spen’s gonna be up or down?”
0:23:42 ‘Cause they own huge positions in Facebook, right?
0:23:43 So one of the guys eventually is like,
0:23:46 “Jesse, I want access to your data.”
0:23:47 Like I just want the aggregate,
0:23:49 and I’m allowed to share it, it’s my data at Ampush.
0:23:51 I’m spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
0:23:53 And he goes, “I want just full real-time access
0:23:54 “to your data.”
0:23:55 I go, “I can give it to you in aggregate.
0:23:57 “I can’t give you any client data.”
0:23:58 And he’s like, “Well, what can I get to you?”
0:24:01 And I was like, “Well, Bootstrap Company, right?”
0:24:02 I’m like, “You know, we’ve been dealing
0:24:05 “with this like working capital situation with our bank.
0:24:07 “Like, will you just give me a $5 million
0:24:08 “interest-free loan?”
0:24:10 He’s like, “Done.”
0:24:12 He’s like, “Done.”
0:24:15 So this guy, Peter, he’s a good friend of mine now,
0:24:17 he gave us a $5 million loan.
0:24:18 So we didn’t have to pay any interest to our bank
0:24:19 to do working capital.
0:24:22 And all I had to do was basically give him a real-time feed
0:24:26 from our tableau or whatever, our aggregate, CPM, CTR,
0:24:28 whatever, all of our data for Facebook.
0:24:30 So anyway, First Rain is a basic software tool
0:24:31 you sell to hedge funds ’cause they’re willing
0:24:32 to pay anything for it.
0:24:35 And so one of my ideas, by the way,
0:24:37 and if anyone’s listening wants to build this with me,
0:24:41 I need someone very good at analytics and decent at sales,
0:24:43 is just with my network,
0:24:47 I could probably get $5 billion in meta Facebook spend
0:24:49 and give people a survey every quarter.
0:24:51 Did you spend more or less?
0:24:53 How excited are you, like a detailed survey?
0:24:55 It’d have to be a really robust survey.
0:24:58 Then I’d go to all these hedge fund people and I’d say,
0:25:00 you can have access to this data every quarter,
0:25:02 it’s $50,000 a quarter.
0:25:05 And you have to guarantee me two years of a subscription.
0:25:07 And I think I’d have people align out the door
0:25:08 of people willing to pay for that data.
0:25:09 And then I would do it for Google,
0:25:10 then I would do it for Amazon,
0:25:13 then I would do it for all of these different platforms.
0:25:15 – Dude, even easier, we like,
0:25:16 why not just go to “Triplewell”
0:25:18 who already has all the data and be like,
0:25:23 “Hey, Triplewell, let’s do this line of business,” basically.
0:25:23 – 100%.
0:25:25 Yeah, let me license your data
0:25:27 for the exclusive use in the financial service,
0:25:28 ’cause that’s not gonna be important for them.
0:25:30 And then you can basically create
0:25:31 a thing that hedge funds would pay for.
0:25:33 And the best thing I would do to hedge funds,
0:25:35 I’d say, I’m only gonna sell it to 20 of you,
0:25:37 but let’s do a reverse auction.
0:25:40 So now make them bid against each other for this data.
0:25:41 And as long as you limit it, they’ll do that
0:25:43 because they don’t want everyone having the data, right?
0:25:45 That’s a really important thing to them.
0:25:47 But anyway, the lesson here is that category,
0:25:51 alternative assets are a great thing to bootstrap into
0:25:54 because one deal basically can make you as a business.
0:25:56 And then you can go from there.
0:25:58 – Yeah, my old business partner used to call it,
0:25:59 just adding a zero.
0:26:02 He’s like, basically, what market or product can we go into
0:26:04 where we do the same exact work,
0:26:07 but we just add a zero to the end of the dollar amount
0:26:08 that we’re able to charge?
0:26:10 Like, Sam, you told me this with your events too.
0:26:12 You used to charge, I think, like $300 a ticket,
0:26:13 but then other people charged $3,000.
0:26:15 And then I forgot who it was, like,
0:26:17 recode or whoever it was, charged $30,000 a ticket.
0:26:21 – And it was like the same work, same product.
0:26:22 It was ridiculous.
0:26:24 And I did the exact same thing, Sean,
0:26:25 that you said you did where you’re like,
0:26:27 I have an idea, but I’m broke,
0:26:29 so I’m just gonna assume that everyone else is broke.
0:26:30 (laughing)
0:26:31 That’s what I did.
0:26:32 – And when you go hang out with other broke people.
0:26:33 – Yeah, it was like–
0:26:34 – It was really an easy thing.
0:26:35 Like, the two takeaways from this, by the way,
0:26:37 are sell to the rich.
0:26:39 You know, you’re gonna be able to add a zero
0:26:40 to what you’re doing.
0:26:42 And then your way of figuring out what they need was,
0:26:44 you had friends in that circle,
0:26:45 you could go make friends,
0:26:46 or you were using GLG,
0:26:49 you were like, I have one area of expertise.
0:26:51 That could be my calling card to get in the door.
0:26:53 And then that will be how I, you know,
0:26:55 understand what these people need,
0:26:58 and then maybe I can pair what I know with what they need
0:27:01 and to either a data product or a consulting product.
0:27:03 – Yeah, and to tie them together, actually,
0:27:04 if anyone’s listening, I would say,
0:27:06 what is it that you know extremely well
0:27:08 are a couple things that are cross sections of each other?
0:27:09 And so first figure that out,
0:27:11 and then figure out who’s willing to pay you
0:27:12 the most money for what you know.
0:27:14 That’s essentially what I did with AUX business.
0:27:15 I was like, I know this thing,
0:27:17 who’s gonna go pay me the most for it?
0:27:19 And that group is gonna pay me the most by far.
0:27:21 – Can I, you didn’t put on this sheet,
0:27:23 but I wanna ask you a couple questions about this,
0:27:25 particularly because I don’t know if Sean knows
0:27:26 much about this company,
0:27:27 and I know a little bit about it,
0:27:29 but I know that what I know,
0:27:30 they’re like crazy impressive.
0:27:34 So I think you sold your company to Red Ventures,
0:27:35 is that right?
0:27:36 – So we saw it, it’s a longer story.
0:27:39 We sold a minority, they wanted to buy the whole thing,
0:27:40 we couldn’t get the terms, we sold a minority,
0:27:43 we gave them an option to buy the rest of the business.
0:27:45 They started buying content assets,
0:27:47 and decided not to buy the rest of our business,
0:27:48 so we ended up eventually selling it to someone else.
0:27:49 But we did for basically–
0:27:50 – But you got to know them.
0:27:52 – For two years, we operated as one company,
0:27:54 ’cause the plan was originally for them to buy it.
0:27:56 So I know them and Rick incredibly well.
0:27:58 – Do you know about this company, Sean, Red Ventures?
0:27:59 – I know about the surface level,
0:28:02 and actually we’ve hit up Jesse being like,
0:28:03 “Dude, this is fascinating, should we get Rick on?”
0:28:06 Like, and I wanna know more.
0:28:07 – Well, but there’s one part of the story
0:28:09 that I just wanna mention, which was amazing,
0:28:10 is like he started this thing,
0:28:13 and then he was actually on the plane
0:28:16 that’s solely landed in the Hudson.
0:28:18 And he gave this amazing talk when he was like,
0:28:21 “I was like one or two years into my business,”
0:28:24 and for some reason, that life or death situation
0:28:26 kind of changed his outlook on life,
0:28:28 and now Red Ventures is known as one of the best places
0:28:31 to work, and it sounds like it’s a great company.
0:28:34 So yeah, what’s the background?
0:28:36 – Yeah, so the story, the way that they tell it,
0:28:37 they started the business in 2000,
0:28:39 so Rick and Dan are the founders,
0:28:41 and they’re both friends, and both multi-billionaires,
0:28:45 and they actually met Ascendant in the late ’90s.
0:28:45 Do you guys know what Ascendant is?
0:28:49 They had like the coupon book, they launched Orbitz,
0:28:51 they were like the original internet holdco.
0:28:54 They met there, very direct marketing heavy.
0:28:56 So in 2000, the two of them broke off on their own,
0:28:58 literally months before the internet imploded,
0:29:02 they started Red F is what it was first called.
0:29:03 Five years later, and their story,
0:29:05 they’re telling of it, not mine,
0:29:07 Rick says, “Dan, give me a dollar.”
