0:00:02 I still think the big opportunity in the media space,
0:00:03 if someone wants to take a big swing,
0:00:07 someone wants to go build a billion-dollar company, it’s…
0:00:09 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:11 I know I can be what I want to.
0:00:14 I put my all in it like my days off.
0:00:16 On the road, let’s travel, never looking back.
0:00:18 Wait, so say, what were you saying earlier, how you hated me?
0:00:20 Or no, you didn’t hate me.
0:00:21 No, I didn’t hate you.
0:00:23 Like, I hated you.
0:00:24 Just to be clear, I hated you.
0:00:27 I did not hate you.
0:00:30 Like, I feel like also part of, like, my shtick has always been, like,
0:00:31 I don’t hate anyone.
0:00:33 I try to kill people with kindness.
0:00:36 I try, like, people have to feel like douchebags for hating me
0:00:37 because there’s no way to hate me.
0:00:39 Like, I feel like that was my MO for a while.
0:00:43 But I remember, yeah, I remember being on the phone with Tim Shaw.
0:00:45 And he was an investor in The Hustle also, right?
0:00:49 Yeah, I was so mad at him for investing in both of our companies.
0:00:49 I was so angry.
0:00:51 Yeah, and I remember being on the phone with him.
0:00:55 And I was like, we’re talking about you for some reason.
0:00:58 And I was like, yeah, like, I would love to talk to Sam.
0:01:00 But I don’t know if he wants to talk to me or us.
0:01:04 And Tim was just like, yeah, I don’t think he likes you guys very much.
0:01:07 But anyway, I didn’t hate you.
0:01:11 But I was jealous of certain things at The Hustle.
0:01:14 And one of the things I was most jealous of was the welcome email.
0:01:17 Like, I remember reading the welcome email and being like,
0:01:18 this is so freaking good.
0:01:22 And I’m so angry that we don’t have one that is as good as this.
0:01:27 I would have traded you the welcome email for your guys’ ability to be like financially,
0:01:30 like, just you guys are far more than competent.
0:01:31 But I was barely competent.
0:01:34 So I so like the envy went both ways.
0:01:35 All right.
0:01:36 So here’s what I want to do for this show.
0:01:37 So here’s the deal.
0:01:40 So wait, do you guys say what you sold for?
0:01:41 Is that public or not?
0:01:46 Yeah, we could say 75 million, I think is the public number.
0:01:50 So collectively, The Hustle and Morning Brew, we sold for like hundreds of millions of dollars.
0:01:56 And we were sort of like the graduating class of like 2020 or whatever.
0:01:58 We were the early people in the newsletter game.
0:02:02 We didn’t like invent it, but we kind of helped pioneer a little bit of what is popular today.
0:02:07 And now officially, as of a couple weeks ago, we are both, or all three of us,
0:02:08 are officially out of our companies.
0:02:09 I’ve been out for a minute.
0:02:11 Alex has been out for a minute.
0:02:15 Now Austin is out, and we could finally reveal like a bunch of information.
0:02:19 Sorry, Sam, to be clear, I’m technically executive chairman.
0:02:22 So I’m no longer day-to-day, but I am executive chairman of Morning Brew.
0:02:24 You are no longer operating.
0:02:26 But I think you guys, do you still have equity ownership?
0:02:29 No, we’re both fully out.
0:02:29 All right.
0:02:30 So that’s what I mean.
0:02:35 And so what I wanted to do was I wanted to go year by year when we each started.
0:02:41 And I want to explain to the listener what we were doing in that year, what our revenue
0:02:43 and profit was, what our subscriber growth was, things we learned.
0:02:48 And also, we have to add this, things that we would do differently if we were starting again
0:02:50 today and things that we wish we had done.
0:02:51 Does that sound good?
0:02:52 Yeah, sounds good.
0:02:55 I’m also excited for it because at the time, I didn’t know any of your numbers.
0:02:59 So this is like the first time I actually know your numbers as we were going through it.
0:03:04 Hey, quick message from our sponsor, HubSpot.
0:03:06 You know, marketing in 2025 is wild.
0:03:08 Customers can spot fake messages instantly.
0:03:12 Privacy changes are making ad targeting a nightmare and everybody needs more content than ever.
0:03:14 And that’s why HubSpot has a new marketing trends report.
0:03:16 It doesn’t just show you what’s changing.
0:03:17 It shows you exactly how to deal with it.
0:03:21 Everything is backed by research and it’s about marketing plays that you can use tomorrow.
0:03:25 So if you’re ready to turn your marketing challenges into results, go to HubSpot.com
0:03:27 slash marketing to download the report for free.
0:03:33 I think I’ve like shared with Austin, like my whole data room at this point,
0:03:35 the cool thing about having a data room is like you’re supposed to have,
0:03:38 you know, all the information that’s easily accessible.
0:03:39 So you can go like go back and look back.
0:03:42 Yeah, but this is this is the first time it’s all been in one place.
0:03:45 We’ve piecemealed it, but I think it’ll be fun to just side by side it.
0:03:48 So you guys started in 2015.
0:03:50 What was the original premise?
0:03:52 And weren’t you guys both in college?
0:03:53 Yeah.
0:03:55 So I was a senior at Michigan.
0:03:57 Austin was a sophomore.
0:04:01 I mean, both of us were kind of on the finance track.
0:04:02 The general premise.
0:04:06 And it’s so funny because like we’ve told this story so many times about how it started.
0:04:07 I don’t know if it’s actually the truth.
0:04:09 It’s just what I remember is the story.
0:04:12 But basically was I was helping students prep for job interviews.
0:04:17 I would ask kids during these mock interviews, how do you keep up with the business world?
0:04:22 Every single student would say, I read the Wall Street Journal, but my but it’s dry.
0:04:23 I can’t get through the whole thing.
0:04:25 My parents told me I have to read it.
0:04:27 And so at some point I was like, this is crazy.
0:04:31 These kids are about to spend their whole careers in business, yet they don’t have something that they enjoy reading.
0:04:37 So I started putting together the kind of OG version of Morning Brew, which was called Market Corner.
0:04:40 And it was a PDF that I had attached to an email listserv every day.
0:04:42 And Austin was one of my readers.
0:04:44 Can I tell you what I think the real story was?
0:04:46 Because it’s probably the same story as mine.
0:04:46 Sure.
0:04:53 You saw the success of the skim and you just said, I’m just going to do this for finance people or in my case, tech guys.
0:04:55 Definitely possible.
0:04:57 Yeah, I think that’s partly true.
0:05:00 I do think Alex started the PDF version.
0:05:01 There were two versions.
0:05:04 There was the Market Corner and then there was turning into Morning Brew.
0:05:14 The evolution of Morning Brew was totally inspired off of, wow, if these two women in New York City could get millions of people, I think maybe a million people at the time reading.
0:05:16 Like, why can’t we do the same?
0:05:21 There’s a bunch of, you know, at the time we thought dudes in finance who wanted to read about the business world.
0:05:24 And did you have any revenue in year one?
0:05:26 No.
0:05:26 No.
0:05:31 Which, by the way, I’ll say was a huge advantage for us that I don’t think you had with the hustle.
0:05:33 Is Austin and I were still in school.
0:05:39 So we basically had a year and a half to two years of like fake timeline where we didn’t have to worry about bringing in revenue.
0:05:46 So, in 2015, I think I was 25, it wasn’t the hustle.
0:05:47 It was just an event called HustleCon.
0:05:55 And that year, I think it had made around $400,000 in revenue and like $200,000 in profit.
0:06:04 Like, it was like a good event, but we, and it was basically like a TED Talk for entrepreneurs, but I was so scrappy and I honestly regret it.
0:06:13 One of my biggest regrets in life is buying the supplies that I needed for that event at Costco and returning the stuff that we didn’t use.
0:06:17 And I didn’t realize that you throw things away once, like Costco throws it away.
0:06:24 And it was like the most shame that I’d ever felt was like being that like cheap and horrible.
0:06:26 Was the hustle that profitable?
0:06:28 Like when you did it that first year, was it profitable?
0:06:34 Yeah, yeah, because it was just me and then I, and then I asked my buddy John to help and it was just us two.
0:06:38 And yeah, it made it so like it when we started in the year 2015 or sorry.
0:06:44 So the next year in 2016, I started the hustle because I was like conferences suck.
0:06:47 I want to create a newsletter because I’d saw the skim.
0:06:52 I read about Thrillist on Mixergy.com and a bunch of other and like a bunch of other newsletter businesses.
0:06:58 And when I started that business, I had $500,000 in my bank and it was all from conferences.
0:06:59 It’s pretty wild.
0:07:02 I think what you said is interesting about the math, right?
0:07:10 I think at the time, and we have a funny story we can tell now that we’ve held back for a while about John Steinberg and our first interaction with him.
0:07:15 But so many people came to us and they would say, like, this is so stupid.
0:07:17 Why are you doing this newsletter thing?
0:07:18 It makes no sense.
0:07:21 But Alex and I would sit there every night and we’d go through a spreadsheet.
0:07:28 And it was the most basic spreadsheet of, you know, newsletter subscribers grow five or 10% a month and CPM stay flat.
0:07:32 Over time, you can get to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of revenue a month.
0:07:35 And I think it was really that simple.
0:07:36 I had the exact same spreadsheet.
0:07:40 I listened to every interview with Ben Lear and I’m like, tell me what the CPMs are.
0:07:45 And then I met with Business Insider reporters and I said, tell me how many people visit your tech part of your website.
0:07:46 Oh, 80 million.
0:07:46 Okay.
0:07:47 Then, yeah.
0:07:49 Like, you’re giving me some numbers to triangulate.
0:07:50 Yeah.
0:07:54 And like at the time, everyone was spending millions of dollars putting video on Facebook.
0:07:58 And, you know, I don’t think we were actually that smart.
0:08:02 I just think the people around us were really dumb.
0:08:09 I do think one of the big advantages, you know, they say at a poker table, if you look around and you can’t find the sucker, you’re the sucker.
0:08:13 Well, I think we picked the industry with a lot of suckers.
0:08:17 There were a lot of people who started five or 10 years before us and they just weren’t smart.
0:08:24 They were doing the same thing that they did for 10 years and, you know, even in 2015, 2017, we were like, yeah, PuzzFeed, it just doesn’t make sense.
0:08:26 It’s not worth a billion dollars.
0:08:29 And for five years, I think people didn’t believe us.
0:08:34 And over time, I think we proved that our model, while it seems silly, it actually works.
0:08:35 It worked and it made us a bunch of money.
0:08:36 All right.
0:08:38 So fast forward to 2016.
0:08:39 Where are you guys at?
0:08:42 How many subscribers do you have?
0:08:44 What was your revenue in 2016?
0:08:45 What’s the business?
0:08:59 Yeah, so 2016 was the year when, at this point, I’m working full-time on Wall Street, doing the brew in basically, you know, let’s call it 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. every night, falling asleep with my laptop on my lap.
0:09:00 Where were you working?
0:09:02 I was at Morgan Stanley.
0:09:02 Was that miserable?
0:09:03 Yeah.
0:09:04 Yes, it was.
0:09:07 My entire life was, like, built up to that point.
0:09:10 Because remember, like, my dad was a trader on Wall Street for 20 years.
0:09:12 My mom was like, this is all I knew.
0:09:13 But it was horrible.
0:09:24 And going back to what Austin was saying about just, like, there not being a lot of smart people in media, I actually think the best thing we did is, like, I call it, like, IQ arbitrage.
0:09:26 Where I was on a trading desk.
0:09:28 Everyone was a PhD in math.
0:09:30 I was the dumbest person on my desk.
0:09:32 Like, not even a shadow of a doubt.
0:09:35 And just by moving to media, I became not the dumbest person.
0:09:39 September of 2016, I quit my job.
0:09:40 Also, it was hilarious.
0:09:47 Right before that, I almost got fired from Morgan Stanley because they were worried I was insider trading through Morning Brew’s newsletter.
0:09:56 So, so, they basically, HR found out about Morning Brew, which I was supposed to have permission to work on.
0:10:02 The guy who was supposed to give me permission and told me he would got fired in a massive layoff at Morgan Stanley.
0:10:03 So, I didn’t get permission.
0:10:13 And they basically had me meet with Morgan Stanley lawyers, two litigators that were defending Morgan Stanley, saying, you can never tell anyone about this meeting.
0:10:21 But, um, we are concerned that you are trying to make investment decisions, uh, and get private information using your newsletter.
0:10:23 So, that was kind of, like, the last straw for me.
0:10:24 Made me really not enjoy the job.
0:10:25 Quit my job.
0:10:29 We raised a small round in 2016.
0:10:33 2016 is also the year when we talked to John Steinberg as he was starting Cheddar.
0:10:37 And John Steinberg is, uh, like, a media executive.
0:10:39 Did you guys see the Facebook message?
0:10:40 Yeah.
0:10:41 That he sent me?
0:10:41 Yeah.
0:10:42 So, this guy named John Steinberg.
0:10:44 At the time, I think I’m 26.
0:10:49 And I’m just, like, a guy in a shitty apartment trying to do this newsletter.
0:10:55 And John Steinberg is the president or CEO of BuzzFeed.
0:10:57 And he’s about to start a new company called Cheddar.
0:10:58 He was at BuzzFeed.
0:11:01 Then he went to Daily Mail North America that he was the CEO of.
0:11:03 He stepped down from Daily Mail.
0:11:06 And then he sent Austin and I an email.
0:11:07 Austin, what was the subject line?
0:11:08 Like, what did the email say again?
0:11:09 Yeah.
0:11:11 So, it was from his, we had no idea who John Steinberg was.
0:11:12 We didn’t know the media industry.
0:11:14 And we get an email from it.
0:11:17 It’s like, John Steinberg, some numbers at gmail.com.
0:11:25 And he emails us, subject line, intro to founders, body of the email, like what you’re doing, period.
0:11:26 That was the whole email.
0:11:30 So, we looked the guy up on LinkedIn and we’re like, holy shit, this guy’s a big deal.
0:11:32 You know, we give him a call.
0:11:35 And I mean, Alex can tell the story better, but he turns it.
0:11:36 He flips on us.
0:11:38 He makes us think that he’s excited in us.
0:11:40 He’s going to, he’s going to invest in us, all this stuff.
0:11:44 And then he brings Alex to his office and I’ll let Alex take it away.
0:11:45 What happens?
0:11:45 Go ahead.
0:11:46 Yeah.
0:11:54 So, I go to John’s office, which at the time was a tiny, like, closet of a WeWork space.
0:11:59 And it was him, Peter Gornstein, who was his co-founder and the chief content officer.
0:12:00 And I get there.
0:12:11 And I think the conversation is going to be about how John is going to invest in Morning Brew or how Morning Brew maybe will have a segment on cheddar that would create, you know, audience and distribution for us.
0:12:13 Instead, he starts interviewing me.
0:12:15 Yeah, because he wanted you to work there?
0:12:15 Yes.
0:12:17 So, he started interviewing me.
0:12:20 He’s like, okay, so Fitbit earnings come out.
0:12:24 You need to get an expert on the story to talk about what this means.
0:12:26 Who are you talking to?
0:12:27 How are you finding them?
0:12:28 Let’s go.
0:12:31 And I was like, well, I’m going to figure out a way to get to the CEO of Fitbit.
0:12:32 Oh, you fell into it.
0:12:43 And then at some point in the conversation, I was like, you know, to be honest, I’m, you know, I’m not interested in a job at Cheddar.
0:12:47 Like, I thought we were going to be talking about a partnership with Morning Brew or you guys investing in us.
0:12:49 And I will never forget this line.
0:12:52 Honestly, I have some respect he said this because he wasn’t wrong.
0:13:00 He goes, to be totally honest, the cost of the legal fees to do this deal would be more than what I would pay for you guys.
0:13:05 And I was like, damn, he’s right right now.
0:13:06 He’s right right now.
0:13:07 Dude, I have a very similar story.
0:13:11 First of all, related to John, I just found an old message on Facebook that I got.
0:13:13 So here’s his opening two lines.
0:13:15 Have we met?
0:13:16 We should meet.
0:13:20 Dude, he’s amazing.
0:13:22 He’s done it like four or five times.
0:13:24 And that guy’s motor just runs.
0:13:25 Like, he is just unbelievable.
0:13:28 So this is, we’re in the year 2016.
0:13:34 I get an email, or maybe I cold email Ben Lear, who started this thing called Thrillist, which became Group 9, like a billion-dollar company.
0:13:39 And then he’s one of the co-founders of Lear HIPAA, which is like one of the most preeminent VCs in New York.
0:13:44 We start talking, and I think he’s going to buy the hustle right out the gate.
0:13:47 And I’m like, hell yeah, like $5 million.
0:13:50 That’s how much I have right now already.
0:13:51 Like, the offer is going to happen.
0:13:59 And he brings in the president of the company, and it turns into an interview.
0:14:01 The exact same thing.
0:14:04 And I was like, oh, I thought you were going to buy us.
0:14:07 He’s like, brother, this is a newsletter.
0:14:09 This will never make more than like $2 million a year.
0:14:11 And I was like, well, I don’t know, man.
0:14:12 Like, if you do the math.
0:14:15 He was like, no, like, you should come and join us.
0:14:17 Like, you know, we’re a real company.
0:14:19 Like, if you want to, like, make this work, you have to join our company.
0:14:22 And forever, that has been a chip on my shoulder.
0:14:31 And just think about, like, how valuable it was that we were all kind of, like, both had conviction and were, like, irrationally confident in what we were doing.
0:14:38 Because, like, you could see so many other scenarios where someone’s, like, you know, googly-eyed by someone who’s super successful and goes and joins their thing.
0:14:43 And then it basically cuts all of the possible upside that, you know, we ended up experiencing with our businesses.
0:14:45 So this is, all right.
0:14:46 So we’re in the year 2016.
0:14:49 The hustle launched on 4-20-16.
0:14:52 And so that year, we did 400K in revenue.
0:14:57 I think we had, at the end of the year, we had, like, 100,000 subscribers.
0:15:04 I had this strategy where I was writing these crazy blog posts and getting, like, 500,000 to a million people a month coming to our website.
0:15:07 And that’s how we grew.
0:15:13 And I think of the 400K, I think 100,000 was advertising revenue.
0:15:15 And I think it was four of us at the time.
0:15:17 Where were you guys?
0:15:23 So that’s amazing because in 2016, we did our first ad deal.
0:15:26 It was a watch brand called Emla Heart, I believe.
0:15:31 It was about a $3,000 deal for three, we used to call them exposures.
0:15:32 We were so naive.
0:15:34 We called them ad exposures.
0:15:36 It was three of us.
0:15:39 We had a writer who, ironically, we poached someone from BI.
0:15:41 I think, I’m not kidding.
0:15:42 I think he made it, like, seven days.
0:15:44 Like, he barely made it at the company.
0:15:47 He quit because we wanted him to work more than a nine-to-five.
0:15:50 But, you know, we did 25,000 that year.
0:15:51 You did 400,000.
0:15:52 We were three of us that.
0:15:53 I was still in college.
0:15:55 But ours were events, though.
0:15:58 It wasn’t advertising, which is way less important.
0:16:00 Yeah, but you guys did, what, still 100,000 of ads?
0:16:01 That’s pretty good.
0:16:04 Yeah, we started advertising, I believe, in June.
0:16:05 And I looked up my first deal.
0:16:06 It was $4,600.
0:16:10 I cold emailed a guy named Chris Martinez at Wealthfront.
0:16:16 So funny, that’s the funny thing is, it kind of reminds me of, like, if you go to my LinkedIn
0:16:21 and look at my DMs from the last 10 years, I have basically DMed every human being that
0:16:24 has worked in growth marketing or media over the last 10 years.
0:16:30 And I remember that name, Chris Martinez, because I probably emailed him 12 times over that year
0:16:31 to try to get him to do a deal with us.
0:16:33 I don’t know who Chris is anymore.
0:16:33 I haven’t talked to him.
0:16:35 But if you’re listening, thank you.
0:16:39 The things I would do differently from 16 is we raised a little bit of funding.
0:16:41 I would not have done that.
0:16:47 I thought, and in fact, I tried to raise way more money, but no one invested, which ended
0:16:51 up being a blessing because I made a lot of money because I owned the majority of the company.
0:16:54 But that’s what I would do differently.
0:16:57 So if you’re listening to this, if I were starting today, I would not raise funding at all.
0:16:58 Would you agree?
0:17:02 I think raising funding is all about your business needs, right?
0:17:04 I certainly wouldn’t have raised more money than we did.
0:17:06 But we did need the $750,000.
0:17:11 I actually specifically remember, this is now fast forwarding to 2017.
0:17:15 It was December like 27th, 2017.
0:17:21 And I didn’t realize that payroll goes out early if it’s New Year’s Eve because they don’t do
0:17:22 payroll on holidays.
0:17:25 And I had a check in my hand that was going to make payroll.
0:17:29 And I had to sprint to JP Morgan because they were going to close at five o’clock.
0:17:30 It was like 4.55.
0:17:35 And, you know, when people say you were close to missing payroll, I was literally two minutes
0:17:36 away from missing payroll.
0:17:41 So we didn’t need every penny from a cash flow perspective, because obviously media companies,
0:17:46 the accounts receivable on them, you might need 30, 60, 90, or 120 days just to get paid.
0:17:52 But yeah, for a media venture, I don’t think you should raise as little as humanly possible.
0:17:57 I will say there is one thing I would have done differently and like one big lesson from
0:17:59 that period and the raise.
0:18:02 The first is we had 28 individual investors.
0:18:07 So we had 28 people who wrote checks from $2,500 to $100,000.
0:18:08 Same.
0:18:11 If I was to do it again, I would have way fewer.
0:18:17 I would also try to suss out if these people are going to be difficult because we’ll fast
0:18:20 forward at some point, but there were some very difficult investors when we sold the business.
0:18:27 The second is time is a crazy thing in startups and you always think you can get more done in
0:18:28 a shorter period of time.
0:18:32 And I remember we had a slide in our investor deck that showed our one-year plan to investors.
0:18:37 And that slide, looking back on it now, took us nine years.
0:18:41 We tried everything in that slide and took us nine years to try everything.
0:18:42 And most of those things did not work.
0:18:45 But yeah, it took nine years to accomplish our one-year plan.
0:18:46 All right.
0:18:49 So now we are in 2017.
0:18:51 Do you remember we ended the year?
0:18:54 I tell the story differently.
0:18:57 I tell the story that we went from 100,000 to 500,000 in subscribers.
0:18:59 I think I missed a year because I went back.
0:19:03 In 2017, we ended the year with 250,000 subscribers.
0:19:04 We had 2.2 million in revenue.
0:19:06 400K was events.
0:19:08 1.8 was advertising.
0:19:12 And my big learning that year was hiring a sales team.
0:19:16 I think I did the first year of ad sales and I was horrible at it.
0:19:18 I didn’t realize how uptight you had to be.
0:19:19 You had to be like buttoned up.
0:19:19 I didn’t know.
0:19:20 I didn’t understand this.
0:19:23 Where were you guys at the end of 2017?
0:19:24 Yeah.
0:19:29 So 17 was the year that we were both full-time or I was only full-time half the year.
0:19:31 We ended at 100,000 subs.
0:19:34 We did $300,000 of revenue.
0:19:36 We finally started taking a salary.
0:19:38 We were taking 60K each.
0:19:40 But that was the first real year.
0:19:41 We hired our first.
0:19:43 We hired Tyler Dank, who now is the CEO of Beehive.
0:19:45 I’m sure everyone listening knows Beehive.
0:19:47 And he was transformational for us.
0:19:48 What was his job?
0:19:50 Everything.
0:19:53 Dude, do you remember his first title, Austin?
0:19:53 Do you remember?
0:19:54 No.
0:19:55 Growth engineer.
0:19:56 Growth engineer.
0:19:57 Yeah.
0:19:57 Yeah.
0:19:58 Yeah.
0:19:59 I mean, he did everything.
0:20:04 And between him and then we had Michael Schwartz, who also now works at Beehive, who was our
0:20:04 first writer.
0:20:08 And then we had, he brought on Neil Freiman, who still works at Morning Brew today.
0:20:13 He is, I mean, like, look, Alex was the visionary of the Morning Brew voice.
0:20:18 But I do think Neil was really the executor and took it to the next level.
0:20:21 Neil is, I think I spoke about him last time I was on the podcast.
0:20:23 Neil was huge for Morning Brew.
0:20:28 He really did what Alex and I couldn’t do, which was take this idea in our head and put
0:20:33 it on paper every single day, 365 days a year for now 10 plus years.
0:20:38 I also think Neil is a great example of what we did well at the Brew and what you did well
0:20:44 at the Hustle, which is, I think about our first three writing hires, Neil, Michael Schwartz,
0:20:48 and then this woman, Nikki, and all of them were non-traditional hires.
0:20:53 Like, I think both the Morning Brew and Hustle were really good at finding undiscovered talent
0:20:56 and seeing a ceiling in them that other people didn’t realize.
0:20:57 And it was the same thing for you.
0:21:01 Like, I remember, we’ll talk about it later, but like, I watched your writers like a hawk.
0:21:06 I could read a Hustle story and knew who wrote it without seeing a name attached to the story.
0:21:08 And I knew their backgrounds.
0:21:12 And none of these people were what media companies would traditionally hire as talent.
0:21:16 Dude, I tried to recruit media people and they laughed at me.
0:21:20 Like, I emailed this one famous journalist and she said, that’s cute.
0:21:21 Thank you.
0:21:24 Like, I tried to.
0:21:36 And so the only people I could A, afford and B, convinced to do this stuff were like, for example, Lindsay Quinn was a blogger at like a procurement startup or something.
0:21:40 Or I don’t even, like, she was not a writer, but she could write and wanted to write.
0:21:46 And you sell them on the dream of like, wouldn’t it be fun if you could do this hobby all the time and make money from it?
0:21:48 And that’s the only people we could convince to join us.
0:21:49 She was, she was my writing hero.
0:21:53 The number of times in my career I’ve tried to poach her is very non-zero.
0:21:55 Yeah, she was fantastic.
0:21:57 And this really fast forward to 2018.
0:21:59 But Alex isn’t kidding.
0:22:03 We knew every single writer you had.
0:22:09 We knew, and Alex in particular, knew every single story who wrote them.
0:22:21 And we would come to work every day, end of 2017, 2018, we would, for the first two to three hours, print out Morning Brew, print out Axios, print out The Hustle, print out The Skim.
0:22:26 And with a paper and pen, and Alex led the charge, we’d go through every single story.
0:22:27 He’d circle what he’d like.
0:22:29 He’d X out what he didn’t like.
0:22:32 And look, Alex is the most likable person on the planet.
0:22:33 You now know this, Sam.
0:22:36 I’m sure a lot of listeners know how likable Alex is.
0:22:51 The only person on the planet I know who doesn’t like Alex is our first writer because Alex would sit there and just, you know, cross out half the words he put in the newsletter and be like, look, Lindsey Quinn wrote this same story better than you did.
0:22:52 Like, be better.
0:22:54 And, I mean, we were maniacal.
0:22:55 We were, you know, we lost our minds to the game.
0:22:58 We were crazy about this newsletter thing.
0:23:01 And for the record, I didn’t do that.
0:23:02 And that’s a regret.
0:23:11 Like, now that I’m older and understand how company building works, like, I would, like, if you told me you were doing that, I’d be like, you guys are insane.
0:23:11 Just have fun.
0:23:12 Do what feels good.
0:23:20 But that does not, like, once you get past, I don’t know, 5 million in revenue or something like that, you could, and that means you probably have some type of product market fit.
0:23:24 You could absolutely iterate your way to being, like, wonderful.
0:23:29 You know, starting, like, you’re at a B or a C plus, you can get yourself to an A plus through iteration.
0:23:39 And honestly, I think a lot of me being maniacal with the content came from, like, what Austin had taught me along the way around standard setting.
0:23:43 And basically, the standard of your business is what you allow.
0:23:48 And so, like, if you allow suboptimal content to be written, that is the new standard you set.
0:23:54 Like, basically, you’re implicit, by saying, not saying anything to something, you’re implicitly saying that that is okay.
0:24:01 And to me, that was my biggest fear, is if I said okay to things that were not exceptional content, that was the new standard of my business.
0:24:03 How old were you guys during this era?
0:24:04 In 2018?
0:24:07 I was 22?
0:24:08 23, right?
0:24:09 Yeah.
0:24:12 And, yeah, I mean, I’m, what, a year and a half older than you?
0:24:13 Yes, you were 24.
0:24:20 Dude, you guys were, like, I’m like what you guys are when you were 22.
0:24:23 Today, I am now a 22-year-old Austin and a 22-year-old Alex.
0:24:25 Like, I totally buy into everything you’re saying.
0:24:28 Back then, I completely would have laughed at you.
0:24:31 And your way is 100% the right way.
0:24:35 Like, being, it’s crazy how mature you guys were at such a young age.
0:24:42 Yeah, when we sat down at first to set our core values, two, and at the time, I thought
0:24:44 core values were fluffy.
0:24:48 Now, in hindsight, I actually regret that we didn’t, you know, write those in stone and keep
0:24:48 those.
0:24:50 We messed around with them a bunch.
0:24:52 But two core values were really important.
0:24:55 It was one, have an ownership mentality.
0:24:56 Act like you’re an owner.
0:24:58 And if you own something, you’re going to, every day, critique it.
0:24:59 You’re going to give it feedback.
0:25:01 You’re going to care a ton.
0:25:03 You’re going to drive every single day to that.
0:25:05 And the second is underdog mentality.
0:25:11 We came into work every day, a group of misfits, a group of people who had no idea what they
0:25:12 were doing in the media industry.
0:25:14 And we just act like an underdog.
0:25:15 It’s March Madness right now.
0:25:20 And you just see that the way these underdogs show up to games, they’re loose, right?
0:25:22 They don’t have this weight on their shoulders.
0:25:25 And every day we came into work and we were like, screw it.
0:25:30 We are going to kick the shit out of all these legacy media companies who raised these, let’s
0:25:32 see, $100 million of funding.
0:25:36 Alex and I would sit down and say, what could you possibly do with $100 million of funding?
0:25:40 And what they did is they burned it on fire and flushed it down the toilet and added no
0:25:40 value to their companies.
0:25:41 Yeah.
0:25:49 I also just think it’s like, at the time, Austin and I, we just had such a fire.
0:25:56 And I think for Austin, similar to you, Sam, Austin kind of creates an opponent in his head.
0:26:01 And that is enough to basically just create this like insatiable drive to win.
0:26:03 I think for me, I actually have less of that.
0:26:06 But the thing that compensated at the time was like the two things.
0:26:10 It was like my, my dad dying and feeling like I needed to provide for my family.
0:26:15 And I told you this last time when we saw each other in person, Sam, like me being bullied
0:26:20 from fifth grade to 12th grade and feeling like I just wanted to prove that I was like
0:26:21 worthy.
0:26:27 That was more than enough where I think even when the brew is small, Austin and I had this
0:26:30 like deep in our bones feeling that we were going to succeed.
0:26:32 Like the business would ultimately sell.
0:26:33 And it was just a matter of time.
0:26:38 That’s what I have always admired about you guys was you have this really cool combination
0:26:43 of optimism and pessimism where Austin is like afraid all the time yet.
0:26:45 Like is logical enough to be like, I’m going to do this, this, this.
0:26:48 And then like the likely outcomes are A, B, and C.
0:26:50 I did not feel that way.
0:26:52 I, I was, I was a scarcity mindset.
0:26:56 And so in 2018, you guys did 3.1 million in revenue.
0:26:57 You had 10 employees.
0:26:59 And how many subscribers did you have?
0:27:03 So 2018, we went from a hundred thousand to a million subscribers.
0:27:10 All right, my friends, I have exciting news for that business idea that’s been sitting
0:27:10 in your notes app.
0:27:16 The Hustle, which is my old company, has partnered with IndieHackers, one of my favorite websites,
0:27:17 to launch a pitch competition.
0:27:20 It’s called The Hustle’s Big Break.
0:27:22 And it’s a pitch competition with a simple premise.
0:27:27 You tell us your business idea in 60 seconds or less, and the winner gets $5,000 to turn it
0:27:28 into a reality.
0:27:29 Here’s how it works.
0:27:32 Record a 60-second video pitch of your business idea.
0:27:35 Include your business name, description, revenue model, and tagline.
0:27:40 And finally, submit it at thehustle.co slash bigbreak.
0:27:42 And it all has to be done by April 4th.
0:27:46 The winner gets $5,000 in cash to kickstart their business journey.
0:27:50 Plus, we’re going to feature them in The Hustle’s daily newsletter, which is read by around a million
0:27:51 and a half people.
0:27:54 And these are the smartest business and tech folks out there.
0:27:57 The winner will be announced on April 11th.
0:28:02 So again, if you have a business idea, go to thehustle.co slash bigbreak.
0:28:04 All right, back to the pot.
0:28:12 So in 2018, I think we ended the year at 500,000 subscribers.
0:28:14 We had 5.1 million in revenue.
0:28:16 About a million was from events.
0:28:21 And I paid my—we had $160,000 in profit.
0:28:25 And that was the first year that we spent on advertising.
0:28:26 I went and looked back.
0:28:29 So we got to like $200,000 organically.
0:28:30 And then we spent money on ads.
0:28:32 And I spent a million that year.
0:28:35 Did you guys spend money on ads that year to get to a million subscribers?
0:28:39 We spent every penny we possibly could.
0:28:43 I would track daily cash flow to make sure that we had enough money.
0:28:46 And we put—I mean, 2018 was the year for us.
0:28:51 That was the year that—I mean, there were days in 2018 we were growing 20,000.
0:28:52 You know this.
0:28:53 We would do these MacBook giveaways.
0:28:58 We would grow 25,000, 20,000, 25,000 subscribers in a day.
0:29:01 So, yes, we spent every dollar we could possibly find.
0:29:07 And my only regret is we couldn’t figure out a way to find more money to put more money into Facebook ads.
0:29:12 If I remember, by the end of that year, we were spending like $500,000 a month on ads, right?
0:29:13 Yeah, at least.
0:29:14 At least.
0:29:15 That’s crazy.
0:29:20 I was being—I had such a poor mindset where I didn’t look at it.
0:29:25 You guys, because you had this finance background, and also I think you are just more like this naturally anyway,
0:29:33 you had this mentality of like, well, I will spend $1 to make—like, if $1 turns into $1.1, I will spend every $1 I have.
0:29:36 For me, it was like $80,000 a month.
0:29:37 That’s astronomical.
0:29:39 It doesn’t matter what the return is.
0:29:40 Like, you know what I mean?
0:29:43 Like, that was a failure.
0:29:44 That’s an immature mindset.
0:29:48 I also feel like part of it was like Austin and I were younger than you.
0:29:56 We also like, you know, at the time, we were only making $60,000, or I think we had upped our salary that year to $120,000.
