What's up, everyone? This is Anthony papiano. Most of you know me as pomp. You're listening to the podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Sean Puri is the senior director of
product for mobile gaming at twitch.
He previously built be bow before ultimately selling the business to Twitch in this conversation. We discussed startup
Studios getting startup reps how to sell a company project selection the issue with dabbling scaling.
Tech companies and why anyone could be an entrepreneur if they really focus on it. I really enjoyed this conversation with Sean and I hope you do as well before we get into the episode though. I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is block fi I'm an investor in the business and a really happy customer block Phi has three products you can buy and sell crypto on their crypto exchange. You can deposit crypto and take out a u.s. Dollar loan against your
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All right, let's get this episode with Sean. I hope you guys really enjoy this one
Anthony promptly on O is a partner at Morgan Creek
digital all opinions expressed by
His guests on this podcast for solely their
opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan
Creek digital or Morgan Creek
Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by
pomp as a specific inducement
to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy. But only as an expression of his opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only. All right guys, bang bang. I've got a special special treat for you today Sean. Thanks for doing this man. What's up? How are
Are you
I'm doing well, ma'am. I'm driving. So, you know people always say, you know, how are you doing? And he said good or whatever. So I had this personal trainer. I started working with and whenever he comes over and he's like, how's it going? I'm like I'm doing good. I'm doing great. But no matter what I say he won upset so he'll be like I'm fantastic. I'm tremendous. I'm thriving so like whatever I say he has like a better word. And so now I'm like, it's this little game I play with other people who are unsuspecting little, you know, civilians because they'll just be like, you know, how's it going to be like today is one of the top three days of the week another very wet.
But I like it it breaks up the you know, normal small talk.
Yeah look and people love to be around people who are just enjoying life. So let's get into it. Let's just start with your background. You done all kinds of cool stuff and have an absolute wild story as an entrepreneur but what it rich grow up and kind of how did you get into entrepreneurship? All right, I grew up all
over the place. I lived in maybe nine different countries in my life, you know finished high school in China started it in, Texas and I lived in Australia that I moved to
I can Valley because I was like that's that's the Hollywood for startups. Let's go there.
My
story's pretty cool. You know, that's pretty I don't know. It's not like some rags to riches story but it is interesting. You know, I thought I went to Duke University. I thought I was gonna be a doctor. I finished all my pre-med requirements and took the mcats was ready to go to med school and I had one class credit left and I was like, alright, what do I want to do? So I said I talked to my friends I said, you know, it's not weird. We've never taken a class together and let's take the easiest most biggest blow off class that there is on campus.
So we went there's this website called ratemyprofessor.com where it says like ratings and and so I go on there I try to find the biggest blow off class offered on campus. What's the easiest thing I can do and I see this class called getting rich and it's a five out of five on he's it's a five out of five on like I don't teach her help and then there's a chili pepper next to her name and the chili pepper means like the teachers hot. So I was like, okay, this is a winner. So we enroll in this class of basically, you know, it's all getting rich was basically a
A personal finance class the teacher herself had graduated 10 years earlier and she went and got rich doing stuff. You know, she was she had a degree in Mandarin. All her friends were going to banking law school and they were like good luck with that Mandarin degree. What are you know what he can do with that. This is you know, 20 years ago. And so she was like I bet I can get a job in China. So she goes to China. She realizes Chinese companies want to do business with the West she becomes the face of that those interactions and she makes a killing she invest that money into the stock market in 1999. She's
The internet seems cool. She rides the run-up of the.com boom and just happens to luckily pull out before the bus because she's like, I want to buy a house. I shall get into real estate and then she writes a real estate Boom for another five years and so by 30, she's retired. She's Rich. She married the guy of her dreams and she's like what I want to do. I want to go back to school and I want to teach what I wish I had learned the stuff that actually helped me make it they should teach this stuff in school. So I end up taking this class of hers and it's basically one day would be a personal finance class. Like what the hell's a mortgage and like
Like what compound you know interest does to you over time and then on the other side, it would just be stories of entrepreneurs and I as I was listening to these which is, you know, if you listen to a podcast you probably like stories of entrepreneurs as well. I was inspired. I was like this guy has lived a sweet life for this girl. There's a sweet life. They are clearly not that smart. Like they're not that much smarter than me and what they're telling me is look when I started I didn't know jack shit. And so if they didn't know it when they started they didn't know anything when they started
I also don't have to know anything when I'm seeing started and also they're telling me look everybody's resume looks like anyway, so if you do want to go get a traditional job later, it's better to have a story that stands out. And so that's a long way of saying I had decided to skip med school and I took the first dumbest idea. I had and started a business which was I started to Cloud kitchen before Cloud kitchens were thing. I didn't think it was I just doing it cause I have money to get a restaurant. So we created the Chipotle of sushi and I partnered with this Food Network chef and I try to create this Cloud kitchen.