0:29:07 Dan gives him a dollar, he goes,
0:29:09 “You can have my half of the business.
0:29:12 “I hate this business, I don’t wanna do it.”
0:29:13 So they do a hard reset.
0:29:14 Five years in, I think they barely
0:29:15 were doing a million in EBITDA,
0:29:18 and these guys are the best learners you’ve ever met.
0:29:20 So then at the time, go back to 2005,
0:29:22 there was this new thing called Google AdWords,
0:29:24 and there was agency starting,
0:29:26 and there’s where lead gen businesses,
0:29:27 and they, for whatever reason,
0:29:28 had a relationship with Direct TV.
0:29:31 They said, “Hey, to Direct TV, if you remember back then,
0:29:34 “I was looking for satellite people to sell in the mall.”
0:29:36 Like these resellers.
0:29:37 So Rick or one of them had this idea
0:29:41 of let’s go to Direct TV and become a dealer.
0:29:42 So they go, “Hey, Direct TV, you wanna be a dealer?”
0:29:44 I go, “Sure, we love dealers.
0:29:46 “What’s your territory?”
0:29:47 They go, “Oh, this new thing called the internet
0:29:48 “will be our territory.”
0:29:49 (laughing)
0:29:52 They go, “Okay, sure, we don’t know anything.”
0:29:54 So they became Direct Star TV,
0:29:56 authorized dealer of Direct TV,
0:29:57 but as a part of their thing,
0:29:58 they owned all the web rights,
0:30:00 they owned all the AdWords rights,
0:30:01 they owned all the SEO,
0:30:06 and in four years, they built a $75 million EBITDA business
0:30:07 just selling Direct TV subscriptions
0:30:09 because they would run the media,
0:30:10 take the phone calls,
0:30:12 and all these things that are commonplace today
0:30:14 where like what you do on your website gets cookied
0:30:15 and then you know on the phone call,
0:30:17 they were pioneers in all of that stuff.
0:30:20 – And basically, if someone became a reseller
0:30:24 of the TV tech dish network or whatever it was,
0:30:26 Direct TV, they gave Red Ventures like $1,000.
0:30:29 – They get $500 bounty for every single customer they get,
0:30:31 and Red Ventures just had to do it for less than that, right?
0:30:32 And so between their media,
0:30:33 and of course, after a few years,
0:30:35 Direct TV is like, “Well, we can’t get rid of you
0:30:38 because you’re driving all of our customers,
0:30:39 but we don’t like the deal we made.”
0:30:41 So then they renegotiated a million different times
0:30:43 and they still probably work with them.
0:30:44 But then they went and took that out.
0:30:45 And then General Atlantic,
0:30:47 the big private equity firm invested
0:30:49 and has crushed it on that deal.
0:30:51 And they went and did that
0:30:53 for any high LTV purchase you can imagine.
0:30:55 So every credit card company worked with them,
0:30:59 American Express, Verizon Wireless,
0:31:01 people who sell Pest Control,
0:31:03 like anything that was like a long-term purchase,
0:31:05 basically Red Ventures was either running their marketing
0:31:06 and when they invested in us,
0:31:08 we want to do the same deal
0:31:09 for direct-to-consumer companies,
0:31:11 which did not work nearly as well as it worked for them,
0:31:13 which is a different story for a different day.
0:31:14 But that’s what they got to.
0:31:15 Then they got to 2015,
0:31:18 they’re doing two, 300 in EBITDA,
0:31:19 and there’s no more growth left,
0:31:20 which is why they invested in us.
0:31:22 And they bought, they did a bunch of other things,
0:31:23 and Rick’s really smart.
0:31:25 And he goes, “Okay, I’m gonna invest in Jesse.”
0:31:28 He did five other deals at the same time, same year.
0:31:30 And a year later, Amplisher’s going,
0:31:33 “Okay, one went down to zero, one, you know.”
0:31:35 But they bought an SEO business
0:31:37 that they use their same playbook.
0:31:38 And within nine months,
0:31:41 they took it from three in EBITDA to nine in EBITDA.
0:31:43 And they go, “Oh, shit, so that worked.”
0:31:44 “Okay, let’s go do a bigger deal.”
0:31:46 So then they bought like a $10 million EBITDA
0:31:49 SEO content business, and they took it to like 25.
0:31:51 – When you say SEO content business,
0:31:53 you’re talking about like the points guy.
0:31:55 – Yeah, the first one was reviews.com.
0:31:57 The second one, I’m forgetting the name of it,
0:31:58 but yeah, like the points.
0:32:00 Then they finally, like, they did a couple of those,
0:32:02 and Rick’s like, “All right, I’m ready for the big time.”
0:32:03 He went and bought Bankrate,
0:32:05 which is a billion dollar publicly traded company
0:32:07 for 100 in EBITDA.
0:32:10 It owns the points guy, it owns creditcards.com, it owns.
0:32:11 And in less than two years,
0:32:14 they tripled the EBITDA of the business.
0:32:16 And then they bought Healthline, they bought CNET.
0:32:17 I mean, so they basically took their,
0:32:19 and now the services part of their business
0:32:21 is a tiny part of their business,
0:32:23 and the SEO content part is a massive part of their business,
0:32:25 but the same culture, the same playbook,
0:32:27 and it’s an incredible business, incredible.
0:32:28 – Can you explain what they’re doing?
0:32:29 So they buy these SEO businesses,
0:32:32 which is, let’s just take Bankrate as an example.
0:32:35 People Google Best, mortgage rate,
0:32:36 more current mortgage rates, whatever,
0:32:39 and they, Bankrate has done the content work
0:32:41 and the SEO work to be the top thing
0:32:43 that shows up on Google.
0:32:44 So then you click it, you go in,
0:32:46 and they have like these affiliate offers,
0:32:46 and that’s all great.
0:32:49 And what Red did was they basically,
0:32:51 am I right, that they bought a business
0:32:53 that was like primarily SEO driven,
0:32:56 and then they layered on paid to that?
0:32:57 Is that the main thing that they did,
0:32:59 or what did they do to the assets?
0:33:01 – There’s four major levers they pull.
0:33:02 And the first thing I have to tell,
0:33:03 and whenever I tell this story is,
0:33:06 Rick, and it’s the most unique culture.
0:33:08 Like at some point, I just take you there,
0:33:10 and you got to tour the campus and check it out,
0:33:12 because you’ve never seen anything like it.
0:33:13 And there’s a great New York time article
0:33:16 where they describe it as like part Wall Street trading desk,
0:33:18 part like Southern politeness,
0:33:21 and part like hard-nosed direct response marketing.
0:33:23 And that’s exact, like, it’s a very apt description.
0:33:24 But anyway–
0:33:25 – Well, and that’s why I wanted to ask you about it,
0:33:27 because Rick seems like an anomaly.
0:33:30 Like he seems like a, like this is normally like kind of a,
0:33:33 no, this could be a shady industry.
0:33:34 It often is a shady industry.
0:33:36 He doesn’t seem like a shady guy.
0:33:38 And they seem like people love working there,
0:33:39 which is rare.
0:33:41 – He’s one of the most special people I’ve ever met.
0:33:42 I mean, he’s one of the most special people in the world,
0:33:43 I think.
0:33:44 – What would we notice if we toured the campus?
0:33:45 What would we see?
0:33:46 – It’s funny you asked that.
0:33:48 So one of my requests to him when they invest,
0:33:50 I want to shadow your leadership team for a week.
0:33:52 Me and my 10 leaders are going to shadow your leaders.
0:33:55 And I want to see what you guys do.
0:33:57 And what you’d find is, you know,
0:33:58 these things that are like startup adages,
0:34:00 they’ve done at a scale of 5,000 people.
0:34:02 Every meeting is short.
0:34:03 Every meeting starts with a bottom line.
0:34:05 Numbers are the only thing that is ever talked about
0:34:07 in levers and every person is basically trying
0:34:10 to optimize more EBITDA and any discussion they’re having.
0:34:13 And they don’t talk about the work that gets done
0:34:16 as independent of that, right?
0:34:18 And so another example is like they shape teams.
0:34:20 So, you know, for digital marketers,
0:34:22 they don’t say like, we have a client team
0:34:23 and we have a marketing team.
0:34:25 We have, they go, we have like team click-through rate
0:34:27 and we have team conversion rate.