0:30:09 And I don’t like—I think part of maybe your mentality for the hustle was like, this is kind of just like a cash-flowing lifestyle business for me that I’m going to just like—I can continue to pull money out of the business as like the vast majority owner of it.
0:30:14 I feel like Austin and I, at the time, weren’t thinking about monetizing it for ourselves in the same way.
0:30:17 Yeah, and Sam, I knew you thought that, right?
0:30:23 Because, you know, a deal in rippling, that whole thing just happened, and we certainly didn’t have someone in your slap.
0:30:25 But we would talk to all your former employees.
0:30:29 We would get every bit of information we possibly could.
0:30:32 And I knew that you had a profit threshold.
0:30:34 You’re like, I want to profit this every month.
0:30:36 And I said, well, that means Sam’s taking his foot off the gas.
0:30:39 And so if Sam’s taking his foot off the gas, I’m going to do the opposite.
0:30:40 Which is funny.
0:30:42 I didn’t make a lot of profit.
0:30:43 I didn’t actually make a lot of profit.
0:30:50 Like, we grew revenue like 50% most every year, but like I did not—so I—yeah, and I think that you were talking about values.
0:30:55 I wish I would have—so, you know, I think you guys matured earlier than I did.
0:30:59 I was still really immature, and I didn’t codify my values, and I didn’t codify the culture.
0:31:05 I started the company when I was 24, 25, and I think I evolved to where I am today when I was like 31.
0:31:09 You guys were kind of like 31-year-old Sam when you were 21.
0:31:15 But had I done it over again, and if you’re listening, I would codify your values early on and stick to it.
0:31:18 Also, what a lot of people do is they buy ads.
0:31:21 Because so back then, this was only, you know, a handful of years ago.
0:31:27 Back then, it felt like buying ads was more—like there weren’t that many experts now to buy ads.
0:31:30 It’s like commonplace, like you—it’s way more common.
0:31:36 And so people buy ads way earlier for their products now, and I actually think that’s a huge mistake.
0:31:37 Totally.
0:31:38 Yeah, I totally agree.
0:31:46 I mean, that’s the part of the story that we didn’t talk about is like we didn’t do paid acquisition until 2017, really.
0:31:52 So 2015 and 2016, to get to 100,000 subscribers, it was entirely organic growth.
0:31:57 So by the time we actually were paying for subscribers, like we knew we had a great product.
0:31:59 We knew how long subscribers were staying.
0:32:04 We also knew how to like work within scarcity of not having money but finding ways to grow regardless.
0:32:07 And I think that muscle, if you skip over it, is a really bad thing.
0:32:12 Okay, and another thing that I learned that—well, I learned—so I’ll say it in 2019.
0:32:13 So we’re in 2019.
0:32:17 You guys did $3.1 million in revenue with $3 million in profit.
0:32:19 $13.1.
0:32:25 Sorry, $13.1 million in revenue, $3 million in profit, a salary each of $250, a team of $25.
0:32:30 We did about $8 million in revenue with $640 being from events.
0:32:37 We did profit of $200,000, but we did cash flow of $1.6 million, and we had—and I’ll explain why.
0:32:43 So at that point, I sort of switched the business to caring about cash flow, and I had subs of about $1.2 million.
0:32:46 And that year, we launched this podcast.
0:32:49 Sean, under the hustle name, launched my first million.
0:32:57 This year, in 2019, the thing I learned was that—you know how a lot of social media companies are like,
0:32:58 who cares about revenue?
0:32:59 Who cares about profit?
0:33:00 Just grow your users.
0:33:02 This was the year that I learned that to be true.
0:33:10 That if you know that you make a certain amount of revenue per advertising—via advertising or subscription per user,
0:33:12 that’s the only thing that matters.
0:33:13 It’s just getting more users.
0:33:14 And I wish I would have understood that a little bit earlier.
0:33:25 Yeah, I think what we learned this year was we started to see the plateau of not just newsletter growth,
0:33:28 but of the economics of newsletters.
0:33:30 Morning Brew got to a point where we started to ask ourselves,
0:33:33 how much could you make on a single newsletter?
0:33:36 I think it was $18 for us per subscriber, right?
0:33:39 $0.50 a month for advertising, maybe?
0:33:41 That sounds right.
0:33:43 I don’t know exactly.
0:33:44 Or $0.75?
0:33:46 Something like that.
0:33:48 I think that makes sense.
0:33:52 But what we learned was, at some point—and the answer ends up being far, far down the road—
0:33:56 but we started to ask ourselves, do we just want to be a single newsletter?
0:34:01 Or are we going to get to a place of diminishing returns from pumping more and more money?
0:34:05 And we were spending—this year, we probably spent $6 to $7 million on paid acquisition.
0:34:09 So we spent what you did in revenue almost, just pumping growth back in.
0:34:12 And we started to ask ourselves, does this make sense?
0:34:14 And that’s where we learned about industry dives.
0:34:19 And we started to really take the approach of, wait, our audience works in retail.
0:34:20 They work in marketing.
0:34:23 They work as CFOs or in finance.
0:34:25 What if we took that path?
0:34:26 The CPMs are higher.
0:34:28 You don’t need to grow as fast.
0:34:29 It’s not a race to the bottom.
0:34:31 It’s more of an engagement play.
0:34:34 And so that’s when we went into our industry verticals.
0:34:39 Yeah, and what I would say is also that year, I actually think of all the years in the business.
0:34:48 2019 was the most important year because that was the year when Austin and I—I can’t remember what month it was.
0:34:54 But basically, I would say Austin and I really never got in big arguments or fights in the history of the business.
0:35:05 But in that year was the year that I could tell Austin was—or a single day, Austin was most upset with me because basically what I remember is Austin and I were still working in the business.
0:35:07 Like, we were in the freaking mud.
0:35:13 And all we could think about was, like, making sure the newsletter went out tomorrow, making sure we were getting an ad deal for Friday.
0:35:17 Like, we could not see a month or a quarter ahead of us.
0:35:19 That’s a really stressful time.
0:35:22 Yeah, and I remember one day, we were in WeWork.
0:35:33 I got a message from Austin on Slack saying, hey, one of our investors, who is this guy, Scott, who created the Snuggie, and he has a bunch of other products.
0:35:42 He told Austin—because Austin had asked him about, like, what are things—what are resources you have to, like, operationalize your business and run your business?
0:35:47 And he goes, I use this book, Traction, and you’re going to read it, and you’re going to adopt it in your business.
0:35:50 Austin read it, and he gets back to me.
0:35:57 He messaged me in Slack, and is like, dude, you need to read this book yesterday, and this is what we’re going to do.
0:36:02 And I remember a day goes by, and I didn’t—or a few days went by, and I didn’t read the book.
0:36:05 And Austin messages me and says, did you read the book?
0:36:05 And I said, no.
0:36:13 And he says, it’s something along the lines of, I don’t understand why you’re not doing the thing that is the most important thing in our business right now.
0:36:17 And I could tell for the first time that, like, he was actually pissed at me.
0:36:19 So I went that day, and I read the entire book.
0:36:20 I did not work.
0:36:23 I went to the highest floor of our WeWork and just read the book.
0:36:25 And I think a few things happened.
0:36:29 One is Traction was a game changer for our business.
0:36:39 I also think that really became the inflection point where Austin really took over as CEO of the business in kind of—not in title, but in action.
0:36:44 And, like, I think it was a transformational year for the company.
0:36:50 I read that book around the same era, and it had the exact same impact on me.
0:37:00 And, in fact, on Tuesday, it’s Wednesday—yesterday, I hired an EOS implementer, and I met with him yesterday to implement it into Hampton.
0:37:05 And so for those listening, EOS, it’s called Entrepreneur’s Operating System.
0:37:06 It’s a framework to run your company.
0:37:07 It’s based off a book called Traction.
0:37:11 That’s so funny that we all came across this at the same time.
0:37:17 Yeah, I’d love for you to do a full episode of My First Million, I think everyone would, where you kind of do a postmortem.
0:37:22 And talk about how you implemented it, reveal as much as you could, because we didn’t hire an implementer.
0:37:24 I thought it was a waste of time and money.
0:37:25 It’s totally worth it.
0:37:29 And that’s my biggest regret, is not hiring an implementer, because I didn’t want to be the bad guy.
0:37:30 I didn’t want to be the bully.
0:37:34 You basically spend, you could say, I don’t know, probably thousands of dollars.
0:37:34 $60,000.
0:37:37 Usually, the guy I talk to, it’s $60,000 a year.
0:37:38 Wow.
0:37:41 Which, by the way, is why it’s an unbelievable business.
0:37:44 It’s basically like a digital franchising business.
0:37:46 It’s such a cool business.
0:37:48 Yeah, but it’s worth it.
0:37:49 It’s basically, it’s $60,000 a year.
0:37:52 It’s basically an executive coach slash organizer.
0:37:57 But it’s so funny that it happens, if you’re running a company, once you get to like the
0:38:02 5 to 10 million mark, that’s where it’s like, all right, what we’re doing is mostly working
0:38:04 at least good.
0:38:06 Let’s do more of it.
0:38:10 And how do I do more of it without killing myself and creating redundancies and building
0:38:13 a company and transition from going from a business to a company?
0:38:15 And that is where that book helped me.
0:38:16 A hundred percent.
0:38:16 Yeah.
0:38:20 I kind of thought about it at the time as like, first chapter of Morning Brew was newsletter
0:38:21 as a hobby.
0:38:24 Second chapter of Morning Brew was newsletter as a business.
0:38:28 And third chapter was like newsletter business, meaning multiple newsletters.
0:38:32 And there was no way we were going to be able to do more than one newsletter unless we
0:38:34 figured our shit out because we were too in the weeds.
0:38:36 How many subscribers did you guys have at the end of 19?
0:38:39 I’d say probably about two, right?
0:38:42 We probably went from one to two, maybe from one to 1.8.
0:38:45 But again, that year was defined as us maturing as a business.
0:38:52 So Sam, at The Hustle, where were you in terms of maturation?
0:38:54 You were doing more than we did.
0:38:56 You had events and you had an ad business and you launched My First Million.
0:38:58 Like, how is the business actually being run?
0:39:02 Oh, and I have to say, we launched Trends that year.
0:39:08 And so Trends was basically a $300 a year subscription where like I had this woman named
0:39:12 Julie and Steph Smith write a weekly email.
0:39:15 And then we had a Facebook group where you could talk about like interesting companies.
0:39:20 That’s why we started measuring cash flow because I learned the importance of building $300 up
0:39:21 front versus monthly.
0:39:27 So at that point in the company, I just had so many like demons that I was still just getting
0:39:27 out of.
0:39:32 And like what I learned about running a company at that era was that the issues that you have
0:39:34 as a person transcend into like the company.
0:39:39 And I went I didn’t have like you guys had each other each other as like right hand man.
0:39:43 And I didn’t have that like at the company where I could like confess to someone all the things
0:39:44 I’m nervous about.
0:39:50 And so I ran the company using EOS and I had Brad, Adam, Ryan.
0:39:52 So Brad did content, Adam did sales.
0:39:55 I think I had Scott Nixon who did growth.
0:39:58 And I think we had one person who did events so I couldn’t remember.
0:40:00 And then I had Steph Smith who did Trends.
0:40:02 So I had five people who reported to me.
0:40:07 And I was kind of beginning to get a little checked out because I was so exhausted at this
0:40:07 stage.
0:40:12 You know, exhaustion kicks in around year four or five, and I was starting to get dead
0:40:14 from running the company and I just did not care anymore.
0:40:16 Like Sean came to me wanting to launch MFM.
0:40:18 And I was like, that’s stupid.
0:40:19 Like I hated everything.
0:40:22 And I was like, this is stupid.
0:40:25 But if you really want to do it, you know, we’ll be the publisher.
0:40:25 So we own it.
0:40:28 But show me an episode.
0:40:31 And he sent me the episode and I was like, fine, we’ll do it.
0:40:33 Like, but there was no, and I published it the next week.
0:40:34 There was no planning.
0:40:35 There was nothing.
0:40:40 And I really was immature for not doing planning, not having longer term thinking and for exhausting
0:40:41 myself out.
0:40:41 Yeah.
0:40:47 One thing I’ll say is I think in that year that you kind of felt like mentally toast and
0:40:51 like a little lost, like that, that was the year that I felt the same way, I think for
0:40:52 different reasons.
0:40:57 The other thing that’s, I think just an interesting observation is like you, you mentioned like
0:41:01 Austin and I had each other as right-hand people as we’re going through the business.
0:41:05 And I think that’s true to some degree, but I also think Austin and my relationship has
0:41:12 evolved a lot over the years because I think we started the business so young that the way,
0:41:16 like when I co-found a company now and the kind of the level of direct communication and
0:41:21 feedback to each other that I have with like, even for story yard with my CEO, it looks very
0:41:25 different than the way that Austin and I would give feedback to each other in the brew.
0:41:30 And it’s not because like, it’s not for any other reason other than we didn’t have the
0:41:33 maturity to speak with like radical candor and speak openly.
0:41:36 I think we were like afraid about critiquing each other, giving feedback.
0:41:40 And so I actually think, at least for me, a lot of my growth honestly came through like
0:41:43 things like therapy or like dealing with it on my own.
0:41:44 I, it’s funny.
0:41:49 I think Austin and I as co-founders today will look so different than us as co-founders, you
0:41:51 know, in 2016 through 2019.
0:41:59 I will say for me, I think my big maturate, like I matured a lot during the sale process,
0:42:02 we dealt with so much and so many different stakeholders.
0:42:05 And look, Alex and I are really lucky.
0:42:14 Like we grew up with, with nice families and we started this business and basically from day
0:42:16 one, everything took off.
0:42:24 Like we had no hardship and the hardest part of running the business professionally, the
0:42:28 hardest part of running the business was when we had the sale process and we had some investors
0:42:31 who were pissed at us for selling too early.
0:42:34 The same investors who six months early were begging us to sell.
0:42:39 We had employees who felt as if they didn’t own enough of the company.
0:42:44 And, and what you learn is when it’s, when you sell a company, there’s a huge lump sum of
0:42:45 money that’s in a paper.
0:42:49 And when everyone sees that lump sum, everyone starts thinking like, oh, how can I get mine?
0:42:51 How can I get my money?
0:42:51 Sure.
0:42:56 I only own 0.25% of this company, but actually I kind of view myself as a co-founder.
0:43:00 I kind of view myself as more than worth 0.5% of this company.
0:43:03 And I think I took that very personally.
0:43:05 It was very hard.
0:43:07 It was very hard for me.
0:43:10 And at the time I was, I was a bull in a bull in a China shop.
0:43:10 Right.
0:43:17 And I remember taking these calls and my, my now wife was in the other room and I’m on
0:43:18 the calls, these people.
0:43:21 And my wife goes, Austin, you’re an asshole.
0:43:23 And I’m like, what do you mean?
0:43:24 She goes, you’re a total asshole.
0:43:26 And I’m like, but I’m right.
0:43:31 And she goes, you’re totally right, but you can be right and not be an asshole.
0:43:34 And I was like, oh, I didn’t know that was possible.
0:43:37 I didn’t know you could feel like that was, that was a thing.
0:43:40 So I was the total asshole up until then.
0:43:41 And I think I’ve matured a little bit since then.
0:43:45 Well, you’re still a bull in a China shop, but in a great way that, you know, what I was
0:43:47 telling you earlier was I would never want to have an argument with you.
0:43:52 I don’t want to fight with you because you will win a lot of times because you’re so smart
0:43:55 and you’re, you’re, uh, you’re just like intense.
0:44:02 And so let’s go to the year 2020, the year 2020 is the years we both sold, or I think
0:44:04 my deal technically closed in February of 21.
0:44:11 But, um, that year, you guys remember the first half of the year we, so the first Q1 of
0:44:13 2020 COVID hit, I’m sure.
0:44:14 Well, actually let’s recap.
0:44:17 So 2020, you did 20 million in revenue, 6 million in profit.
0:44:23 We did, uh, uh, 12 million in revenue and I forgot how much profit we did, but we had
0:44:26 about 3 million in cash and we had 1.5 million subs.
0:44:27 I think you had three.
0:44:31 And the beginning of that quarter Q1, we were probably in the same spot.
0:44:33 I thought we were going out of business.
0:44:34 COVID hit.
0:44:35 We thought, I thought it was over.
0:44:36 Did you think that?
0:44:37 Yeah.
0:44:39 I mean, I, it’s very interesting.
0:44:45 Like I can remember with these big moments, like exactly where I was pacing in a room, talking
0:44:46 to Austin.
0:44:52 Like I literally remember pacing back and forth in my now in-laws main room, talking
0:44:52 to Austin.
0:45:00 We were talking about one of our biggest sponsors, who is a financial services company that I can’t
0:45:05 remember the exact number, but let’s just say it was like they had a $75,000 sponsorship
0:45:06 coming the next day.
0:45:09 And the day before as COVID was starting, they canceled it.
0:45:10 So right.
0:45:12 $75,000 gone in one conversation.
0:45:15 And then basically the floodgates opened.
0:45:20 And I can’t remember the exact amount, but let’s just call it like in a period of a few
0:45:24 weeks, 30% of all revenue that we had booked vanished.
0:45:31 And I remember Austin and I going back and forth being like, how the hell are we going to make enough money to just not fire people?
0:45:37 I remember the first lever we pulled is we basically turned paid acquisition, paid marketing down to zero.
0:45:46 But him and I literally like we brainstormed everything from starting a Patreon and asking people to donate all the way to our education business.
0:45:49 Like we ended up launching an education business at the brew, which we’ve since shuttered.
0:45:52 But the reason that started was to bring in short term cash.
0:45:58 And that first education thing was a partnership with Scott Galloway when he was starting section for his section four.
0:45:59 We did the same thing.
0:46:05 We did a course and it made $300,000 in one month and it helped save us.
0:46:08 And that was the year that I learned what the word force majeure meant.
0:46:12 And it was crazy.
0:46:15 I thought we were going out of business.
0:46:20 And I remember you guys had just signed like an $80,000 a month like office lease.
0:46:25 And I was like, yeah, I hope this breaks them down.
0:46:26 I hope this is their downfall.
0:46:33 And I remember during this era, I remember I got one of our advertisers who we shared.
0:46:40 Because when we got going, something we didn’t say earlier, advertising and newsletters wasn’t really much of a thing.
0:46:43 We had to convince like early adopters to give it a shot.
0:46:45 And so we had a lot of this.
0:46:46 We had shared advertisers.
0:46:50 And I would beg them, like, show me their click-through rate versus our click-through rate.
0:46:53 And what I learned was like it was basically like the same for a lot.
0:46:54 Like it wasn’t like significantly different.
0:46:59 But the first half of that year, I thought we were going to go out of business.
0:47:02 The second half, everything fucking boomed.
0:47:03 It was crazy.
0:47:07 The business was booming.
0:47:10 Like our trends thing was selling like crazy.
0:47:12 People were spending like crazy.
0:47:14 It was a boom.
0:47:19 And we ended up getting, like I remember we got, what was that called where the government gave you money?
0:47:20 Like P something?
0:47:25 Yeah, we like got some of that money because our events business got shut down entirely.
0:47:28 And I was like, I don’t know how I’m going to make payroll.
0:47:33 And then it turned out, I’m like, damn, I kind of feel bad because we killed it.
0:47:34 We killed it that year.
0:47:35 Like it felt great.
0:47:44 I remember the emotional journey of the acquisition was crazy for Austin and I because our, I don’t know how long your sale process was.
0:47:46 But our 90 days.
0:47:55 It was LOI, LOI to closing was 90 days, but then there was like 30 or 60 days of flirting.
0:47:56 Yeah.
0:47:58 So ours looked completely different.
0:48:02 Our process like end to end was 11 months.
0:48:10 So the first conversation with the person at, um, on the Axel Springer side of things was November of 2019.
0:48:14 And I remember we first got deal terms.
0:48:17 I can’t remember when it was, but let’s just call it like January or February.
0:48:19 March.
0:48:21 From Axel Springer or from who?
0:48:22 Yeah.
0:48:22 From Axel.
0:48:23 Yeah.
0:48:27 And I remember what happened was in March, world shuts down.
0:48:32 There’s a period of three weeks where Austin and I are like, forget a deal.
0:48:33 We don’t even know if we’re going to have a business.
0:48:37 And then after those three weeks, starting in April, everything ripped.
0:48:42 And we went from Austin and I being like, like we, not that we don’t even think we’re going to have a deal.
0:48:44 We don’t even know if we’re going to have a company after this too.
0:48:46 We’re way underpriced.
0:48:47 We’re doing so well.
0:48:52 Are we even being, uh, paid appropriately for how much the business is ripping now?
0:48:54 And that rollercoaster in those three or four months was insane.
0:48:59 New York city founders.
0:49:05 If you’ve listened to my first million before, you know, I’ve got this company called Hampton and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs.
0:49:11 A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people who I met in Hampton.
0:49:13 We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it’s amazing.
0:49:19 But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors for your life and for your business.
0:49:20 And it’s life changing.
0:49:27 Now to the folks in New York city, I’m building a in real life core group in New York city.
0:49:34 And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does 3 million in revenue or you’ve raised 3 million in funding,
0:49:38 or you’ve started and sold a company for at least $10 million, then you are eligible to apply.
0:49:41 So go to joinhampton.com and apply.
0:49:44 I’m going to be reviewing all of the applications myself.
0:49:47 So put that you heard about this on MFM.
0:49:49 So I know to give you a little extra love now back to the show.
0:49:56 So we both sold that year, the sales process.
0:50:01 That was the most intense part of my life.
0:50:02 It was horrible.
0:50:05 Like it was so miserable.
0:50:08 I was so bummed for like almost every day for three months.
0:50:11 This woman who works with me, her name’s Edie.
0:50:12 She still works at HubSpot, I believe.
0:50:17 I hired her earlier that year or maybe a few months before COVID hit.
0:50:21 And she was probably 63 or 65.
0:50:26 She basically had birthed her daughter a little bit later in life in her 40s and was like,
0:50:30 now that my daughter is 20, I’m going to go back to work to prove to her that young women can kick ass.
0:50:32 And I was like, hell yeah, you’re the best.
0:50:34 I’m going to, I would love to hire you.
0:50:36 And so she was like our HR person and our accountant person.
0:50:37 And she was great.
0:50:42 But then I learned during the deal process, like I would, we would be on a meeting with like me,
0:50:48 HubSpot, which had like six people, KPMG accountants, six people, and then six lawyers.
0:50:54 So it’s like, that would have been like a $20,000 meeting.
0:51:00 And I hear Edie and I kind of see her bring her iPhone up.
0:51:01 And take a picture.
0:51:04 And I was like, Edie, what the hell are you doing?
0:51:06 And she was like, I don’t know how to take a screenshot on my computer.
0:51:08 And they’re talking about Dropbox.
0:51:09 And I don’t know how to use Dropbox.
0:51:11 So I’m trying to like take pictures.
0:51:14 I’m like, Edie, I got to teach you how to use Dropbox, man.
0:51:16 So she’s like brilliant.
0:51:17 She like nailed it.
0:51:18 And she was so good at her job.
0:51:21 But she didn’t know some of the technical stuff like using Dropbox.
0:51:23 So I had to teach her during this process.
0:51:26 And I’m like, I can’t tell them that.
0:51:28 Like, this is how scrappy we are.
0:51:29 Wait, did you use a banker?
0:51:31 Dude, I hired a banker.
0:51:34 So the first time I tried to sell, I hired a banker.
0:51:36 And we ended up getting an offer from Vice.
0:51:37 And it was an all stock offer.
0:51:39 Thank God I didn’t take that.
0:51:41 And I did.
0:51:43 You’d be working at McDonald’s.
0:51:44 Oh, my God.
0:51:46 It was like I went to tour the office.
0:51:47 And like no one was there.
0:51:48 And I was like, where is everyone?
0:51:50 And they were all in sexual harassment training.
0:51:52 Because like incidents there were like so common.
0:51:53 I’m like, you guys suck.
0:51:55 And so I hired a banker for that.
0:51:56 And I hated it.
0:52:00 And then I always thought that HubSpot or a company like that should buy us.
0:52:02 And they reached out to me.
0:52:05 And I was like, I don’t need a banker.
0:52:06 Like, I’m going to negotiate this.
0:52:09 When I started the company, my goal is to make $20 million by the age of 30.
0:52:11 I was like, as long as I make that, I don’t care.
0:52:13 And the deal allowed that to happen.
0:52:14 And so I didn’t hire a banker.
0:52:18 And I actually talked to Kip, the CMO of HubSpot.
0:52:20 And he told me that he tried buying you guys.
0:52:24 And he was like, I wanted to buy both of y’all and own the business newsletter space.
0:52:26 And he’s like, but they were too far along.
0:52:28 And you guys hadn’t talked to anyone.
0:52:31 So I knew we were going to be able to buy you, but not them.
0:52:32 Yeah.
0:52:36 So I don’t know if Kip is totally being truthful there.
0:52:38 I think Kip wanted to buy us.
0:52:46 I got the impression at the time that they were going to make a $120 million bet on email
0:52:47 newsletters.
0:52:48 They were really interested.
0:52:55 But because we did a better job of monetizing each subscriber, you know, we were more expensive
0:53:00 and the hustle didn’t care or HubSpot didn’t care about that extra revenue.
0:53:02 Like, you know, okay, it’s or a profit, right?
0:53:05 What’s $10 million of profit to the HubSpot?
0:53:07 They cared about our users, right?
0:53:09 The classic and vertical integration.
0:53:12 And I think that you, you know, you said you always thought you were going to sell the HubSpot.
0:53:18 I always thought we were going to sell to Fidelity or E-Trade or Robinhood.
0:53:23 I thought it made so much sense as an acquisition play and as a retention play.
0:53:29 And, you know, we pitched, Alex and I were talking about this last night, Sam, I don’t think I’ve
0:53:30 ever told you this story.
0:53:31 I definitely haven’t told it on the podcast.
0:53:33 But we pitched SoFi.
0:53:33 SoFi.
0:53:40 And the CEO of SoFi at the time was formerly the CEO or COO of Twitter.
0:53:41 I think Anthony Noto.
0:53:44 And he really liked us or at least liked the business.
0:53:48 And we went, we pitched a group of executives at SoFi.
0:53:49 And it’s over Zoom.
0:53:49 This is during COVID.
0:53:51 And I’m like, Alex, this is our pitch.
0:53:53 Like, this is our moment.
0:53:54 We’re going to sell for hundreds of millions.
0:53:56 We’re going to get all this stock in SoFi.
0:53:57 It was going crazy.
0:53:59 And we pitched him for 15 minutes.
0:54:04 And the woman, I’m not kidding, deadpans, looks at Alex and goes, I don’t get it.
0:54:09 And I’m like, which part?
0:54:12 And she’s like, why would we buy you guys?
0:54:14 I don’t get the whole thing.
0:54:16 And I was like, well, you know, content to commerce.
0:54:17 We have an audience.
0:54:23 And the other guy, like the head of business and all that, flips the background of his screen.
0:54:26 And he shows SoFi Stadium, right?
0:54:27 He shows that they’re big stadium.
0:54:32 And he goes, 300 million eyeballs a year.
0:54:34 I’m like, what?
0:54:37 He goes, that’s how many people see this stadium.
0:54:40 You think we want 3 million emails?
0:54:42 What are we going to do with 3 million emails?
0:54:44 And that was the entire call.
0:54:45 What a douche.
0:54:47 Your wife should have talked to them.
0:54:51 That’s insane to me.
0:54:56 But I think, Austin, I feel like you made a good point about like just the lesson in incentives there.
0:54:57 Yeah.
0:55:04 I mean, at the end of the day, we were telling the marketing team of a company, we can market your product better than you can.
0:55:12 You know, what CMO, what head of marketing is going to buy a company unless they have a ton of humility if they believe that our pitches, we can do your job better than you can.
0:55:13 And I think this issue is pretty fearful.
0:55:16 And so that’s why that’s why that deal didn’t go through.
0:55:20 So, you know, and we couldn’t even get in touch with the Fidelity’s of the world, the E-Trade’s of the world.
0:55:22 They didn’t, like, that wasn’t a conversation.
0:55:29 So that’s when we went to more media buyers like Axel Springer, who already had made the offer, and a few others.
0:55:31 And, look, we shopped.
0:55:31 I don’t know about you.
0:55:33 I’m curious how many conversations you had.
0:55:34 We shopped it to everyone.
0:55:35 We got no—
0:55:37 I shopped it to all traditional media companies.
0:55:38 No one was interested.
0:55:39 Hearst.
0:55:41 Hearst wasn’t interested.
0:55:43 Like, New York Times wasn’t interested.
0:55:45 No media people were interested.
0:55:48 And, frankly, I hate the media industry, so I was kind of happy.
0:55:54 Yeah, and that’s part of the reason we sold, is we were—I mean, a couple hours before we signed, we were unsure.
0:55:57 I was talking to all these people, getting all this advice.
0:56:05 But we came back to we own the vast majority of the company, and we didn’t get a single offer in writing from another company.
0:56:07 And that was just terrifying to us.
0:56:11 We said, what if Axel Springer goes away, and we’re never going to be able to sell this company?
0:56:14 Of course, in hindsight, that’s not true, but at the time, you’re so scared.
0:56:16 It was a—you know, we made a decision.
0:56:20 I think it was the right decision in hindsight, but we did it partly because we were scared.
0:56:21 Can I—all right.
0:56:25 I want to rattle off the—so my story ends there.
0:56:26 In 2020, we sold.
0:56:31 You guys sold half the company and then later sold the rest.
0:56:37 I’m going to rattle off the future numbers, but then I want to talk about, like, future stuff, like what people listening can learn.
0:56:41 So 21, you did $46 million in revenue and $10 million in profit.
0:56:45 22, $70 million in revenue, $10 million in profit.
0:56:47 23 was the same numbers.
0:56:52 And so I imagine the business now is in the $70, $80, $90 million range, something like that.
0:56:55 But you guys aren’t owners anymore.
0:57:01 What do you think people doing—now newsletters are really popular.
0:57:05 I remember when Substack started, I thought it was the dumbest idea ever.
0:57:07 I chose not to invest in Beehive.
0:57:08 I thought that was a silly idea.
0:57:09 I was wrong about both of those things.
0:57:16 What do you think that the people starting now are getting wrong, and where’s the opportunity, in your opinion, in this space?
0:57:27 I think the number one thing that people get wrong is they view this arbitrage that we had in 2017, and they think it exists today.
0:57:33 They think the same economics exists today because they read a blog post that Tyler Dank wrote in 2018.
0:57:40 The value of a subscriber is significantly less than it was when we started because there are so many newsletters out there.
0:57:45 And people forget that the most important thing, it goes back to what did we do in 2018?
0:57:50 We printed the newsletter out every day, and we were not maniacal over the content.
0:57:57 Every person out there I see now on Beehive, 99%, like, oh, here’s an untapped market.
0:58:05 Let me write, like, C-plus or B-minus content, and let me use all these growth hacks, and I’m going to get to a million subscribers, and I’m going to sell all these ads.
0:58:11 And I think they get to half a million or a million subscribers if they can, and their ads don’t sell for $50,000.
0:58:13 They sell for $3,000.
0:58:18 And the economics don’t work because there’s not enough engagement because the content’s not good enough.
0:58:20 And so just people aren’t focusing on the content.
0:58:21 It’s all about the content.
0:58:27 That’d be like selling a SaaS product and the code not being very, or the product not working that well.
0:58:29 Like, you have to focus on the content first.
0:58:30 Everything else follows.
0:58:32 Yeah.
0:58:38 I would just add on, and Austin and I have obviously talked about this at length, but the more niche, the better.
0:58:45 Like, the internet is just this long tail of millions of niches, and the more niche you go, especially if you pick the right niches,
0:58:54 not only can you get higher CPMs, and I would argue that, like, in this advertising pullback that has happened for, like, the brew or just media companies in general,
0:58:56 B2B has been less impacted.
0:59:03 But the other part about it is, you know, the trouble we had at Morning Brew, which I think you had less of at The Hustle,
0:59:07 is we didn’t know, we could not figure out how to monetize our audience directly.
0:59:09 We tried everything.
0:59:11 We tried selling merch to them.
0:59:13 We tried the education product.
0:59:15 We couldn’t figure out a good solution.
0:59:20 For your audience, like, I think Hustle Trends was a really smart product for your audience.
0:59:25 The more niche you go, I think the more clear it becomes how you can directly monetize your audience.
0:59:35 I think a big thing to learn for people starting now is my strategy was partially right, partially wrong.
0:59:37 The strategy that I had, I hated advertising.
0:59:45 I remember, do you guys remember how, like, the sales guys always wear jeans and a plaid shirt and these bright brown shoes?
0:59:51 I remember I bought a pair of those brown shoes and I wore them to one meeting in New York and I took them off at the end of the meeting and I threw them away.
0:59:53 And I, like, went home in my socks.
0:59:58 I was like, I’m never wearing these fucking brown shoes that tech salespeople wear ever again.
1:00:01 I will never wear these brown shoes.
1:00:04 I just, like, distinctly remember that because I hated it.
1:00:07 And so I was like, I want to create products to sell to my audience.
1:00:13 And what a lot of people get wrong about that is they go outside.
1:00:19 So, like, you know, I think Adam and Becca at work, we wanted to sell, like, software products or something like that.
1:00:30 And that strategy that they and many other people, or I don’t even know if they did do it, but whoever wants to try and do that, it will almost always fail.
1:00:42 Because in order to make a business like this work, where you sell stuff to your audience, you almost always have to be within your core competency of content.
1:00:51 And if the founder is not, like, what Mark Zuckerberg was to Facebook of being, like, a tech wizard, you need to be that about content.
1:00:54 Otherwise, it’s not always, but almost always.
1:00:57 Otherwise, the business sucks.
1:01:06 And so I think that for the people listening, if you are going to build something, go super hard on content, make money via advertising, which is the right thing to do.
1:01:18 And then if you do make money in other ways, you will almost always want to make money in ways that fit within, like, the ikigai of, like, your company’s core competency and what the world wants is some type of content-y media thing.
1:01:29 Yeah, we see it all the time, where people start a media company, they try to sell a product, and it’s really hard because you’re pivoting from a content company to a product company or software company.
1:01:31 It’s really, really tough.
1:01:38 It’s like BuzzFeed, like, doing, haven’t they tried, like, making ovens or something like that?
1:01:41 Yeah, with Tasty, they have, like, their entire cookware brand.
1:01:50 Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it’s like, basically, you just are adding so much complexity to your business, especially the more you get out of your core.
1:01:55 Because it’s like, like, a media company and content, like, content is the product.
1:01:56 A media company is a business.
1:02:00 Then what you’re basically saying is you want to create an entirely different business.
1:02:04 And now what you need to figure out is the entirely different business, is the product exceptional?