For sushi as delivery only restaurant and that took me down this adventure. I did that. I did a biotech thing with this billionaire guy in Australia. So I come to Silicon Valley because I'm like look, this is where the action is and I beat this guy Michael Birch and Michael Birch has made it big. He sold the company called Bebo to end well for 850 million dollars, he's at Ulta other winds to that were you know tens of he's built probably for different products to tens of millions of users. And so anyways the guy
It and he decided he's going to open up his own idea lab. So it's his own little you know, he built the most like, you know, pimped-out Penthouse office in San Francisco. I still think it is the best office in San Francisco. He hired up 20 badass engineers and he's like, let's build it. We own everything knowing no external investors will sell fund the whole thing and let's try to find another home run and so I was like, hey, this sounds awesome. My my whole mindset moving to Silicon Valley was look I've done a couple startups myself, but I want to learn from somebody who's done it before now.
Now
and
and so I you know, this guy had this got done it before and I said, how do I pack for you know, 20 years of learning into the next four years of work. And so that was my mindset and how do I pack 20 years of learning to four years of work? I thought this idea lab will be great because I'm gonna get so many different reps on whole bunch of projects and not as an investor but like as the person building them building them with a team. And so anyways, I did that with him for about five years. We had a whole bunch of
We had a couple things that actually took off and you know got to like number one on the charts, you know, but didn't quite have the longevity that we wanted. And then the last thing was sort of the I guess most successful one out of it, which was a company. We actually bought the company Bebo back. So after he sold it to AOL AOL does nothing with it. He comes to me one day and says look, it's Bebo is going to just be off so, you know offset and go into bankruptcy with a chance to buy it back if you want to do something with it. So we buy it back for a million bucks. We
Today's something new as Esports platform and ended up selling that last year to Twitch and so exit twitch and since then I've been at twitch kind of enjoying that experience earning out my deal and and getting to know something new and so that's what I do is I you know, I'm an entrepreneur built a bunch of stuff that didn't work got a couple wins under my belt sold sold. The last one to Twitch also hosts a podcast as well that I think you're going to be on soon called my first million.
And where we just brainstorm business ideas me and Sam start off as an interview show but we quickly realized what people like more was which when we would shoot the shit and just brainstorm half-baked business ideas that you could use to, you know, make a million bucks. We don't have the time to do it. But we just give away the ideas for free because we already have our hands full with our own projects. And so yeah that thing took off as well and it's doing pretty well.
So one thing that's really interesting is the idea lab concept is not new, but the way that it was funded and kind of
The different iterations what were some of the biggest lessons you learned going through, you know, all the kind of start and stop and failures and successes in that concept.
So I learned a lot about the individual ideas and what how to make an idea successful or when to kill an idea which is really hard to actually learn as an entrepreneur. You can only learn that the hard way but on the idea lab front I learned that idealab suck like don't do an idea lab. It's a super sexy tempting thing to do like every successful entrepreneur like, you know, Kevin Rose,
After he sold his company, he starts his own Studio deer camp after you know Uber and StumbleUpon starts his own studio expo Mark Pincus after Zynga. Like this is the thing to do, you know, because it makes sense. You still want to create new stuff like you're not going to stop wanting to do have new ideas. You can't turn that switch off and your brain if you're wired that way but now you got money and now you feel like you kind of know what the hell you're doing. And so you're like cool I'll bet on myself will make up a bunch of different ideas because again focus is really hard to do. What's not hard as being add and
Reading a bunch of different projects and so it's tempting really fun thing to do. But ultimately I think quite a bad idea if success is your metric. If you try to enjoy yourself, it's great. If you're trying to be successful, I wouldn't do an idea lab and I advised a whole bunch of other people who are trying to do their idea Labs because they would say Hey, you know, you seem pretty smart. You've done this for years. Like I want to do mine and now these are some of the successful wealthiest people the world that are trying to do this and they're failing to and so I think that the challenge is
You get all these good things with a start-up Studio you get a bunch of at-bats that's good. You have the ability to carry over learning. So we don't project fails. You don't have to go get a job. You just start the next project. That's also really good. What you lose though is the critical thing that makes startups work, which is Relentless focus and back against the wall. I have to make this work. I told my whole family I told the whole world. I'm doing this. I got to find a way and with an idea lab, it's sort of like
You're doing this project. It's exciting at the beginning. It kind of starts, you know, you build a prototype. Oh that feels like progress you get a few users that feels like progress and then you hit some wall or some Plateau where just take off right away. And and what ends up happening is as an entrepreneur. Normally you just power through that wall as an idea lab, you're like, oh, you know, fuck that project gonna go do stuff this. How about that other idea we have that's kind of still in that sexy fun early stage. And so you end up giving up a little too soon on all these projects or just being distracted and not being like Relentless about it.