0:34:28 And we have team traffic volume.
0:34:31 Like they literally organize people by the KPI
0:34:32 that they’re trying to drive
0:34:34 so that there’s a deep, deep focus into it.
0:34:36 They have these really cool things called business reviews
0:34:39 where basically Rick and the leadership team sits
0:34:40 and you have 20 minutes to come in,
0:34:41 give an update on your business.
0:34:43 Real decisions are made about the business
0:34:44 and he does like 40 of the,
0:34:46 or like 40 over two days basically.
0:34:49 So it’s a high energy, very smart.
0:34:50 It’s like, it’s a very unique culture.
0:34:52 But anyway, so the culture is a starting point by far
0:34:54 because without it, I don’t think any of this works.
0:34:56 They have four main levers.
0:34:58 The first is improvement of traffic acquisition,
0:34:59 both paid and organic.
0:35:02 So to your point, Sean, they’ll layer on paid
0:35:03 in a really smart way.
0:35:04 They think a lot about cost per visitor
0:35:06 and revenue per visitor
0:35:08 and get that equation working extremely well,
0:35:09 but they’ll do a lot of SEO as well
0:35:11 and they’ll get volume up, right?
0:35:12 So I think I remember high level
0:35:14 when they bought the points guy,
0:35:15 I’m making these numbers up,
0:35:18 but it was doing 70 cents in revenue per visit
0:35:20 and maybe 40 cents in cost per visit.
0:35:22 And two years later it was doing like $1.70
0:35:25 in revenue per visit and like 90 cents in cost per visit.
0:35:27 But the visits were up by like a factor of two
0:35:28 or something like that, right?
0:35:31 So first lever is traffic acquisition.
0:35:33 Second lever is they’re extremely good
0:35:34 at onsite optimization.
0:35:36 If you guys pull up the points guy
0:35:38 or any of those things now, you’ll say, wow,
0:35:40 Platinum American Express is plugged here,
0:35:41 but it’s plugged in a smart way,
0:35:42 but I want to click on it,
0:35:43 but it doesn’t feel too salesy.
0:35:44 They’re very good at getting basically
0:35:48 the onsite optimization to be significantly higher.
0:35:50 The third lever is they’re incredible geniuses
0:35:52 when it comes to pricing
0:35:55 to the efficient frontier of a customer’s curve.
0:35:57 You guys know what I mean when I say that?
0:35:59 – You’re using a lot of words, my friend.
0:36:02 – Dependently, but when you put them together that way,
0:36:03 it was just a combination I wasn’t familiar with.
0:36:04 – So when you’re a credit card,
0:36:06 so you’re American Express, right?
0:36:08 And American Express is probably worth
0:36:12 willing to pay $700 per credit card application,
0:36:13 but their person on their side
0:36:16 will pay 200 if they can, right?
0:36:19 So the only way, if you can figure out
0:36:22 the exact willingness to pay for an incremental customer
0:36:24 by your customer in their business,
0:36:26 your profits skyrocket.
0:36:29 So the simple way to say it is they’re good at pricing.
0:36:31 They can really charge more for what they get.
0:36:33 And I’ll tell you a funny story.
0:36:34 The guy who’s retired now,
0:36:36 but he’s a good friend of mine.
0:36:37 He’s a Southern dude.
0:36:41 He’s very disarming, but then he’s smart as shit.
0:36:44 And he’s like, Jesse, we were 60 days from close.
0:36:46 We were gonna close this bank rate deal.
0:36:48 And their team told me there was a bidded auction
0:36:50 for how you bought credit card applications.
0:36:52 And no technology could beat it.
0:36:54 And he said, I looked at it and I said,
0:36:56 Discover’s only paying 500 for an application.
0:36:58 And they said they’re willing to pay 900.
0:37:00 Why are we not charging them 900?
0:37:02 He’s like, well, that’s how the algorithm works.
0:37:03 He’s like buying this deal.
0:37:05 He goes, the day we closed the deal, Jesse,
0:37:07 I threw away that algorithm.
0:37:07 I pulled up a spreadsheet.
0:37:08 I called all the customers and said,
0:37:09 what are you willing to pay?
0:37:10 What are you willing to pay?
0:37:11 I got them.
0:37:13 I charge them exactly what they were willing to pay.
0:37:15 And I got 20% more in EBITDA over and like,
0:37:18 within the first month I owned the business.
0:37:19 And so that’s the third lever they’re good at.
0:37:22 And then the fourth lever is they’re not crash and burn
0:37:25 people, but they’re very thoughtful about,
0:37:27 and when they invested in Ampush,
0:37:29 I cut the headcount under their sort of tutelage
0:37:32 by more than half and our revenue grew during that time.
0:37:34 So they’re very good at like,
0:37:37 truly challenging the bloat in an organization
0:37:39 and being like, how many people do we actually need?
0:37:40 Like one story you guys will love is,
0:37:41 one of their executives said,
0:37:44 they bought some like government owned thing.
0:37:46 It’s a really weird business that mails you all the mailers
0:37:48 when you move, forgetting to deal with it right now.
0:37:50 I hate that.
0:37:53 So it actually was owned by the USPS and then it got.
0:37:54 I hate that.
0:37:55 Now Red Ventures owns it.
0:37:57 I go, so how’d you decide how to reduce the headcount?
0:37:59 He goes, we took the top three managers in the company
0:38:00 and we held a draft.
0:38:04 So we basically put everyone’s name on the board
0:38:07 and we said, there’s only 40 people of 80 staying.
0:38:09 Now go draft your best people.
0:38:12 And again, they’re compassionate with obviously
0:38:13 the people they let go.
0:38:15 It’s not meant to be a negative towards them,
0:38:17 but like these organizations,
0:38:20 they’re very good at leanly staffing these organizations.
0:38:21 So those are the four big levers
0:38:23 and that’s how they get the kind of results they get.
0:38:24 That’s dope.
0:38:26 Appreciate the Red Ventures masterclass.
0:38:27 That’s great.
0:38:29 They’re like a juggernaut that I didn’t know much about
0:38:31 in terms of how they actually operate.
0:38:33 Your boyfriend, the guy from Silver Lake,
0:38:34 the guy you love, who’s the guy?
0:38:36 What’s his name that you have a crush on?
0:38:38 I should probably know his name if he’s my boyfriend.
0:38:40 Egan, what is his name, Egan?
0:38:42 I think he’s on their board.
0:38:44 Yeah, he’s on their board, GA’s on their board.
0:38:47 And I mean, look, they’re all minority holders.
0:38:49 They’ve never raised a dollar of primary capital.
0:38:52 So they’re, in my opinion, they’re a bootstrap giant, right?
0:38:54 They’ve taken secondary, but they’ve never raised primary.
0:38:57 Their headquarters is like North Carolina or something, right?
0:38:58 Yeah, they’re in Charlotte.
0:39:00 But again, dude, Rick is a hustler of all hustlers.
0:39:02 It’s right across the border in South Carolina
0:39:03 because the state of South Carolina
0:39:06 has paid for the whole thing with tax incentives.
0:39:12 You have on here, every profitable founder
0:39:14 should understand PE and rollups, what’s that mean?
0:39:18 Yeah, I think one of the biggest value creation levers
0:39:21 if you’re running a $2 to $5 million Ubitda business
0:39:22 is a rollup.
0:39:24 And I’ll tell the story of the company
0:39:26 that ended up buying Ampush
0:39:28 because it’s kind of like still hurts me
0:39:29 a little bit when I tell it.
0:39:32 So there was a business called Elite SEM.
0:39:34 It was an SEM agency.
0:39:36 4 million Ubitda, same year that I think Ampush had
0:39:39 like six or something in 2015.
0:39:40 We went to the deal of Red Ventures,
0:39:42 whatever, learned a ton.
0:39:45 But these guys sold to a business called Mountain Gate Capital.
0:39:47 And let’s assume, I don’t know what they paid,
0:39:48 but let’s assume it was on eight times Ubitda,
0:39:50 which is a fair multiple.
0:39:54 So they paid 32 million for the business, right?
0:39:56 The founders rolled 30%, I don’t know for a fact,
0:39:58 but I’m just making that up in this scenario.
0:40:00 Founders roll 30% of the value.
0:40:01 They take 20 million off the table
0:40:03 and they roll the rest in.
0:40:06 Mountain Gate goes and buys another six different businesses
0:40:08 in the one to two million Ubitda range.