1:02:07 Do you have someone who understands it deeply, who can run it?
1:02:10 Then the media side, can you keep that going in the right way?
1:02:18 And then also, is there an intersection where your audience not only trusts you, but trusts the thing that you’re now selling them that’s a different product?
1:02:20 Like, there are so many more moving pieces.
1:02:25 What else for a different opportunity?
1:02:28 You guys had on here that you being based in New York helped.
1:02:30 I agree with that.
1:02:31 It helped you guys a lot.
1:02:36 I think being, like, if you are an AI company, being in San Francisco is beneficial.
1:02:39 If you are a media or content company, being in New York is beneficial.
1:02:40 I think that was huge for us.
1:02:47 I think if you want to build a big brand in media, you have to be where the ad agencies are.
1:02:51 I mean, Alex was just grinding, going to ad agencies, meeting with people, talking to people.
1:02:54 If he lived in Austin, those people weren’t there.
1:02:55 He was never going to be able to meet with them in person.
1:02:56 Yeah.
1:03:01 It’s like your way, you’re not in it to win it if you are not in New York.
1:03:02 Yeah.
1:03:10 One other thing I would say is, like, I think actually, Sam, you and I feel differently about newsletters now.
1:03:15 Like, I know kind of your perspective is, like, newsletters are so much harder, you wouldn’t necessarily do it today.
1:03:22 My general view is, like, I feel like we’re, like, past early of every media channel on planet Earth.
1:03:24 Like, I don’t think anything is early anymore.
1:03:26 Like, podcasts have been saturated.
1:03:27 YouTube’s been saturated.
1:03:29 Newsletters have been saturated.
1:03:31 Like, everything is harder in my mind.
1:03:34 So, I think, like, the game overall has become harder.
1:03:41 That said, I still think there are going to always be opportunities, especially in a niche that you know a lot about, to succeed.
1:03:47 So, like, I would say I am still bullish on newsletters as a way of owning your audience.
1:03:52 I just think the level you have to play the game is higher than where we had to play the game.
1:03:56 One other just random thought is I used to always hate the news business.
1:04:04 Like, I thought the news business was such a bad business to be in because you need so many people to crank out content.
1:04:06 The economics are horrible.
1:04:15 I would actually argue with kind of where we are in society now and, you know, like, general distrust of news broadly, of traditional news broadly.
1:04:19 I think there’s a ton of opportunity to actually disrupt news as an upstart.
1:04:23 And I think we’ve seen that with, like, Barry Weiss and the free press.
1:04:25 And I think we’ll see more of that over the next few years.
1:04:30 So, here’s one of my takes on is for, like, where interesting opportunities are.
1:04:33 I would bet my life, I bet my life you guys agree with me.
1:04:42 Quarterly or monthly hardcover magazines or some type of physical newsletter.
1:04:44 Yeah, I love that.
1:04:51 I almost made, so we did Money Wise, a podcast about, it’s like a personal finance podcast for high net worth people.
1:04:53 I almost made that.
1:04:58 I was going to make it a $500, $2,000 a year.
1:05:10 shows up quarterly in a manila envelope, stapled printer paper, but really well-written articles to keep it, like, to feel like a mom-and-pop type of, like, underground zine.
1:05:12 That’s what I thought about doing.
1:05:13 And I still think someone could pull that off.
1:05:16 Have you seen Arena Magazine?
1:05:18 Is that the thing you love?
1:05:20 Yeah, so I think it’s really cool.
1:05:22 It’s this guy, Max Mayer.
1:05:25 I believe he worked at 8VC with Joe Longsdale.
1:05:27 And he started this magazine.
1:05:28 It’s quarterly now.
1:05:37 I don’t, I can’t tell you if it’s going to be a big business, but they tell the coolest stories, and it’s beautiful.
1:05:50 Like, this thing is done, you know, like a magazine from 20 or 30 years ago, where you’re selling super high-gloss paper, and the graphics are amazing, and then you’re probably charging a $7,000 CPM to some beauty brand.
1:05:51 It’s amazing.
1:05:54 And Stripe is making these really cool ads and ramp.
1:05:55 It’s awesome.
1:05:56 Everyone should check out Arena Mag.
1:05:59 What I would do is, so you said beautiful.
1:06:00 I would make it the opposite of beautiful.
1:06:15 I would pick an industry that has a lot of employees, whether it’s like the financial advisory industry, or the advertising world industry, something where there’s like a hundred or a few hundred thousand people, but you are only one or two degrees separated from each person.
1:06:21 And the whole name of the game would be name as many names as possible, and as many companies as possible in it.
1:06:31 And so you would want to, like, buy it for all of your staff, and you would have, like, rankings, like, the top, this person, this quarter, and it would, because it was almost like the difference.
1:06:35 Do you remember when Oscars started advertising in the subway versus on, like, a computer?
1:06:40 For some reason, when you see Casper out in the open versus on Facebook, you think, oh, wow, this is, like, way more legit and exciting.
1:06:46 I would do that right now for an industry, and I would name as many names as possible.
1:06:53 So they would just be paying money, an annual fee per year, just to have their name on paper.
1:06:55 Yeah, I like that.
1:06:57 The par 30 under 30?
1:07:01 Something like that, but for, like, financial advisors or something.
1:07:06 But I hate financial advisors, so it would be like, like, you all suck, but here’s the least sucky ones.
1:07:08 Any other interesting opportunities that you want to bring up?
1:07:14 I think that’s, I mean, the media space, I think that’s it for, like, the newsletter stuff.
1:07:26 I still think the big opportunity in the media space, if someone’s taking a big swing, someone wants to go build a billion-dollar company, it’s to do what we’re talking about or what the hustle did, right?
1:07:31 Use content to build something like a trend, but do it to the extreme.
1:07:35 So I think the best example right now, look at what Overtime’s doing.
1:07:40 Dan Porter, who’s been on the show, is amazing, right?
1:07:43 And for the first three years of this business, I didn’t get it at all.
1:07:45 I thought it was so stupid.
1:07:46 So dumb.
1:07:47 I was like, this guy’s an idiot.
1:07:49 He left all these awesome jobs.
1:07:49 He could do anything.
1:07:54 And he built another company off a ton of funding, and all he did was just put sports on social.
1:07:57 And next thing you know, he’s doing basketball tournaments.
1:07:59 I’m like, huh, that’s, like, kind of cute.
1:08:03 And then he’s running a league that’s trying to compete with college basketball.
1:08:05 And I’m like, holy shit.
1:08:07 This guy is on a different level.
1:08:09 He’s trying to compete with the NCAA and the NBA.
1:08:11 That’s a big swing.
1:08:17 Like, you know, if in a couple of years, I build another big company, I would think like
1:08:17 that, right?
1:08:22 Whether it’s, you know, basketball like that, or Padel, I think is really interesting.
1:08:24 Or there’s people now thinking about doing tennis.
1:08:29 There are so many interesting niches where you can go take a massive swing and try to compete
1:08:31 with, you know, the biggest organizations in the world.
1:08:34 Yeah, I have a few I want to add on top of that.
1:08:39 The first is a media company focused on alternatives.
1:08:40 What’s an alternative?
1:08:41 Alternative to what?
1:08:42 Like alternative investments.
1:08:45 So like real estate, private equity, venture, et cetera.
1:08:50 Like my whole thing is alternative investments are becoming a bigger part of people’s portfolios,
1:08:52 but they’re more opaque.
1:08:53 They’re harder to understand.
1:08:59 But they’re also really interesting ways to monetize people who are investing in alternatives.
1:09:06 I think basically a company that becomes like the go-to source for figuring out the complexity
1:09:10 of investing in alternative assets is going to make a killing.
1:09:12 I think that’s the first.
1:09:22 And second is basically for a long time, Austin and I talked about how an amazing way to monetize
1:09:26 our audience and we could figure it out would be like our version of Motley Fool.
1:09:30 And the reason we never did it is like Motley Fool’s built an incredible business.
1:09:32 But it doesn’t feel good.
1:09:37 Yeah, but our thing was like the marketing just does not feel good to us.
1:09:44 And so I think if someone can figure out how to support retail investors in a way that
1:09:49 makes them smarter about not losing their money in the markets and media is just like, you
1:09:50 know, the funnel to it.
1:09:54 Even like when we were at that newsletter conference two weeks ago, right?
1:09:57 And James Altucher was talking about what he makes on his premium.
1:09:59 He said he made a hundred.
1:10:00 He said it on stage.
1:10:02 He said $120 million a year in revenue.
1:10:03 Yeah.
1:10:06 And so I think that is still a massive opportunity as well.
1:10:09 Um, this is awesome, guys.
1:10:10 Thanks for doing this.
1:10:11 Um, how do you feel?
1:10:13 Feel good.
1:10:14 That was like therapy for me.
1:10:16 That was the most therapy I’ve done in my life, I think.
1:10:21 But for the record, you know, I, I never hated you guys.
1:10:23 I hated the story that I made up of you.
1:10:28 And, um, for the listener over the past, like three or four years, Austin, I have become
1:10:31 very, very close where our families are hanging out on Saturday.
1:10:36 Um, Alex, you and our, we did a family hang two weeks ago.
1:10:37 I have nothing but love for you guys.
1:10:40 I consider you guys family and you’re some of my closest friends.
1:10:46 And so it’s, it’s been fun to, to get soft instead of like, you know, wanting to, uh, compete
1:10:53 because now that I know more about you guys over the past, like 10 years, I don’t want to
1:10:54 ever compete against you ever again.
1:10:57 You guys are very formidable and not people I want to go against.
1:10:58 It was horrible.
1:11:00 Nothing but love from our side.
1:11:01 Yeah.
1:11:02 Quite the one 80 from 2018.
1:11:08 It was all the story, which by the way, I think if you’re listening to this and you have a company,
1:11:11 having that story was so helpful.
1:11:12 Yeah.
1:11:17 Like going, having an enemy was so helpful, even if it’s made up.
1:11:22 Um, it’s funny you say that I will use this time, uh, to plug my new newsletter that’s launching.
1:11:26 And one of my first newsletters that I I’ve written is about enemies.
1:11:29 And I think having an enemy, whether it’s real or fake, right?
1:11:30 For us, it was the skin and the hustle.
1:11:32 I think it’s really, really important.
1:11:34 Um, you know, beehive has convert kit.
1:11:37 Uh, and I think it just motivates everyone just a little bit more.
1:11:40 And I know Nathan and he’s the sweetest guy ever.
1:11:43 I’ve gotten to know Tyler a little bit and he seems like a wonderful guy.
1:11:48 And I’m like, I’m not going to start, stop you guys from fighting because I think a fight’s good.
1:11:51 And also I know that you’re both wonderful people and you would love each other in a different world,
1:11:55 uh, or when this is all done, but you have like, you have to have that.
1:11:58 So I’m on board, which just six, six years from now,
1:12:00 one of them is going to have a podcast, my first email,
1:12:03 and they’re going to both be on it and it’s going to be all hugs.
1:12:04 What’s your thing, Austin?
1:12:05 Where do they get it?
1:12:06 You can just find it.
1:12:08 My Twitter DMs or sorry, my Twitter bio.
1:12:11 Well, I appreciate y’all.
1:12:13 And, uh, thanks for doing this.
1:12:17 If you Google your name, Austin, by the way, it’s that stupid photo of you guys on the white wall
1:12:23 that you’ve been using for like 15 years and it’s your last episode of my first million.
1:12:26 So it’s funny how we have all come to work together.
1:12:27 Um, all right.
1:12:28 We appreciate y’all.
1:12:28 That’s it.
1:12:29 That’s the pod.
1:12:30 Thanks.
1:12:32 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:12:36 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it.
1:12:38 Like no day’s off on the road.
1:12:38 Let’s travel.
1:12:40 Never looking back.

0:00:03 So this is actually a company that I’ve, I’ve wanted to invest in for so long.
0:00:05 If you’re doing this, like, please just email me.
0:00:18 All right. So I wanted to have you on because you are one of my healthiest buddies.
0:00:24 Last time you were on, I think you’ve been on three times already. You didn’t get into a lot
0:00:28 of the ideas because we were just like peppering you with so many questions and I wanted to be more
0:00:34 focused. I think I asked you what are five or six like interesting health companies or health trends
0:00:40 that you’re interested in investing in. And you hit me back with a very detailed list in a very
0:00:45 short amount of time. So clearly, you are like already thinking and acting on a lot of these
0:00:49 things. Can we go through each of them? And you just tell me what they are because I’m crazy
0:00:57 fascinated. Because like, for the listener, you told me in 2014 or 15, that you were quitting
0:01:02 tech, like you had a software company, and you were going to launch a bone broth company.
0:01:09 And I was like, Oh, man, like you’re like, you’re decided to throw your life away. That sucks. Like
0:01:14 you were you were going to be one of the greats. And then it just came out in Forbes, I think.
0:01:21 Or was it Forbes? You had this amazing feature about your company, Kettle and Fire and how you
0:01:26 surpassed 100 million in annual revenue. And it was amazing. And I’m like, you definitely won. And I
0:01:30 read the article, by the way, and I texted like five friends. And I’m like, Justin does everything the
0:01:37 right way. By the way, did I get that right? You guys, you’re at 100 million run rate or revenue?
0:01:41 Yeah, north north of that. Yeah. And you said something amazing. I think you said we’re going
0:01:47 to what did you say we’re gonna be the best operating e commerce company in America? Is that right?
0:01:54 Yeah, I mean, basically, like, there are most of the big public big food companies were started pre 1900.
0:01:59 And so a lot of these companies are very, very bloated. They’re large, you know, they’ve been around.
0:02:04 Frankly, I think many of them are poisoning people. And then paying lobbyists and other sort of opposition
0:02:09 research groups to make sure that like soda doesn’t get removed from food stamps and all these sorts of
0:02:14 things. And so I think these are just generally bad actors. And I think that there’s a huge opportunity
0:02:19 to both out innovate these big CPG companies and also just run a better business. Like I guarantee no one
0:02:26 in, you know, Battle Creek, Michigan, working at Kellogg’s is looking at like, how do we use AI to automate a
0:02:30 lot of our workflows and process and things like that? Whereas like, that’s something we have live work
0:02:36 extremes going in kettle and fire to figure out like, how do we apply the craziest technology,
0:02:41 you know, move like leap forward of, you know, certainly my life, certainly my lifetime, to just
0:02:46 running the best possible company that we can. And I think it’s working so far, we have like 34 people
0:02:50 for, you know, for our size of business, which is quite good scale.
0:02:52 You have only 34 employees?
0:02:52 Yeah.
0:02:57 Wow. Is it wildly profitable? Or is it working its way to be wildly profitable?
0:03:01 No, we’re profitable. I mean, one of the things that I’m very proud of is like, we’ve raised
0:03:07 only $10 million in primary capital since starting the company. And so it’s been pretty capital
0:03:11 efficient. And, you know, we’ve been focused on building the trend, but also building a good
0:03:13 business since we started it like nine years ago.
0:03:18 Damn. That’s awesome that you have proven me and I’m sure many other people wrong. And you’ve,
0:03:22 you’ve been early on a bunch of stuff. All right, so let’s dive deep. What’s the first one you want
0:03:22 to talk about?
0:03:28 Yeah. So first one I want to talk about is, I think that, you know, there are, there’s this
0:03:32 huge, huge macro trend where all people are talking about Maha, they’re talking about seed oils,
0:03:33 talking about all these things.
0:03:35 What’s Maha? Make America healthy?
0:03:36 Make America healthy again.
0:03:36 Okay.
0:03:40 We’re talking about all these things about fixing the chronic disease crisis in the U.S.
0:03:47 And I think that health trends specifically for dogs and other pets, like tend to lag a couple
0:03:52 years behind humans. Like basically a couple of years ago, you know, you saw Blue Apron,
0:03:57 HelloFresh, a bunch of these companies launch. And then a couple of years beyond that, Farmer’s
0:04:02 Dog, a like fresh dog food delivery kind of company launches. And I think there are well over a hundred
0:04:08 or 200 million in revenue at this point. It’s crazy. And I basically think that you can look at the
0:04:12 U.S. chronic disease crisis, obesity rates, inflammation, cancer, autoimmune, all these
0:04:18 things. The same thing is happening in dogs. Like something like one in four dogs are going to get
0:04:24 cancer at this point. This is like unique. It’s new. Cancer rates among dogs are rising. And again,
0:04:29 this is because dogs, like humans, exist in an environment that is actively poisoning them. Like
0:04:35 kibble is total trash and it is literally making dogs sick. And so I think that there are a lot of these
0:04:40 health trends that like people are getting into, uh, that you’re going to see become popular now
0:04:46 and in two to three, four years are going to be popular for, for pets, especially because now it’s
0:04:51 something like, I think that millennials or Gen Z, like literally have more dogs than babies or something
0:04:57 like that. The market is growing incredibly quickly. Although I don’t have a dog, but, uh, I think there’s
0:05:04 like a lot, a lot of gold in that sort of like take human health thing and apply it to a dog,
0:05:09 like health product. Is this true? You say here that, uh, in some cities there’s more dogs and babies.
0:05:14 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s certainly true. Like the younger, the younger you go.
0:05:20 Hey, quick message from our sponsor HubSpot. You know, marketing in 2025 is wild.
0:05:25 Customers can spot fake messages instantly. Privacy changes are making ad targeting a nightmare and
0:05:29 everybody needs more content than ever. And that’s why HubSpot has a new marketing trends report. It
0:05:33 doesn’t just show you what’s changing. It shows you exactly how to deal with it. Everything is backed
0:05:37 by research and it’s about marketing plays that you can use tomorrow. So if you’re ready to turn your
0:05:42 marketing challenges into results, go to hubspot.com slash marketing to download the report
0:05:50 for free. Uh, the kibble thing is interesting. I, um, I had a dog for 15 years. He was my best friend
0:05:56 and his last five years of life, it hit me where I was giving him. So when I first got him, I was poor.
0:06:02 So I would like buy the cheapest dog food and then I got, you know, I could afford like whatever they
0:06:06 tell you, you know, like the shtick they tell you is like only buy something where it says like
0:06:10 chicken on the first ingredient, who knows if that’s true or not, but that’s the more expensive
0:06:15 thing. And then I was like eating kibble, like dry dog food. That’d be, it would be sort of like
0:06:20 feeding me potato chips every day. Do you know what I mean? Like, and like people’s dogs are,
0:06:24 you know, what do you do when you have a dog and you eat dinner? They all come in obsessed over you
0:06:29 and you like yell at them. And I’m like, if you gave me refried beans for every single meal,
0:06:34 of course, I’m going to want, like be desperate for any new food. It’s kind of insane,
0:06:40 right. That we would feed them the same thing. And it’s like a process dried thing that doesn’t
0:06:46 expire. Totally. It’s insane, right? It’s totally insane. And you look at the ingredient, it’s like
0:06:50 full of trash, full of artificial ingredient, you know, like all of the stuff that people are trying
0:06:55 to remove from their diets. We basically put in kibble and feed the dogs for every single meal.
0:06:59 For every meal. I remember like my in-laws have a dog and he comes over and they’re like, oh,
0:07:02 don’t give them table food. I don’t want him to be unhealthy. I’m like, I don’t know,
0:07:06 man. I feel like this asparagus and chicken might be all right.
0:07:14 100%. And we had Kevin Rose on the podcast and he had funded a company called dogagingproject.org.
0:07:20 And I believe what they are doing, the whole premise is that for some reason, I believe it was because
0:07:24 a lot of times you don’t want to see your, you’re willing to suffer or you’re willing to let your
0:07:28 family suffer oftentimes more than you’re willing to let your dog suffer. And the premise,
0:07:34 but at the same time, you’re willing to experiment more. And so the premise was that they had there,
0:07:38 what’s the drug that is a longevity drug that starts with an R?
0:07:39 Rapamycin.
0:07:46 Yes. I believe they were doing, they were selling this to dog owners. And what they found was like,
0:07:50 I guess there’s a huge correlation between what we can do with dogs and what will eventually do with
0:07:53 humans, like you’re suggesting. And they have noticed that they have gotten dogs to live longer.
0:07:58 And their premise is we are going to start here and then eventually go there to humans. And so,
0:08:00 yeah, the people agree with you.
0:08:06 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that they’re looking at it as like, you know, drug, uh, and then we’ll
0:08:10 expand dog longevity and then we’ll move into humans. I think what, I think that like the business
0:08:15 opportunities exist looking backwards. Like everyone is talking about water cleanliness and water
0:08:19 filtration and stuff like this. And yet when they go to feed their dog, they like put their bowl under
0:08:25 the sink and the dog gets a load of like whatever toxins, alcohol, not alcohols, uh, chlorine, like,
0:08:30 you know, all of these sorts of things. And like, that’s its daily water source. Um, and I think
0:08:35 that there’s all of these things where like, why is there not a reasonably sized company just doing
0:08:41 like Aurora, like a really, you know, R O R R A, like a really high end water filter, uh, but geared
0:08:45 towards dogs or something like that. I don’t know. I think like dog saunas and dog, dog cold plunges
0:08:50 is probably a little too far, but certainly I think that, uh, there’s like a bunch of peptides
0:08:55 supplements, you know, water filtration, things like that, that even like doing dog kennels and
0:09:00 things like this with more natural materials that probably would do quite well for people who already
0:09:05 think and view the world through the health lens and have not yet begun the process of applying that
0:09:11 lens to their health or to their pets. Can you tell me what light labs is? That’s amazing.
0:09:15 I looked at the website. It seems like this might, this is your brother’s thing. It might
0:09:20 be bigger than everything you guys have done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I mean, so my brother
0:09:26 and I, we started kettle and fire together and we grew it. And after some period of time, he stepped
0:09:30 back from the business. And so his new business, which he started last year is called light labs.
0:09:37 And what they’re doing is basically there are so many toxins and other sorts of like crap in our food
0:09:42 supply chain and a kettle and fire. We spend almost half a million dollars a year testing all of the
0:09:47 batches that we’re making, uh, of bone broth to make sure that like, there’s no glyphosate, there’s
0:09:53 no PFAS, there’s no phthalates, like all these sorts of things. And so we, as a company spend a lot of
0:09:57 money and a lot of energy, making sure that our supply chain is clean, but we’re making sure that it’s
0:10:02 clean of stuff that you can’t see as a consumer yet. You probably care about. And so what light labs is
0:10:08 doing is they’re basically building a lab testing, toxin testing company, like a modern one for consumer
0:10:14 brands, like kettle and fire, where they do two things. Like they will test for nutrition, nutrition
0:10:20 fact panel, uh, run the normal, like heavy metals testing, things like that. But they also do a longer
0:10:27 tail of rarer tests like phthalates, PFAS, glyphosates, pesticides, things like that. And then once they run these
0:10:34 tests, they actually expose it and push the most recent versions of a brand’s lab tests to both their
0:10:39 website, or if you’re sold mostly in retail, the goal is to get like a QR code that a consumer can scan
0:10:45 and see like, what is kettle and fire’s most recent lab tests show around like PFAS and other sorts of
0:10:50 exposures. So I think this is like one of the most interesting things happening in the health world
0:10:56 right now is this broad push towards transparency and like getting a bunch of these things, microplastics,
0:11:02 satellites, whatever that people know are bad, but don’t have visibility into like bringing
0:11:07 transparency, transparency to that food system, which then creates the incentive and energy to make change.
0:11:09 So that’s kind of what he’s doing.
0:11:13 I have a ton of questions on this. Okay, so you and I lived in Austin together. And then before that,
0:11:19 we lived in San Francisco together, both very much like bubble cities where Austin’s like, you know,
0:11:24 very health conscious and particularly our friend group is very health conscious. And then San Francisco
0:11:31 was like, you know, the on the forefront of a lot of tech. Do people where I’m from in Missouri,
0:11:35 where you’re from and PA, do they care about any of this stuff?
0:11:42 Not right now. But but I think that that’s not like not 100% of people have to care for this to
0:11:48 make sense. Like what is undoubtedly true is people are spending more time and energy focusing on sourcing
0:11:53 toxin reduction, they’re spending more money at, you know, companies like Whole Foods on brands like
0:11:58 kettle and fire on their health in general. And I think that this is one of the things that people
0:12:03 are going to start caring about when they shop. And like the minute that, yes, it may not be like people,
0:12:08 you know, where my family’s from, where your family’s from, they may not be asking about phthalate
0:12:13 load in, you know, their hot dogs that they’re eating or something like that. But some percentage of people
0:12:18 will, and you only need a small increase in order for there to be demand from the brand and consumer
0:12:25 side to, you know, to basically have supply chains and agricultural resources, ranching, like all these
0:12:31 practices that incorporate and think about toxin exposure, pesticide load, and the like. And so I
0:12:36 think Light Labs is the type of company that I’m super bullish on bringing transparency to the food
0:12:41 system. Because I think it’s just going to, like, once you bring transparency, then there’s energy to try and
0:12:43 clean up and improve the food system behind that.
0:12:49 And so this company from, I don’t know anything about this space. It’s basically like putting an
0:12:54 organic label on your food. So a food company would pay them and they would say Light Labs is a reputable
0:13:01 brand. We have proof that they’ve tested everything. We paid them money to do it. And we have a dashboard
0:13:06 as well where we can like, see where we are in the process of the testing. Is that right?
0:13:13 Yeah, exactly. So consumer brands, like we Kettle on Fire, we already have to spend money on, you know,
0:13:15 on these different sorts of tests and things like that.
0:13:16 Why do you have to?
0:13:22 Because you’re legally required to by the USDA or FDA to do nutrition facts panels, you have to do like
0:13:27 heavy metals testing, you just, there’s just a slew of tests that you have to run.
0:13:34 Yeah, by law before you can actually just sell a product. And so that that’s like a thing that you
0:13:40 already have to do. Then what Light Labs is doing is they are bringing a bunch more transparency to the
0:13:46 supply chain and making it so that you can look at, you know, momentous supplements or like any number of
0:13:52 these things and basically see, okay, beyond just metals testing and things like this, what are the
0:13:57 the other things that they’ve tested for? Oh, wow. I can see, you know, like no detectable phthalates.
0:14:02 I can see no detectable glyphosate, no detectable atrazine, like some of these other pesticides
0:14:08 that people care about. And so I think it’s bringing that, what has been like hidden in the
0:14:13 depths of these like horrible lab tests run by companies that are like 60 years old to the forefront
0:14:17 and making it influence consumers buying behavior. That makes me so bullish.
0:14:22 How big is the biggest lab business now or the couple biggest ones? And when your
0:14:25 brother was raising money or when he was just brainstorming with you on describing how big
0:14:29 this could be, or like what his dreams were in 20 years, what was he saying?
0:14:35 Yeah. So the biggest one is called Eurofins. I think it’s like an 11 or 12 billion dollar company.
0:14:35 Like in revenue?
0:14:41 No market cap. So, but I mean, it pretty closely maps to revenue because it’s like
0:14:46 a service business, you know, it’s, it’s like not a great doesn’t trade very well. So what he was
0:14:51 saying is basically step one, I think that we can build a competitor and be better than Eurofins. Like
0:14:56 you submit to a Eurofins lab, you submit an email inquiry and you get, you get a response maybe in
0:15:00 like three or four days. Uh, and then when they run your tests, they don’t communicate anything and
0:15:05 they dump like 30 PDFs on you that you have to hire someone that understands food scientists to like,
0:15:09 you know, translate this stuff. It’s really like insane.
0:15:12 And you go to their website, Eurofins.com. It looks like you’re like,
0:15:20 you know, making a vaccine or you’re doing like, you’re doing like, uh, like, like some type of
0:15:28 embryo work. Like it’s like a very intimidating website. It looks like an academic site from like
0:15:30 95, you know, like it’s very intimidating.
0:15:35 Exactly. And so they’re not the type of company that is going to build an incredible product for
0:15:39 consumer brands. Uh, and they’re not the type of company that’s going to build a consumer facing
0:15:45 product. And so what he was like, my brother was thinking is he was like, wow, this is going to be
0:15:50 incredibly interesting. We can build a Eurofins competitor. We can do a better job servicing
0:15:54 CPG brands. We already know how to do that from his experience at Kettle and Fire. And then we have
0:16:01 the opportunity to build out this entire other business where we can build like consumer awareness
0:16:07 of these different toxic compounds, uh, and turn, you know, Kettle and Fire’s 500,000 a year of lab
0:16:13 testing expense into an actual revenue generating function and almost like a marketing line item.
0:16:16 Dude, this is so awesome. Does he have any revenue now, your brother?
0:16:20 Yeah. They, uh, they’ve launched a couple months ago and they’ve started to get revenue.
0:16:22 Yeah. Did he raise funding or did he bootstrap it?
0:16:25 He did. No, no, no. This is definitely the type of company you have to raise money.
0:16:28 It looks expensive to start.
0:16:33 Yes, definitely. It’s, it’s honestly, it’s the type of company that I think
0:16:40 is, it’s, it’s the perfect, like act to company. Like Nick has experienced domain expertise can raise
0:16:44 money. And when your first thing is like, Hey, we have to raise, you know, millions of dollars
0:16:49 and we’re going to write a check for like, you know, multiple millions to like buy a laboratory
0:16:53 and buy lab equipment, all this stuff. It’s tough to make that bet on like a 22 year old,
0:16:56 but on a 29 year old with some experience, like it makes more sense.
0:16:57 Is this in Texas?
0:16:59 Yeah. In Austin.
0:17:01 Wow. This is amazing. All right.
0:17:08 Wow. First of all, this is crazy. How much does, oh, and the, uh, the labels. So like,
0:17:12 if you go to McDonald’s or fast food, they put the nutritional there, which is like way more
0:17:16 challenging, I think than like an M and M or a candy bar, which is more controlled, but I’m pretty
0:17:21 sure I’ve always like believed that nutritional labels are bullshit. Like in my head, I’ve always
0:17:27 been like, it’s give or take maybe even 30% of what is presented. The calories, right.
0:17:33 Is it like, I would just, cause I weigh my food. I I’ve tracked, I’ve tracked almost everything that
0:17:38 I’ve eaten for like four years now in my fitness pal. Wow. And like, and you weigh it and I weigh it.
0:17:42 And now I eyeball it sometimes, but like, first of all, I’ve noticed a few things. One,
0:17:47 when people eyeball their food to track, they almost always overestimate or sorry,
0:17:54 underestimate by around 30%. And then if you go and buy like a, let’s just say a big Mac,
0:18:00 the degree in which they are different is huge. And there’s no way that news, those nutritional labels
0:18:04 are accurate with just the calories, let alone like whatever else, like the macros,
0:18:09 plus whatever else is supposed to be in it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the FDA first,
0:18:14 depending on the, uh, the compound, um, or the nutrient, like they’ll have a limit that is often
0:18:20 it’s 10 plus, plus or minus 10% for sure. Oftentimes it’s upwards of like 30, 40, even 50%,
0:18:24 depending on the compound. Um, cause as you can imagine, some of these things are, are fairly
0:18:30 sensitive, uh, like potassium or iodine or things like this that are present in minuscule amounts.
0:18:36 Like it’s really hard to say exactly for every single cookie or piece of bread that you’re
0:18:41 getting or whatever, that there’s X amount of iodine in it. And so the FDA allows for, um, you know,
0:18:48 reasonably high tolerance, um, on, on some of these errors, which makes a lot of this nutrition
0:18:49 stuff even harder to figure out.
0:18:56 All right, my friends, I have exciting news for that business idea. That’s been sitting in your
0:19:02 notes app. The hustle, which is my old company has partnered with indie hackers, one of my favorite
0:19:07 websites to launch a pitch competition. It’s called the hustle’s big break, and it’s a pitch competition
0:19:13 with a simple premise. You tell us your business idea in 60 seconds or less, and the winner gets $5,000
0:19:18 to turn it into a reality. Here’s how it works. Record a 60 second video pitch of your business
0:19:23 idea, include your business name, description, revenue model, and tagline. And finally, submit
0:19:31 it at the hustle.co/bigbreak. And it all has to be done by April 4th. The winner gets $5,000 in cash to
0:19:36 kickstart their business journey. Plus we’re going to feature them in the hustle’s daily newsletter,
0:19:40 which is read by around a million and a half people. And these are the smartest business and tech
0:19:45 folks out there. The winner will be announced on April 11th. So again, if you have a business idea,
0:19:50 go to the hustle.co/bigbreak. All right, back to the pop.
0:19:56 Who, who owns the like is the certified organic? Is that a company?
0:20:03 It is a, I believe it’s a nonprofit. I think it’s Oregon Tilth is one of them. But yeah, it’s like a
0:20:10 certifying body. And I’ve always contested that that’s bullshit. Because like, I just think that
0:20:15 when you, I’ve like, I’ve seen farms where they have like an organic section and a non-organic section.
0:20:21 And like, it just seems like when you put medicine on one of them, it inevitably will get in the other
0:20:27 one. That is certainly true. The thing that is good for like, I think organic is better than nothing,
0:20:32 but it’s certainly not perfect. And I think that there is a lot of, you know, there’s a fair bit of
0:20:38 research that organic vegetables, for example, have far fewer pesticides than their conventional
0:20:42 kind of counterparts, but they still have some. But it’s not because they’re directly being sprayed.
0:20:45 It’s because of like, you know, wind, water, like all these sorts of things,
0:20:50 moving these compounds everywhere. What’s another good one? You want to do function health or skin
0:20:56 gut health? I’m fascinated by all these. Yeah. Let’s do, let’s do function. So, you know,
0:21:00 function health, superpower, like… Explain what those are. Yeah. So function,
0:21:04 function health and superpower, they’re basically companies where you can go to their website,
0:21:10 sign up, pay an annual membership fee, and they’ll facilitate a telemedicine thing where they’ll be
0:21:16 like, hey, you can go get your blood drawn at, you know, a lab or have someone come to you and you can
0:21:22 test your own blood for like, I think it’s over 190 markers. So you can get things like PFAS exposure,
0:21:28 heavy metals, testosterone, you know, insulin markers, all these sorts of things that to just
0:21:34 know, are you healthy or do you have things that you need to work on? And so I think that like,
0:21:40 I believe that function is one of the fastest growing companies in the entire Andreessen portfolio.
0:21:45 like they’re growing super, super fast. And yeah, I think they announced another fundraising,
0:21:50 but I think they announced that it got to like nine figures in revenue in like two or three years,
0:21:56 like something insane. It’s crazy. So it’s crazy. And like, there’s so much demand for people wanting
0:22:00 to understand their biomarkers, their lipids, like all these sorts of things. I think that rolling four
0:22:05 or five years, are we going to know more or less about the health of our bodies and what’s like going on
0:22:10 in our systems? It’s definitely more. And what I think function, superpower and the like are doing
0:22:15 is they’re lowering the friction for people like you and I to understand what’s going on
0:22:21 in our bodies and our blood and all that. And that information creates a ton of potential for action.