Talk to me about when you guys sold Bebo to Twitch. Obviously, it's all four million bucks. So there were some sort of appreciation in value guys created and then the transition from kind of that entrepreneurial mindset and going to work every day trying to build stuff in scratch. So now be an executive at you know, pretty impressive company.
Yeah. Well selling it was interesting and I'll share this story because there's two types of sales. There's type 1 which is your Instagram like you built the thing it's taking off Twitter wants to buy you suck is trying to buy you like, you know,
He wants you to investors banging down your door. They're saying no stay independent and you decide to sell in that case. You've been you are onto something you're winning. You have a lot of momentum and you're a threat to the industry. That's why you get fucked. Then there's everybody else and I have this like, you know speech I gave entrepreneurs privately which is like you are not Instagram because if you're talking to me, you're not Instagram meaning like if you're trying to figure out how do I sell this thing? You're in the you're in the camp of be you're selling you're not getting bought and so
So what I was joke is that I sold a failing company now in truth. We weren't failing we actually had like, you know decent momentum but like we weren't a breakout Superstar company that just everybody wanted to buy I'm fucking manufactured that sale and you know, it was because I realized look if we keep going down this path. I think winning looks like kind of a middle-of-the-road medium-sized company. That's not what my investor signed up for. That's not what I signed up for. It's going to be just as hard as building a big company, but we're going to end up in a medium-sized company in the success case. So I was like look,
Let's sell this baby.
So I was like look let's let's sell this baby. And so I went out and I pitched and I figured out how do you sell a company and I have this like whole deal framework of our holes process of like how to sell, you know, a not Instagram company and we ended up getting a couple offers and decided to go with twitch, which was awesome. Like, you know, we sold it for eight figures like I can't say the exact thing because you know, I don't want Jeff to get mad at my Uncle Jeff to come down and bring the wrath of Basil's on me, but actually, you know, some stuff got leaked so
That wasn't my fault. But but basically we sold it for a good outcome, you know, personally life-changing money. And you know now I got a new experience which was go to Twitch. And now boom I'm at a 2000 person company your the market leader. It's like the exact opposite of a start-up like startup your small and your nobody nobody knows you and now you're at twitch and it's like the exact opposite and I got to you know, see what that's like for the past year being an executive company and it's very very different.
Give me the 62nd overview of how you saw
a
Annie
How do you sell the company you figure out first everyone waste their time thinking about why they're so great and you need to figure out what story you fit into for the acquirer. So what I did was I went to I thought about each require I talk to people on the inside to figure out. Hey, what are the big problems? You guys have to solve this year? Like what are the Urgent problems you have? What are the either opportunities you need to be chasing or like headaches that like the CEO is worried about
And then I just asked myself. How can I pitch my company as a solution to that problem? It's very much like building a product but like most entrepreneurs don't go about it that way they just start to focus on themselves. Here's what we do. Here's what industry were in her so much traction we have or don't have and that's why they get stuck because that's not easy to understand thing for an acquirer. So I went out and I mapped out 40 acquirers. I figured out what's what's the angle if I'm them what's problem does buying Bebo solve for me and then I rank them on like strongest fit to
weakest fit and I started with the weakest fit and went pitch practice that pitch and got good at actually like answering their questions and figuring out what data they need and how to organize it because I got some great advice along the way which was you need to turn your company into a giant by button like a one click purchase from Amazon. So like get your Doc's together get your data room together clean up your cap table clean up any mess Enos. You have figure out, you know, your three sentence story that they're going to go pitch in their boardroom when they have to go get board approval.
For this and like work backwards from that and the last thing is get what I call your deal Doula. So like I just had a kid this year. I just learned about the you know, the process of having a baby and you know, a doula is something you know, somebody who really helps and assists you birth that baby and you need the same thing with a deal you need to deal do a lot to help you, you know a keep your head straight because it's really like it can be very stressful for people be like negotiate figure out how to negotiation certain need to work and three like, you know, they open doors and they
I'm kind of back channel for you in a way that really helps you and so when the CEO or the kind of whoever's your champion at the company was going to buy you they need to hear from multiple sources and they need to sort of get reaffirm because you don't want them to get fired for acquiring your company. So they need to have high certainty that this is a good deal which is done in two ways. They understand it other people tell them this is a good deal and they see that other companies want to buy you so you got to get multiple offers. And so that was my trick was get multiple offers.