0:40:09 Now for those businesses,
0:40:14 they pay like four to five times Ubitda.
0:40:16 Then they grow the whole thing organically, right?
0:40:18 So then they go for, was it math four?
0:40:20 Let’s say they buy another five or six companies.
0:40:22 They buy 10 and Ubitda, right?
0:40:26 Total invested capitals call it 60 ballpark.
0:40:28 – But now the business is worth 15 times Ubitda.
0:40:29 – Correct.
0:40:32 Then it was bought by New Mountain who bought Ampush.
0:40:34 It was bought by New Mountain for 15 times, 15,
0:40:36 which is 225 million Ubitda.
0:40:38 So the founders got 20 million
0:40:41 plus they got another bite of call it 40 or something like that.
0:40:44 Plus the PE firm obviously crushed it on it.
0:40:45 My push to founders would be like,
0:40:48 if you understand that multiples are a function of growth,
0:40:51 stability and margin or defensibility,
0:40:52 however you want to think about that.
0:40:54 And all those things improve with scale.
0:40:56 And so there’s just what they call,
0:40:58 the finance nerds call it multiple arbitrage,
0:41:00 which means I can buy at a low multiple
0:41:02 and then I can sell in a few years for a higher multiple.
0:41:03 And I think a lot of,
0:41:06 if I’m a profitable bootstrap founder including myself,
0:41:07 like even for growth assistance and other things,
0:41:10 I’m like, this seems like such an obvious path
0:41:12 to create a tremendous amount of value
0:41:14 that’s like better than the venture path
0:41:17 for so many different reasons more apt and more just,
0:41:19 but yeah, I think everyone should look at it in their space.
0:41:21 And by the way, I think I’ve been approached
0:41:22 multiple times and pitched on this
0:41:27 and it’s on my list of like creative AI meets rollup.
0:41:30 So Jesse, go, let’s go buy a creative agency,
0:41:33 redo their processes with AI, right?
0:41:35 Then once you’ve figured that out,
0:41:36 let’s go buy 10 more of them.
0:41:38 And not only will you be able to roll up
0:41:39 and get all this multiple arbitrage,
0:41:41 but you will create a much more profitable business.
0:41:44 So I think there’s a lot of strategies out there.
0:41:45 And I would say like,
0:41:46 I think a lot you can do with private equity,
0:41:47 without private equity,
0:41:49 but the founders of running these businesses
0:41:50 should be the ones leading them.
0:41:52 And the more the founder has the strategy,
0:41:53 the better they’re gonna do with the PE firm
0:41:55 if they ever need the capital to go do it.
0:41:56 – Right.
0:41:58 You mentioned AI, I wanna ask you about that
0:42:01 because you were early to the social networking wave.
0:42:03 I think you were doing like a social networking
0:42:05 type of thing in the first year of Facebook.
0:42:08 I think there’s some story where Zuck called you.
0:42:09 – I called him on his cell phone
0:42:11 and pretended to be somebody else, that was a good one.
0:42:13 – You called Zuck, tell that story, by the way.
0:42:15 – Who did you pretend to be?
0:42:19 – So summer of ’05, we’re like,
0:42:21 Facebook’s, oh my God, Mark Zuckerberg’s a year old,
0:42:22 he’s our age, right?
0:42:24 We’re like, he’s our age, he’s gonna crush it.
0:42:26 But he’s never gonna go into high school.
0:42:27 Somebody should start a high school Facebook.
0:42:29 And we’re like, why not us?
0:42:30 So we start the high list.
0:42:31 I have like the docs,
0:42:33 we have these little iconography and all this stuff.
0:42:35 We basically rebuilt the clone of Facebook.
0:42:36 And at the beginning of the summer,
0:42:39 we went to go by HSFacebook.com.
0:42:41 And some kid at Columbia, I don’t even remember his name.
0:42:44 Maybe he’s listening and he can, he can from himself.
0:42:45 He owns it.
0:42:48 And he goes, well, I’ll sell it to you for like $20,000.
0:42:49 And we’re college kids, we’re like, no thanks.
0:42:51 We’ll call it the high list.
0:42:52 And we say peace.
0:42:54 We build the whole product, we launch it.
0:42:56 Literally on the eve of the launch, he calls us
0:42:59 and he goes, Mark Zuckerberg wants to buy HS Facebook.
0:43:02 So I’m giving you a last chance buddy, like, you can get it.
0:43:04 And I was like, oh my God, we need,
0:43:05 and I was like, my first question was,
0:43:06 is he going to launch in high school?
0:43:06 He’s like, yeah, he says he is.
0:43:07 And I’m like, no, are you sure?
0:43:09 Like, I think the guy’s bullshitting me.
0:43:11 So I’m like, prove it.
0:43:13 So he forwards me the email from Zuck.
0:43:14 And this is not, this is just a guy named Mark Zuckerberg.
0:43:16 He’s not Zuck Zuck today, right?
0:43:20 And the guy includes a 917 area code number.
0:43:22 Sorry, Zuck, your area code is 917 on your cell phone.
0:43:24 And I don’t know what the rest of it was.
0:43:25 I don’t remember.
0:43:27 But basically it has a cell phone number.
0:43:29 So I’m like, okay, how do we call
0:43:31 and how do we verify this is true?
0:43:34 So I call Zuck, by the way, I call him
0:43:36 from my summer internship office at Bain Capital.
0:43:37 So I’m like sitting inside
0:43:39 some finance company calling him.
0:43:42 And I go, my name is Tom Goldberg.
0:43:44 I’m partners with this guy, Bob.
0:43:47 And we own HS Facebook together.
0:43:48 So I want to make sure that you’re not,
0:43:50 like I’m not getting cut out of this deal
0:43:52 that you apparently have with him.
0:43:54 And he goes, yeah, I’m going to buy it from him.
0:43:55 And you need to sort that out with him.
0:43:57 And then I go, well, what are you going to do with it?
0:43:59 And I kid you not, he spends 30 minutes.
0:44:02 And to his credit, he outlines the entire strategy
0:44:04 that Facebook has executed.
0:44:05 He goes, first we’re going to go to high schools.
0:44:06 Then we’re going to go to workplaces.
0:44:07 Then we’re going to go into pods.
0:44:09 Then we’re going to, like he had the whole strategy.
0:44:11 This is in ’05, dude.
0:44:12 This is a year into Facebook.
0:44:13 – And he’s like,
0:44:14 – He’s like, they’re going to start wearing chains
0:44:15 and cool shirts.
0:44:16 – Yeah, he didn’t know that.
0:44:17 – Right around the age of 35.
0:44:19 – He’s like 22 or when I’m 21.
0:44:21 And then he’s like, wait, by the way,
0:44:22 what was your name again?
0:44:23 And I’m like, click.
0:44:27 Needless to say our high school Facebook plan
0:44:29 did not work out.
0:44:30 They launched and they crushed us.
0:44:33 And we went and got jobs in finance.
0:44:34 – That’s an amazing story.
0:44:35 – That’s a sad story.
0:44:37 – And by the way, isn’t the funny thing that like,
0:44:40 the actual answer was go join Facebook.
0:44:41 Like just go do whatever you can.
0:44:43 – At every point in my life,
0:44:45 that has been the right answer to maximize my outcome.
0:44:47 And when I started Ampush, dude, for 10 years,
0:44:50 like I was before all their ads and I did the math
0:44:52 because a buddy of mine got a job with same resume,
0:44:54 got like a corp dev and he didn’t take it.
0:44:55 I was like, he’s an idiot,
0:44:57 but he didn’t take it, but we have his offer.
0:44:59 We have his physical offer still.
0:45:01 It’s like, oh, that would have been worth $75 million.
0:45:02 – Dude, I talked to a guy the other day
0:45:06 who was like the two or 300th employee of Facebook.
0:45:09 And he was like, I had a $100 million in Facebook stock.
0:45:10 – Yes.
0:45:11 – You know, he worked there for seven years
0:45:12 or something like that.
0:45:13 – What I should have done is said,
0:45:15 hey, look, I started this high school competitor.
0:45:16 Do you want to hire me, dude?
0:45:18 Because I’d probably be like a billionaire right now
0:45:20 because we’re a year into the business existing.
0:45:23 – And by the way, like to start Facebook,
0:45:27 unbelievable amount of work and genius
0:45:30 to be the founding kind of like first five,
0:45:33 10, 15, 20 people there.