0:22:27 But why, why are, why is function growing so fast? Because I’ve used inside insight or inside tracker,
0:22:30 inside tracker, inside tracker for years. And then before that, there was,
0:22:36 I don’t know, like there, there’s, these have always been a thing. Why? Like, and now I’m hearing
0:22:42 so many people talk about function health or I’m like, I, these have been cool and awesome for
0:22:47 a decade now. Why is this one particularly awesome? I think that their marketing is great. I think that
0:22:52 the value prop is great. It’s like one price, one annual membership, get this slew of tests.
0:22:56 Uh, like if you had, if you went to your doctor and asked for the same test that function would give
0:23:00 you, it would be like, dude, they don’t let you. Well, well, so if you went to, right,
0:23:05 they either don’t let you or it would be like seven or $8,000. And so function is like 500 bucks
0:23:09 a year. I had my friend try to go get this testosterone checked and he went to the doctor
0:23:14 and the doctor was like, ah, you’re 32. You don’t, you’re fine. Like, you don’t need to do that.
0:23:19 It’s insane. The medical system is so patronizing. It’s like, they’re also, there’s people talking
0:23:23 about how you shouldn’t get an MRI or shouldn’t get your blood work done because like it’ll scare
0:23:28 you cause all these questions or scare you. And you’re like, fuck off. Like that’s such
0:23:33 an insanely patronizing thing. Yeah. It’s crazy. Like I, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve done this before
0:23:38 where I’m like, I want this tested and they’re like, but you seem perfectly healthy. And I’m like,
0:23:43 dude, just like write it on the paper. It means nothing to you. And it’s important to me. Just do
0:23:47 what I tell you to do, please. Like exactly. Like this, this literally requires nothing from you.
0:23:53 And I’m just going to learn. It’s exactly right. I think that like the medical profession writ large,
0:23:57 there’s certainly people that do good, but I think that many of them have this, like the patient’s an
0:24:02 idiot. I know everything kind of vibe. And that is, if you look at the trajectory of American health,
0:24:06 certainly, uh, I think that we need to change what we’re doing. And I think taking like health matters
0:24:11 into their own hands is a huge, huge thing. And so why this is an interesting trend to me,
0:24:16 function, superpower, and the like is for the first time, I think you were going to see
0:24:21 millions and millions of people being onboarded and understanding like what is going on in their
0:24:26 blood, uh, what’s going on in their bodies and then taking steps to optimize or improve that thing.
0:24:31 And so right now, if you take supplements, it’s like, you know, Sam, you probably take creatine or
0:24:35 something like that. You’re, you probably take it and you’re like, eh, maybe I’m a little more shredded.
0:24:39 Maybe I’m like, you know, feel better or whatever, but you probably don’t, you’re not seeing any
0:24:44 of your lab markers change. Same is true of like thyroid or cholesterol markers or lipids or other
0:24:49 things. I think as people get this information and start to retest over a, you know, six to 12 month
0:24:57 period that we are going to see way, way, way more products and services that sprout up where people,
0:25:02 where like there is demand for people who want to optimize their biomarkers. So sort of like today,
0:25:05 we have personal trainers who help you get shredded. Cause like, that’s kind of the only thing people can
0:25:10 see. I think in the future, we’ll have like apps, trainers, services, things like this
0:25:16 that are specific to Sam wants to lower his ApoB score, or Sam wants to improve his, um,
0:25:20 you know, LDL or, or something like that. Sam wants to improve his thyroid.
0:25:25 Like, I think all of these things are newly going to be marketing angles and things that people talk
0:25:27 about because they have this insight into their body.
0:25:33 This company also took off. By the way, I quit taking creatine. It, it turned me into a gorilla.
0:25:39 I got so big. Like I couldn’t, I could not like fit into clothing. Like, have you, have you taken it?
0:25:45 I have. And I stopped, um, I stopped because a friend freaked me out. He was like, everyone who
0:25:50 goes on creatine starts losing their hair, which I like didn’t experience, didn’t know about, but I was
0:25:52 like, huh, I’ll cycle off it for six months and see what happens.
0:25:54 I went on it. It didn’t happen to you, obviously.
0:26:01 No, not yet. But like, I like, like I ballooned. Like I just like got so, it just felt like I had
0:26:06 so much water. Like it was like 15 pounds in like three weeks. Uh, wow. I got huge. Like I went from
0:26:12 like 202 to like 215 or something. And then I was like, all right, I gotta go off it for like eight
0:26:19 days. And it just like all went away. Um, cause yeah, I don’t know what happened, but, um,
0:26:25 and this function health thing, these guys took off because, uh, I mean, what they did was smart.
0:26:30 They, I don’t know if Mark Hyman started it or if he’s like considered, is he like the, the Kim
0:26:34 Kardashian of skims where like, I don’t know if he had the idea or like someone else had the idea
0:26:38 and he was the face, but like partnering up with that dude, who’s got 2 million or something
0:26:45 followers. Like my father-in-law is like, whatever Mark says I do. Uh, and so like, uh, partnering up
0:26:51 with a guy like this is so much better than whatever else health influencers sell, like, uh, coaching PDFs
0:26:52 or you know what I mean?
0:26:57 Totally. Yeah. Like I, I generally think also as a side comment, this is how creators are
0:27:02 going to monetize more in the future is like owning chunks of very good businesses that rely on
0:27:07 distribution rather than just like I’m Mark Hyman and I get an affiliate fee every time I referred
0:27:10 someone to check out function health or something, you know?
0:27:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What’s this other one about, um, functional medicine doctor for your home.
0:27:21 That is, uh, amazing sounding. Explain that. Yeah. So there’s increasing awareness around how
0:27:26 your home can basically be a source of disease. Like lighting can be bad.
0:27:30 EMFs, you know, are controversial, but like, I think definitely have some health impact.
0:27:31 Wait, what’s that?
0:27:36 Uh, EMS electromagnetic frequencies, basically like your cell phone, your Wi-Fi router,
0:27:40 like all of these sort of things that, that are, that we’re surrounded by all the time.
0:27:45 Um, you know, water toxicity thing, like off gassing things called volatile organic
0:27:49 compounds, basically like the, the, you know, when you walk into a, a building that’s newly
0:27:51 painted or something like that, you can smell it.
0:27:53 Dude, do you have so much anxiety all day?
0:27:58 No, I’m pretty chill. I really believe in the like 80, 20 thing on this stuff.
0:28:03 Cause like everything you’re describing in my house is like, uh, you know, like a chainsaw.
0:28:10 And they’re just going to just rip me up. Like I saw a video, there’s this guy named carnivore
0:28:18 MD and, uh, he had a video on YouTube explaining like his house and carnivore MD is like the most
0:28:22 extreme of the most extreme when it comes to like these type of granola health influencers.
0:28:29 And like, he had like, uh, uh, a mattress that had only natural fibers, which I don’t,
0:28:34 I don’t know what a grounding thing is, but there was like this, like it’s grounding for electricity.
0:28:39 He had like a pole that went into the ground of his home and all the electricity had to like touch
0:28:43 that grounding pole. Do you, is that a thing you don’t talk about? That’s amazing. Yeah.
0:28:52 Like it was like, and then he had like, um, uh, no led light bulbs. He had no wifi. So there was no
0:28:57 wifi at his home and you had to plug in if you had to, if you wanted to use the internet on this one
0:29:02 particular area of his home, like it was crazy. Uh, and I was reading it or watching this video and
0:29:08 I’m like, that’s cool. And also this fucking exhausting. Yeah, definitely. It’s very exhausting.
0:29:12 Like when you just named all of these things, I’m like, I don’t know, man. Like I kind of would
0:29:18 just fucking kill me early. Like, you know what I mean? Like maybe I’ll just take that as a consequence.
0:29:23 Yes. So I agree. It’s exhausting. It’s a multifactorial problem. It’s like a thing that
0:29:28 people are aware of, want to fix, but don’t know where to get started. This is actually why I think that
0:29:33 a like functional medicine or like trainer that makes your, you know, your house healthy
0:29:39 is a very interesting idea. I actually invested in a company called light work. Um, it’s do light
0:29:44 work.com, but they’re, they’re basically doing this where they can send someone to your house
0:29:51 and do a test around, you know, what are the things that, what are the things that are potentially causing
0:29:56 disease or stress or other sorts of things in your home? Uh, and it’s, it’s like shocking what
0:30:04 they have found. Like they tested a, um, you know, a billionaire’s home recently and across like all
0:30:10 sorts of things like air quality, water quality, VOCs, EMF exposure, all of this, you know, it rated very,
0:30:17 very badly. Like people are not looking at the home through the lens of, of health and chronic disease.
0:30:21 And when you start to, there’s like a ton of changes that you want to make. Many of those are,
0:30:25 are, which are, you know, confusing or, uh, you know, people don’t really understand. So I think
0:30:31 that there is a huge opportunity for people to start thinking about, you know, home health, uh,
0:30:35 or housing through the lens of health. And I think that a company like light work or
0:30:41 others that brings this sort of home health test assessment, uh, almost like function, you know,
0:30:45 a function health for your house is like a really, really big opportunity.
0:30:50 So they have a list on their website. So water quality, I assume that includes putting some
0:30:56 type of filter. They have lighting, which I imagine that means like no led lights or a certain type of
0:31:03 bulbs. They have EMF, which I guess that is the grounding thing we talked about. Uh, like basically,
0:31:08 it’s somewhat, yeah, it’s, it’s more like, uh, it’s more like, are you sleeping over a wifi router?
0:31:13 Like, are you spending a lot of times in air? You know, a lot of time in areas that have a very high
0:31:17 power, uh, you know, electromagnetic frequency, dude, they’re going to get so pissed at me when
0:31:22 they found out that I sleep with the family guy playing in my ear for my cell phone when I sleep on
0:31:32 my phone. I’m going to fail this test. They have, uh, uh, air quality. So that means like,
0:31:37 do you have plants inside your house or what? More, more like our is, what is the quality of
0:31:42 your air? Mostly that’s contributed like things that are bad are some of the paints that are doing
0:31:47 off gassing, some furnishers off gas quite a lot. Uh, you know, microplastic fibers kind of like
0:31:51 floating around in the air, um, from your like carpet or something like that. So a lot of these things.
0:31:57 Do these guys make money? Uh, they just started. So the answer is sort of so far.
0:32:01 How much does it cost? Uh, it depends on the house size, but
0:32:08 anywhere it’s, it’s definitely a premium product like 5,000 or 10 grand. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s,
0:32:13 I would say that it is one of these companies that starting out is expensive concierge, like all that
0:32:19 kind of stuff over time. I think there’s a huge amount of potential, uh, especially using AI and whatnot
0:32:23 to have people kind of do a version of this assessment almost themselves, or you walk around
0:32:26 your house with a camera and all these sorts of things. And this company just tells you like,
0:32:31 change this, do this. This is probably bad. This is not, um, like there’s a, there’s a really cool
0:32:36 potential technology solve here, I think. And the guy who started this, does he have a background in this
0:32:43 stuff? Uh, yeah, he, so he got incredibly sick. He and his wife actually, um, moved into a house. Uh,
0:32:48 that house was on top of a power line. Uh, that house had like a bunch of mold issues that they didn’t
0:32:53 realize about when, when they moved in and over the course of a year, their health on like every marker,
0:32:59 energy, everything just like collapse. And so they went, you know, they went, they’re healthy. They’re
0:33:04 31. Um, they went to normal doctors, they went to all these people and only after a crazy amount of
0:33:09 experimentation and talking to doctors, they realize, wow, it’s our health that like our home is actually
0:33:15 making us sick. And that’s what kind of got them down this rabbit hole of trying to understand the
0:33:20 problem, which is that many people are getting sick, feeling low energy, feeling all these things,
0:33:24 uh, cause they’re being slowly poisoned by the house they live in. Dude. I feel whenever I hear
0:33:30 this story, I think I’m broken because like, you know, I described my family, like my, where I’m from
0:33:37 in Missouri, we’re basically, we’re, we’re just mules. Like we like, you know, you eat donuts in the
0:33:42 morning, you eat cheeseburgers and fries in the afternoon and you eat steak and pizza and french fries
0:33:46 at night with tons of beer. And you just do that every single day. And you just don’t complain.
0:33:51 And like, if you were to tell, like you tell me that these people, like if, if my house was full
0:33:56 of mold, I would just think I have allergies. It just, uh, whatever. Like, this is just how I feel.
0:34:01 Yeah. Uh, do you know what I mean? And so like, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know, you know, to like do,
0:34:06 I’ve just thought, I would just think this is just life and I, and I wouldn’t ever complain about it
0:34:08 either. I would just be like, ah, fuck it. Like rub some dirt on it. It’s fine.
0:34:13 You’re not alone. I mean, this is like how most people respond to this. Right.
0:34:18 I just think that as people are becoming more aware of these things, were you not raised that
0:34:24 way? My mom was one of the early, like into organic people. Like we used to pour. Yeah.
0:34:28 She would buy milk in a glass drug that was like unpasteurized. So it held these nasty clumps
0:34:32 and you’d like pour it into your cereal in the morning and a clump would hit it and the whole
0:34:34 like roll would explode all over you. It was so gross.
0:34:35 Your mom’s a freak.
0:34:42 I know. At one point, I think I was like in fourth or fifth grade, the health food store where she was
0:34:46 buying all this stuff literally burned down and all the kids like threw a party. We were like,
0:34:48 yeah, no more, no more crappy milk.
0:34:54 That’s insane. And you know, it is funny as my wife, you know, as we’ve had kids started having
0:34:58 kids, it’s so funny. Once the baby comes out of you, you automatically become granola.
0:35:04 Uh, there’s a, there’s a subreddit. Have you seen the subreddit? It’s called like, uh, uh,
0:35:11 granola mom. Is it moderately granola moms? Yeah. Moderately granola moms. And, uh, yeah,
0:35:17 moderately granola moms, a place for almost hippies. And honestly, it’s like one of my favorite places
0:35:23 to get information because it’s people who are hippie, hippie, hippie, dippy, but they’re self-aware,
0:35:29 which is like why I like you. So like, I want like someone who’s like, you know, loves the extreme
0:35:34 stuff, but can also dumb it down to me. Who’s more, uh, like, you know, I don’t really want to learn
0:35:39 everything. I wish you would just tell me what to do and tell me like, what’s like experimental versus
0:35:44 what’s like actually proven. And like, you know, you like kind of can help me as a more normal consumer,
0:35:50 figure it out. And, uh, I’ve noticed that my wife, the second, you know, we were, we had a kid,
0:35:56 it was like no more Teflon, um, plastic bottles are no go, like things like that. And frankly,
0:36:02 I love it. I love it. We, we hung out with Joe Gebbia recently. Did you know, did you ever go to
0:36:11 Airbnb’s office? Yeah. So I don’t know if you remember this, but they were wild. So this was back in 2000.
0:36:17 I think they did this actually from the beginning, but they had 2000 people working out of that office,
0:36:24 something like that, maybe a thousand. And they made 100% of their own food and to, to an extreme.
0:36:31 So for example, they had air bowl, which was some type of like Airbnb Red Bull. They had, uh, so the,
0:36:37 the condiments, the ketchup, the mayonnaise was literally made on site by the staff. And so,
0:36:43 and their meats were all from butchers, uh, every single thing they had. So they had trail mix
0:36:50 where it was like nuts with like chocolate that they had made. Uh, it was crazy. And I distinctly
0:36:54 remember that. And I thought it was crazy. And then I started thinking about it. I’m like, that’s kind
0:36:58 of amazing. And we hung out with Joe Gebbia and I asked him about that. I go, why, why did you guys
0:37:03 do this? He goes, man, that’s how I was raised. Like my mom, I think, I think he grew up in Vermont or
0:37:09 somewhere, somewhere, uh, rural, New England. And he was like, my mom was basically into this stuff.
0:37:13 And I was raised doing all this. And I just thought it was good for the planet and it was good for our
0:37:19 bodies. And so we insisted at Airbnb that we did this. And so back then, you know, I don’t know how,
0:37:24 maybe Joe’s 40 something. So he was, uh, raised in the late eighties, early nineties. Back then,
0:37:30 if you did that, like your mom, you were a freak. Now, all the young, cool guys that like we follow
0:37:33 on Instagram, who we’re friends with all do this stuff. And I think it’s like pretty amazing.
0:37:40 That is so cool. You don’t remember that about Airbnb. Uh, I went there. I didn’t. Yeah. I went
0:37:44 there to like meet up with friends and then see a talk. Uh, so I only went two or three times and
0:37:49 didn’t actually get that, that level of detail. That’s so cool. It was wild. I don’t know if they still
0:37:52 have an office. I don’t know if they still do that, but during the pandemic, they had to lay
0:37:56 people off. And unfortunately the, the culinary staff was probably the first to go.
0:38:00 Yeah. That feels like the first thing that a public company, like activist investor kind of
0:38:05 yells at you. Yeah. But you know, I understand that it’s can be tough to justify when there’s like
0:38:09 no need for an office, but that was the story. It honestly, it was amazing. I tell the story all
0:38:13 the time. And I, when I saw that I was kind of on board with Airbnb even further. Cause I’m like,
0:38:16 if they sweat the details with this, they probably sweat the details with other stuff.
0:38:21 Hey, can I tell you a Steve jobs story real quick?
0:38:25 So jobs once said that design is not just how something looks, it’s how it works.
0:38:30 And a great example of that is my new partner, Mercury. Mercury has made a banking product that
0:38:34 just works beautifully. I use it for not just one, but all six of my companies right now.
0:38:38 It is my default. If I start a company, it’s a no brainer. I go and I open up a Mercury account.
0:38:42 The design is great. It’s got all the features that you need. And you could just tell it was made
0:38:48 by a founder like me, not a banker somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool.
0:38:53 So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, head over to mercury.com and
0:38:58 open up account in minutes. And here’s the fine print. Mercury is a financial technology company,
0:39:02 not a bank banking services provided by choice financial group and evolve bank and trust members,
0:39:08 FDIC. All right, back to the episode. All right, let’s do two or three more. You had one on about
0:39:13 skin gut health. What is that? And whenever someone says gut health, it freaks me out because the,
0:39:16 what’s it called? Leaky gut is the world’s greatest branding.
0:39:21 Yeah. So this is actually a cosmetics company that I’ve, I’ve wanted to invest in for so long.
0:39:26 I haven’t seen anyone do it. If you’re doing this, like, please just email me. My email is very easy
0:39:31 to find or ping me on Twitter. But the thing that I think should happen is like, there’s, I don’t know
0:39:38 how many hundreds of billions a year spent on the skincare kind of space. And if you look at research,
0:39:43 almost, there are certain things that work, like certainly there’s classes of peptides and things
0:39:50 like that, that I think maybe work decently well, um, from a skincare standpoint, but for most people,
0:39:55 if you’re buying any sort of skincare to look younger or whatever, it’s just like a waste of money or it’s
0:40:02 like marginally effective. Um, that way. So say that again. So your, your stance here is that skincare
0:40:08 is mostly a waste. Skincare is mostly a scam. Yeah. Yeah. Minus like a couple of things like certain
0:40:13 peptides, uh, it’s sunscreen moisturizer. Sure. If you want your skin to be like more moist,
0:40:17 but a lot of the anti-aging stuff, anti-wrinkle cream, all these sorts of things.
0:40:22 Is that a, is there one that starts with an R? Uh, well, retinol A is one of the few things that’s
0:40:27 actually, that’s actually relatively effective. It’s like all, but this is the thing. It’s like
0:40:34 basically only peptides are the things that work. That’s a peptide. Yeah. So it’s, it’s a peptide
0:40:38 things like, um, like one skin uses a peptide. Uh, there’s something called like copper it’s
0:40:43 copper GKU, I think, which is another peptide. These things seem to actually work, um, as well
0:40:50 as some compounds like methylene blue and whatnot, but other compound, like any sort of random $50 thing
0:40:54 that you’re going to buy on Amazon that is like anti-aging and uses, you know, jojoba oil or like
0:40:59 any of these things, like just frack, like just do not work. Um, or if they do, they’re so marginal,
0:41:04 it’s basically not worth doing in my opinion. Um, what does work is, and you don’t wear sunscreen
0:41:11 either, right? No, you, you, that’s one of your like bold stances, which is that I basically think
0:41:17 like most sunscreen is carcinogenic. Again, this is another thing in the, in the U S we allow things
0:41:22 like oxybenzones that are not allowed in the EU. It’s in almost every sunscreen in the U S uh,
0:41:27 is definitively carcinogenic. And so like why we encourage kids to put on, put this on and like
0:41:32 use eight hours a day. I have no idea. So do you use zinc? Um, so I use a non nano zinc oxide
0:41:36 sunscreen just for my face. If I’m going to be in the sun for like a very long period of time. Yeah.
0:41:43 Dude, just so controversial for a white guy. I know. I don’t know. Like I, I feel like I’m,
0:41:49 I’m happy with my skin. Um, so, so yeah. So the thing that I want to invest in is there is
0:41:54 a lot of research that shows the relationship and the link between gut health and skin health.
0:41:59 Uh, and so like if you have a healthy gut or if you work on probiotics or you work on like,
0:42:02 you know, drinking bone broth, doing things like this that are going to improve your gut health.
0:42:07 Generally, um, there’s research that shows that that is reflective in skin. There’s something called,
0:42:11 I think it’s called like bioluminescence basically, but there’s a way that you can measure
0:42:16 how much light someone’s like skin cells are emitting. And that improves as your gut health
0:42:21 improves, which is kind of a wild fact. How, how long is the, is the change? So like,
0:42:25 for example, I don’t have like the greatest, I, I have dry flaky skin. I just thought it was just
0:42:31 because I’m just like a super white dude. And like in the winter time, my skin gets destroyed
0:42:36 in the summertime. I’m great. But like, you know, uh, I always thought that it was just like the lack
0:42:43 of sun. Cause like, like my scalp, my scalp will get like so dry during the, during the winter time.
0:42:48 And I like need to get under the sun. Yeah. Yeah. So if I like red light chicken lamps, does that do
0:42:55 stuff? Yeah. It’s helpful. Like during winter time, I feel miserable. Like I, I like, I’m like,
0:43:02 I need like the sun to like burn off everything on my head and on my face. So if I started drinking,
0:43:06 what’s the routine, if I started doing that, how long would my skin it take for my skin to get
0:43:11 better? I bet it would take like six months, basically. It’s going to be summer by this,
0:43:17 by that time. Start now. You’ll be great in December. Yeah. Um, but I, I, I think that the
0:43:23 macro like business opportunity is people treat skincare as just a topical thing that you apply to
0:43:29 your skin, not like an expression of your gut health and skin health and all these sorts of things.
0:43:33 And so I think there is an opportunity to build an incredibly large cosmetics company,
0:43:39 um, you know, in skincare company, combining topical applied skincare. That’s actually effective
0:43:45 with gut based interventions that are going to like improve your skin from sort of the inside out.
0:43:49 And I’ve like wanted this company to exist for seven years now, but, but isn’t that bone broth? I mean,
0:43:54 what does this look like? Yeah. So I think it would be a, like a combination of specialized probiotics that,
0:43:58 um, that are geared towards, you know, improving skin health. Uh, I think it would be probably a
0:44:05 crash diet of like 30 to 60 days where you’re removing a bunch of like toxins and other inflammatory
0:44:10 foods from your diet, incorporating bone broth, and then some sort of like effective topical skincare.
0:44:15 And I think that regimen would outperform basically anything that exists in the skincare world today.
0:44:22 Do you eat any processed foods? I try not to, but like do on a weekly basis, how, how often?
0:44:30 Probably very, probably none zeroed. And yeah, one. So like that’s easy for, I understand that for
0:44:35 meals. So you probably, you do, you probably cook or do leftovers. What about for a snack? What’s a,
0:44:41 an example? Uh, I use these, actually, I just had one earlier. So it’s a Maui Nui venison stick.
0:44:46 Oh, I have one as well. I got, I got my, my, my, uh, kettle and fire, uh, collab with them.
0:44:51 There we go. Hell yeah. Yeah. Um, dude, they’re so, you guys, you guys sent me a bunch of them. I
0:44:56 think like each stick is like $3. Yeah. It’s like three or $4. Yeah. I have like a thousand dollars for
0:45:03 these at my house. Amazing. Um, so I, I do those like meat sticks. I’ll do fruit, um, couple of bone
0:45:07 broth. Like those are kind of the go-to snacks. I’ve kind of been addicted to dried mangoes recently,
0:45:11 which. But that’s a process. No, like, is that not considered, is it beef jerky is not considered
0:45:16 process? I wouldn’t consider it process. Like if you’re sourcing it, you know, sourcing it from a
0:45:20 good place, like it’s not going to have a bunch of additives. It’s basically just like meat that has
0:45:25 been dried and then some spices. Uh, yeah, I do dried mango. Where do you, I do it from whole food,
0:45:31 but the problem is, is that like, I’ll eat, I can do like a bag a day, which is like, it is a
0:45:37 problem. 800 calories. Uh, and like, it’s basically like four Cokes. Yeah. Yeah. Although I don’t know,
0:45:41 I’ve been eating like, I, there’s, there’s this interesting diet online that I’m, I’m currently
0:45:46 trying. It’s called a, the honey diet, but basically you just eat fruit and honey before noon each day
0:45:51 and then have like a high protein meal in the afternoon. Why are you doing this? Just to experiment,
0:45:58 frankly, and just see how I feel. But so far I feel pretty fucking good. And so the, the mangoes fit
0:46:04 within that diet I’ve been doing, um, my snack lately has been dates and butter. Have you ever
0:46:10 had that? No. Oh my God. It’s the great, I think I saw a carnivore MD do it. And I was like, let me
0:46:15 try this. Cause I got a sweet tooth. Like I have a very addictive personality. And when I quit drinking
0:46:19 alcohol, it totally went to sugar. So I’m always having to combat that, but I think everyone is.
0:46:27 And so, uh, uh, uh, half a tablespoon of butter in a date, it’s like the greatest thing on earth.
0:46:31 I’ll have to give it a go. Actually carnivore MD is very into this, like meat and fruits thing,
0:46:36 like honey, fruit, and meat is basically his diet. Uh, and he’s very into this. So I don’t know. I,
0:46:42 I actually think that we are, there’s a good chance that honey fruit, like we’re on the,
0:46:46 the very early stages of like people realizing that sugar is not that bad for you when it comes
0:46:51 in fruit or honey form. That’s an interesting take because I would have thought you would have
0:46:56 said the opposite, which is like glucose is glucose. No. Oh, that’s interesting. That’s
0:47:03 interesting. So you do high sugar fruit as well. Not just, this is something I’m just starting to
0:47:08 experiment with. And so like, I’m not even sure. So I literally, I got my labs done recently. Uh,
0:47:13 and then like last week started this honey diet thing. So I’m going to test again in like three months
0:47:17 and see how, see how things look. That’s pretty fascinating. I would not have thought that that’s
0:47:22 something you would do because I like, I’ve read about like bananas. Uh, Sam Korkos actually told
0:47:26 me, he said this in passing. So I don’t want to like attribute this to, cause I could have, I could
0:47:31 have be listening to him wrong, but I believe he said that a modern banana is candy. And the way it used
0:47:36 to be was like a carrot. He was like, they, they were not like this as delicious, but we’ve like
0:47:40 genetically, you know, it’s kind of like a honey Chris apple. Like, you know, like, uh, it’s basically
0:47:46 like genetically predisposed to be like, you know, way sweet. Yeah. Yeah. Like it’s, I think the new
0:47:53 apple that’s popular is called cotton candy apple. That’s funny. They have that at central market.
0:47:57 It was called the cotton candy apple. I’ll have to try it. I’ve not seen that. So like you would eat
0:48:04 that. Uh, I mean, I would experiment with it for 90 days for sure. Yeah. Like, I don’t think a lot
0:48:09 of this stuff, like, yes, if you’re optimizing for sweetness, I understand that, um, that you could
0:48:15 argue maybe it’s bad, but I think that nature tends to like keep trade-offs within a certain band. Um,
0:48:21 and so I don’t know if you’re having organic produce or whatever. Like I, I think that this
0:48:25 stuff is like, not, it’s not bad to experiment with it and just see how you feel. Do you eat,
0:48:32 uh, vegetables? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Well, Ari’s laughing at me and so, and so are you, but like a lot of,
0:48:40 some of these guys are like, I think carnivore MD in particular is, uh, on some parts, anti vet on
0:48:45 something anti-vegetable. He’s come off that a little bit. I mean, like to me, I think that you
0:48:50 just have to have a macro lens on this, which is like, what if humans been eating for hundreds of
0:48:55 thousands of years? It’s not like, you know, in, in the year 1900 year rolled around or 1970, when
0:48:59 like the chronic disease crisis really started ramping up that all of a sudden people are rampantly
0:49:04 eating vegetables and getting sick all the time. It’s like, obviously in my view, not like we are in the
0:49:09 midst of a vegetable eating epidemic that is making everyone sick. It’s like clearly like the ultra
0:49:13 processed foods that are new to our food system. And so does he have some good points? Like maybe our
0:49:19 vegetables less good than, than most people think, like I could believe that. Do I think it is a thing
0:49:24 that is like worth optimizing and to never eat vegetables? Like definitely not. Here’s one, um,
0:49:33 for some of these health trends. Um, I think that, um, polyester clothing is gonna, um, there’s gonna be,
0:49:39 I mean, there’s already a niche of people. I’m one of them where I, I don’t wear, if a clothing has
0:49:45 polyester, I, I tried always to avoid it unless it’s like, you know, like special or particularly
0:49:52 amazing where, but, but in general, it’s gotta be all natural fibers. Are you, are you on board with
0:49:57 that? Oh yeah. I mean, polyester clothing is like the number one contributor to microplastics. Basically
0:50:02 they like shed like crazy when you’re washing them. And there was, um, there’s some studies that have been
0:50:08 done around, uh, they basically took dogs and had them wear polyester underwear and their sperm count
0:50:13 went down like 60 or 70%. And then they switched them off of polyester underwear. And like, it came
0:50:20 right back up. No shit. No way. So what underwear do you wear? Do you wear underwear? Yeah. So there’s
0:50:25 a company called NADS that does like organic, um, organic stuff. There’s another company called PACT,
0:50:32 P-A-C-T. And I usually wear those. How interesting is women’s, I mean, I don’t know. Does this,
0:50:39 does this matter to women? So it’s unclear to me right now, I would say potentially, but it seems
0:50:46 like the thing that is causing the loss of sperm is like, there’s some sort of, um, electrical charge
0:50:52 thing that happens between polyester and the skin that seems to impact, um, impact like, you know,
0:50:57 sperm generation. And so it’s, it’s not clear to me yet. I haven’t like gone super deep on it.
0:51:03 How fascinating. So yeah. Pretty wild though. Right. That dog thing is crazy. So are you crazy?
0:51:08 There you go. That’s another great dog health idea, you know, dog, all or all natural dog underwear.
0:51:17 That’s insane to me. So I use, uh, ex aficionado and I loved it because it was, uh, it like would dry
0:51:23 quickly after you cleaned it and they never stretched out, but I think it is highly synthetic. Uh, almost
0:51:28 certainly. And so, but honestly, cotton underwear for the most part sucks, but there’s some companies
0:51:33 that are making like really good cotton workout gear and cotton underwear that I, I really appreciate.
0:51:39 So like, for example, what I like to do is a lot of my workout shorts, I just get sweatpants,
0:51:45 like all cotton sweatpants and I’ll cut them. Uh, but like, I’m a big fan of like all cotton workout
0:51:53 gear because Lululemon and, uh, like it has like underwear in the shorts. So your junk is just on
0:51:58 the polyester even harder. Do you know what I mean? Totally. Totally. There, there’s actually a company,
0:52:04 uh, there’s a company called Riker. I love Riker. I love their stuff. It’s so good.
0:52:11 Riker. Yeah. It’s so good. It is so good. It’s the only short company for men and they have shirts
0:52:15 and stuff too, but it’s the only, but the shorts are particularly, particularly are hard to do
0:52:20 because you like, if, uh, if a workout short doesn’t have the underwear, then you’re just kind
0:52:25 of like flopping all over. You know what I mean? So you like, but it’s hard to do with cotton.
0:52:30 Totally. Yeah. So their, their stuff is great. I really, really like what they’re doing. Um,
0:52:36 and I use their stuff for all my workout clothes. That’s great. Um, can you tell me really quick,
0:52:40 are there, I just want to know what Justin does. Are there any other, do you have any other stances
0:52:45 like this? So this is like, so fascinating to hear some of your stances that might be controversial or
0:52:51 uncommon. I feel pretty confident that like our current vaccine schedule is very much not good
0:52:56 from a chronic disease standpoint. I don’t like make any claims around autism or whatnot, but from a food
0:53:01 allergy standpoint, uh, certainly the U S is like the worst chronic disease issue and is the most
0:53:07 vaccinated, uh, and has like the, the, the most egregious vaccine schedule of any developed country.
0:53:10 So what are you suggesting spacing it out or not taking them?
0:53:15 Yeah. I basically think like fewer shots, more spaced out is like what I’m planning to give kids.
0:53:17 I wrote a very long post on this.
0:53:22 It is pretty incredible. Like for example, they give a kid a hep B shot, like literally five minutes
0:53:28 or less, like two minutes out of the womb. And I was like, well, I don’t, I don’t know if she’s
0:53:33 going to be around like someone with hep B anytime soon. So the only way you can get a hep B is through
0:53:39 sexual, you know, sexual activity and blood transfusions. And they test the mom for hep B before
0:53:43 birth. And so like, you’re just vaccinating a kid against something and the immunity wears off
0:53:47 after a decade. And also not that many people have, I don’t think hep B is like particularly
0:53:52 common. Uh, like it’s basically drug users, I believe. Totally. I, I, I mean, and the other
0:53:57 thing is like, my view is that our, our health organizations have been captured and, uh, you
0:54:03 know, by large companies. And I think like you look also the COVID MRNA vaccine was added to the infant
0:54:09 childhood immunization schedule this year. It’s like, that is not a scientific position. That is
0:54:14 purely something else is going on. Um, so I think that’s like a relatively controversial take that I
0:54:18 have, um, that I wrote a very long piece about that I think is defensible. Any other last ones?
0:54:26 Yeah. So against like the health tribe, um, I think that the, yeah, the, the fruit and sugar one is
0:54:30 probably like the biggest one that I’m, that I’m focused on right now. And then I also think that
0:54:36 this like demonization of, I think that the tribal stuff, tribalness of, of like food cultures is,
0:54:42 is something that I, I think is not, not good. Like I basically am much more into nutrient density.
0:54:46 And I think if you’re eating nutrient dense, like pizzas and carbs and all that stuff,
0:54:52 as opposed to like conventional, you know, vegetables, fruits, and meats all the time that are like
0:54:57 maximally sprayed and processed and all this stuff. Like I, I actually think that eating a bunch of carbs
0:55:01 that are from a very, very good source, uh, probably your health outcomes will be better.