Pitch myself as somebody that they you know put myself in their terms how I solve their problem this year and get yeah just have have people back channeling for you.
You've got a number of what some would consider irrational or counter intuitive ideas. I want to go through those and you just kind of spit ball at me why you believe these things? The first is real estate is full of Rich dumb people. What does that
is that it is full of it. I got in trouble for this but I believe it to be true real estate has the highest percentage of dumb rich people and people took that as an insult. I didn't mean it as an insult. I meant that as a compliment.
Means hey you can get rich in this area without having to be a genius like dude. I was trying to create the next Twitter or next YouTube that's hard to catch lightning in a bottle. If I just got it on multifamily real estate that does not take the same level of luck and genius that other things take so that's why I say that and you know people real estate people get all pissed when I say that but it's true and B. It's not an insult. It's a way to say look if financial gain is your number one thing to do and you're not you don't have the ego of trying or the you know, the
Creative juices are just flowing out of you real estate's a great way to go dumb. Rich people everywhere. It's awesome.
Hey, who cares if you're dumb or smart if you're rich, right? So exactly project selection is more important than hard work. I actually agree with this but explain what you mean by that.
Yeah, so hard work is this like thing everybody grasp grabs onto and I had trouble with us because I'm not that hard worker. I'm actually quite lazy and I thought for a while I believed what Society tells you which is that you have to work really hard to be successful.
Sure, it helps but like hey, I got successful and I still didn't work that hard and like so I definitely proved that this sort of counter narrative. There's plenty of people that are like this a for more important factor to success is Project selection. Most people choose the wrong project. So here's kind of how I think about this. I used to play poker a lot and in poker, I found that I would crush it at certain games. Like if I play that certain soft tables like I lived in Australia and it's just dumb tourist playing poker or online. I'd go to the low stakes, you know, the won $2.00 limit tables and I
Just crush it, but then I would get my ego, you know, I'd want to go heads up for you know High limits and I'd you know be sitting there with 50 Grand at a table trying to beat this guy because he's good and like what a dumb thing to do if my objective is to make money. That's a really dumb way to make money. I'm going where I don't have an edge. And so I learned in poker they always say table selection is we know one of the critical factors is more important than being, you know, sort of this genius bluffer and so in the same same vein for startups or projects you're doing you want to work.
The projects where you are where success is in your favor not against you and too many people try really hard things and then try to hard work their way out of it. And that's a terrible idea. I want to go to a waterfall and just get wet. I don't want to go in the desert and find water like and I learned that the hard way because I did a bunch of projects that were like going in the desert trying to find water and then I've now experienced the opposite and I will tell everybody that's because I think it'll save you a lot of pain project selection not hard work.
So I agree with everything you said with one caveat, which is If people could select the right project and then work hard. It's like it's like rocket fuel right?
It's a turbo for sure and like but what I'll say is it's not an absolute requirement for success. But of course if you're both in the same, if you're two people go into the same project and then one works way harder than the other they're going to get better results. And and so yeah, it's for sure additive but it is Miss prioritize it people people say it because it sounds really good to say it sounds like
like for example
I'm always wary of things. That sound good when you say them, I'm like is that really true? So like for example you it's unpopular to say intelligence really matters because it sounds like something that's kind of outside of your control. It sounds kind of elitist or saying like resources really matter or like whatever your background really matters and these may or may not be true. But like they don't sound good when you say them you don't you don't get props in the you know on Twitter you don't get retweets for saying this stuff. But if you say hard work really matters,
He likes to agree with that. You sound good. It sounds like everything sounds very fair ever. He's got a fair shot and the harder you work the better results you get in my experience. That's not really true hard work it helps it is additive but it is by no means the like, you know, the thing that correlates best to success much but there are many other fact four or five other factors. I would put over hard work. Number one. I would say is choosing the right project. So that's kind of like my My Little My cheat code. I would always use is anytime you see
see something that is just universally you'll get a pat on the back for saying should really question if it's true or if people say it because it's signals, you know a good thing for them.
Lots of people saying things they think they should be saying right. It's the it's the seeking of consensus instead of Truth. Exactly. Yeah. People shouldn't join early stage startups.