0:45:34 Tremendous amount of work.
0:45:37 You’re scaling something that’s massive
0:45:38 and you got to be like really sharp
0:45:40 or you’re going to get washed out.
0:45:44 To be the hundredth or 200th person at Facebook,
0:45:46 don’t need anything special to be honest.
0:45:47 – Dude, or the thousandth.
0:45:49 – You’re around, okay, get over here.
0:45:50 Can you lift boxes for a bit?
0:45:52 All right, he lifted boxes for a bit.
0:45:54 Hey, can you, we got a bunch of spammers.
0:45:56 Can you look at all these and figure out like
0:45:57 what we’re going to do, tell the team,
0:45:59 like we need people to filter this.
0:46:01 And by employee 200, you no longer need to be
0:46:03 at the top of the genius curve.
0:46:04 – Oh my God, dude.
0:46:07 – Work an incredible amount and you still get rich.
0:46:11 – So here’s the deal.
0:46:15 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:46:17 It was called The Hustle and it was a daily newsletter
0:46:19 at scale to millions of subscribers.
0:46:21 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:46:25 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:46:27 and only three of them were actually doing
0:46:27 any writing.
0:46:30 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:46:32 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:46:35 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:46:38 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:46:41 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:46:42 If you want to grow your newsletter,
0:46:44 if you want to monetize a newsletter,
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0:46:50 So check it out, beehive.com.
0:46:54 That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:46:58 – Hi, four years into Ampush,
0:47:00 I was looking for a head of sales
0:47:01 and our best place to hire salespeople
0:47:02 was from Facebook itself,
0:47:04 because they knew how to navigate the beast
0:47:07 and get us more leads from that.
0:47:11 Get this guy, we love each other on the first dinner.
0:47:12 He meets two other people on the team
0:47:13 and where he’s four interviews in
0:47:15 and I do the classic talk.
0:47:17 All right, let’s talk comp for a second, right?
0:47:20 We’re a startup, we’ll give you a couple points of equity.
0:47:22 And he gets this very scared look on his face.
0:47:26 He goes, “Jesse, I’m investing $800,000 a month
0:47:28 “in Facebook stock, how are you gonna match that?”
0:47:32 And I’m like, “Dude, what, what?”
0:47:32 – Yeah, why are you here?
0:47:34 – Good to meet you, buddy, I’ll see you later.
0:47:36 – That is absolutely insane.
0:47:40 Sean, have you heard the story about Noah Kagan
0:47:41 and how Noah was hired to work at Facebook?
0:47:45 Noah was a 32nd or 30th employee.
0:47:48 And basically what happened is he was out at a party
0:47:50 and he was drunk or something like that.
0:47:53 And he tells a reporter, a tech rich reporter,
0:47:55 we’re gonna launch this thing and that thing
0:47:56 and it’s gonna be the best thing ever.
0:47:58 And it becomes a news article the next day.
0:48:00 And Zuck goes to his desk and he goes,
0:48:03 “You’re fucking with my company, you’re out.”
0:48:05 And he fires him on month nine.
0:48:09 So Noah was three months away from his first divest.
0:48:11 And Noah’s told me, he goes,
0:48:13 “Had I just made it that three months,
0:48:17 “those shares today would be worth about $100 million,
0:48:18 “those three months.”
0:48:23 All because he had a big mouth when he was 21
0:48:24 and drunk at a party.
0:48:27 He was Ampush’s first Facebook ads client,
0:48:29 believe it or not, AppSumo was.
0:48:30 – That’s awesome.
0:48:31 – I bought his first, I got his first customers for him.
0:48:33 – Yeah, and now it’s like, you know,
0:48:35 a business that does 100 million a year in revenue.
0:48:36 So it kind of worked out,
0:48:37 but it would have worked out a lot easier
0:48:39 if he kind of kept his mouth shut.
0:48:41 – Yeah, but my thought, I don’t know
0:48:42 how you guys feel about that.
0:48:44 I’ve done that math and I’m like,
0:48:45 but I don’t think I could have worked,
0:48:47 like I don’t want to work for someone.
0:48:49 – Of course, you can’t look back and be like.
0:48:51 – But even if I could, even now make that decision,
0:48:52 I’m like, I don’t think I would have wanted to work
0:48:55 for Facebook or anywhere for that long or like.
0:48:58 – Dude, I would, that would have been awesome.
0:48:59 Are we gonna say shot?
0:48:59 – I think you’re both right.
0:49:02 So the math on this, just to put it in perspective,
0:49:04 let’s say you join when Facebook has valued at a billion
0:49:08 dollars, which I think it was like a few years in.
0:49:10 I don’t think it was like right away ’cause at the time,
0:49:13 it was unclear, social networking would be that big.
0:49:16 And so let’s say you join at a billion dollar valuation
0:49:18 and your employee, you know, 400,
0:49:23 and you’re so junior and they give you $10,000 of stock
0:49:26 a year and you’re gonna make, you get a $100,000 salary
0:49:29 and you’re gonna get 10,000 of stock.
0:49:32 Over four years, you’ve accumulated $40,000 of stock
0:49:34 at even at a billion.
0:49:38 Today, Facebook is a $1.35 trillion company.
0:49:39 So that’s, you get-
0:49:40 – 1,000 bagger.
0:49:45 – Multiply by 1,000, but $1,300 times your $40,000.
0:49:48 It’s a $54 million stock option you got
0:49:50 for being the janitor at Facebook at the right time,
0:49:52 which tells me a couple of things.
0:49:55 Number one, picking the right company and project
0:49:58 will be like, by far picking the right market to be
0:50:00 in the, and then the winner of that market,
0:50:03 if you’re in the tech industry is by far the most impactful
0:50:06 thing you can do in your, in your like career.
0:50:07 It’ll, it’ll beat your hard work.
0:50:09 It’ll beat your own like, you know, intelligence.
0:50:12 It’ll beat being right many times in a row.
0:50:13 Like you just had to be right once in the right time.
0:50:16 And I should point this out, which is that at the time,
0:50:19 or like every kind of like four years,
0:50:22 it’s pretty obvious what like winning companies look like.
0:50:24 So my version of this was I only did two job interviews
0:50:25 in my life.
0:50:27 The first one was at Monkey Inferno,
0:50:28 which was the, the studio I ended up joining
0:50:30 cause I wanted to be in a studio.
0:50:31 And the other one I did was Stripe.
0:50:33 And I could have told you right then,
0:50:34 like Stripe is the winner.
0:50:35 Like it’s the winner of the startups.
0:50:37 There’s a reason that was the only other interview I did
0:50:40 was because I was like, Stripe is the winner.
0:50:41 It was super obvious.
0:50:43 And I’ve done the similar like heartbreaking math of like,
0:50:45 wow, even if I had joined,
0:50:46 I would have just been like a sales guy,
0:50:49 a biz dev guy, like I had no, like,
0:50:52 I would no seniority would have made an absolute fortune.
0:50:53 Now, on the other hand, you have the Jesse thing,
0:50:55 which is like, do you want to do it?
0:50:57 Would you, would you actually have stuck it out?
0:51:00 And even beyond that is, would you have held?
0:51:03 Cause there is no chance that I would have held.
0:51:05 I bought Bitcoin in 2014.
0:51:06 I did not hold all the Bitcoin.
0:51:09 I gambled Bitcoin away on a poker night one night
0:51:11 cause I was just like playing online poker.
0:51:12 I did all kinds of things.
0:51:16 That’s now a four times $60,000, you know, thing.
0:51:17 At the time, Bitcoin was like 300 bucks.
0:51:20 So it was like, I thought a thousand dollar investment.
0:51:22 It was actually a quarter million dollar investment.
0:51:23 And so, you know,
0:51:26 the idea that I would have held is ridiculous.
0:51:29 And I don’t think, I don’t think the math is actually real
0:51:31 because nobody holds for that long.
0:51:32 – I agree.
0:51:33 – That’s insane.
0:51:35 I’ve got the same story, by the way, with Airbnb.
0:51:38 I think I was going to be employee 120 or something.
0:51:39 And I don’t know.
0:51:41 Also, it was a $20 an hour job.
0:51:44 I don’t even know if the equity would have been a lot,
0:51:47 but you do the math and it does sting a little bit.