0:55:06 That stuff’s like impossible to find. Like for example, in order to do that, you’d have to find
0:55:13 someone that mills their own grain or something like that. Like, like that’s like, it’s virtually
0:55:21 impossible or not virtually impossible, but it’s a job. Yeah. Yeah, it is. I very much agree. Um,
0:55:27 dude, you’re the man. Thank you. I just like, uh, you know, I text you these questions anyway. And so
0:55:32 it’s fun just to get now every time, just to pepper you with all types of questions that I have,
0:55:36 but I appreciate you. Yeah, no, this has been super fun, man. Uh, thanks for having me on as always.
0:55:42 And we didn’t even promote your company. Yeah. So my, my company, um, kettle and fire is a bone
0:55:46 broth company, which we talked about. Uh, my, my company now is called true med. We’re basically
0:55:52 making it so you can buy, um, exercise, healthy food supplements using tax-free HSA or FSA money.
0:55:56 So if you go to true med.com, you can see a bunch of the brands where you can spend tax-free dollars.
0:56:01 Um, and then if you are interested in like some of the health stuff I talk about, uh, I also have a
0:56:07 newsletter, which is Justin Maher’s sub stack. And a new podcast. True med has a podcast. It’s great. I
0:56:12 like it. Yeah. Yeah. We’re, we’re doing like a couple episodes on, you know, movement, exercise,
0:56:17 nutrient density, dude. I appreciate you. Thank you so much. God bless. Thanks for having me on.
0:56:37 That’s it. That’s the pop. Hey, Sean here. I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvie story.
0:56:42 One of the great ad men. He said, remember the consumer is not a moron. She’s your wife.
0:56:47 You wouldn’t lie to your own wife. So don’t lie to mine. And I love that you guys, you’re my family.
0:56:52 You’re like my wife and I won’t lie to you either. So I’ll tell you the truth for every
0:56:57 company I own right now, six companies. I use Mercury for all of them. So I’m proud to partner
0:57:01 with Mercury because I use it for all of my banking needs across my personal account,
0:57:05 my business accounts. And anytime I start a new company, it’s my first move. I go open
0:57:08 up a Mercury account. I’m very confident in recommending it because I actually use it.
0:57:13 I’ve used it for years. It is the best product on the market. So if you want to be like me and
0:57:18 200,000 other ambitious founders, go to mercury.com and apply in minutes. And remember,
0:57:22 Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice
0:57:26 Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC. All right, back to the episode.

0:00:04 You hear about these companies that are going from zero to a hundred million in like two years or three years or whatever.
0:00:07 Like the equation is very simple from a company perspective.
0:00:19 What’s up? We got my buddy Ahmad here.
0:00:27 He’s the founder of Mercury, an awesome company that I use and love and is you’ve created a billion dollar company, dude.
0:00:34 You did it. You did the thing that all of us, when we were living in San Francisco and in our 20s trying to build these companies, you finally did it.
0:00:34 How does that feel?
0:00:37 It’s funny you say that.
0:00:48 We raised our Series B in 2021, which is actually like four months after we did our last podcast together at My First Million in January 2021.
0:00:54 And then we’re just announcing our Series C, which is a 3.5 billion valuation with Sequoia leading.
0:00:59 But in 2021, when I raised my round, I was at a 1.6 billion valuation.
0:01:07 And it was so weirdly anticlimactic because it’s like I’d started as an entrepreneur in 2006.
0:01:10 So 2021, what is that, like 15 years?
0:01:13 So I’ve been working towards this objective of like building a unicorn company, right?
0:01:17 Like that’s, as you say, like I moved here when I was like 22.
0:01:20 And like that’s all it was about for me for a long time.
0:01:22 It was like getting this like really successful company.
0:01:27 And then you hit this objective, like becoming a unicorn and like nothing changes.
0:01:32 So I have this like, I have this helmet behind me because that’s like, this is from Joe Montana.
0:01:37 He was, he’s an investor and he’s a footballer.
0:01:41 So he sent me the helmet and that’s literally the only thing I got when I became a unicorn.
0:01:47 I mean, obviously I had a successful company, but I keep it there to show like, you know, like these objectives don’t really matter.
0:01:51 It’s like you have to enjoy the journey because you hit the objective and then you’re like, okay, now what?
0:01:55 Dude, Joe Montana should make that his thing.
0:01:58 He’s just, he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn.
0:02:03 Well, I mean, at least he sends it to the ones he funds because it says like billion dollar club on air.
0:02:04 It’s kind of cool.
0:02:05 All right.
0:02:08 I told you, I said, love to brainstorm with you ideas.
0:02:16 I thought you would come with a bunch of fintech ideas because you’re the bank guy, but you came with a bunch of, you sent me a list of bullet points, none of which sound like fintech.
0:02:17 So I’m excited.
0:02:25 Give me some of these ideas, things that you think founders today could be going and doing, or if you weren’t doing Mercury that you would be interested in doing.
0:02:26 Yeah.
0:02:29 So I had three trends that I think are interesting.
0:02:31 Trend number one is space and space tech.
0:02:34 There’s a few reasons I like the trend.
0:02:37 Number one, you know, I’m, I’m just a sci-fi nerd.
0:02:38 Like I love space.
0:02:41 So I think it’s really exciting as a space.
0:02:46 And it’s finally hit this point where like there’s all of these kind of enablement factors.
0:02:52 So number one, like just a few years ago, getting anything to space was like a hundred million endeavor, right?
0:02:55 Like we’re talking about like literally a hundred million dollars to get something in space that works.
0:03:04 Because, you know, there was no SpaceX and all of the space satellite stuff was like these hardened, like, you know, radiation proof, like satellites.
0:03:09 Now the other week, like SpaceX did like eight flights or something in one week.
0:03:10 Like it’s insane.
0:03:16 So, you know, this, there’s this repeatable kind of channel to get things in space.
0:03:16 It’s much, much cheaper.
0:03:19 And it’s going to, it’s getting cheaper every, every month, basically.
0:03:24 And nowadays people have these kind of micro platforms where it’s basically a computer in space.
0:03:28 Like it’s not going to cost you a million dollars to get, like, just to build the satellite.
0:03:31 Like you can do it for like a hundred thousand dollars or something.
0:03:33 So this is like huge enablement thing.
0:03:34 And I’ve invested in a bunch of companies.
0:03:36 I did this company called Albedo.
0:03:40 That’s doing, that’s doing kind of very low earth orbit pictures of things.
0:03:44 So you can get like 10 centimeter kind of resolution pictures from space.
0:03:44 Yeah.
0:03:50 Everyone’s kind of excited about AI, which I’m also excited about that, but that’s a heavily, you know, everyone’s doing it.
0:03:51 Super competitive, yeah.
0:03:53 Whereas I think actually space is still like super open.
0:03:56 There’s not that many people kind of attempting things in space.
0:04:03 So the crazy idea I sent to you, which I don’t love this idea in terms of like, we need to come up with like why we should do this.
0:04:05 But I think a nuclear power plant in space would be really cool.
0:04:12 Like potentially we put this thing on the moon and then we mine, mine water from the moon.
0:04:21 And, you know, one of the cool things about water is if you can split water, you get hydrogen and oxygen and oxygen and hydrogen together make rocket fuel.
0:04:24 But it’s also like you get breathable oxygen, which is useful.
0:04:27 So having power in space is pretty useful.
0:04:29 And there’s lots of interesting things on the moon.
0:04:36 And, you know, if you have a nuclear power plant there, you could probably like, there’s this other cool company that does this thing.
0:04:38 I don’t know if you’ve seen it.
0:04:42 I can’t remember the name, but like it spins things super fast and then like basically fires them out.
0:04:49 I think it’s very hard to get something from Earth’s surface into space by like spinning around and around and flicking it.
0:04:50 But I think on the moon, it’s much easier.
0:04:52 The gravity is lower and there’s no air resistance.
0:04:53 Right.
0:04:56 So, yeah, if you had a nuclear power plant, you could power there.
0:04:58 So I thought that was cool.
0:04:59 Let’s see what else.
0:05:04 I’ll talk about my second theme because it ties into space as well.
0:05:07 So the second theme is defense tech in general.
0:05:09 Obviously, we’ve seen Anderil.
0:05:16 But, you know, there’s kind of two trends, well, actually three trends in defense tech that I think are interesting.
0:05:19 Number one, yeah, there’s a lot of geopolitical disturbance.
0:05:28 Everyone is basically, yeah, we’re living in like or moving into a multipolar world, which means like, you know, there’s India, there’s China, there’s America.
0:05:32 And America is no longer kind of the policeman, right?
0:05:39 Like the only way America since the 1990s has been able to be a policeman is there hasn’t been any other power to really challenge that.
0:05:43 So it’s not just the U.S. needs to rearm.
0:05:45 It’s all of Europe, India, whatever.
0:05:47 Like everyone is like arming.
0:05:51 So you have like all of these people that are in the market now that weren’t.
0:05:55 And then number two, autonomous vehicles have changed the game, right?
0:05:58 These drones, AI in general can be applied to all of this stuff.
0:06:01 And then number three, yeah, you’re going to get a ton of drones.
0:06:06 Like it’s not just like big billion dollar fighter planes, right?
0:06:11 It’s going to be actually like a thousand or million like tiny drones that are like easy to manufacture.
0:06:17 So all of these things kind of make it so startups can now compete again in a way that like wasn’t possible before.
0:06:23 Hey, quick message from our sponsor, HubSpot.
0:06:25 You know, marketing in 2025 is wild.
0:06:27 Customers can spot fake messages instantly.
0:06:31 Privacy changes are making ad targeting a nightmare and everybody needs more content than ever.
0:06:33 That’s why HubSpot has a new marketing trends report.
0:06:35 It doesn’t just show you what’s changing.
0:06:37 It shows you exactly how to deal with it.
0:06:40 Everything is backed by research and it’s about marketing plays that you can use tomorrow.
0:06:46 So if you’re ready to turn your marketing challenges into results, go to HubSpot.com slash marketing to download the report for free.
0:06:52 So I think there’s like two types of ideas that I think are interesting.
0:06:54 Number one, like how do you make more things autonomous?
0:07:01 So people are doing autonomous drones, but you could do autonomous subs, autonomous boats, autonomous tanks, right?
0:07:03 Like I think a lot of these things are not being hit on.
0:07:07 And when you make them autonomous, you can change the form factor as well.
0:07:09 Like you can make them smaller, you can make thousands of them.
0:07:11 So that’s one aspect.
0:07:16 And then the second aspect is like a lot of these autonomous things kind of favor defense.
0:07:21 So I was reading about this and the Ukraine-Russia war is like actually like trench warfare, which is kind of crazy.
0:07:25 Like we haven’t had it since World War I, but they’re literally digging trenches.
0:07:30 And like that’s why the lines are like hardly changing because it’s like neither of them has air superiority.
0:07:36 The drones actually make it hard to get air superiority because you can have like a tiny drone knockout of like a million dollar plane.
0:07:42 So in that world, like, you know, so we’ve got one side is autonomous side.
0:07:47 Second side is like the kind of how do we build more defensive autonomous things as well?
0:07:50 So like, you know, maybe we automatically have these machines that are building trenches.
0:07:57 You could have autonomous mines that are like smart and they don’t, I mean, I guess that sounds like bad to people, but you could have it.
0:07:59 So like if it’s a civilian, it doesn’t blow up.
0:08:01 If it’s a tank, it does blow up, right?
0:08:05 Like you can make these like safer mines that move around.
0:08:14 And then to tie back to the space thing, you know, I think in the next kind of war, space warfare will be a big part of it, right?
0:08:22 Like if you can knock out satellites, you can like, you know, cut down on Starlink and all of this kind of communication.
0:08:26 You can remove the visual side of things, right?
0:08:27 Like these kind of satellites that are viewing things.
0:08:29 You can knock out GPS.
0:08:32 So some of that actually happened during the Ukraine war.
0:08:37 There was like some, you know, there’s some rumors about like some satellites being knocked out.
0:08:38 But I think that’s going to be a big thing.
0:08:42 So the counter to that is how do you create defense around satellites, right?
0:08:47 How do you, maybe you’ll have like stealth, equivalent of stealth satellites, right?
0:08:58 Like you kind of only move them when like the sun is kind of obscuring the viewpoint and you move them to a place and then obscure them completely so they’re not reflective.
0:09:00 Yeah, I know.
0:09:03 There’s a ton of ideas around like defensive kind of stuff in space as well.
0:09:10 So what I like about what you just said is that there’s probably three core things I think about when it comes to great ideas.
0:09:13 And I will differentiate a great idea from a good idea.
0:09:15 So on this podcast, a lot of times we’ll talk about good ideas.
0:09:19 A good idea means a business where there is demand.
0:09:21 There might even be competition.
0:09:22 It might even be established.
0:09:24 But that gives you a bit of a playbook.
0:09:26 And it’s not going to be winner take all.
0:09:27 There’s room for everybody to eat.
0:09:39 And a good idea, what it profiles out to is that you make millions of dollars, maybe tens of million dollars, maybe a couple hundred million dollars with a higher likelihood of success.
0:09:46 But you’ll pretty much never get to the billion dollar or sort of groundbreaking new category creation type of companies doing that.
0:09:50 And what you’re talking about is a different criteria for great ideas.
0:09:53 And a great idea, I would say there’s three tests.
0:09:54 The first is the Peter Thiel test.
0:09:59 So famously, Thiel went to YC and he was asked to give a talk.
0:10:02 And he went and he drew two circles on the whiteboard, like a Venn diagram.
0:10:08 And he basically said, he colored in the middle and he labeled one circle sounds like a bad idea.
0:10:11 And the other circle was, is actually a good idea.
0:10:18 And he’s like, you’re looking for the overlap because the best ideas sound initially like a bad idea, but actually are a good idea.
0:10:22 And so now that’s hard to do because you don’t know what’s actually a good idea.
0:10:24 You have to sort of think for yourself there.
0:10:36 But what it is good at is it sort of reminds you not to run away if your initial idea sounds a little crazy, sounds a little out there or, or, you know, eight out of 10 people who first hear it say, nah, no way.
0:10:36 Right.
0:10:42 And so you, so that’s the first thing is like a great idea typically comes disguised as a bad idea.
0:10:45 The second thing is some inflection point.
0:10:51 So you talked about how for space, suddenly if SpaceX is doing eight trips in a week, right?
0:10:58 It’s like going to space went from somewhat impossible to possible now a regular thing.
0:11:03 It’s like, oh, I could just hitch a ride on one of these trips and the trips are getting cheaper and cheaper every year.
0:11:10 Or somebody is already taking a payload up and I can just add something to it or I can build on top of their satellite platform that’s already, already going to be up there.
0:11:13 So I think that’s a huge inflection like you’re talking about.
0:11:16 The other one you talked about with defense is autonomy.
0:11:24 So just the ability to make things self-driving, self-flying, self, you know, self-swimming, you know, just basically give a thing eyes.
0:11:30 And now it has a brain because of AI and suddenly you can take humans out of the equation for, for that job.
0:11:35 And when it comes to like warfare or defense, great, because that’s, you know, lives saved when you do that.
0:11:38 So, you know, you have these inflections.
0:11:40 So that’s thing number two.
0:11:44 And thing three, I would say is scares everybody off.
0:11:55 So like, you know, you were saying AI in general, like, you know, if I said I’m building an AI agent startup, that’s probably like the biggest bloodbath competition right now.
0:12:00 But you’re kind of right that smart, capable teams that are doing interesting things in space.
0:12:05 There’s still like way more opportunity and way less versus the number of teams pursuing them.
0:12:14 And same thing in defense that, you know, still the average smart, capable team is not not going after that right now.
0:12:17 And so there’s just like a lot of room and, you know, these are huge TAMs, right?
0:12:22 So obviously, like, you know, space and satellites, that’s a that’s a huge market.
0:12:26 And then defense is obviously huge, especially as you said, the whole world is rearming.
0:12:34 So it kind of hits all three, even though my first reaction, when you say nuclear power plant in space, I’m like, I don’t even that breaks my brain a little bit.
0:12:35 I don’t even know what that means.
0:12:36 It’s not even possible.
0:12:45 I kind of like the underlying thought process you have going in, even though I don’t fully get the like, you know, the end product idea, because I just don’t know anything about the space.
0:12:52 Yeah, I mean, I have like some simple ideas that are maybe good, but not great, but like, you know, more achievable.
0:12:55 Here’s a fun one I thought about last night.
0:12:57 I thought it’d be fun to have a billboard in space.
0:13:00 The first ads in space.
0:13:06 So I had this, like a few years ago, I was like going camping, and I didn’t have internet.
0:13:10 And like, yeah, there was this like Starlink satellite launch.
0:13:14 I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, but like, I think they fixed it so it doesn’t do this.
0:13:15 But they basically launched the satellite.
0:13:17 So they were like, they were kind of positioning them.
0:13:18 So they were all visible.
0:13:22 And there was like 20 in a string in space.
0:13:24 And you could see the naked eye.
0:13:24 Like with a telescope?
0:13:25 Oh, just naked eye.
0:13:26 No, just naked eye.
0:13:27 You just look up and there’s like a string.
0:13:29 And initially I was like, are those stars?
0:13:29 Are they UFOs?
0:13:34 Because they’re like, yeah, they’re like very bright, like they’re brighter than a star.
0:13:40 But they’re like, they’re like completely in a line and they’re moving quite fast because they’re in like LEO, right?
0:13:43 But I was like, oh, that’s kind of sick.
0:13:49 Like, you know, you can literally as a human, like launch this thing that changes like everyone’s view from Earth.
0:13:50 Right.
0:13:51 I thought that was like kind of insane.
0:13:58 But yeah, I think, I don’t think it’d be that hard to put a billboard in space and make it so you could view it from a telescope.
0:14:03 I don’t think you could do it like, I mean, you could probably do the natural eye thing, but like obviously people will complain.
0:14:07 But making it so you could view it with the telescope, I think would be actually kind of cool.
0:14:08 And then people would like buy that.
0:14:11 So this one’s more a good idea.
0:14:12 I mean, I don’t think that’s a billion dollar idea, but.
0:14:18 Well, do you remember, there was a whole service around buying and naming stars.
0:14:19 Do you remember this?
0:14:22 This was kind of like a big idea in the 90s, maybe early 2000s.
0:14:25 The free body problem, that’s like one of the ideas.
0:14:26 I haven’t actually read it.
0:14:28 No, it’s like on my kind of to-do to-read list.
0:14:32 But we, back in the day, we had this business called Birthday Alarm.
0:14:37 And Birthday Alarm was like to remind you of when it’s your friends and family’s birthday.
0:14:40 And then you could send an e-card, just like a greeting, you know, animated e-card.
0:14:50 But there was this company that had approached us that was like, hey, if you add the gift of naming a star after someone, you get a certificate, blah, blah, blah.
0:14:55 And it was like, whatever, 30 bucks to buy a star in someone’s name.
0:14:58 And that company was doing like 20 million a year, I remember.
0:15:00 And it was just like a couple of guys.
0:15:02 And they approached us to that.
0:15:03 We said no.
0:15:09 But when we had gotten to know them, I was stunned that they were doing, you know, that much revenue, at least at that time.
0:15:14 I do think it was a bit of a fad, but still, that was very impressive to me.
0:15:22 I thought the other one that would be kind of cool is like, you know, when I die, it would be cool to send, like, I actually don’t want to be cremated.
0:15:24 But if I was cremated, it would be cool to send some ash to space.
0:15:29 Having like some sort of memorabilia being sent to space, I think it’s kind of interesting as well.
0:15:30 And that would be easier.
0:15:36 And the more practical ideas, I do think intelligence as a service is kind of like an interesting idea.
0:15:38 So you mentioned AI agents.
0:15:41 So there’s tons of these companies going after these big categories, right?
0:15:44 Like this AI SDRs, AI customer support agents.
0:15:49 I haven’t seen too many companies kind of go after more niche ideas where people are willing to pay.
0:15:53 So AI SAT tutor, right?
0:16:01 Like imagine, like actually, like AI is great at education because A, like the content is like extremely easy for AI to do.
0:16:03 Structure, yeah.
0:16:03 Yeah.
0:16:05 B, it can be completely personalized.
0:16:07 C, it’s just extremely patient, right?
0:16:13 Like, I mean, when I try to teach my 13-year-old, I’m like pulling my hair out after like a few minutes.
0:16:21 So there’s a whole class of like, you know, you take any test and you could probably make an AI agent that’s like great at that and great at teaching that.
0:16:25 So like you could do the bar exam, you could do MCAT or whatever the doctors do.
0:16:26 That’s such a no-brainer.
0:16:27 Is that somebody doing that?
0:16:28 Somebody has to be doing that, right?
0:16:29 Because-
0:16:31 I haven’t heard of anyone doing a great job of it.
0:16:33 Yeah, nobody’s won yet, which is amazing.
0:16:42 But like, you know, you look at Kaplan and you look at the big test prep companies, they were built like decade, like many decades ago, right?
0:16:52 And they were built in the, I mean, I used to buy like those giant books with, you know, the practice tests and them from Princeton, I think Princeton Review or whoever, when I was studying for the SATs.
0:16:55 And then sure, it moved to like video and online after that.
0:16:57 But now you’re right.
0:17:04 Like if you just did AI, a personal one-on-one tutor, I think that’s, you know, obviously, that’s obviously the best.
0:17:12 I don’t know if you’ve seen the studies of like, or if you write about the like the two-saving thing when it comes to tutoring, it’s basically like nothing has shown as measurable.
0:17:15 Of an effect as one-on-one tutoring and education yet.
0:17:21 And it’s basically, the problem for a long time was, I think, I think you basically would get something like two standard deviations above the mean.
0:17:26 And by the way, this is kind of debated and people say, no, that was, it was measured wrong and it’s not true.
0:17:28 I think intuitively it’s like feels right.
0:17:31 Like when I’m learning something, if I talk to someone, like-
0:17:36 If I had a gun to my head and it was get the best grade possible on this test, right?
0:17:40 If my life depended on it, would I choose just showing up cold?
0:17:41 No.
0:17:44 Would I choose just a book where I self-paced and self-study?
0:17:44 No.
0:17:46 Would I choose a library of videos?
0:17:47 No.
0:17:53 If it was like a tutor comes to my house and sits with me for six hours a day and that’s how I study for this, I’d be like, that’s my best shot.
0:18:05 And if it was the smartest, most patient tutor with infinite knowledge and knew exactly where my level was and was ready to work with me the moment I was ready to do it, all times of the day, right?
0:18:06 That’s an AI tutor.
0:18:20 So I think that’s kind of great because it’s so scoped to, you know, one specific test, which people are not doing because they voluntarily want to, you know, educate themselves.
0:18:24 But like, I need to pay X dollars to get Y grade to get into Z college.
0:18:25 Yeah, you’re willing to pay.
0:18:35 Yeah, I think like the good ideas right now in these kind of AI agent, whatever things are like these like kind of more nichey ideas that you can expand from later, right?
0:18:38 Rather than trying to do like all tutoring, right?
0:18:40 I think that’s actually like quite a hard problem and AI is not quite there yet.
0:18:46 Like if you pick just one thing and you just like completely nail it, then you can always expand from there as well.
0:18:47 Right, right, right.
0:18:48 I like that.
0:18:51 What are some of the most interesting companies you’ve invested in recently?
0:18:59 So is there any company that’s like taking off or doing well that you feel like more people should know about, but they don’t know about it yet?
0:19:04 You know, this is like what I put as like intelligence as a service company.
0:19:08 So I’m an investor in 11X, which does kind of AI SDRs.
0:19:12 And I’m also an investor in Decagon that does kind of AI customer support agents.
0:19:17 You know, they just have like these insane numbers.
0:19:24 I don’t think they’re public, but, you know, you hear about these companies that are going from like zero to a hundred million in like, you know, two years or three years or whatever.
0:19:31 Like all of these ones that hit where they’re like, you know, like the equation is very simple from a company perspective.
0:19:35 It’s like, hey, I’m paying a ton of money for customer support or SDR.
0:19:42 Like if you can do the same task with some sort of like fallback to humans at half the price, sure, let’s do it.
0:19:42 Right.
0:19:54 So there’s definitely across a bunch of these spaces and the big ones are like, you know, sales, customer support, legal, accounting, a bunch of these.
0:19:56 And I’m an investor in like many of these companies.
0:19:59 There’s definitely like a moment where like they’re really winning.
0:20:05 And obviously it’s still early, but it seems obvious to me that like a bunch of these things will be delivered by AI.
0:20:16 So on the other side, every company that has sales or SCS or whatever, the CEO, the board is saying like, hey, how do you make yourself more efficient through AI?
0:20:29 Right. So the buyers are like really looking for solutions and anyone, there’s not that many actual, in each of these spaces, there are a lot of companies, but like it’s normally it’s really hard to do enterprise sales, right?
0:20:31 Like this is like a nine month, 12 month cycle.
0:20:38 But when you have like buyers that are just like, hey, I need to deploy something to show something that I’m like, I’m doing stuff in AI.
0:20:45 It creates this like moment where you can actually like have this explosive enterprise sales growth, which is actually very rare.
0:20:47 It only happens like in these kind of rare trends.
0:20:54 All right, my friends, I have exciting news for that business idea that’s been sitting in your notes app.
0:21:01 The Hustle, which is my old company, has partnered with IndieHackers, one of my favorite websites, to launch a pitch competition.
0:21:03 It’s called The Hustle’s Big Break.
0:21:06 And it’s a pitch competition with a simple premise.
0:21:12 You tell us your business idea in 60 seconds or less, and the winner gets $5,000 to turn it into a reality.
0:21:13 Here’s how it works.
0:21:16 Record a 60 second video pitch of your business idea.
0:21:19 Include your business name, description, revenue model, and tagline.
0:21:24 And finally, submit it at the hustle.co slash big break.
0:21:26 And it all has to be done by April 4th.
0:21:30 The winner gets $5,000 in cash to kickstart their business journey.
0:21:35 Plus, we’re going to feature them in The Hustle’s daily newsletter, which is read by around a million and a half people.
0:21:38 And these are the smartest business and tech folks out there.
0:21:41 The winner will be announced on April 11th.
0:21:46 So again, if you have a business idea, go to the hustle.co slash big break.
0:21:48 All right, back to the pod.
0:21:52 Would you, let’s say you weren’t doing Mercury right now.
0:21:55 You had all your free time and you know everything you know today.
0:21:59 And you wanted to find an AI idea, a winning AI idea.
0:22:01 What would be your process?
0:22:09 Like, explain to me how Imad finds, like, kind of comes up with the ideas and vets them and sort of figures out what idea to do versus what idea not to do.
0:22:13 I approach things like both top-down and bottom-up.
0:22:18 So top-down, and I actually did this as part of, like, your podcast prep stuff.
0:22:25 You know, I went to ChatGPT and said, like, hey, tell me every human worker in the U.S. that, like, does knowledge work.
0:22:31 Give me a list of all of them and tell me how much labor costs across each of them, right?
0:22:32 So that’s very top-down.
0:22:37 And you’re like, okay, you know, there’s education, there’s medical, there’s lawyer, there’s accounting, there’s, yeah, whatever.
0:22:41 Like, all these, like, knowledge worker type things, like design, coding, et cetera.
0:22:42 So that’s, like, a top-down approach.
0:22:44 And you can say, okay, you know, here’s the most interesting.
0:22:46 And you could do, like, a matrix kind of thing.
0:22:48 It’s like, okay, here’s all the interesting ones.
0:22:48 Here’s the TAM.
0:22:50 Here’s all the companies that are in those spaces.
0:22:52 Here’s all the bits that are not done.
0:22:57 You know, here’s, yeah, maybe you want to avoid regulated spaces.
0:22:58 Or maybe you want to go all in on regulated spaces.
0:23:02 Maybe you’re like, hey, no one’s touching doctors because everyone’s scared of doctors.
0:23:07 Like, why don’t we just make an amazing doctor for, like, I don’t know, Africa or something?
0:23:10 Because, like, you know, there’s less regulation there and you can prove it out, et cetera.
0:23:14 So that’s one kind of top-down approach.
0:23:18 And then I’d also go bottoms-up and I’ll go, okay, you know, what gets me excited, right?
0:23:19 I love serving entrepreneurs.
0:23:22 So, like, because I’m an entrepreneur, all my friends are entrepreneurs.
0:23:24 I love the idea of, like, people making things.
0:23:27 So maybe I’d say, okay, you know, what are things entrepreneurs struggle with?
0:23:31 And, you know, one thing that I still don’t have a great solution for is, like, you know,
0:23:34 as a CEO, there’s so much knowledge across the company.
0:23:36 I’d love something that, you know, there’s a few companies doing this.
0:23:47 But I would love to have, like, an AI twin of Imad that, like, is, like, continuously absorbing all the knowledge across, like, the company and maybe across the internet and telling me stuff.
0:23:50 And it’s like, I think Imad should really pay attention to this.
0:23:59 And, like, even, like, I actually thought it would be kind of fun to make it so, like, on the Slack, like, there could be an Imad twin and someone could ask you questions.
0:24:01 Say, like, oh, what would Imad think of this idea?
0:24:07 Yeah, actually, like, a funny thing that just came up the other day, and I was like, I’m pretty sure my AI twin could answer this.
0:24:13 It’s like, someone was like, oh, you know, our boardroom is, like, kind of small, and we just added two people to the board.
0:24:16 Like, hey, should we do the board meeting at our law firm?
0:24:19 And I was like, no, fuck, no, I’m never going to do a board meeting at a law firm.
0:24:20 Like, that sounds awful.
0:24:24 I’d rather stuff, like, 16 people in a tiny room than do that.
0:24:28 So I feel like in my AI twin could have answered that question.
0:24:30 So that would be, like, my bottoms-up approach.
0:24:35 And I, yeah, I do think, like, you should really work on things that get you really excited.
0:24:38 Like, you know, an AISDR, like, I’m happy for those guys.
0:24:40 I personally would not get excited about that.
0:24:43 Like, I hate receiving sales emails and calls.
0:24:50 So I think doing things that you would, like, wake up in the morning and say, like, I’m excited to solve this problem.
0:24:52 Because, like, these things take such a long time, right?
0:24:54 Like, I’ve been doing Mercury now for, like, eight years.
0:25:01 And if I, you know, if I was doing something boring, I would, like, probably wake up in the morning or, like, why do I have to do this again?
0:25:05 So I think that’s, like, the bottoms-up approach where you try to think of, like, what do I care about?
0:25:07 What do I want to see in the future?
0:25:08 And try to come up with that.
0:25:11 And then, you know, you kind of merge those two kind of concepts together.
0:25:15 And, you know, often you do something and you find out, actually, it’s a bad idea as well.
0:25:22 So, you know, Mercury actually had, like, a very smooth ramp where it was, like, I was, like, okay, I like this idea.
0:25:24 And then I executed on the idea and we never had to pivot.
0:25:28 But, you know, often you do, like, as you learn something, you’re, like, oh, actually, this doesn’t make sense.
0:25:29 But this makes sense.
0:25:33 So, you know, that’s part of, like, ideation is to, like, actually go build things.
0:25:35 Do you, so let’s take an idea.
0:25:36 We’ll roleplay it real quick.
0:25:38 So pick one of the ideas.
0:25:41 Like, plausibly, you’d be, like, oh, yeah, that kind of checks the boxes.
0:25:44 It kind of top-down makes sense, bottoms up.
0:25:45 It resonates with me.
0:25:46 Like, what would be an example of that?
0:25:47 Is it the digital twin thing or is it?
0:25:49 Let’s do the, yeah, let’s do the digital twin.
0:25:50 I think that’s, like, kind of the most fun.
0:25:57 So you have a, you know, your digital twin CEO who’s basically reading all the slacks, the documents in Google Drive.
0:26:00 He knows everything about the contracts that are all there.
0:26:05 He looked at the, he has access to the CRM so he can see anything in the dashboards, et cetera.
0:26:07 All right.
0:26:09 So now, first few weeks, what are you doing?
0:26:12 Is it, like, I trust these five people.
0:26:13 I’m going to bounce the idea off them.
0:26:14 Do you make a deck?
0:26:15 Because that clarifies your thinking.
0:26:16 Do you just go build a prototype?
0:26:17 Do you go look at competition?
0:26:18 That’s a great question.
0:26:19 Where do you go next?
0:26:23 You know, with Mercury, I had this moment where, so, you know, we’d raise the money.
0:26:24 We were doing the thing.
0:26:30 And I was like, okay, you know, let me go talk to a bunch of, like, potential companies that could use this.
0:26:32 Like, you know, create, like, you know, create, like, a big pipeline.
0:26:34 And also just learn what it’s about.
0:26:36 And I talked to basically 100.
0:26:39 And I remember, like, getting kind of depressed after I talked to them.
0:26:40 Because I talked to 100.
0:26:42 Most of them were like, oh, yeah, that sounds kind of cool.
0:26:44 But, like, there was, it’s very lukewarm.
0:26:48 And it was only two of the 100 companies that were like, oh, yeah, like, I would fucking use this.
0:26:50 Like, give it to me right now kind of thing.
0:26:55 And at that point, like, you know, it was like, it took us a year and a half to build this.
0:26:56 So this was, like, one year in.
0:27:01 So, you know, you’re, like, you’re kind of running out of momentum anyway, because it’s taking so long to build something.
0:27:03 And then you go talk to 100 people, and everyone’s kind of lukewarm.
0:27:04 I was like, what am I doing?
0:27:08 But, you know, I was like, I would really want this.
0:27:10 So I just, like, powered through it.
0:27:17 And it turned out, you know, A, if 2% of people want something and the market’s big enough, that’s, like, probably big enough for, like, an early adopter base.
0:27:17 Right.
0:27:25 But if you think about it, like, you know, talking to 100 people and having only two people get excited about something is, like, actually, like, kind of, like, tricky.
0:27:30 And, you know, maybe I wouldn’t have talked to those two people, because, like, if I talked to 50 people, I might have missed out on it completely.
0:27:35 So I think it’s actually, like, surprisingly hard to vet an idea against humans.
0:27:38 Like, people just don’t know.
0:27:40 And it’s hard to imagine an idea as well.
0:27:47 So I, what I think I would do is, you know, I would do that talk, and I would go talk to some VCs as well.
0:27:52 Like, I’d talk to a bunch of users, I’d talk to some VCs, just get an idea of, like, what is the reception like?
0:27:55 But then I would, like, try to spend a lot of time.
0:28:04 And, you know, firstly, for me, like, one of the things that gets me excited about Mercury is that, you know, after, like, last year, we launched a bunch of new things.
0:28:08 Like, we launched invoicing and bill pay and reimbursements and personal banking.
0:28:12 And some ideas are, like, hit a dead end over time, right?
0:28:18 Like, you kind of do the idea, and then you end up, like, five years later, you’re just, like, making, like, small features and just selling it more, etc.