0:51:50 – But dude, I mean, the one way, like I was,
0:51:52 I worked at Goldman, I was 25.
0:51:55 My 29 year old boss made $2 million a year.
0:51:59 My 35 year old boss was making $15 million a year.
0:52:01 And then I got off that path because I was like,
0:52:04 I don’t want to like sit here and look at spreadsheets all day.
0:52:05 Like it’s a very not dynamic job.
0:52:07 I didn’t, I looked at my boss.
0:52:08 I said, do I want to be them one day?
0:52:09 And I said, no.
0:52:11 And I literally wrote this down to keep myself honest.
0:52:15 I said, I’m okay with like half my personal expected value
0:52:17 to be able to like do my own thing in the future.
0:52:18 I don’t know, I’ve never rerun the math,
0:52:22 but I had to like make that decision for myself.
0:52:25 – What’s a $15 million a year employee at Goldman do?
0:52:27 – There’s a bunch of jobs that make that kind of money.
0:52:29 But in my world, I was in the like the buy side hedge fund.
0:52:32 They were investing, we had a $7 billion fund,
0:52:34 two and 20, right?
0:52:37 If the thing delivers 10% a year,
0:52:41 they make the fees on seven billion or like what, 140 plus
0:52:45 on 10% is 700 million, it’s like 350 million in carry.
0:52:48 And there’s four senior people.
0:52:50 Now, Goldman might even get half of it or whatever,
0:52:53 but like they’re paying 50% out of whatever people make
0:52:54 in the hedge fund.
0:52:55 So, but then bankers make that much.
0:52:57 I mean, all of these financial services
0:52:59 at a senior already level, they all make tons of money.
0:53:01 There was a guy who endowed a scholarship I got
0:53:02 when I was a pen who was a partner at Goldman
0:53:03 at the head of the infrastructure fund
0:53:07 and was making 55 a year is what he told me.
0:53:07 – And then when he told you,
0:53:10 did he just like smirk the biggest spark
0:53:13 you’ve ever seen in your goddamn life?
0:53:14 I mean, it just, it was permanent.
0:53:15 He had a facial.
0:53:18 – But I saw that I was like, hey, you’ve been there 30 years
0:53:19 and like, have you ever been in those atmospheres?
0:53:22 None of the three of us would last more than two
0:53:23 or three years in those atmospheres.
0:53:27 They’re not, they’re political, it’s not, I don’t know.
0:53:29 There’s more than money, right?
0:53:30 – I totally agree.
0:53:32 I think our actions have showed that,
0:53:33 but I also think it is entertaining
0:53:38 to see like just the sort of mind bending amounts
0:53:40 that people make doing certain things.
0:53:43 And in the case of joining companies early,
0:53:45 like, wow, that’s kind of it.
0:53:47 That’s all you really had to do
0:53:48 in terms of like financial success.
0:53:50 There’s a funny tweet that Chamath put out the other day
0:53:54 where he was like Bill Gates, you know,
0:53:56 if he had just basically held his Microsoft stock,
0:53:58 I think the richest man in the world
0:54:01 or number one or number two, something like that.
0:54:03 And instead, you know, he did the Gates Foundation
0:54:04 and he did a whole bunch of other things.
0:54:08 He like sold and then has his family office.
0:54:11 And the top reply, which was like a huge ratio
0:54:12 was like, now do you with meta, right?
0:54:14 Because I think he leaves Facebook.
0:54:16 He’s like, great, I got a billion bucks
0:54:17 and then I’m going to do social capital.
0:54:18 I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.
0:54:20 And for, you know, to do SPACs,
0:54:21 I’m going to do all these things
0:54:25 for like, you know, the next 12 years, 15 years.
0:54:27 And if he had just simply like held the meta stock
0:54:29 and chilled, he would have financially out far out
0:54:32 and formed his own, you know, his own brilliance
0:54:34 doing all this different investing action.
0:54:35 – Yeah, I, you know, but that’s the thing.
0:54:37 That’s why you got to do things that you actually care about
0:54:39 or that light you up or that you motivate you in a way
0:54:40 that’s different from cash.
0:54:42 Because I mean, dude, the other thing is how many,
0:54:43 I mean, you guys probably have friends like this.
0:54:45 I have friends who are worth more than I am
0:54:46 who have much more money and,
0:54:49 but they got it through like a meta type situation.
0:54:50 They’re like the most insecure.
0:54:52 Like they’re like, oh, I just got lucky.
0:54:54 They’re afraid to talk about it.
0:54:56 Like it seems like a, like a horrible existence.
0:54:59 Like, and there’s a lot of people I know like that.
0:55:01 I met one of the founders of YouTube once
0:55:04 and the guy was like, I lotto ticket success.
0:55:07 You know, I like, he was, he was very unhappy
0:55:08 with the amount of money he had made.
0:55:10 So you think that it’s like, I’m on easy street.
0:55:10 I get it.
0:55:12 Like, but the psychological thing that people feel like
0:55:14 for all, I mean, it’s a whole nother,
0:55:16 there’s a whole nother vector of challenges
0:55:18 that come with it versus I think all the three of us
0:55:20 are founders, you start a business,
0:55:21 whatever it is you made, you made it,
0:55:22 you know, you did it.
0:55:25 Like there’s a different element to it, in my opinion.
0:55:26 – I like talking about it the same way.
0:55:29 Like looking at mega mansions on the internet.
0:55:30 It’s fascinating to one part of my brain,
0:55:32 but then the main part of my brain is like,
0:55:33 I wouldn’t even want that out.
0:55:36 Like, not even then, it’s like, dude, that’s way too big.
0:55:37 That wouldn’t be fun to live in, that’d be uncomfortable.
0:55:39 And man, the maintenance of that would be like,
0:55:41 pan of the ass, if that’s not what I want.
0:55:44 In the same way that when we got acquired by Twitch,
0:55:46 I had thought in the last seven years,
0:55:49 I had worked towards like, I want to build a, you know,
0:55:51 a successful tech company, right?
0:55:54 I was in the venture capital world success in that world
0:55:56 as you build a billion dollar plus company.
0:55:59 We were doing like a social type of product,
0:56:02 a media product and Twitch is like one of the 10 winners
0:56:04 that like actually existed.
0:56:06 And then I saw Emmett’s day to day and I was like,
0:56:08 oh man, I would be miserable if I was doing this.
0:56:11 And not even in like, like it was just, that wasn’t fun.
0:56:15 Like his job fundamentally was like putting out fires
0:56:17 and you know, all problems roll up basically.
0:56:19 And like, it’s the worst problems that roll up.
0:56:20 – Shit rolls up ill.
0:56:22 – Yeah, shit rolls up ill, exactly.
0:56:24 It’s the worst problems that rolled up past your executive
0:56:26 team because they would solve a bunch of them,
0:56:28 but the ones that they can’t really solve cleanly
0:56:29 roll up to you.
0:56:31 So you get the worst of the worst that roll up to you.
0:56:32 And he would sit in the conference room and basically,
0:56:34 you know, his calendar was managed by somebody else.
0:56:36 And there’s a 30 minute block and another 30 minute block
0:56:37 and another 30 minute block.
0:56:39 And he’s reading memos and he’s doing decisions all day.
0:56:41 And I’m like, man, this is not like,
0:56:43 like the fun factor is not there.
0:56:44 And that’s when I started asking a question.
0:56:47 That’s why I started this podcast is I was like,
0:56:49 who’s having the most fun?
0:56:50 Rather than who is the most successful,
0:56:51 who is the most rich?
0:56:53 It’s just fundamentally, who’s having the most fun?
0:56:54 And I remember looking at Joe Rogan and I was like,
0:56:56 I think Joe Rogan’s having a blast.
0:56:59 It seems like he basically, the podcast,
0:57:01 which is like an unedited, unscripted thing.
0:57:04 He’s hanging out with comedian friends
0:57:07 or super interesting scientists and paleontologists
0:57:09 and just fascinating people like that.
0:57:11 And then on the side, he does comedy,
0:57:12 which is like, you know,
0:57:14 a craft that he really cares about that he does.
0:57:17 He does the UFC, which is like his hobby.
0:57:19 And he gets to commentate for that and sit ringside,
0:57:21 but he also doesn’t overdo any of the things,
0:57:25 meaning he doesn’t do his podcast in a way
0:57:27 that’s like optimized for views.
0:57:28 He’s not like, he’s like,
0:57:29 I want to do a three hour conversation
0:57:30 because that’s what I want.
0:57:33 Not because that’s optimal for the algorithm.
0:57:34 For UFC, he doesn’t travel.
0:57:36 He’s like, I’ll do the ones that are nearby me,
0:57:37 but I’m not going to fly around the world
0:57:39 every weekend commentating this.
0:57:41 Like, I hope that works for you guys.
0:57:42 Same thing with this comedy stuff.
0:57:43 He’s like, you know,
0:57:44 I’m going to do it the way that I want to do it.
0:57:46 And when I saw that, I was like, okay,
0:57:49 that is a different model of success that I, you know,
0:57:53 I want more than kind of what I wanted in my twenties.
0:57:54 – You use Joe Rogan,
0:57:56 but I honestly think you can apply that to anyone.
0:57:58 Like my hedge fund friends who love hedge funding,
0:57:59 they’re happy.
0:58:00 They love it.
0:58:01 It’s finding your thing.
0:58:02 It’s finding the thing that you really enjoy
0:58:03 and then just going all in on it.
0:58:05 Those are the people I think who are winning.
0:58:08 – You really got to enjoy like doing it a lot
0:58:11 because it all really sucks to get there.
0:58:15 Like, do you guys remember Zuck in ’06 to,
0:58:18 maybe it was like ’08 to like ’15?
0:58:19 Like, I would not have trade places with him.
0:58:21 I would never in a million years
0:58:23 trade places with Elon Musk.
0:58:24 But the idea of like having all these things-
0:58:26 – Zuck’s like, yeah, me neither.
0:58:28 No trade.
0:58:29 I also reject that trade, Sam Parr.
0:58:32 – Yeah, very, very, very fair of him to say that.
0:58:34 But it does seem cool.
0:58:35 Like, I guess what I mean is like,
0:58:38 I could acknowledge that that seems awesome.
0:58:40 That would be cool to have.
0:58:42 And also, I’m not willing to do it,
0:58:44 but it’s, that’s like fantastic.
0:58:45 – Yeah, I think one of the most powerful things
0:58:47 is figuring out what’s,
0:58:48 there’s the difference between cool for you
0:58:49 and cool for me, right?
0:58:50 – That’s right.
0:58:52 – There’s so many things where I see people’s life set up
0:58:54 and I’m like, that is super cool for you.
0:58:56 And like, I don’t mean that in a negative way.
0:58:58 It’s like, I do think it is super cool.
0:59:00 And I think it’s even cooler that it’s what you wanted,
0:59:03 but I have to figure out what is cool for me look like.
0:59:05 – You know what’s funny is our last episode,
0:59:08 you talked about the seven spiritual roles.
0:59:11 And you talked about that book that you were reading,
0:59:13 or how you were thinking about reading it
0:59:13 or something like that.
0:59:15 I went and bought it because personally,
0:59:18 I’m in a little bit of a place now where it’s like,
0:59:20 I think some people call it the second mountain.
0:59:22 You know, you already like achieve a little something
0:59:26 to where you’re like, you’re secure, but you’re like, all right,
0:59:28 but what’s a problem that I want to work on
0:59:30 or a way to spend life that may be a little bit higher up
0:59:32 on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
0:59:36 And so I’m personally still like asking myself,
0:59:37 it’s not defined yet for me.
0:59:39 – Jesse, do you have one?
0:59:40 I’m curious.
0:59:43 – Yeah, you know, I’ve done,
0:59:44 I think Sean, you know this,
0:59:46 I’ve spent probably a better part of six or seven years
0:59:47 on this personal growth journey,
0:59:50 which has turned into like a spiritual journey.
0:59:53 And the defining moment came for me,
0:59:55 maybe three years in when my coach was like,
0:59:57 what’s the one thing you can’t not do?
0:59:59 It’s like a really weird question.
1:00:01 And the exercise for, you know, you can do it, Sam,
1:00:02 right now is what’s the one thing you can’t not do?
1:00:04 Write down a few sentences,
1:00:05 and then every week look at those sentences
1:00:07 and see if they seem to grow with you.
1:00:08 – That’s a good idea.
1:00:11 – And in one funny way he’s like,
1:00:12 what’s the thing that comes in the room when you show up?
1:00:13 Like, what’s the stench?
1:00:16 ‘Cause his point was we try to make purpose
1:00:17 this far out thing we have to go get.
1:00:18 And it’s actually the thing already inside of us
1:00:21 that we just need to like tap into and live more fully.
1:00:25 And for me, it was, I love helping other people
1:00:26 like be the best versions of themselves,
1:00:28 like raise their game to the next level
1:00:30 of what they’re capable of.
1:00:30 Even in this podcast,
1:00:32 like I think I taught you guys two new things.
1:00:34 Like it just, it comes out, it’s not purposeful.
1:00:36 And that’s, I’ve made it more purposeful now.
1:00:37 But like at the time it wasn’t,
1:00:39 but it was a thing any of my friends would tell you about me,
1:00:40 any of my employees would tell you about like,
1:00:41 what do you do?
1:00:43 Jesse walks in and like the bar goes up
1:00:44 and it’s like an exciting go up.
1:00:48 And so I really, one of the interesting examples of this,
1:00:49 he goes, so how do you keep your to-do list, Jesse?
1:00:51 And I was like, oh, initiatives or clients.
1:00:54 And it’s like, what if you kept your to-do list
1:00:56 based on your people you worked with, like executives
1:00:57 and how you’re helping them
1:00:59 be the best versions of themselves.
1:01:02 He’s like, you’d probably still like get the work done
1:01:03 that you need to get done,
1:01:04 but you do it in this very inspired way.
1:01:06 And Gateway X, I mean, Gateway X is a whole function
1:01:08 of me going, the thing I want to do
1:01:10 is help other people learn and grow.
1:01:12 I’m not the CEO of any of these companies.
1:01:14 Like now I do actually keep my to-do list that way.
1:01:15 I don’t write growth assistant or AUX.
1:01:17 I write Adrian and Casey.
1:01:20 And I’m like, how am I helping those people?
1:01:22 And I find it’s a weird thing when I frame my success
1:01:24 or my life through the PNLs of those businesses,
1:01:29 I get very like, I’m not as powerful.
1:01:32 I’m like a more scarce minded person.
1:01:33 And when I frame it as the like,
1:01:35 how do I help those individuals?
1:01:35 Which is the same shit
1:01:37 because they’re running the businesses.
1:01:40 I’m like creative and I’m happy and I’m more flowing.
1:01:41 So for me, it’s like,
1:01:43 that’s the thing and it feels really energizing for me.
1:01:45 Like I think I could do it for a really long time.
1:01:46 And obviously the setup,
1:01:48 the way I’ve got it set up matters a lot too.
1:01:50 Like I’m, you know,
1:01:51 not running any of the individual businesses.
1:01:52 I don’t think I want to.
1:01:53 I don’t want to run staff meetings.
1:01:56 I don’t want to run comp plans, hiring.
1:01:57 Like all these things, I did it.
1:01:58 You guys have done it.
1:01:59 Like it’s not what I want to do,
1:02:02 but I do want to help grow each of these businesses.
1:02:04 – Dude, you’re awesome.
1:02:05 I appreciate you doing this.
1:02:06 – Thanks man.
1:02:07 – Thanks for having me.
1:02:07 – Great to see you.
1:02:10 By the way, how’d you get Nellie at your birthday party?
1:02:11 What was that about?
1:02:13 Tell that story before we go.
1:02:14 – Dude. – It was the quick one.
1:02:17 – So I turned 40 in May, as you guys know,
1:02:19 and I have a cool video montage of the party,
1:02:20 my wife and I have some party,
1:02:23 but I’ve been telling all my friends about St. Louis
1:02:24 since I was 18, so I went to college.
1:02:26 I’m like, St. Louis is the best city, whatever.
1:02:27 And everyone’s like, I was like,
1:02:28 I’ll move back there one day.
1:02:29 They’re like, no, you’re not.
1:02:31 And then I moved back and they’re like, oh shit,
1:02:32 you moved back.
1:02:34 And so I had 200 people in town
1:02:36 who I’ve been raving to about St. Louis
1:02:38 for like 10 plus years.
1:02:40 So I’m like, what’s the most ridiculous thing
1:02:41 you could do if you’re me having your 40s?