0:28:21 And then some ideas, like, turn out to, like, fork, like, a thousand ways.
0:28:28 And Mercury is one of those things because, A, there’s just so few people in banking that, like, a lot of these spaces are unexplored.
0:28:34 And, B, banking is, like, this kind of platform where it has all your money, it has all your finance team, so you can build a lot of things on top of it.
0:28:39 So I’d want to think about, like, okay, you know, if I did the digital twin idea, like, what are the forks?
0:28:42 Like, why does this become even more interesting the more users, like, you get on it?
0:28:47 And maybe the interesting thing is, like, okay, it’s not just a CEO twin, everyone at the company has a twin.
0:28:50 And maybe some of the people don’t even exist at the company.
0:28:56 Maybe these are, like, the, you know, maybe you have, like, a comms person at the company that’s just literally just AI.
0:28:58 I’m just, like, riffing off this.
0:29:02 Maybe your AI twin shows up at the Zoom calls.
0:29:07 Yeah, maybe it’s, like, becomes your coach and it’s, like, helping you through difficult times, right?
0:29:15 Like, I think there is, that is an idea that could probably fork a lot of ways because, like, it has all the knowledge, it learns a lot about you, it’s in your communication channels.
0:29:21 Like, it’s got these core ideas that, like, yeah, it sounds like a pretty good idea that we’re riffing on it.
0:29:22 Yeah, I’m getting excited.
0:29:23 Yeah.
0:29:32 Well, you also, with Mercury, you, it seems like, this may be too simple, but, like, it seems like you had been a founder for 10 plus years.
0:29:38 And you were, like, I don’t personally, like, have a banking product I love, but every startup needs a banking product.
0:29:39 So, I want to build for startups.
0:29:41 There’s nothing that anybody loves.
0:29:45 Maybe they don’t hate their thing or they don’t spend too much time thinking about it, but they don’t have one that they love.
0:29:48 And you basically built the one you would want.
0:29:52 And then the bet was that there’s going to be a lot of other founders that think like me, that like what I like.
0:29:55 Is that fair or is that oversimplifying it?
0:29:57 No, no.
0:29:58 That’s 100% fair.
0:30:01 I think, generally speaking, I’m a little unusual.
0:30:05 I get, like, if I have to call someone to do something, I get so annoyed about it.
0:30:10 Like, if I can, like, press a button, yeah, I will delay for weeks for sure.
0:30:11 But, like, if I have to do it.
0:30:15 And, like, that’s the way banks are after, you know, except for Mercury.
0:30:17 Like, you have to call to, like, get a wire done.
0:30:21 Like, you know, I don’t want to, like, I guess they’re kind of gone, so I can probably bitch about them a little bit.
0:30:26 But, like, First Republic, like, if you wanted to send a wire, like, you know, firstly, you tried to do it and you’d hit a limit.
0:30:27 So you call them, raise the limit.
0:30:31 And then you do it and, yeah, then it would go to the next phase.
0:30:33 And then they would call you and you’d have to authorize it.
0:30:35 Then someone else would have to call them.
0:30:39 It was like a multi-week process just to figure out how to send wires.
0:30:42 So I was like, this is what, so you guys started sponsoring me.
0:30:43 And I was like, all right, cool.
0:30:46 I have an idea for the ad read because I got six Mercury accounts myself.
0:30:47 So I was like, trust me, I already know.
0:30:49 You don’t need to give me the talking points.
0:30:50 I know why I use it.
0:30:52 And I was like, I know you have all these fancy features.
0:30:57 But, like, for me, as a founder, I move at a certain pace.
0:30:59 And as a founder, it’s one of the only advantages you have, right?
0:31:01 You don’t have the biggest team.
0:31:02 You don’t have the most money.
0:31:03 You don’t have a lot of things.
0:31:04 You don’t have the most experience.
0:31:07 You don’t have a brand in the market that everybody knows.
0:31:11 But, like, your pace is the one thing that you have that all the big companies don’t have.
0:31:17 The problem is if you just start hitting walls because you can’t move fast, that becomes very problematic.
0:31:19 So, like, I like to have an idea.
0:31:22 I like to buy a domain on GoDaddy in two seconds, right?
0:31:25 I like to file my – if I have a trademark, I like to just be able to file it online.
0:31:28 I want to talk to a lawyer and schedule a call if I want to start a bank.
0:31:32 And those little things, they sound like one-offs, but they add up and they create momentum.
0:31:34 And momentum begets momentum.
0:31:39 And so I just will always default to using any tool that can operate at founder speed.
0:31:41 So with Mercury, it was like, oh, cool.
0:31:42 I can just type.
0:31:43 Don’t have to talk to any human being.
0:31:44 Don’t have to call anybody.
0:31:46 Don’t have to drive and park somewhere.
0:31:48 And I can get my bank account open.
0:31:49 I can get money in.
0:31:54 And I can wire money because I used to wire for my e-com business out of Wells Fargo.
0:32:01 And I would have to – every single month, just to pay our suppliers, I’d have to drive to a Wells Fargo bank, make an appointment, which I always forget to do, go inside.
0:32:02 They gave me this freaking T-fob.
0:32:04 It takes like a freaking hour to do it, yeah.
0:32:07 They gave me this thing like it’s the nuclear codes and I had to have that.
0:32:12 And then it’s like – and then I had to sit there in an hour and then she would ask me questions and I’d have to make sure that the number is right.
0:32:15 And I’m like, dude, I wish I could just copy, paste, push a button and be done with this.
0:32:17 And then I had to get my limits raised.
0:32:21 Then they had to call another lady to raise the limits because they would only let me do 50K or 100K at a time.
0:32:23 It was super annoying.
0:32:32 And so it’s amazing that literally just feeling like, okay, these people get me and they’ll build a product that moves at my speed, how important that was.
0:32:33 And I also then took that to hiring.
0:32:40 I was like, oh, my best hiring heuristic is basically did this person speed up the pace, keep pace, or slow down pace?
0:32:49 And anybody who slows down pace for me, even if they have other strengths, I found that it rarely works out to work with somebody who operates at a slower speed.
0:32:54 Like, if we have a discussion or an idea, and you’re like, cool, I’ll get to you next week.
0:32:56 It’s like, wait, wait, wait, we said this was important.
0:32:58 Yeah, yeah, let’s just get it done.
0:32:59 There’s still eight hours left in the day.
0:33:00 What are you talking about?
0:33:02 Like, how long could that possibly take you?
0:33:05 And it’s not that they won’t do it.
0:33:09 It’s just if their default expectation, if their default clock speed is slow, it’s just not going to work.
0:33:12 I want my software fast and my employees fast.
0:33:12 Yeah.
0:33:18 So actually, you know, like, once you describe that process, like, it sounds awful.
0:33:23 So I think, like, there’s, like, people just get used to being abused by the current products, right?
0:33:30 Like, I think it’s, in some ways, like, because I came from the UK, I didn’t, I didn’t, I had a slightly better expectation of banking.
0:33:34 Like, you know, in the UK, you can move money instantly.
0:33:36 And, like, the software was better for various reasons.
0:33:42 So I think there’s, like, some element of the fact that, like, I had this outsider perspective as an immigrant.
0:33:52 And I do think that’s, like, part of it, that, like, people in America were, like, okay with once a month having to, like, drive to Wells Fargo to do something basic and, like, having this, like, painful process.
0:33:54 And, like, beg them to let me do something with my own money.
0:33:55 Yeah, exactly.
0:33:56 Like, convince them.
0:33:57 And sometimes they say no.
0:33:58 Yeah.
0:34:01 Dude, the term abuse is so good.
0:34:03 It’s, like, that’s going to be a new filter for me on ideas.
0:34:07 Is, can I describe the current abuse that the product is doing?
0:34:12 Like, I was in this conversation the other day and it was, like, super, it was, I went to that dialogue conference.
0:34:13 I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but, like.
0:34:13 Oh, yeah.
0:34:14 And look at this.
0:34:16 This is the dialogue cup I have.
0:34:16 Oh, perfect, perfect.
0:34:19 So I went there last, like, two days ago or whatever.
0:34:24 And in the room was, like, the CEO of Renaissance Technology, like, the Renaissance, like, the best investors in the world.
0:34:27 The CEO of Bridgewater, like, it was basically, like, the who’s who.
0:34:31 And in the money conversation, it’s, like, a group of 10 people.
0:34:34 In the money conversation, the topic of crypto came up.
0:34:43 And somebody who was a dean of a very famous university was basically, like, arguing that, you know, crypto, I don’t know.
0:34:44 I’m not convinced.
0:34:47 And I just sort of, it was the abuse thing.
0:34:52 So I was, like, so you, he’s, like, you want to park your money in something like the dollar, right?
0:34:52 Cool.
0:34:53 Got it.
0:34:54 I understand a bunch of reasons why.
0:35:05 But the abuse that was normalized was, so the dollar, which has a whole arm, the Fed, whose job is to have a 2% to 3% target inflation.
0:35:06 Oh, oops.
0:35:07 Sometimes we go way above that.
0:35:09 But we’ll try to get back to 2% to 3%.
0:35:14 And I was, like, so your default expectation is that in 30 years, your purchasing power is cut in half.
0:35:23 That’s, like, the accepted financial abuse of saving all your money in U.S. dollars is that every 30 years, your purchasing power gets cut in half.
0:35:26 It’s a lot worse than that because of, like, asset appreciation, right?
0:35:32 Like, people don’t think about it, but, like, you know, like, houses and a lot of other things are, like, way above inflation.
0:35:38 Inflation even measured where it doesn’t include your house or your rent, like, you know, like the kind of screwed up version of inflation.
0:35:47 Even that, even that, like, the adjusted EBITDA of inflation, right, where it’s, like, this specific basket, even that’s supposed to be 3%.
0:35:53 So it’s, like, that’s a system where that abuse of, like, what, of savers getting penalized, right?
0:35:56 Anybody who saves gets penalized in the dollar system.
0:35:58 But it’s a blind spot.
0:36:01 People really don’t, they’ve accepted that abuse.
0:36:05 They’re so used to that abuse that it’s just taken as fine.
0:36:06 You know, it’s not even a problem.
0:36:08 It’s not even, like, a known problem for them.
0:36:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:36:16 I mean, I think part of the reason it’s not a problem for, like, richer people is because they get the asset appreciation, right?
0:36:18 So, like, you know, people aren’t sitting on cash.
0:36:31 It’s, unfortunately, a lot of the abuse actually happens to, like, poorer businesses and, like, poorer people where they have to sit in cash because, you know, they don’t have, they’re living paycheck to paycheck and, like, most of their money is not in assets.
0:36:32 Right.
0:36:34 So I think that part is, like, particularly sad.
0:36:38 I don’t necessarily think crypto is the only answer there, right?
0:36:39 Like, you could buy gold, you could buy stocks.
0:36:43 Bitcoin has obviously done particularly well in the last 10 years.
0:36:49 But, yeah, it’s definitely, like, something where, like, there’s something a bit weird about the system for sure.
0:36:50 Yeah, exactly.
0:36:55 You can debate the solutions, but the problem seems, like, not debatable, but it’s just accepted.
0:36:56 It’s an accepted abuse.
0:37:02 Tell me, you guys had this crazy situation where Silicon Valley Bank goes through this crisis.
0:37:10 Tell me where you were when that happened and then what the next, I don’t know, 24, 48 hours, what did that look like and what happened to Mercury during that time?
0:37:18 Because it seems like you were the big, you were a big beneficiary of that situation in terms of customers coming to you guys or adoption.
0:37:19 Yeah.
0:37:24 I mean, to set the scene, right, like, SVB has been around one year longer than I was alive.
0:37:26 So it was, like, started in 1983.
0:37:27 So I always remember that.
0:37:33 And when, you know, when I was working on Mercury, right, like, SVB is part of the seed deck, right?
0:37:36 It’s like, hey, this is the 800-pound gorilla.
0:37:38 Like, this is what everyone in the Silicon Valley uses.
0:37:41 At that point, they were, like, worth $16 billion.
0:37:43 And I think at peak COVID, they were worth $40 billion.
0:37:45 So this is a big company.
0:37:52 So, you know, when this started happening, you know, I wasn’t, we had obviously been competing against each other.
0:37:58 But, you know, it was, like, kind of a weirdly indirect competition in the sense that, like, SVB just offers something very different, right?
0:38:03 Like, this is, like, the stolid Silicon Valley Bank that’s been around forever.
0:38:06 And then Mercury is, you know, this upstart fintech, right?
0:38:09 Like, so, and, like, you know, we used SVB in my previous company.
0:38:10 I like those guys.
0:38:12 Like, they were, like, they were friendly.
0:38:14 They, like, cared about startups.
0:38:16 I mean, their software wasn’t great, but none of the banks had great software.
0:38:20 So, like, to be clear, I didn’t feel anything bad about them.
0:38:23 And I felt really bad for the people there.
0:38:26 And, you know, I thought they’d be fine, right?
0:38:29 Like, when Thursday rolled along, I was like, hey, everyone’s freaking out.
0:38:31 Like, people, like, panicking about things on the internet.
0:38:35 Did you find out about it at the same time as all the rest of us?
0:38:38 Or did you have some inkling or some foresight that that might happen?
0:38:46 In the December, like, so most of the bank run happened to SVB in March 2023.
0:38:56 In December 2022, there was, like, this article about, like, the fact that the MSPs, the mortgage-backed security, MBS, the mortgage-backed securities were, like, massively underwater.
0:39:01 There even been some VCs that had freaked out and, like, pulled their portfolio companies out.
0:39:04 So, I had seen some of those rumors in that December 2022.
0:39:12 But, again, like, yeah, people was calling some crisis and, you know, like, if you want to, like, right now, there’s someone freaking out about something.
0:39:14 So, like, my default is to ignore that stuff.
0:39:19 But, yeah, I mean, on Wednesday, it kind of kicked off.
0:39:22 And, like, you know, we started seeing, like, just people were freaking out.
0:39:25 And they were like, hey, how quickly can I get a Mercury Bank again, right?
0:39:29 And it went from, like, you know, normally, like, banking.
0:39:31 Like, people don’t want to switch banking services, right?
0:39:34 Like, this is a lot of the customers that Mercury wins are, like, a day zero.
0:39:36 Like, you just start a new business.
0:39:37 You don’t have a bank account.
0:39:37 You need something.
0:39:38 And we’re there for you.
0:39:40 It’s much harder for us to switch people.
0:39:46 So, yeah, we obviously, like, hitting up every startup in Silicon Valley with, like, our sales team and other marketing stuff.
0:39:49 Did you have, like, a kind of emergency meeting?
0:39:51 Like, hey, here’s the game plan?
0:39:54 Or how did you organize that to, like, sprint?
0:39:58 Yeah, my initial thing was, like, hey, you know, I was, like, we do not say a word of this publicly.
0:40:01 Like, we don’t want to, like, jump on the misfortune.
0:40:05 But anyone that comes to Mercury, let’s, like, support them.
0:40:07 And we did a bunch of things.
0:40:08 So, we changed the product.
0:40:14 So, you know, we’re, like, hey, if you’re a non-SVB customer, we can always onboard you next week, right?
0:40:14 Right.
0:40:18 But if you’re coming from SVB, let’s make it in just two and a half an hour.
0:40:26 So, we, you know, we had this Plaid connection thing, and we put that right at the top, and we said above it, SVB customer, connect your SVB, and we’ll, like, prioritize you.
0:40:31 And, like, SVB customers were really easy to prioritize because they’re, like, you know, they tended to have more money.
0:40:34 They’re already vetted by a bank.
0:40:35 They’re not new customers.
0:40:41 You know, we basically, like, tried to think of all the ways we could speed up the process for them.
0:40:43 And we really focused on just providing that process.
0:40:46 Was it, like, 2x, 5x, 10x normal?
0:40:47 Like, what did you see?
0:40:50 So, right now, Mercury has, like, 200,000 customers.
0:40:53 And we had, like, maybe 100,000 back then.
0:40:58 But, yeah, SVB had a lot of money, but not, like, an insane number of customers.
0:41:03 So, I want to say they had, like, 30,000 or 40,000 kind of total customers.
0:41:08 So, the volume was big in terms of dollars, but not necessarily in terms of, like, numbers.
0:41:09 It was significant.
0:41:15 I think what we published is, like, around 8,000 customers moved over to us, like, in a two-week time period.
0:41:20 Yeah, which is, like, big, but not, like, crazy compared to, like, the normal kind of monthly growth we get.
0:41:21 Right.
0:41:27 So, the other thing we did is, you know, everyone was saying to us, like, hey, SVB failed.
0:41:29 Like, why won’t Mercury fail?
0:41:35 And, you know, I would say to people, like, verbally, it’s like, hey, you know, we’re not a bank ourselves.
0:41:36 We work with partner banks.
0:41:40 And your money is, like, has extra FDIC insurance.
0:41:43 So, at that time, we had 1 million in FDIC insurance.
0:41:52 And then I would say, okay, you know, after, if you have more than a million, put the rest of it in U.S. government, T-bill, mutual funds, which we have as part of the platform.
0:41:55 So, I would say this over and over again to people.
0:42:01 But, obviously, like, you know, if MR says, like, hey, your money’s safe, like, that’s not very fulfilling, right?
0:42:04 Like, the SVB CEO was also saying your money’s safe.
0:42:06 So, what we did over that.
0:42:06 So, did Sam Bankman free.
0:42:07 Yeah, exactly.
0:42:10 So, I was like, that’s the one thing I don’t want to say online.
0:42:12 So, what we did over that weekend is we built this product.
0:42:13 It was called Mercury Vault.
0:42:16 And it would basically visualize where your money is.
0:42:21 We’d say, okay, you know, this much of it is in FDIC insured account up to this much.
0:42:25 So, if you had, you know, and we also actually worked with our partner banks to extend the FDIC insurance.
0:42:27 So, we went from 1 million to 5 million over that week.
0:42:33 So, it’s, you know, if you had 6 million in your Mercury checking account, we’d say, okay, 1 million of that is no FDIC insured, 5 million is.
0:42:37 And then, you know, we’d help you set up your treasury system.
0:42:39 So, you’d put in U.S. government T-bills.
0:42:42 So, we built this product and that really worked.
0:42:45 Like, it’s so powerful.
0:42:49 So, you used product to build trust instead of words.
0:42:50 Yes.
0:42:52 And it’s also spoke to the moment.
0:42:58 It’s like, okay, you know, instead of us, like, hiding away from it, we weren’t saying, like, you know, let’s not talk about whether your money is safe or not.
0:43:00 We were like, okay, let’s show you, right?
0:43:05 Like, you know, you don’t have to, like, trust, like, Imad’s word or, like, some marketing.
0:43:07 Like, we were like, here’s a product that shows you.
0:43:10 And it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t, like, something completely new.
0:43:15 Like, this basically, like, my general view on things is, like, if you’re saying something over and over,
0:43:20 if customer support is doing something over and over, like, how do you make that in the product so, like, people don’t have to ask you.
0:43:21 And it’s just so much more powerful.
0:43:23 Like, it feels tangible to people.
0:43:30 It also just felt to people, like, okay, you know, instead of us going to another bank that could also get a run,
0:43:35 we’re going to something where, like, you get this extra FDIC insurance and Mercury’s a fintech.
0:43:38 It’s not, you know, at that point, like, you know, like, we are not holding your money.
0:43:40 The money never touches Mercury’s bank account.
0:43:41 And it never does.
0:43:45 Like, it goes to our partner banks and they have an FDIC sweep network.
0:43:48 So, that was really important to people that, like, we were speaking with product.
0:43:51 And, like, it’s also, you know, I think entrepreneurs appreciate that, right?
0:43:58 Like, the one, like, the fact that, like, we spend the weekend building a product for them that, like, actually answered their biggest question,
0:44:01 like, made people go, like, oh, shit, like, Mercury gets it, right?
0:44:03 Like, I think that was, like, a really powerful moment for us.
0:44:05 Yeah, that’s dope.
0:44:06 You have this…
0:44:13 Also, I actually felt good as an entrepreneur because, like, I think sometimes, you know, when there’s a crisis moment,
0:44:17 you can feel a little bit, like, it’s like, oh, man, what am I supposed to do here?
0:44:19 Like, obviously, you can talk to customers and things like that.
0:44:21 But building product is, like, what we are about.
0:44:24 So, as an entrepreneur, I was like, okay, you know, let’s spend the weekend.
0:44:26 Everyone, like, let’s go do this.
0:44:28 Like, you know, it gave you, like, something really tangible to do.
0:44:37 So, actually, the whole team, like, thinks, like, even, I guess, two years later, like, we, yeah, the whole team is, like, hey, we worked that whole weekend.
0:44:38 We built this product together.
0:44:45 Like, everyone’s, like, still, like, excited about that moment because, like, it, like, it did the thing that we were good at doing to solve that problem.
0:44:46 Yeah, yeah.
0:44:49 You got the adrenaline rush, but you stayed in character.
0:44:52 You didn’t go out of character and try to do something that you don’t normally do.
0:44:56 You have these philosophies that you sent over.
0:44:59 One of them maybe is related to what we just talked about.
0:45:02 It’s go all in on asymmetric upside bets.
0:45:03 Yeah.
0:45:04 Can you unpack that?
0:45:11 I feel like a lot of people kind of try entrepreneurship or do things, but they don’t go all in on them.
0:45:22 And, you know, when I did my first startup for seven months in the UK, and I was like, you know, it was really a moment for me where, like, I was like, okay, this is what life is about for me.
0:45:28 Like, I was very, you know, I did college, I did computer science, but I was never, like, that excited about it.
0:45:30 I just did it because I was good at it.
0:45:31 And it was kind of fun.
0:45:33 And then I worked at a job and I hated it.
0:45:36 I worked at Bloomberg for a year and I was like, wow.
0:45:39 Like, you know, I was worried that that’s what life is, right?
0:45:45 Like having this, like, grind and like, and then, and then, you know, one of my friends was like, hey, let’s do this, like, startup thing.
0:45:47 And I was like, okay, you know, let’s try it out.
0:45:52 And I, and that was like the first time I did something where I was like, oh shit, like, this is so much fun.
0:45:54 And that startup did nothing, right?
0:46:02 Like it went nowhere, had no users, but just the idea of like working 9am to like midnight, building something myself and launching it.
0:46:07 Like, I just, I don’t know, there’s just something about it that like, so speaks to like my core.
0:46:11 So I was like, okay, if I want to do this, you know, what is, where can I do this the greatest?
0:46:18 And at the time was San Francisco, I would still say San Francisco, but at that time it was like a hundred percent, like I had to be here to do it.
0:46:21 So I was just like, you know, had basically no money.
0:46:22 I backed up my stuff.
0:46:27 I did get into Y Combinator with my second startup and moved to San Francisco.
0:46:31 And I just spent, you know, even in that seven months when I was in London, I was all in.
0:46:34 Like I was, I would like code and build this thing all day.
0:46:37 And then I would go to every single event that was possible to go to.
0:46:41 And like, honestly, half of them, or maybe all of them were a waste of time, but just, you know,
0:46:47 you just, if you work really, really hard and you do all the things, you’ll eventually like build up a network, right?
0:46:54 That’s how, actually, like the way I came to San Francisco is I met someone through this, like just extreme networking I did.
0:46:57 And they’d already got into Y Combinator and they needed a technical co-founder.
0:47:00 And I was like, okay, you know, I want to go to San Francisco, so I’ll join you guys.
0:47:07 So I think like, I just feel like a lot of people that do things just kind of half do them.
0:47:11 They’re like, oh, you know, it’s my side gig and I’m doing this thing.
0:47:12 And I’m like, you know, whatever.
0:47:15 I’d had no money when I quit my job to like do my first startup.
0:47:22 But like that kind of like forceful, like grind, like, where you’re just like all in on things,
0:47:28 that just pays dividends in a way that’s like half doing things just, I don’t think really does.
0:47:36 And I feel like, you know, over time, like going all in on things, like, you know, another part of my things is like going all in on family.
0:47:42 Like basically like I, you know, I married, like I met my wife three weeks before I moved to the U.S.
0:47:45 and I had a long distance relationship and then I married her.
0:47:49 And then we had a kid like two years later, which like I was the one, like the startup grind.
0:47:52 But I was just like, okay, you know, I’m all in on like having this family.
0:47:54 I don’t know.
0:48:00 So I just feel like going all in on things has just like this like big upside that like half doing things just doesn’t.
0:48:07 And I think the asymmetric side of it is like, you know, the worst thing that could happen to me is if my startup didn’t work,
0:48:08 I’d have to go and get another job.
0:48:14 So like basically like I was always like, okay, you know, at that point I was getting paid like 40,000 pounds a year or something.
0:48:19 So I was like, okay, you know, I’m losing 40,000 pounds a year in salary, maybe 50,000 if I get a raise or something.
0:48:23 But the asymmetric bet is like, you know, I could make a million or whatever.
0:48:25 But, you know, it’s also asymmetric life bet.
0:48:32 It’s like I could either like my downside was like, you know, I’m going to have a shitty time and not enjoy my life.
0:48:36 And my upside was like, I’ll have a great life that I’m extremely motivated and excited about.
0:48:42 So that to me is like extremely asymmetric, like doing things where you’re like extremely excited and like having fun.
0:48:44 Like that’s a rare gift, right?
0:48:48 Like I think a lot of people don’t do things that they enjoy every day.
0:48:50 And like, you know, I have some friends that are like that.
0:48:52 And like, it’s just kind of depressing talking to them.
0:49:02 Like having like the ability to do things that you really enjoy in life is such a such an important thing that like I think if you find something that is like that, you should go all in on that.
0:49:06 Hey, Sean here.
0:49:08 I want to tell you a little story about Winston Churchill.
0:49:13 So Churchill once said, first, we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us.
0:49:19 And I think this is true, not just for the buildings we see in cities, but also for the building blocks you choose in your company.
0:49:22 For any company that I start, I use Mercury for all of my banking needs.
0:49:23 Why?
0:49:24 Well, it was built by a YC founder.
0:49:28 And you could tell this is built by a founder who understands the needs of other founders.
0:49:29 Second thing is, is modern.
0:49:31 It’s clean, easy to use.
0:49:32 The design is really nice.
0:49:37 You’d never have to drive somewhere, park, put coins in the meter, get out just to do one simple task.
0:49:39 You could do everything in just a couple of clicks.
0:49:43 They got bill pay, checking account, savings account, wire transfers, everything you need.
0:49:43 They got it.
0:49:46 I use it for not one, but actually six of my companies right now.
0:49:48 And I actually even have a personal account with them.
0:49:49 It’s kind of amazing.
0:49:53 So if you’re ready to operate in the future, head over to mercury.com, apply in minutes.
0:49:56 Disclaimer, Mercury is a financial technology company out of bank.
0:50:00 Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.
0:50:03 Thank you to Winston Churchill for that little ad segment.
0:50:04 All right, back to this episode.
0:50:11 I love what you just said because I wrote going all in, right?
0:50:14 As a reminder, I have these note cards, which are usually just reminders.
0:50:18 Like the best information is not brand new information.
0:50:23 It’s just true information that I needed to hear again, needed to bring to the front of
0:50:25 mind, or I needed to remember in my current context.
0:50:32 And I think that the way you described it actually made it click for me in a new way, which is
0:50:34 going all in is a skill.
0:50:35 And I did the same thing as you.
0:50:37 I had a startup straight out of school.
0:50:42 And I had this idea and I was having all this fun with my friends.
0:50:45 And I was either going to go to med school as I had planned, took the MCATs, all that, or
0:50:46 I was going to do this startup.
0:50:49 I decided I’m going to do the startup thing, right?
0:50:50 Then I start with that.
0:50:52 And then I got this gravitational pull.
0:50:53 I got this job offer.
0:50:55 Somebody was going to pay me $120,000.
0:50:58 I had to move to Indonesia where the opportunity was.
0:51:02 But it was like this guaranteed salary, blah, blah, blah.
0:51:07 And I remember my co-founders, my two buddies, I was like, yeah, we told ourselves this stupid
0:51:09 story, which, you know, we’re always telling ourselves stories.
0:51:12 And I was like, I’m going to go, dude, the lessons I’m going to learn there are going to
0:51:14 be so useful for us.
0:51:17 Like, I didn’t have the courage to just say, I’m going there because I really want this
0:51:19 guaranteed kind of safe salary thing.
0:51:24 And instead, we told ourselves this story that I needed to learn business over there
0:51:25 before I could go do business here.
0:51:29 And within two months when I was there, I was like, this was a mistake.
0:51:31 I need to be all in.
0:51:33 And I quit my job.
0:51:34 I told the owner, I was like, hey, I’m out of here.
0:51:35 He’s like, what?
0:51:36 Like, it’s only been two months.
0:51:39 And I just told him, I was like, I need to see this through.
0:51:41 Like, I’ll always wonder, right?
0:51:42 Like, I kind of know what this is.
0:51:43 Same thing.
0:51:44 Like, I’m not like lit up every day.
0:51:45 I had more fun over there.
0:51:47 Yeah, there’s no guarantees over there.
0:51:50 But like, I think the guarantee of feeling lit up every day is going to be like good
0:51:51 for me in the long run.
0:51:54 So I flew back and I was like, all right, I’m all in.
0:51:55 And we moved.
0:51:56 That was the first thing.
0:51:58 Because I was like, is this the best place to build this company?
0:52:00 And if not, why are we building it here?
0:52:01 Just because we’re already here?
0:52:03 Like, that seemed like a terrible reason to just do it.
0:52:07 So we immediately moved to like the hub of where that type of company was built.
0:52:08 It was a restaurant chain.
0:52:12 And all the top restaurant chains have been launched, or most of them have been launched
0:52:16 in Colorado, like Chipotle and Smashburger and Quiznos.
0:52:17 There’s like noodles and company.
0:52:21 There’s like eight of the big fast casual chains have started in that area.
0:52:25 It’s the Silicon Valley of like, you know, shitty fast food.
0:52:28 And so we go all in there.
0:52:31 And it was the same thing, which nothing really came of that startup.
0:52:32 You know, like I lost money.
0:52:36 I lost arguably a year of time working on something that didn’t work.
0:52:41 But I absolutely didn’t lose because not only did I set myself on a different trajectory,
0:52:47 but I more importantly learned the muscle of going all in, which once you fast forward five
0:52:51 years and you look back at your same smart friends, friends from school who have just
0:52:55 been in, you know, a bit of a corporate life that whole time, you see that that muscle has
0:52:56 atrophied.
0:52:57 They don’t have that muscle.
0:53:00 And that muscle is really important because whatever you’re going to do, the winning idea,
0:53:04 you’re going to need to be able to go all in in order to make that idea work.
0:53:05 Yeah, 100%.
0:53:05 All right.
0:53:10 The last philosophy I want to hear from you, because I dig these, is there are no rules.
0:53:13 Just construct your work and your life the way you want.
0:53:14 What do you mean by that?
0:53:15 What makes you say that?
0:53:20 You know, I feel like when you’re in Silicon Valley, everyone’s got these like, you know,
0:53:25 there’s so many people who are trying to like be influencers, like VCs, like, you know,
0:53:30 everyone’s got these ideas that like, hey, you know, like I remember when, you know, in 2011,
0:53:34 when I had my first kid, like it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have a startup.
0:53:36 Like people were like, literally like, what are you doing?
0:53:38 Like you’re going to fail your startup or whatever.
0:53:44 But actually, one of the things that’s like a completely contradiction is like the only way
0:53:47 you succeed is by doing things that are unusual, right?
0:53:49 Because if you’re doing the normal things, how can you succeed?
0:53:51 Because like everyone’s doing those things.
0:53:57 So weirdly, like, you know, if you look at every single success, it’s a contradiction because
0:54:01 it had to be a really common thing in Silicon Valley is don’t do consumer startups.
0:54:04 But actually, the biggest startups like Amazon, Facebook, Google, they’re consumer startups,
0:54:05 right?
0:54:08 Like, so why are we telling everyone not to do consumer startups?
0:54:10 But like, those are the $3 trillion companies.
0:54:18 So I find like, you know, in general, like most knowledge is like, you have to understand where
0:54:20 it comes from and why it comes from and like why you’re the exception.
0:54:23 But like the only way you succeed is being an exception.
0:54:29 So like, you kind of have to like, just ignore the rules and like, just do the thing and be
0:54:31 the exception, because that’s the only way you succeed.
0:54:33 But I do think there’s like knowledge out there.
0:54:35 And like, there’s a reason people talk about these things.
0:54:38 And you should understand why it is that you are different.
0:54:41 And like, you know, what are the problems with consumer startups?
0:54:42 And there’s lots of them.
0:54:46 But I’ve just generally found in life that like, actually, the best things I’ve ever done
0:54:51 have been like ignoring the rules and just doing things that like, yeah, I just think
0:54:55 like most of the time, if you do the, not the opposite, but like, if you, if you pick
0:54:59 the set of rules that you’re ignoring, because you have like a strong reason to ignore them,
0:55:01 you’re going to be much more likely to be successful.
0:55:03 That’s a, that’s a great point.
0:55:06 You know, there’s that, I forgot what the phrase is, but it’s like experts know all the
0:55:08 rules and masters know when to break them.
0:55:12 So, so, you know, that’s the, that sort of the best signal of mastery is when you know
0:55:15 the rules and you intentionally choose which ones you’re going to break.
0:55:20 So like, if you, I’m learning the piano right now and my teacher will be like, oh yeah,
0:55:21 this is Bach or this is what Beethoven did.
0:55:26 And he’ll be like, he’ll specifically call out, he did this thing that, you know, normally
0:55:27 you wouldn’t do, right?
0:55:28 This doesn’t make sense.
0:55:32 These are two different keys or that doesn’t, it’s not part of the scale, but it works because
0:55:33 of this.
0:55:35 And it’s like, they make up the reason why it works.
0:55:35 Yeah.
0:55:38 They make up the reason, but it’s post post fact, right?
0:55:38 Exactly.
0:55:41 It’s, you know, now it becomes a new rule later.
0:55:43 It’s like, oh yeah, but if it resolves tension, then it works.
0:55:44 It’s like, okay, cool.
0:55:48 But at the time, this sort of breaks, breaks that rule.
0:55:49 And that’s what all the, all the best ones do.
0:55:54 What I like about what you just said is it made me think it’s worth writing down.
0:55:55 I’m going to try this after this podcast.
0:56:00 It’s worth writing down, like, not just how I want to win, how I want to live my life,
0:56:06 but specifically like what rules, what kind of common best, best practices or generally accepted
0:56:10 good practices that I am intentionally choosing to break.
0:56:11 You know, I’ll give you an example.
0:56:15 Um, the other day I was having a conversation with a guy who’s really smart and wise.
0:56:18 And he said, he said this great line and everybody nodded and took notes.
0:56:22 He was like, um, you know, when you get money, people come to you, they want to get, do business
0:56:22 with you.