1:02:44 Like Nellie, I mean, you guys are similar, similar in age.
1:02:46 From my high school to early college,
1:02:47 Nellie was like the biggest rapper on the planet
1:02:49 and he’s from my hometown.
1:02:50 – Nellie was our guy.
1:02:53 He was the first famous St. Louis guy.
1:02:55 And it doesn’t matter what race you are,
1:02:58 how old you are, Nellie was like our son.
1:03:00 He made us so proud.
1:03:02 – If you’re in your 30s or 40s, just close your eyes.
1:03:05 I’m just gonna say a few words that’ll just take you back.
1:03:09 Country Grammar, Air Force Ones, EI.
1:03:11 – John and her?
1:03:11 Oh my God.
1:03:14 Like just the memories that come with those words.
1:03:17 – So I’m like, all right, yeah, I’m, you know,
1:03:18 what’s the ridiculous thing I could have my party?
1:03:19 I’m like, have Nellie perform there.
1:03:22 So my wife closed through the normal channels.
1:03:24 They’re like, you know, he basically doesn’t do this, right?
1:03:26 So he’s like, look, it’s 300,000 just as a starting price.
1:03:29 By the time you do it all, it’s half a million dollars.
1:03:31 And I’m like, I wanna die with zero,
1:03:34 but like that’s a little, little rich for my blood.
1:03:35 – I don’t wanna live with zero.
1:03:37 – Yeah. So I’m like, all right, we’re not gonna do that.
1:03:39 And then I kind of am sad for a few months.
1:03:41 And then the entrepreneur of me goes, wait, come on,
1:03:43 there’s gotta be another way to approach this, right?
1:03:45 So St. Louis is not a big place.
1:03:47 I asked a couple of people, I go, you know,
1:03:48 Nellie’s people, right?
1:03:50 And I’m like, can you introduce me?
1:03:52 And so I get to know, they’re great.
1:03:54 By the, there’s this guy, Mike Chaffin,
1:03:55 there’s one wonderful guys, I get to know them.
1:03:57 And you know, they introduced me as this guy
1:04:00 who’s like an expert digital market or e-commerce guy.
1:04:01 So I’m like, hey, what’s going on?
1:04:03 What’s going on in your world?
1:04:06 Oh, you know, Nellie is actually working
1:04:09 on two big e-commerce businesses, like his team is.
1:04:11 And I go, ooh, tell me more.
1:04:13 And they have to help me all about it.
1:04:14 And I’m like, okay, well, here’s the thing
1:04:15 you should think about and make sure you tag this product.
1:04:18 And they’re like, oh, wow, you know a lot about this.
1:04:21 And I’m like, okay, how can I be helpful, right?
1:04:24 And then I just basically have been working with them.
1:04:26 And right, here’s a Shopify app, do this.
1:04:28 Here’s a good contractor for this.
1:04:30 They’re helping their team get it going.
1:04:32 And at some point it came out, the AUX business came out.
1:04:34 And I’m like, yeah, I charged private equity firms
1:04:37 like $200,000, $300,000 to do that, right?
1:04:39 And they’re like, oh, but you’ve just been doing it for free.
1:04:40 Like, well, can we be helpful?
1:04:42 I’m like, it’s funny you ask.
1:04:44 A young man’s dream would be to have Nellie
1:04:46 at his birthday party.
1:04:47 And you know, they’re his people.
1:04:49 So they’re like, well, let’s go talk to him.
1:04:50 And they go, well, he’s got to meet you
1:04:51 ’cause he doesn’t know who you are.
1:04:53 And if he doesn’t know you, so I take my wife,
1:04:56 you know, I get my sort of urban like going on there
1:04:59 and we become, he’s super nice guy, really friendly.
1:05:01 – Dude, have you ever been more nervous
1:05:02 walking up to that meeting?
1:05:03 – I was nervous.
1:05:04 My wife was super nervous.
1:05:06 Like, why the hell am I here right now?
1:05:08 We meet him in like the Soho wannabe in St. Louis.
1:05:10 So a club wannabe.
1:05:11 – You go for the handshake, Dap Up?
1:05:12 What do you do?
1:05:14 – Yeah, you know, not the handshake, but the, you know,
1:05:15 pull in.
1:05:17 Yeah, yeah, of course.
1:05:20 And so that goes really well.
1:05:23 – Yeah, my guy, he started using that phrase, my guy.
1:05:24 – Yeah.
1:05:26 And he asked me, so what do you want to do?
1:05:28 And I think like, I was like, oh man,
1:05:29 you got to come out to EI.
1:05:30 We got to have the intro.
1:05:32 It’s gonna be like, and he like looks at me.
1:05:33 He’s like, okay, you’re a real fan.
1:05:36 I’m like, yeah, man, this, like, you were, you were the guy.
1:05:39 So they’re like, okay, Nelly loved you, we’re in.
1:05:41 Then they’re like, wait, what was the date again?
1:05:43 It’s May 25th.
1:05:45 Like, well, he’s in Napa on the 24th night
1:05:47 at some festival, and then he needs to be in Vegas
1:05:49 on the 26th day for a day party.
1:05:54 And they’re like, he would do it as a friend now
1:05:56 because you’ve helped him, but he just can’t make
1:05:56 the date work, Jesse.
1:05:59 And so again, I’m like depressed for 48 hours.
1:06:01 And then I’m like, no, fuck this.
1:06:04 I’m like, what if I fly in private both ways?
1:06:07 And they go, we’ll talk to him, come back the next day.
1:06:10 Okay, he’ll do it, but it’s gotta be a G4 or better.
1:06:11 – Oh my God.
1:06:13 – Nelly does not fly in anything below a G4.
1:06:15 So I go and I do a bunch of like, you know,
1:06:17 I’ve been flying private a little bit
1:06:18 since the Ampere sale and I was like,
1:06:20 talked to a bunch of these brokers
1:06:21 and I basically get them to beat each other up.
1:06:22 And it was roundtrip.
1:06:24 So it got a little cheaper per hour than it normally would.
1:06:27 But for 60 grand, I got him a roundtrip on a G4,
1:06:30 Napa to STL, STL to Vegas.
1:06:31 And he rolls into the, you know, he rolled,
1:06:34 and he, by the way, he was amazing at the party.
1:06:36 Like, I’ll text you guys videos and stuff.
1:06:37 Like he, it was scary
1:06:40 because he wasn’t under any contract with me.
1:06:41 So he could have come out and said,
1:06:43 “Hey, happy birthday, Jesse, EIEI.”
1:06:44 And he could have left.
1:06:47 He ends up doing a 45 minutes set.
1:06:49 And he told like his manager and manager told me,
1:06:51 he’s like, dude, he was like so hyped.
1:06:52 There was like all these Indian people
1:06:54 who like knew his music.
1:06:57 Like he was so pumped that you guys are all just like,
1:06:59 rapping and my brother and I are on stage,
1:07:00 rapping EIEI with him.
1:07:03 Like it was, dude, it was a top three life moment.
1:07:04 Like it was unbelievable.
1:07:07 – That’s so awesome.
1:07:10 – It was the best.
1:07:12 Like it was honestly one of the best hours of my life.
1:07:15 – He was super cool.
1:07:17 – A little dicky if you’re out there listening,
1:07:19 I would, I’m turning 40 in a few years.
1:07:20 I would love to start, you know.
1:07:22 – Yeah, you gotta save that money, dude.
1:07:23 You gotta save that money.
1:07:26 – Yeah, you have to hope that his like career just goes down.
1:07:27 – Well, I told my wife,
1:07:28 I’m like for your 50th, I’ll get Beyonce
1:07:30 because hopefully by then I’ll have a little more money
1:07:33 and you will, her stock will be down.
1:07:35 – Yeah, we gotta just catch them right before they hit cameo.
1:07:37 So they can’t be peaking.
1:07:38 They gotta be on some sort of a decline,
1:07:41 but like not all the way rock bottomed yet.
1:07:43 So that’s, that’s what we’re going for.
1:07:45 – Jesse, we appreciate you, you’re the man.
1:07:46 Thanks for doing this.
1:07:47 – You too guys, good to see you.
1:07:48 – All right, that’s it.
1:07:49 That’s the pod.
1:07:51 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
1:07:54 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
1:07:56 ♪ I put my all in it like no days on ♪
1:07:58 On the road, let’s travel never looking back
1:08:01 (upbeat music)