0:56:23 They want you to invest in their thing.
0:56:24 They want a loan.
0:56:25 They want whatever.
0:56:26 And he goes, I have this rule.
0:56:32 Um, you know, either our friendship is sacred or the money is sacred, but you can’t have both.
0:56:35 And I said, so does that mean you just never do business with friends?
0:56:36 He goes, never.
0:56:37 And everyone’s like, yeah, that makes sense.
0:56:38 It could be really messy.
0:56:40 And I go, I don’t know.
0:56:42 I think that everything you said is true.
0:56:47 And yet I choose that mess because I think there’s a great upside in like finding the people
0:56:48 you love and doing life with them.
0:56:52 Like life is a lot more fun when I do projects with friends or invest in people’s companies.
0:56:56 And I, I, you know, I give people, I bet on people and yeah, sometimes it doesn’t work
0:56:56 out.
0:56:59 And sometimes it gets a little hairy, but like, I choose this mess.
0:57:04 It’s like, I choose that rule to break and I’m, I’m comfortable living with that, you
0:57:07 know, and I can always go back and change my approach, but for now that’s a rule I’d want
0:57:07 to break.
0:57:11 But that’s a good example where you, you want to understand how to break the rule as well,
0:57:12 right?
0:57:14 Like, it’s not just like, I’m going to break the rules, therefore I don’t care about it.
0:57:18 You want to go like, okay, you know, if I’m putting money in a startup, I’m going to
0:57:21 make sure there’s a contract and everyone understands like, here’s how we work together.
0:57:24 And like, yeah, I do think when you break the rule, you have to kind of go out of
0:57:28 the way to mitigate, uh, the potential downsides of like breaking that role.
0:57:31 Like, and the breaking the rule is doing the harder thing normally.
0:57:35 So you have to understand why and how, and how do you mitigate that risk?
0:57:40 The rule you broke was as a startup founder in SF with all the options to choose, you chose
0:57:45 the like highly regulated, highly compliance based, hard, have to build for a year and a
0:57:46 half before you launch.
0:57:51 You know, that’s not, that’s not the quick and dirty prototype vibe code.
0:57:53 Like you can’t do that playbook there.
0:57:56 So you’re like, all right, I’m going to choose to break that norm and go this way.
0:57:57 Cause that’s what I want.
0:57:58 Yeah.
0:57:58 Yeah.
0:58:03 But, but I spent a lot of time understanding what I was like in for, right.
0:58:08 I spent like three months just talking to people and like researching, you know, compliance and
0:58:10 rules and laws and like all this stuff.
0:58:11 And like, I wasn’t, I wasn’t doing it blindly.
0:58:12 Yeah.
0:58:13 All right.
0:58:16 So Ahmad, where should people find you and who should reach out to you?
0:58:19 Who do you, who do you want to reach out to you, uh, from things like this?
0:58:23 Cause when you’re out there, you know, you attract certain people, but I like to say, you know,
0:58:26 you want to have your API, you want to tell people who should connect with you and, and,
0:58:27 and, and on what basis.
0:58:29 So give me a sense of that.
0:58:30 Where, where should people find you and what should they reach you about?
0:58:34 The easiest way is on X or Twitter, uh, as it used to be.
0:58:36 Um, I’m just Ahmad, uh, yeah.
0:58:37 Who should reach out?
0:58:40 You know, I’m always willing to try to be helpful to entrepreneurs.
0:58:45 So, you know, if you have an idea, you want to, uh, pitch me something or whatever, you know,
0:58:50 reach out and yeah, I, I try to be like quick and say yes or no, if I’m interested or not.
0:58:55 Um, and obviously if you’re interested in Mercury, uh, you know, go to mercury.com and sign up.
0:58:56 All right.
0:58:56 Love it.
0:58:58 Thanks for coming on, dude.
0:58:58 Yeah.
0:58:59 Thanks for having me, Sean.
0:59:15 Hey, Sean here.
0:59:17 I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvie story.
0:59:18 One of the great ad men.
0:59:20 He said, remember the consumer is not a moron.
0:59:21 She’s your wife.
0:59:23 You wouldn’t lie to your own wife.
0:59:25 So don’t lie to mine.
0:59:27 And I love that you guys, you’re my family.
0:59:29 You’re like my wife and I won’t lie to you either.
0:59:33 So I’ll tell you the truth for every company I own right now, six companies.
0:59:35 I use Mercury for all of them.
0:59:39 So I’m proud to partner with Mercury because I use it for all of my banking needs across my
0:59:41 personal account, my business accounts.
0:59:44 And anytime I start a new company, it’s my first move.
0:59:45 I go open up a Mercury account.
0:59:47 I’m very confident in recommending it because I actually use it.
0:59:48 I’ve used it for years.
0:59:50 It is the best product on the market.
0:59:55 So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, go to mercury.com and
0:59:57 apply in minutes.
1:00:00 And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
1:00:04 Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.
1:00:05 All right, back to the episode.

0:00:01 I got to tell you about a YouTube story.
0:00:05 Okay, so this is a story of how a guy
0:00:08 found an underrated opportunity in the YouTube market
0:00:09 and turned it into $3 billion.
0:00:21 So there’s this guy, Rene,
0:00:24 and Rene discovers an opportunity.
0:00:27 Sam, do you know what the most viewed YouTube channel is?
0:00:29 Most views on YouTube, do you know?
0:00:32 The obvious answer would be Mr. Beast.
0:00:33 The second…
0:00:34 Mr. Beast, number 13?
0:00:35 Why are we talking about number 13?
0:00:36 I’m talking about number one, Sam.
0:00:39 Okay, do I do the bro move
0:00:42 where I under guess so you quit?
0:00:44 No, I’m going to say some type of Indian thing.
0:00:46 Probably like an Indian…
0:00:47 Number one is T-Series.
0:00:48 It’s Indian music.
0:00:50 So it’s just like all the famous Bollywood songs.
0:00:51 But do you know what number two is?
0:00:52 I don’t.
0:00:52 No idea.
0:00:53 Cocomelon.
0:00:55 Cocomelon, yeah, God.
0:00:57 Does your kid watch Cocomelon or is too young, maybe?
0:01:00 I refuse to let her watch Cocomelon
0:01:01 because it’s crack.
0:01:03 It’s baby crack.
0:01:08 So by the way, number two, number five, number six, number seven,
0:01:11 those are all just like Cocomelon.
0:01:13 They’re basically kids’ entertainment channels.
0:01:16 By the way, a couple of them are like Russian and Ukrainian
0:01:18 in the top 10 of all views.
0:01:21 So Cocomelon was this channel
0:01:25 that was actually started back in 2006, 2007.
0:01:29 This dad who was like an animator slash filmmaker
0:01:32 and his wife, who I think was like a cartoonist
0:01:33 for children’s books,
0:01:35 they noticed there’s like,
0:01:38 oh, there’s like nothing good on YouTube for kids.
0:01:41 And so they start creating very simple animations
0:01:44 for kids on YouTube.
0:01:47 Just like literally, if you go to their channel
0:01:49 and you click pop, click oldest.
0:01:51 And the very old, the oldest one,
0:01:54 I think it’s like 18 years ago is a video.
0:01:55 That’s like the ABC song.
0:01:56 It’s a 40 second video.
0:01:59 And if you go look at all the old ones,
0:02:00 it doesn’t look like Cocomelon today.
0:02:01 There’s no character.
0:02:03 There’s no like kid, JJ.
0:02:06 There’s no like crazy cracked out animations.
0:02:07 There’s nothing.
0:02:07 There’s just like,
0:02:09 literally they’re just doing nursery rhymes.
0:02:10 So it’s like ABC,
0:02:12 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,
0:02:14 Baba, Black Sheep, all the hits.
0:02:16 And so those start getting a lot of views.
0:02:19 And for like 10 plus years,
0:02:22 it’s just them doing animations,
0:02:25 no sponsors, no merchandise,
0:02:27 no gimmicks, no nothing.
0:02:29 They’re just living off of YouTube ad revenue.
0:02:29 They got a small team.
0:02:31 They get into about 20 people.
0:02:32 10 plus years.
0:02:33 Wow.
0:02:35 So that’s a grind.
0:02:36 They did that.
0:02:37 There’s another story.
0:02:39 Blippi.
0:02:40 I don’t know if you’re familiar with Blippi.
0:02:41 Blippi is sort of like-
0:02:42 Is he the guy who sings,
0:02:43 but it’s like many guys now?
0:02:46 Yeah, they’ve switched out the character,
0:02:49 but basically it’s a dude who wears a blue suit
0:02:50 with orange overalls and a bow tie.
0:02:51 And he’s like,
0:02:53 yeah, it’s me, Blippi, right?
0:02:54 And he’s like,
0:02:56 basically he just goes to like abandoned,
0:02:58 like not abandoned,
0:02:58 I shouldn’t say that.
0:03:00 Like kids like play places when they’re closed
0:03:01 and he goes and he plays in them
0:03:04 and he like films himself playing in the play place
0:03:06 and he teaches you things and whatever.
0:03:08 Slightly educational, slightly fun channel.
0:03:10 Wait, were you going to say Blippi
0:03:14 is recording abandoned warehouses?
0:03:15 Abandoned play places,
0:03:16 like there’s no one there,
0:03:17 but they’re not abandoned.
0:03:17 I thought you’d be like,
0:03:19 today’s special word is tetanus.
0:03:20 Like if you do,
0:03:21 like-
0:03:22 Yeah, exactly.
0:03:26 Can you say rabid?
0:03:27 Yeah.
0:03:28 Rabid.
0:03:31 So Blippi, this guy basically sees that his,
0:03:33 I think his niece or nephew or something like that
0:03:37 is watching these like really low quality videos of tractors.
0:03:39 Like, you know, like kids love trucks and tractors.
0:03:39 I do.
0:03:41 He’s like, oh man, like my kid loves this.
0:03:43 My nephew loves this tractor video.
0:03:44 And so he goes and he makes one.
0:03:45 If you get the same thing,
0:03:46 go to the Blippi channel,
0:03:46 you click oldest,
0:03:50 you’ll see it’s a video of a tractor going through a field.
0:03:53 And his next one is like another tractor video.
0:03:55 And he’s on green screen with it.
0:03:56 He’s not even near a tractor.
0:03:57 He just green screens himself on top of it.
0:03:59 And so he starts creating this.
0:04:00 He starts getting a lot of views.
0:04:02 And so what happens is there’s this guy,
0:04:02 Rene.
0:04:05 And what Rene does is he decides to create a PE rollup,
0:04:08 but around these kids’ YouTube channels.
0:04:12 And the opportunity is that Rene worked at a company called Maker Studios.
0:04:13 Do you remember Maker?
0:04:13 Yeah.
0:04:17 It kind of ended up being like they were the hottest thing going.
0:04:19 And they raised money at billions of dollars of valuation.
0:04:21 And it didn’t exactly live up to that,
0:04:22 but it kind of created like,
0:04:24 it was like so innovative that a lot of the employees were,
0:04:26 went and did amazing stuff.
0:04:26 Is that right?
0:04:28 Kind of.
0:04:28 Yeah.
0:04:31 So basically they were early on to the YouTube professionalization.
0:04:35 And what they were trying to do was they created what’s called an MCN,
0:04:36 a multi-channel network.
0:04:37 And, you know, what does that mean?
0:04:39 It’s sort of like an agency,
0:04:43 like a CAA for YouTube talent.
0:04:44 So for some of them,
0:04:46 they would own the channels and then the talent would operate them.
0:04:47 For others, the talent owned their own channel
0:04:49 and they would do the brand deals.
0:04:51 But like, instead of you,
0:04:53 the one YouTuber negotiating your brand deals,
0:04:55 they would go to, you know, whoever, Coca-Cola,
0:04:57 and negotiate it for all 30 channels on their network.
0:04:58 Right?
0:05:00 So it’s like creating a, like a television channel,
0:05:00 but on YouTube.
0:05:03 And this idea sounded really good.
0:05:05 It just wasn’t a really good idea.
0:05:06 It’s been tried and failed many, many times.
0:05:07 Right.
0:05:11 It was one of these startups you have to be very wary of because they,
0:05:13 it’s reasoning by analogy.
0:05:18 So if you ever hear like Elon talk about like reasoning from first principles,
0:05:22 which is basically you take like solid truths, like logic,
0:05:24 and you build one logic block on top of another,
0:05:28 like a stack of Legos that all click together in a chain of logic.
0:05:30 Reasoning by analogy is to say,
0:05:32 yeah, we’re CAA, but for YouTube.
0:05:37 And you don’t really understand the underlying assumptions about how YouTube works and how Hollywood
0:05:38 works.
0:05:38 It’s totally different.
0:05:41 There actually doesn’t need to be a CAA for YouTube,
0:05:44 or it wouldn’t be that valuable if you were the CAA of YouTube,
0:05:45 but it raised money.
0:05:47 And it was a very hyped thing at the time.
0:05:49 They actually ended up with a good exit to Disney.
0:05:51 I think Disney bought them for $709 or a million dollars,
0:05:52 something like a big exit.
0:05:56 But it was a kind of a failed company and it failed inside of Disney.
0:05:59 But it like could be an okay business,
0:06:02 just not a good business that requires hundreds of millions.
0:06:05 Yeah, not hundreds of millions in funding good business.
0:06:06 There are plenty of these like agents,
0:06:09 creator agencies on TikTok and Twitch that are like bootstrapped.
0:06:11 That’ll do like a few million dollars a year of profit.
0:06:12 Good for them.
0:06:17 Hey, quick message from our sponsor HubSpot.
0:06:19 You know, marketing in 2025 is wild.
0:06:21 Customers can spot fake messages instantly.
0:06:23 Privacy changes are making ad targeting a nightmare
0:06:25 and everybody needs more content than ever.
0:06:27 That’s why HubSpot has a new marketing trends report.
0:06:29 It doesn’t just show you what’s changing.
0:06:31 It shows you exactly how to deal with it.
0:06:32 Everything is backed by research
0:06:34 and it’s about marketing plays that you can use tomorrow.
0:06:37 So if you’re ready to turn your marketing challenges into results,
0:06:41 go to HubSpot.com slash marketing to download the report for free.
0:06:44 So what happens?
0:06:46 So Renee, he’s at Maker.
0:06:47 He didn’t start it, but he works there.
0:06:50 And when Disney acquires it, he goes to Disney
0:06:53 and he becomes like the head of like digital content internationally.
0:06:55 So I’m like, you know, some title there.
0:06:58 And what he realizes, he says, here’s the opportunity.
0:06:59 He goes, when I was at Maker,
0:07:02 I realized that kids’ YouTube videos were getting tons of views,
0:07:05 but they were overlooked by traditional PE and media companies
0:07:06 because they, you know,
0:07:08 basically they look too janky to be taken seriously.
0:07:12 He said, of the top hundred most viewed children’s bands online,
0:07:14 none of them were owned by big studios.
0:07:15 So he’s at Disney.
0:07:19 He’s like, look at the top hundred channels, kids’ channels on YouTube.
0:07:24 None of them are owned by Disney or Pixar or like any of the major studios.
0:07:28 And his co-founder, who was at Paramount at the time, goes,
0:07:30 yeah, also none of those,
0:07:33 none of those YouTube channels that are getting all these views have streaming deals
0:07:37 because the streamers say we need the content to be exclusive.
0:07:38 And the YouTubers are like exclusive.
0:07:40 I mean, YouTube’s my bread and butter.
0:07:41 Why would I take the content off of YouTube?
0:07:43 So they were just like, wow, we’re not doing a deal.
0:07:46 So they get together and they started stack ranking
0:07:48 and they basically made a simple criteria.
0:07:54 So they said, I want something that has high views and has like a quality IP.
0:07:55 So like it has a brand name.
0:07:59 It has a character that people might associate and love.
0:08:01 Something you might buy a plush doll of someday.
0:08:03 Like you’ll buy a toy of this, this thing.
0:08:06 He goes, if they have both of those, I’m interested.
0:08:09 And straight out of the gate, they’ve raised about $150 million.
0:08:14 And they raise all this money saying, we’re going to do this roll-up.
0:08:15 And they do three deals.
0:08:20 So shout out to the Roll-Up Europe Beehive newsletter
0:08:22 because he had the details on this.
0:08:26 No, but all the traditional media, they only have the surface level details.
0:08:29 Some guy on Beehive has like a really detailed breakdown of this
0:08:31 because these companies are based in Europe.
0:08:34 And so they’re all listed in companies house.
0:08:37 So he was able to like go see literally how much did the CEO make?
0:08:40 And the headline of this story is they take that $150 million.
0:08:42 They start buying up these channels.
0:08:46 And four years later, they exit this to Blackstone for $3 billion.
0:08:47 What?
0:08:49 Technically, they exit to Candle.
0:08:51 Candle’s backed by Blackstone.
0:08:52 That’s where Candle got the money.
0:08:54 But they sell for $3 billion.
0:08:57 How much revenue was it making?
0:08:59 So let me break it down.
0:09:02 They go and they buy Cocomelon for $103 million.
0:09:05 92 million up front, 11 million contingent.
0:09:06 Okay.
0:09:08 So 100 million on Cocomelon.
0:09:11 70 million on Blippi, of which only 26 million was up front.
0:09:13 45 million was contingent.
0:09:16 And then Little Baby Bum was the third big one that they bought.
0:09:19 And Little Baby Bum had also nursery rhymes and whatnot.
0:09:20 And they did that for 65 million.
0:09:26 So that basically, and at that point, they had raised more money of equity and debt.
0:09:31 And so they raised about $400 million in total equity and debt to create the $3 billion exit.
0:09:36 So like a 10x return roughly on the capital that they used to buy these channels.
0:09:36 Wow.
0:09:41 And in four years, literally through M&A, they were able to create $3 billion of value.
0:09:42 Here’s what they did.
0:09:43 So here’s the revenue.
0:09:46 So their company is called, the holding company is called Moonbug.
0:09:51 So Moonbug, basically 2019 is sort of like a $20 million a year business.
0:09:54 2020, it’s about a $50 million a year business.
0:09:55 Then it goes to $150 million.
0:10:00 Then it goes to $230 million with $100 million in EBITDA before they got taken out.
0:10:01 Holy shit.
0:10:04 It was doing $100 million in EBITDA in only four years?
0:10:05 Exactly.
0:10:08 And the founders of this thing, so each of them cleared.
0:10:12 Rene makes $300 million for this four years of work.
0:10:14 His co-founder makes $300 million.
0:10:20 The head of M&A made $60 million and the CFO made like $20 or $30 million in the roll-up
0:10:21 and the rest went to the investors.
0:10:27 When they bought these companies, did they need to be great at operating YouTube or was
0:10:32 the, they were so good at incentivizing Blippi or whatever that they’re like, just keep going.
0:10:33 You’re doing fine.
0:10:38 You get this much of your payout if you hit this and that.
0:10:42 So these businesses are simple and complex at the same time.
0:10:42 What do I mean by that?
0:10:45 One, a lot of the views are just going to come on the back catalog.
0:10:49 So, you know, it’s, it’s still wheels on the bus.
0:10:52 It’s twinkle, twinkle, little star that is racking up views every single month.
0:10:54 You don’t have to do anything on those videos.
0:10:57 I’m not sure if you’re saying wheels on the bus as analogy of running a company or you’re
0:10:59 literally referring to the song, wheels on the bus.
0:11:05 And so they, the back catalog gets a lot of views.
0:11:06 What they did, which is smart.
0:11:09 So Cocomelon wasn’t originally called Cocomelon.
0:11:14 It was originally called Checkgate, which sounds like a baggage company.
0:11:16 Dude, it reminds me of, it sounds like the cult.
0:11:18 Remember the, the cult that where they all killed themselves?
0:11:20 It was like Heaven’s Gate, Checkgate.
0:11:21 Okay.
0:11:23 So yeah, not familiar with that.
0:11:25 Not, I need to brush up on my cults.
0:11:25 Yeah.
0:11:30 So Checkgate, and then they rebranded to ABC Kid TV, which if you watch the videos, it’ll
0:11:32 still start ABC Kid TV.
0:11:33 And then it starts the song.
0:11:38 Then they rebranded to Cocomelon, but that’s like in 2017 or something like that.
0:11:39 Like it was like a long time.
0:11:42 It was like 10 plus years into the company that they rebranded.
0:11:45 And that’s when they introduced JJ and the characters and the colors.
0:11:48 And then, so basically that’s where you get the characters.
0:11:49 Same thing with Blippi.
0:11:50 They had Blippi.
0:11:51 They take out the main guy.
0:11:55 They replace him with a, like a rotate, like a, like an actor basically.
0:11:57 Because he’s ready to move on.
0:12:04 And they also introduced Mika, this like diverse character who could come in and like appeal
0:12:04 to a wider set of audience.
0:12:07 So they’re doing like moves in the content.
0:12:08 Yes.
0:12:10 But the other moves they did was they got it on the streamers.
0:12:11 So they got it onto Netflix.
0:12:15 It’s now the most watched kids thing on Netflix is Cocomelon.
0:12:20 Then they go into the toys business and they’re doing, you know, millions and millions in toys
0:12:20 and licensing.
0:12:25 And so, you know, you, they built out the full like suite of business basically around
0:12:26 these.
0:12:27 They do Blippi the musical.
0:12:29 It’s a live tour that’s going around the nation.
0:12:33 And that’s, you know, selling out, you know, basically tickets, me and my family, we all
0:12:35 went and this, you know, there’s not an empty seat in the house.
0:12:41 And so like these things are like, they turned them into, you know, rocking and rolling businesses.
0:12:42 They kind of use the Disney playbook, right?
0:12:48 Which is like create massively loved IP and then monetize it through everything except for
0:12:49 they just didn’t do theme parks.
0:12:55 Have you seen on South Park where Mickey Mouse is, you know, comes off as this nice guy,
0:12:58 but behind the scenes, he’s trying to convince the Jonah brothers that they better wear their
0:13:02 virginity rings or their chastity rings because they’re wanting to like have sex.
0:13:06 And he’s like, you better put that fucking ring back on.
0:13:12 First of all, incredible impression.
0:13:18 How did you feel three seconds before you did that, before you committed?
0:13:23 You know, there is no, when you’re taking a risk, you cannot paint a world where it’s only
0:13:24 upside.
0:13:26 You have to accept that there is potentially downside.
0:13:30 These are the things I tell myself before I’m ever taking a big risk.
0:13:31 And I thought about that.
0:13:34 I’m a risk taker.
0:13:35 Yeah, I’m a risk taker.
0:13:38 I do impromptu impressions sometimes that I’ve never done before.
0:13:41 But that’s what I imagined Rene to be.
0:13:45 He’s like, listen, Blippi, I need you to put that fucking tie on and I need you to get out
0:13:45 there and dance.
0:13:49 Blippi’s like asking for a raise.
0:13:52 What’s the hard part about this business?
0:13:54 Is it convincing people to sell?
0:14:01 No, I don’t think that was that hard because they had a huge check and the huge check helps.
0:14:07 You know, like I think at the time, I think Cocomelon had done like 80 million in revenue
0:14:08 or something like that, that year.
0:14:10 And then they bought them for 100.
0:14:14 So they bought them, you know, probably like at a 5x multiple or 6x multiple of profits or
0:14:14 something like that.
0:14:19 I don’t know exactly the multiple, but I’m guessing they offered them like, hey, here’s a bunch
0:14:21 of money that you could have.
0:14:25 And like, you’ve been running for like, you know, years doing this on this treadmill.
0:14:26 And like, what if we could help?
0:14:28 And what if we could take you to the next level?
0:14:29 You don’t know those people?
0:14:31 Oh, I golf with the guy from Netflix.
0:14:32 Oh, I used to be at Paramount.
0:14:33 Oh, I was at Disney.
0:14:35 I can help you get to the next level.
0:14:37 Break down doors that didn’t seem like they were open.
0:14:40 The hard part was picking up the gold on the ground.
0:14:43 So this happens a lot in business.
0:14:44 It’s like these ideas are just sitting on the ground.
0:14:49 And it’s the hard part is somebody taking a very simple idea very seriously.
0:14:56 So to say, yeah, you know, that silly like nursery rhyme channel, I’m gonna go raise $150 million
0:15:01 from like whoever Goldman Sachs to go and acquire these.
0:15:06 And you have to say that with a straight face when there’s no track record of that.
0:15:09 You know, you have to really pitch a strong case.
0:15:13 And I also wonder and you would actually have good insight to this because you worked at Twitch.
0:15:16 I wonder what opportunity looks like.
0:15:25 So for example, when you explained Renee’s inner dialogue of like, hey, look at all the top 100 channels.
0:15:30 None of them are owned by PE or they all are just kind of like these mom and pop shops.
0:15:40 This seems so obvious, but I wonder what that inner dialogue actually was with uncertainty in the same way where I don’t know anything about streaming,
0:15:41 but you used to work at Twitch.
0:15:45 And then I know that like there was that there was like two new video get kick streamer.
0:15:46 I forget.
0:15:51 But like I wonder if a Twitch employee could have looked at me like these.
0:15:52 There’s an opportunity here.
0:15:54 Here’s a gap because I could see the data.
0:15:55 Therefore, we should support this other thing.
0:15:56 What was the other one called kick?
0:15:58 There’s Mixer.
0:15:58 There was to kick.
0:15:59 Yeah.
0:16:00 YouTube has their own Facebook.
0:16:06 Actually, you know, there was a time where we were before Twitch acquired us.
0:16:08 We were building like a tool in the ecosystem.
0:16:10 We were getting to know a bunch of the streamers who were using our tool.
0:16:16 And we were like, look, this tool, like the hard part is this tool like kind of caps out at like 100 million.
0:16:20 If we do, if we win, if we win, the size of this is like 100 million, we think.
0:16:24 And the problem is that the platform’s worth like 5 billion.
0:16:27 How do we do the 5 billion thing?
0:16:29 And we’re like, we’d have to create another platform.
0:16:31 It’s like, okay, well, there’s the technology part of it.
0:16:32 That’s hard, but doable.
0:16:36 The hard part is getting the streamers and getting the network effect to go.
0:16:38 Like, how do you break the network effect of something like Twitch?
0:16:44 And what you realize is that a very small number of streamers drive a huge amount of the viewership.
0:16:49 So in theory, you could get those streamers together and you could say, hey, we’re coming over here.
0:16:52 And so I actually went and pitched my investor.
0:16:57 Now, I shouldn’t say pitch because it wasn’t, I wasn’t fully committed.
0:16:59 I wasn’t sure that this is a swing worth taking.
0:17:02 But I was like, I think what we would need to do.
0:17:04 Wouldn’t it be neat if we did this?
0:17:10 I was like, we need to throw some sort of event where we get a hundred of the, we get all the top hundred streamers in a room together.
0:17:13 And basically we need to make them an offer they can’t refuse.
0:17:13 We need to make that.
0:17:15 We need to basically overpay the top hundred.
0:17:24 And, you know, the thing is with the top hundred, even if they’re making $5 million a year and you’re offering them 3x that, 4x that, whatever it is.
0:17:27 Okay, you’d need $500 million to do this.
0:17:30 And they need to say yes, which is hard.
0:17:35 But if you had $500 million, you could create a platform that’s going to be worth $5 billion.
0:17:38 Like, it’s not that much more complicated.
0:17:40 Like, once you have the streamers, you’ve got the hard part.
0:17:41 You could build all the other stuff.
0:17:41 You could build the chat.
0:17:42 You could build the streaming technology.
0:17:44 You could build the bits.
0:17:45 You could build the subscription feature.
0:17:46 You could build all the other stuff you would need to build.
0:17:49 But you’d have to get the main creators to come over.
0:17:51 You have to have the sentiment be, this is where you need to be, not Twitch.
0:17:53 Really, that’s the really, really hard part.
0:17:58 And so we were like, I don’t know, that’s kind of a crazy idea.
0:17:58 We didn’t end up doing it.
0:18:04 When we got acquired, Emmett takes me out to drinks the night the deal closes.
0:18:06 And we go meet in this bar in the mission and we’re talking.
0:18:10 And I was like, yeah, like, you know, it’s kind of like you could put your cards on the table now.
0:18:11 The deal’s done.
0:18:14 And I was like, yeah, you know, actually, we were talking about something.
0:18:19 I said, you know, one of the things that I thought about doing was I realized, like, you know, we did the math.
0:18:20 We realized these streamers matter the most.
0:18:25 If we paid them this much, I think we could have got them, you know, 70% of them maybe to come over.
0:18:27 And like that could have caused like some waves.
0:18:30 And he’s like, yeah, actually, we’ve thought about that.
0:18:38 So what we had done was we, we made it so that none of their, all their, they’re on contracts with us, unlike YouTube.
0:18:42 So like on Twitch, they actually have like multi-year agreements with Twitch.
0:18:45 And he goes, we just made it so that they don’t expire at the same time.
0:18:57 So we always aligned it where for the top streamers, they’re all ending at different times so that nobody would ever feel safety in numbers to move to another platform as a giant group because they could never get their contracts to align.
0:19:03 Yeah, actually, I think in reality, that actually wasn’t the case.
0:19:08 And in truth, the streamers just could have like moved over and there’s nothing Twitch could have done about it.
0:19:11 Like the contract wasn’t, you have to stream here.
0:19:14 The contract was, you only get this deal if you stream here.
0:19:19 Meaning like you get this ratio, this, maybe the split or this minimum guarantee, whatever, right?
0:19:25 But like the reality was if Twitch went and started suing streamers, that would have been horrible for their own business.
0:19:30 They would never do it, which is why multiple streamers did take money from Mixer and Kick and others.
0:19:32 And they left and Twitch didn’t do anything about it.
0:19:38 So like the reality was a more high agency version of me, you could have actually tried it.
0:19:43 And it would have been, probably would have been more worthwhile my time than what we did with the tool because the tool never had the upside.
0:19:51 Alright, my friends, I have exciting news for that business idea that’s been sitting in your notes app.
0:19:58 The Hustle, which is my old company, has partnered with IndieHackers, one of my favorite websites, to launch a pitch competition.
0:20:00 It’s called The Hustle’s Big Break.
0:20:03 And it’s a pitch competition with a simple premise.
0:20:09 You tell us your business idea in 60 seconds or less, and the winner gets $5,000 to turn it into a reality.
0:20:10 Here’s how it works.
0:20:13 Record a 60-second video pitch of your business idea.
0:20:16 Include your business name, description, revenue model, and tagline.
0:20:20 And finally, submit it at thehustle.co slash bigbreak.
0:20:23 And it all has to be done by April 4th.
0:20:26 The winner gets $5,000 in cash to kickstart their business journey.
0:20:32 Plus, we’re going to feature them in The Hustle’s daily newsletter, which is read by around a million and a half people.
0:20:35 And these are the smartest business and tech folks out there.
0:20:37 The winner will be announced on April 11th.
0:20:43 So again, if you have a business idea, go to thehustle.co slash bigbreak.
0:20:44 All right, back to the pot.
0:20:48 This is a great story.
0:20:50 I want to know the update.
0:20:51 I want to know what happened.
0:20:52 And how did you know how much money he made?
0:20:54 I told you.
0:20:55 My guy on Beehive.
0:20:57 He basically went to their…
0:21:02 Rene’s LLC or whatever, the equivalent of an LLC, is on Companies House.
0:21:05 And you can see that $280 million hit the bank in a certain year.
0:21:07 They had to report that.
0:21:08 And so he kind of did all the math.
0:21:10 And he also had their cap table, like their waterfall.
0:21:15 So it was actually kind of nerdy and interesting in that the way they structured the deal was basically with investors.
0:21:23 The founders who were doing the roll-up were basically entitled to somewhere between 22% to 28% of all proceeds of the roll-up.
0:21:24 All right?
0:21:26 So that was like their profit participation at the end.
0:21:29 So whatever we sell this for, we get between 22% to 28%.
0:21:30 Investors are going to get the rest.
0:21:32 Wait, that’s insane.
0:21:33 That’s different than equity?
0:21:41 No, it’s like equity, but it’s basically like, you know, you have equity, but then you have, let’s say, preferred equity, right?
0:21:43 Or you have like liquidation preferences.
0:21:44 You can have rules.
0:21:45 You can have strings attached to equity.
0:21:45 So for example…
0:21:46 Wow, I did not know that.
0:21:48 What they did…
0:21:48 You did.
0:21:49 Because in venture, this happens all the time, right?
0:21:51 When a company raised money, they rated preferred shares.
0:21:53 Preferred shares mean they get their money back first.
0:21:56 So even if I own 25%, I don’t necessarily get 25%.
0:21:56 I might get zero.
0:21:59 Yeah, I guess I just assumed if this is a PE firm, the rules are different.
0:22:03 And like, it was like, for example, it was like tied to the carry or something like that.
0:22:09 So what they did was, it was based on the multiple of the invested capital, the MOIC, right?
0:22:13 So it’s like, if it was under 3x return, so they raised 400 million.
0:22:18 If it was going to be an under 3x return, they were going to get like only 9% of the proceeds
0:22:19 or something like that, like a lower percent.
0:22:19 Got it.
0:22:22 But they hit 10x, right?
0:22:25 So they hit the highest tranche, which was basically they got their 10% of sweat equity
0:22:28 plus 11% of profit participation.
0:22:29 So they got like 22% or something.
0:22:31 Did they use any of their own money to start this?
0:22:34 I think Rene was an investor, but I don’t know how much.
0:22:36 Yeah, this guy’s great.
0:22:37 That’s a good story.
0:22:40 I have a life update for you.
0:22:41 Okay, let’s do it.
0:22:45 And I wanted to share because I think it’s fun.
0:22:48 But I also think that there’s a lot of people who can learn from the situation that I’m in
0:22:49 because I think they’re in similar situations.
0:22:54 So the life update is my partner, Joe, and I, we are now the CEOs of my company, Hampton.
0:22:59 And the life update is basically I’m going like pretty much all in on it.
0:23:04 And I wanted to explain a quote that I read that made me want to do this.
0:23:07 So we like, or at least I like Palmer Luckey.
0:23:08 Do you like Palmer Luckey?
0:23:09 Yeah, sure.
0:23:10 Why not?
0:23:14 Palmer Luckey, we had him on the pod like three years ago, two years ago.
0:23:16 And I’ve been just fascinated with his way of thinking.
0:23:20 And he had this interview come out.
0:23:21 I linked to it on the bottom of our document.
0:23:24 It was with Tablet Magazine.
0:23:29 And I think he came out with this in 22, maybe.
0:23:30 And I want to read it to you.
0:23:33 So Palmer Luckey is the CEO of Andrel.
0:23:36 It’s a 13 or $20 billion company, something like that.
0:23:37 Also created Oculus.
0:23:43 So he said, at some point in business and in life and in romance, you have to commit
0:23:44 to a path.
0:23:47 A lot of my peers in the tech industry do not share this philosophy.
0:23:50 They’re always pursuing everything with optionality.
0:23:53 Oh, I need to be able to raise money from anybody.
0:23:55 I need to be able to sell my business in any way.
0:23:56 I need to have liquidity in any way.
0:24:00 I need to make sure that I’m not closing myself off to future romantic partners.
0:24:03 I need to make sure that I’ve got my options open.
0:24:08 I need to make sure that I’m not going to buy a house and lock myself in or having children.
0:24:08 I don’t know.
0:24:09 I’m not ready.
0:24:10 I don’t want to commit to that path.
0:24:16 And keeping their options open, they ensure that they’re going to jump from option to option.
0:24:19 And if they don’t commit to a path, they’re going to fail at it.
0:24:21 You have to commit to make it work.
0:24:23 And I think marriage is the same way.
0:24:24 You just have to commit to it.
0:24:27 You have to say, this is the path that I’m on for better or worse.
0:24:28 And I’m going to double down.
0:24:33 And I thought, that is a great quote.
0:24:36 That really stuck with me when I read this.
0:24:41 And I realized that with my business, Hampton, I had hired a CEO for it.
0:24:43 And so I wasn’t able to like really…
0:24:44 From day one, right?
0:24:45 I think that’s the important thing.
0:24:46 Day, month eight.
0:24:49 So I got it to a million in revenue.
0:24:53 He scaled it to eight figures in revenue.
0:24:55 And then I am now taking over.
0:25:02 But because of that, I wasn’t able to put my influence on it.
0:25:03 You have to respect your CEO.
0:25:05 You have to respect the manager in charge.
0:25:07 And I hated that.
0:25:08 I was not a fan of that.
0:25:12 And I think that on this podcast, we talk a lot about that.
0:25:13 And it sounds cool.
0:25:15 And I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people.
0:25:16 But it wasn’t great for me.
0:25:21 And the reason I wanted to bring this up on the pod was because a lot of people you see doing this.
0:25:25 They called it like a holding company or whatever, where they’re like doing lots of different stuff.
0:25:26 Because we glamorize it.
0:25:30 Because if it works, I’m sure it’s great if that is your main thing.
0:25:33 And I was starting to think, oh, that would be great.
0:25:34 I would like to do that.
0:25:36 I realized I don’t want to do that.
0:25:37 I just want to do one thing.
0:25:39 And this quote really inspired me.
0:25:40 That’s really what I care about.
0:25:43 Now, let me ask you a couple questions.
0:25:45 You weren’t doing a holding company, though, right?
0:25:47 You were just doing Hampton already.
0:25:47 Yeah.
0:25:58 So why the switch where you go from being founder, chairman type person to I want to be the CEO or actually co-CEO, not even be the CEO?
0:25:59 Why that?
0:26:04 I realized that I wanted to have full control because I wanted this to be a legacy.
0:26:08 I wanted to just put my texture on it.
0:26:13 But also, when I realized I hate remote work, I hate it more than anything.
0:26:19 And I wanted to create an office where I live, an office culture, because those are some of the greatest memories that I have.
0:26:24 You and I used to work across the street from each other at the corner of Bush and Montgomery, right?
0:26:25 Was it Bush and Montgomery?
0:26:25 Yeah.
0:26:27 I loved that intersection.
0:26:34 Just walking out and seeing the action and seeing my employees upstairs and be able to just like go for lunch and just like, like shooting the shit during breaks.
0:26:35 I loved it.
0:26:42 And I just felt that this was a really good way to make all of my selfish wants come to reality.
0:26:42 Right.
0:26:44 Yeah, that’s great.
0:26:48 You know, I think that a lot of people are probably feeling this right now because everybody went remote during COVID.
0:26:55 And now we’re, what, two, three years into that, that full remote decision.
0:26:57 And at first, you have the honeymoon period of remote.
0:26:58 Ah, look at this.
0:26:59 I don’t have to commute.
0:27:01 I don’t have to even get dressed.
0:27:02 I don’t got to wear pants.
0:27:03 I just got to top up.
0:27:04 Here we go.
0:27:06 You know, oh, this is great.
0:27:07 I can see my kids.
0:27:11 And then you’re like, God, I can’t get away from my kids.
0:27:14 I haven’t left the house in weeks, you know, or whatever, right?
0:27:19 Like you start to see some of the consequences of the negative side of those decisions.
0:27:29 And I think the biggest one for you and me, at least I felt this, is I miss just being creative and serendipitous with my team.
0:27:32 So it’s like, A, have a team, right?
0:27:37 And B, be able to just whiteboard, sticky note, go for a walk, go for lunch.
0:27:39 Like I brought Diego out here.
0:27:41 So Diego was living on the other side of the country.
0:27:42 He was living on the East Coast in Baltimore.
0:27:44 How long has it been now?
0:27:48 Diego’s been out here for a couple months, two, three months, something like that.
0:27:49 How has your life changed?
0:27:50 For the better, dude, way better.
0:27:53 First of all, I get to kind of still do basically what I do.
0:27:56 But now I just have a buddy to do all of it with, right?
0:28:01 So it’s like, I kept the same schedule where it’s like, in the morning, he comes over.
0:28:03 The first two hours of my day are like my creative block, right?
0:28:06 Where it’s just, I don’t do anything else.
0:28:09 I just write or I podcast or I, you know, read.
0:28:11 I only do something on the creative side.
0:28:13 It’s like a creative gym session.
0:28:14 It’s like going to the gym, but for creativity.
0:28:15 All right.
0:28:15 So we do that.
0:28:16 Well, we do that together now.
0:28:16 It’s great.
0:28:19 And then my trainer comes over.
0:28:19 We work out together.
0:28:21 He’s working out with my trainer now.
0:28:21 So it’s great.
0:28:22 Yeah.
0:28:23 You know, we do a hard workout.
0:28:25 Then we go grab tacos.
0:28:26 And while we’re grabbing tacos.
0:28:27 Dude, you guys are like a prison gang, man.
0:28:29 That sounds exactly like a prison gang.
0:28:29 You wake up.
0:28:31 Yeah, we just need some enemies, dude.
0:28:31 Yeah.
0:28:34 The problem is only there’s just like old retired people around us.
0:28:35 But if they, you know.
0:28:36 Dude, go start a beef.
0:28:39 Actually, I do have some neighborly beef.
0:28:41 I could, I could actually just double down on that.
0:28:42 Now that I think about it.
0:28:42 Yeah.
0:28:45 My trash can’t get blown into your yard.
0:28:45 I’m sorry.
0:28:47 I don’t control the wind.
0:28:49 So, but then we go.
0:28:51 And what I told him, I’ll go, notice this, dude.
0:28:55 Of our best ideas, how many of them have come while we were at this taco shop?
0:28:59 Because there’s something in the creative process to like the bounce, as they used to call it,
0:29:00 the pickup artist game.
0:29:03 And in the book, the game, they talk about this technique called the bounce.
0:29:05 It’s like you’re at the club or bar, you meet someone.
0:29:09 If you really want to like accelerate your connection with that person, don’t just stay
0:29:10 there for another hour with them.
0:29:13 Just be like, Hey, let’s go grab a bite to eat.
0:29:14 I know a great place.
0:29:17 And if you leave, if you do the same, the same hour with that person, but in two different
0:29:19 places, connection goes up.
0:29:23 Well, there’s a, something like that with creativity where we’re working on a problem here.
0:29:26 We end up getting, you know, like slightly stuck, or we come up with what we think is
0:29:29 a solution, but in our gut, we’re like, that doesn’t seem great.
0:29:30 Oh, let’s take a break.
0:29:31 Let’s go for a walk.
0:29:34 So we walk or bike to a taco place at the taco place.
0:29:36 It’s always, that’s where the idea comes.
0:29:38 Once we’ve taken our mind off it, once we’ve changed the environment.
0:29:41 And I was like, dude, notice how many, how often that happens.
0:29:46 If we were just remote, none of that would have happened because I would have gotten off
0:29:47 the zoom with you.
0:29:48 And then I would have gone to take a break.
0:29:49 You would have gone to take a break.
0:29:51 I wouldn’t be like, Hey, let’s just leave our phones on.
0:29:54 Like it would have just been like a little bit weird to do that.
0:29:57 And we would not have had, you know, those next ideas.
0:30:00 And if you’re in the creative line of work, those ideas are gold.
0:30:02 Those ideas is what you’re in it for.
0:30:03 Right.
0:30:03 Right.
0:30:07 Like, unless you’re in a like factory type of work where it’s all about productivity,
0:30:11 um, you know, for us, creativity is the pro is productivity.
0:30:12 It is the new productivity.
0:30:16 And so we need to set up a situation that lets us be more creative, which being in person
0:30:18 was, was pretty massive for that.
0:30:19 Yeah.
0:30:19 It’s funny.
0:30:21 We’re both craving the same stuff.
0:30:25 And I think that a lot of people are, um, and I, yeah.
0:30:31 And so like, I went and looked at apartments this weekend and, um, I, uh, we have our, I
0:30:32 I think my lease starts May one.
0:30:36 Uh, and so I’m going all in on this, uh, this in real life stuff.
0:30:39 Like I needed an office or you’re going to like split.
0:30:41 I don’t know yet.
0:30:42 I’m still working out logistics.
0:30:44 I went and looked at this apartment building.
0:30:47 Do you, have you ever been to like, I don’t know if this is happening in San Francisco.
0:30:52 So the new thing in New York is that there’s these apartment buildings and it took me a
0:30:54 long time to realize what they are, but I I’ve nailed it.
0:30:55 They’re cruise ships.
0:30:58 And so basically what they are is they’re really cheap.
0:31:04 I mean, they’re super expensive, but the build quality is like kind of crap, like all like
0:31:07 basic builder quality, uh, apartment units.
0:31:11 But then the actual lobby has a bowling alley.
0:31:12 Oh, like the amenities are amazing.
0:31:12 Yeah.
0:31:13 Yeah.
0:31:14 Like a rock climbing gym.
0:31:15 And it’s like all like in the basement.
0:31:18 And then it has like the best gym you’ve ever seen in the world.
0:31:21 And then it has like a playroom, a golf simulator.
0:31:27 It’s basically built to be sort of like a mall where like it’s built for like, uh, the 35
0:31:31 year old, three, two kid, uh, all under eight type of like families.
0:31:33 And so I went and looked at like an apartment like that.
0:31:37 And I was like sitting in that apartment building and I’m like, I don’t know if I go to bed here
0:31:41 at night and these like tight ass walls, like hearing like honking in the city.
0:31:45 And so I haven’t decided if I can like put up with that and I’d rather commute, but potentially
0:31:46 I would move to the city.
0:31:47 I like, here’s what I did.
0:31:49 I sat down and I was like, what’s my dream day?
0:31:54 Well, my dream day is I get up at seven, I go and work out and then I get coffee with
0:31:58 like Austin reef who lives next to my in-laws or I would get coffee at my in-laws and then
0:31:59 I’d go to work at nine 30.
0:32:03 And then my wife would like show up at the office to do some work.
0:32:05 And then we’re both home at five to have dinner.
0:32:09 And that’s like, and then maybe at like seven or eight, after the kids go to bed, I would
0:32:09 go for a walk outside.
0:32:10 I’m like, that’s the perfect day.
0:32:11 All right.
0:32:12 How can I create that?
0:32:16 And so I’m still working backwards on how, how could I create that?
0:32:20 The problem is I forgot about going to bed at night and how I need a huge ceiling because
0:32:25 I get claustrophobic and that’s going to cost $60,000 a month because New York City is like
0:32:28 the craziest place in the world when it comes to renting an apartment.
0:32:31 And so I’m still trying to figure out, you know, some of those logistical details on how
0:32:33 on earth, like I could pull off this.
0:32:37 It was like super relatable with like walking and doing whatever until you’re like, but I
0:32:39 need 16 foot ceilings to sleep.
0:32:44 No, I just like at your house, like you’re like a lot of apartment ceilings are eight feet
0:32:44 tall.
0:32:45 And it like, I don’t know.
0:32:46 You feel like claustrophobic, dude.
0:32:49 The rent in New York City is outlandish.
0:32:55 So when we were younger, uh, do you remember like the idea of when we were 25, I think I
0:32:59 spent like $800 a month, a $10,000 a month apartment nowadays in New York City.
0:33:00 It’s not nice.
0:33:02 It’s like a shit two bedroom.
0:33:05 Uh, it’s crazy how expensive, uh, Manhattan is.
0:33:09 And so I got to like figure out all the logistics, but that’s my spiel.
0:33:11 I’m going all in and I’m going to go all in on in real life.
0:33:12 I need it.
0:33:13 My soul is aching.
0:33:18 How much were you working on Hampton anyways, hours a week, 40 hours a week?
0:33:21 Like it was like, Oh, what’s going to change your CEO now?
0:33:28 Well, I can’t like, like before it was like, well, how can I convince this person that my
0:33:29 idea is the right way?
0:33:36 Uh, you know, like it, I was a very respectful boss.
0:33:40 I felt like, and it was like, but now it’s like, I don’t, I don’t really got to be respectful.
0:33:41 I’m just going to say like, this is what I want to make.
0:33:46 Uh, I need you guys to help me make this, uh, type of energy versus before.
0:33:49 I think I was a little bit more hands-off and I was thinking a lot.
0:33:50 Now I’m actually operating.
0:33:51 Yeah.
0:33:53 What?
0:33:55 Oh, no, that’s just funny.
0:34:00 Like, I feel like, uh, I was just reflecting, like, you know, you, I think Andrew has a good
0:34:00 gift to this.
0:34:03 I do this too, which is like, we tell these great stories.
0:34:06 You’re like, you know, I was reading this article about Palmer Luckey and he said this
0:34:08 beautiful quote and you have this quote.
0:34:12 And you’re like, I decided I too need to commit and choose a path, but it’s like, and it’s
0:34:14 a great way to frame a story like this.
0:34:15 It’s like the truth.
0:34:19 I think I’m going to speak for you for a second, but I think the truth, a lot of these situations
0:34:25 is just like, it’s irritating to be out of like, to not have your hands on and not be in control.
0:34:28 It’s like, I just like to be in control and do things my way.
0:34:31 But like, wow, that’s a less fun story to say.
0:34:32 It’s like, you know what?
0:34:37 I just really feel like we all chase optionality and we’re better off to commit and really just
0:34:38 No, that is the truth.
0:34:43 And it’s like, I think it’s the truth, but I don’t think that’s why you’re the CEO now.
0:34:45 No, usually, usually discovery.
0:34:46 Because you read this Palmer Luckey quote.
0:34:50 No, usually discovery for me, and I bet it’s for you and for many other people is you feel
0:34:53 a certain way and you’re like, this freaking sucks.
0:34:54 And somebody puts words on it.
0:34:58 And then someone puts words on it and you’re like, oh, that’s like normal to feel or this
0:34:59 person said this.
0:35:02 I guess what I’m saying is you weren’t choosing multiple options.
0:35:04 You just weren’t in control.
0:35:07 The quote that Palmer Luckey should have said is like, if you’re the founder,
0:35:11 put your fucking DNA in the company and just go like, be hands on, be a micromanager,
0:35:12 but go in there.
0:35:12 Do it.
0:35:13 I was going easy.
0:35:15 I was in like the dad phase.
0:35:20 So like, it was like, uh, like I want it to be available at like noon.
0:35:25 Now I’m, now I’m more so like, look, I can be there in the morning and in the evening.
0:35:30 And I think that’s, I’m still being a good dad before it was like, uh, I have to have
0:35:32 X amount of hours of FaceTime.
0:35:34 Now I’m out of the honeymoon phase of being a dad.
0:35:37 And I’m like, look, I could like be with you for breakfast and be with you for dinner.
0:35:39 And I think I could still be a good father.
0:35:41 And so that was partial it, partially it.
0:35:42 Gotcha.
0:35:43 Yeah.
0:35:48 I, uh, I was talking to somebody and, uh, recently and they were like, you know, I just want to
0:35:50 like, I’m working, I’m working hard on this.
0:35:52 They’re like chasing some projects, some deal.
0:35:56 And I was like, why are you doing this?
0:35:58 You’re so like, you’ve done so many deals.
0:35:59 You’re, you’re post-economic.
0:36:00 You’ve made so much money.
0:36:02 Why go so hard at this?
0:36:06 And they were like, I just really want my kids to see what the, you know, their dad working.
0:36:10 And I was like, I don’t, I don’t even think he was lying.
0:36:12 I think he genuinely believes that, but I’m like, dude, you’re doing this deal because
0:36:13 you like doing deals.
0:36:14 That’s all you’ve done.
0:36:15 You, you’ve done deals for 30 years.
0:36:17 You’re amazing at doing deals.
0:36:18 It’s a rush to do a great deal.
0:36:19 It’s fun to win.
0:36:22 It’s fun to dunk the basketball and you’re trying to dunk.
0:36:26 And you don’t have to be like, I just want my kids to see a hardworking dad.
0:36:27 It’s like, dude, you’re sitting on your laptop, sending emails.
0:36:31 It’s like, it’s not like they see your, their dad, you know, sweating it out in the
0:36:31 soul.
0:36:32 You’re not chopping down wood, dude.
0:36:36 So I was like, but people tell themselves all kinds of stories.
0:36:39 And I just find it hilarious because of course I do the same thing, but when you see it
0:36:43 in other people, it’s much more easy to spot like, oh, you’ve told yourself a story.
0:36:43 That’s cool.
0:36:44 Like that makes, it’s fine.
0:36:47 Whatever, whatever gets you to do the things you want to do is fine.
0:36:53 New York City founders, if you’ve listened to my first million before, you know, I’ve got
0:36:57 this company called Hampton and Hampton is a community for founders and CEOs.
0:37:01 A lot of the stories and ideas that I get for this podcast, I actually got it from people
0:37:02 who I met in Hampton.
0:37:05 We have this big community of a thousand plus people and it’s amazing.
0:37:09 But the main part is this eight person core group that becomes your board of advisors
0:37:11 for your life and for your business.
0:37:19 Now to the folks in New York City, I’m building a in real life core group in New York City.
0:37:23 And so if you meet one of the following criteria, your business either does 3 million in revenue
0:37:28 or you’ve raised 3 million in funding, or you’ve started and sold a company for at least $10
0:37:30 million, then you are eligible to apply.
0:37:33 So go to joinhampton.com and apply.
0:37:36 I’m going to be reviewing all of the applications myself.
0:37:38 So put that you heard about this on MFM.
0:37:40 So I know to give you a little extra love.
0:37:41 Now back to the show.
0:37:45 Would you want your children to work with you?
0:37:47 Is that even in your wants?
0:37:51 I would, I would think that would be really fun or cool to do.
0:37:55 I worked with my dad for about a year and it was actually a lot of fun, much more fun.
0:37:59 Like working with my dad was more fun than just like hanging out with my dad and not working.
0:38:00 You know what I mean?
0:38:02 Like it was actually like a better dynamic.
0:38:03 It was a cooler dynamic.
0:38:03 I learned more that way.
0:38:07 And I saw him differently and he acted differently in work mode versus he did in home mode.
0:38:08 So it was kind of cool.
0:38:12 So I think it would be really fun, but it’s not something I’m like trying to gear up.
0:38:14 You know, I think I’ve told you this before.
0:38:20 Like my new sort of dad ideal is Ben’s dad.
0:38:23 So Ben’s dad, Andy, he, he did a very simple thing.
0:38:27 That’s going to sound like, it’s going to sound like nothing, but I personally think it was
0:38:33 quite profound, which is the way I initially was trying to be a dad and how other people
0:38:35 are dads is you have things that you’re into.
0:38:38 I love basketball and I keep trying to buy little basketballs and like put them near my
0:38:39 son.
0:38:41 I buy the hoop and I like take them to a class.
0:38:43 I’m like really trying to get them into basketball.
0:38:46 Cause like, Oh man, I really just want him to like, love the things that I love.
0:38:47 And then we could share that.
0:38:48 We could bond over that.
0:38:52 Whereas his dad was like, he’s like, what’s that type of blood?
0:38:54 That’s like, uh, it’s the universal donor.
0:38:57 It looks like O negative or something like that.
0:38:57 He’s O negative.
0:39:00 So he’s like, he’s got one son who’s into standup comedy.
0:39:01 So he’s like, great.
0:39:03 I’m now into standup comedy yesterday.
0:39:04 I knew nothing.
0:39:05 Didn’t care today.
0:39:09 Everything I do is eat, sleep and breathe standup comedy, bought books, watch videos,
0:39:13 goes to shows by himself, starts practicing himself, starts giving his son feedback on every
0:39:16 single thing that he’s doing in a helpful, supportive way, making connections, whatever,
0:39:17 whatever he could do.
0:39:19 He’s like, I’ll meet you where you’re at.
0:39:22 And, um, Ben loves the Phoenix suns.
0:39:22 Guess what?
0:39:27 Andy now watches every Phoenix suns game is a hardcore fan is always talking about the suns.
0:39:29 Cause he’s like, I’ll meet you where you’re at.
0:39:32 If that’s what you’re into, I will get so into it that we can bond over that.
0:39:37 And I just thought that was like a really selfless kind of amazing thing he did.
0:39:39 And I just hadn’t seen a lot of dads do that.
0:39:43 I think my instinct and many dads instincts is just to try to get them to like the shit we
0:39:44 like, and then they don’t.
0:39:48 And then we’re like, all right, like I support you, but like at an arm’s length.
0:39:51 And I just thought it was much cooler to go all in on what your kids are into.
0:39:55 So I hope, and I’ll expose my kids to like business and like, I’ll be totally open to
0:39:56 them working with me.
0:40:02 But I really want to do the Andy thing, which is if they’re into whatever musicals, then
0:40:05 do re mi, you know what I mean?
0:40:08 That’s awesome.
0:40:11 That, that almost makes me emotional here about Ben’s dad.
0:40:12 What a, what a great dude.
0:40:13 He really is.
0:40:15 Do you want to end there or do you want to keep going?
0:40:17 I have a, I have one quick one.
0:40:18 This is actually kind of cool.
0:40:19 This guy, Josh on Twitter.
0:40:22 So Joshua Ogundu, uh, tweeted this out.
0:40:23 It was a cool find.
0:40:27 So he tweeted out about this company called Shotzi.
0:40:28 Have you ever heard of Shotzi?
0:40:30 It’s an app.
0:40:31 No.
0:40:32 Yeah.
0:40:33 Didn’t we talk about Shotzi?
0:40:34 No.
0:40:39 So Shotzi is an app for tracking your Ozempic injections.
0:40:40 Oh, that is funny.
0:40:43 And it just crossed a million in ARR.
0:40:46 And all it does is it basically is a, it’s a shot tracker.
0:40:48 So, you know, it’s, I guess, I don’t know.
0:40:53 Maybe you can tell me, like, I guess it’s somewhat cumbersome to keep track of maybe, I don’t know
0:40:59 if it’s when you did it, how much your dosages, a reminder, it’s time for your next shot.
0:41:02 By the way, how about that little jab of, uh, I don’t know.
0:41:04 Maybe you could tell me, like, how do people use this app?
0:41:05 You’ve talked about you too.
0:41:06 I know, I’m joking.
0:41:10 With Ozempic, you have to increase the dosage a lot.
0:41:11 So let’s say you start with, like, 5 ml.
0:41:16 After two weeks, you have to go to 7, and then you have to go to, like, 10.
0:41:17 And it’s not, like, incremental.
0:41:18 So you…
0:41:20 So when you hear this idea, were you like, yeah, that was a pain point?
0:41:22 Or for you, was it like, nah, I don’t really see it?
0:41:25 I didn’t take it enough to be a pain point, but it’s very clear.
0:41:29 It’s just sort of like, imagine taking vitamins and, like, you have to add a pill.
0:41:31 Every two to three to four months.
0:41:35 And it’s like, it just, it is easier to track if you want to follow it by the book.
0:41:38 I’m more of a, like, eyeball and see how I feel type of guy.
0:41:41 Look in the mirror.
0:41:43 Yeah, like, do we want to party today or not?
0:41:46 That’s like, you know, that’s kind of…
0:41:48 They call it vibe coding.
0:41:49 I was a Vibos epic guy.
0:41:50 It was just, how do I feel that day?
0:41:55 Yeah, so the woman who made this, I think her name’s Aja.
0:41:58 She was an engineer at The Athletic.
0:42:00 Like, a software engineer at the media company, The Athletic.
0:42:04 And I guess on the side, she just built this, like, for her own pain point.
0:42:07 And then I think it took off in, like, the Reddit communities.
0:42:10 And just off of Reddit and then some TikToks about it,
0:42:13 it’s gotten downloaded, like, 100,000 times.
0:42:15 It’s got this paid subscription, crossed a million in ARR.
0:42:16 What?
0:42:18 Niches and Riches, man.
0:42:20 Like, this is Riches and Niches.
0:42:24 This is, like, just such a simple, just problem solution app, right?
0:42:29 That somebody realized, okay, if Ozempic is the next big thing, right?
0:42:31 If these GLP-1s are the next big thing,
0:42:32 I don’t know how many people take them.
0:42:34 I think it’s, like, 40 million people or some, like,
0:42:38 really big number of people who now all are on some schedule
0:42:43 and realizing that you could build an app just for that population is a smart idea.
0:42:46 Have you seen, like, the Oscars and the Grammys and things like that?
0:42:47 Like, everyone looks great.
0:42:51 Luka Doncic is losing weight quickly.
0:42:56 Is it, is, uh, are they illegal in sports?
0:42:57 I don’t think so, no.
0:43:01 Ah, I mean, it’s kind of a, kind of like a, it definitely is like…
0:43:02 You lose, like, muscle mass, right?
0:43:05 So I don’t think athletes would really care too much about this.
0:43:11 You cannot lose, you, I’m not a scientist, but you, obviously, you can,
0:43:15 if you eat enough protein and you lift weights, I think you can maintain.
0:43:17 It basically just makes you not eat.
0:43:22 So if you can say, like, yeah, but I’m going to eat and I’m going to hit my protein
0:43:24 and I’m going to lift weights even though I don’t want to eat today.
0:43:27 Yeah, you could, you could keep protein.
0:43:29 It’s just, you don’t want to eat.
0:43:29 You’re full.
0:43:31 Let me ask you a random question.
0:43:36 Um, I was watching this video today about somebody was speculating, uh, that LeBron,
0:43:38 uh, LeBron does like whatever.
0:43:41 I saw the Lance Armstrong thing about it.
0:43:42 So Lance Armstrong was talking about it.
0:43:44 Chael Sonnen has talked about it.
0:43:45 Chael’s like, yeah, we have the same drug guy.
0:43:45 I know.
0:43:46 I know what he’s taking.
0:43:47 I’m not going to say, but I know what he’s taking.
0:43:49 But Chael’s also like a professional troll.
0:43:52 So you don’t know when he’s being facetious or truthful.
0:43:58 Yeah, but also did use, uh, you know, performance agency drugs when he competed and he was basically
0:44:02 like, he’s on EPO and like, you know, you would take, if you were, if you wanted to do what
0:44:08 he’s doing, if you wanted to be doing tomahawk dunks at age 40 in the NBA, uh, like, you know,
0:44:12 playing 30 minutes a game and averaging 27 points or whatever, like you would do this.
0:44:16 And, uh, and I, I actually just was thinking about this in like the world of business.
0:44:23 Um, is there PEDs at business and like, how would you feel about, uh, people doing that?
0:44:25 Have you ever taken Adderall or Ritalin?
0:44:30 I’ve never taken it, but I know I have several friends that do it, uh, to, to focus, to be
0:44:31 more productive.
0:44:36 I don’t do any, I don’t do any drugs, but 10 years ago, before I got sober, I, for some
0:44:38 reason, a doctor gave me a Ritalin prescription.
0:44:43 I have no idea why I don’t remember how, what, what happened, but I got it and I took it for
0:44:45 about four days.
0:44:48 And on the fifth day I had like a mental breakdown and made me too speedy.
0:44:50 I was like, I made me anxious.
0:44:51 I’m like, I’m going crazy.
0:44:51 This is horrible.
0:44:53 And I was like, I’m never taking this crap again.
0:44:56 But those four days I was on fire.
0:45:02 Uh, I was like laser focus and it, I felt on top of the world.
0:45:09 And so obviously a lot of people take this and I would not feel bad if my competitor took
0:45:09 it.
0:45:10 Is that what you’re asking?
0:45:16 I just, I don’t know, like in sports, it’s definitely seen as, I think for most people
0:45:21 when they would hear about an athlete doping or cheating, it’d be literally like you’re cheating
0:45:22 and it’s a tainted record.
0:45:23 Right.
0:45:26 But I think, I think those drugs should be legal in sports a little bit.
0:45:27 Do you think that?
0:45:31 So, so you would, you think in, in business, you, I guess there’s two questions.
0:45:33 Do you think a lot of people are taking this type of stuff?
0:45:36 I remember Sam Bankman-Fried had the, like the patch.
0:45:38 I think a huge amount of people are taking it.
0:45:41 Dude, I think there was a joke on Reddit.
0:45:46 There was a guy who was like, I’m naming my daughter Vyvanse because I love this drug so
0:45:46 much.
0:45:51 Uh, yeah, I think there’s a, yeah, I think everyone, I think if you’re under the age
0:45:53 of 30, I would assume that you’re taking it.
0:45:55 Oh, wow.
0:45:56 That’s great.
0:45:57 That’s, you think it’s that popular?
0:45:58 Yeah.
0:46:03 I think that I am now a very wholesome, straight edge person.
0:46:04 And I think you have always been that way.
0:46:06 So I think perhaps we don’t.
0:46:07 I’m just naive, dude.
0:46:09 I didn’t even like, nobody, nobody offered me any.
0:46:10 I didn’t, I didn’t get any.
0:46:12 It’s not like I’m like morally superior.
0:46:13 I just didn’t even know.
0:46:16 No, I’m not, I’m not saying that it’s morally superior to be this way.
0:46:20 I just think that you and I have never, well, uh, since I’ve known you, I have never partied
0:46:24 and you have never partied or at least been part of like the drug or alcohol scene really.
0:46:29 And I do think most people, uh, it’s like getting weed, you know, like, oh, like I can’t sleep.
0:46:31 But the doctor’s like, gotcha.
0:46:32 I understand.
0:46:33 Do you know what I mean?
0:46:36 Like waking, like, yeah, that’s how I think it is.
0:46:41 The closest thing I have to that is like calling my dog a service animal so I can like, you
0:46:42 know, take her into some place.
0:46:46 Dude, I, so when we were younger, our parents would.
0:46:50 Like my parents gave me Ritalin because like every boy who couldn’t sit still in fourth
0:46:54 grade, they were like, oh, you, you, you have an illness, son.
0:47:00 And we need to keep you from standing up from the chair and like, you know, you, you, you
0:47:01 have to take this pill.
0:47:02 And I remember taking the pill in fourth grade.
0:47:06 And after like a few months, I’m like, I didn’t have like the vocabulary to explain to my mother,
0:47:09 but I was like, this is making me sad.
0:47:10 Like something was going on.
0:47:12 And so she was like, oh, this is crazy.
0:47:12 What are we doing?
0:47:14 But I remember taking it.
0:47:15 It changes you.
0:47:20 And I do think that when I took it as an adult, it felt like I was on EPO and I was having to
0:47:21 do the tour to France.
0:47:25 Like it felt, I’m like, oh, I understand how this is like a, a, a, a, a PED.
0:47:28 Did you see how Chamath wants to come up?
0:47:31 Which I don’t really respect a lot of what he says, but do you see how he said he wanted
0:47:34 to have the, uh, PED free poker?
0:47:37 Oh yeah.
0:47:37 Yeah.
0:47:39 Who’s saying like a no Adderall poker tournament, basically.
0:47:40 Yeah.
0:47:40 Yeah.
0:47:43 Uh, that’s, that’s sort of intriguing.
0:47:43 That’s it.
0:47:44 I must just be sleeping on this.
0:47:49 Like I, I didn’t realize this was as I have a couple of friends who I know they were, they
0:47:51 told me like, oh yeah, I’m going to stop doing that.
0:47:52 And I was like, oh, you’ve been doing that.
0:47:52 What is that?
0:47:53 Why?
0:47:53 For what?
0:47:56 Like, you know, it didn’t even really occur to me.
0:48:00 I guess as I, as you guys are saying this, I’m realizing that, oh, I’ve probably just
0:48:01 been foolish about that.
0:48:02 Yeah.
0:48:04 It wouldn’t surprise me.
0:48:04 Okay.
0:48:06 So like, what do you call the listeners of this pod?
0:48:10 The yuppie class, like the white collar class or whatever.
0:48:19 I would bet that 30% of the people between the ages of 22 and 35 who are in this white collar
0:48:24 or yuppie or Henry class are on ADHD medications.
0:48:26 That’s my prediction.
0:48:27 30%.
0:48:28 It’s a lot, right?
0:48:31 If you’re on that Addy in the comments, let us know.
0:48:36 We’re going to pull the YouTube comments right now.
0:48:39 Natty or Addy.
0:48:41 I had friends that would buy in the Silk Road.
0:48:42 Can you even buy it online?
0:48:44 I guess you don’t even need to buy it online anymore.
0:48:45 You can just go to your doctor, but.
0:48:48 There’s probably like an Adderall toothpaste at this point.
0:48:50 And if not, it’s a great idea.
0:48:51 Yeah.
0:48:54 Brush in a rush.
0:48:54 Let’s go.
0:48:57 10 out of 10.
0:48:59 10 out of 10.
0:49:00 You nailed that one.
0:49:01 All right.
0:49:01 That’s it.
0:49:01 That’s a pop.
0:49:04 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:49:06 I know I could be what I want to.
0:49:09 I put my all in it like my days off.
0:49:10 On the road, let’s travel.
0:49:11 Never looking back.
0:49:19 Hey, Sean here.
0:49:21 I want to take a minute to tell you a David Ogilvie story.
0:49:22 One of the great ad men.
0:49:25 He said, remember, the consumer is not a moron.
0:49:26 She’s your wife.
0:49:28 You wouldn’t lie to your own wife.
0:49:29 So don’t lie to mine.
0:49:30 And I love that.
0:49:31 You guys, you’re my family.
0:49:32 You’re like my wife.
0:49:33 And I won’t lie to you either.
0:49:35 So I’ll tell you the truth.
0:49:40 For every company I own right now, six companies, I use Mercury for all of them.
0:49:46 So I’m proud to partner with Mercury because I use it for all of my banking needs across my personal account, my business accounts.
0:49:49 And anytime I start a new company, this is my first move, I go open up a Mercury account.
0:49:52 I’m very confident in recommending it because I actually use it.
0:49:53 I’ve used it for years.
0:49:54 It is the best product on the market.
0:50:01 So if you want to be like me and 200,000 other ambitious founders, go to mercury.com and apply in minutes.
0:50:04 And remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
0:50:09 Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.
0:50:10 All right, back to the episode.