Yeah. Well the caveat here is you shouldn't join it from it's a dumb decision from a financial perspective. I love early stage startups. I you know, I've turned down a
More money to do early stage startups. I think you should if you're really optimizing for like less a financial gain and that's not the main thing to optimize for but if you are optimized financial gain, you should either start your own company and own the equity because the founder the founder will get like, you know, a hundred or 50% of the company when they started and then the first two employees who are going to be just work just as hard take just as much risk pretty much they will be you know, 3% or less, you know by V employee. You're getting Point 2 5 .3
Three point four percent of the company which is ridiculous, but that's the norm and so joining at an early stage you do you work really hard. You just don't get the same upside. So I like to say if you're thinking about money which again you don't have to think about but if you are only owned the company on the equity yourself or go work at Fang dude, there's people you know who work at Fan companies that are you can go out of college and be making 300K a year. If you're an engineer. I know people are making a million dollars a year and they live a very very relaxed lifestyle.
Getting none of the risk and headache that entrepreneur weight makes or or a early-stage startup person does now if you're trying to learn which is how kind of how I thought about it when I was young in my career. I was like, look I learn later. I'm going to learn now. I'm gonna optimize for learning working at an early stage startup is great.
Yeah. I completely agree with both of those things the difference between acting like a lion vs. A cow. And this might be my favorite thing that you said,
I stole this one. So this I can't take full credit for but hey, I still
All 90% of my ideas. I just you know, my job is to find good ideas and share them not claimed to be the owner. So no Vol actually is the one who said this but it lined up with what I've experienced which is most people work Monday through Friday and they work roughly like a 9 to 5 schedule and I always when I was trying to work that way it never felt right, you know, like I had always done my best work in like extreme burst where once I had Clarity on something or motivation to do something like don't talk to me for like 16 hours. I'm going to just work on this thing like crazy.
And then like I'll go 2 days I want to anything and you know, my mom thinks like what are you doing? Like you should go to work and for Creative people and ambitious people. I worked you're not like a factory worker. You don't just go in Monday through Friday like a robot and work for eight hours straight and get the same output per hour. It's definitely not that way not all days are created equal not all hours not all weeks are created equal. So if you recognize that you should say well then how should I work? And I think you should work like a lion's the way a lion works. This is kind of the framework of all you said I like
because a lion will sit and they'll wait they observe the surroundings. They wait to see their prey app appear. Like what do I want to eat? And they won't just run around aimlessly and you know fake hunting they wait till there's actually pray then they Sprint and they Sprint until they catch their prey and they hunted down then they eat and enjoy they you know, they enjoy the fruits of their labor and then they go back to resting and waiting again, and that's not how most people work. What most people do is like a cow. They just stand and stand out there in the field with their neck down.
They graze on grass all day eight hours a day just slowly chomping up the grass and they don't really make much progress. And so if you're an ambitious and creative person you're in a creative field, like probably most people listening to this are just say to yourself. I literally say this myself like work like a lion I'm gonna work like a lion today what that means is identify. The one thing I'm going to kill today Sprint hunt it down and kill it enjoy and then
rest. Alright, so on the podcast you and Sam parse it and basically just come up with
idea after idea after idea. I've listened to many episodes some with people that we have mutual friends that have come on and some with just you guys I ating what are some of your favorite ideas you guys have come up with
Sure, so I shortlisted a few I'll just hop around I'll just go through them. So so we'll do it. We'll do it fine. I'll go quick and you give me your hot take reaction to each one of these you can say that's a dumbass idea or you could be like it. I think there might be something there. Okay. So the first one is is hooked for romance novels. So, okay. So I'll tell you the quick background hooked is a company that is like if you ever read Goosebumps back in the day like when you're a kid, I read them. It's basically like kind of
Scary stories, but they tell it through the phone. So it's like it's in a text message format. They app just like each line of the story is like a text message and you just read it. So hooked it's taken off. Its got 50 million readers. They do like 60 million a year in Revenue. Nobody really talks about them. And so turns out people still like to read they just do it in new ways. And so I think you should do this for romance novels. So I was surprised to learn that romance is like one of the fastest selling categories is the biggest selling category in
Outside of the Bible basically so like, you know, the best-selling book is Fifty Shades of Grey but there's also you know the Twilight series. There's also you know, Danielle Steel who's got a house on billionaires row here in San Francisco that house was paid for through romance novels. And so the average reader of romance almost read like five times as many books as the average person who reads books as average book reader and so there's just this carnivorous appetite and there's not enough Supply. And so I think you should create
a lightweight mobile platform where you subscribe $7.99 a month and you get you know, regular dose of romance novels romance short stories and actually a listener heard this idea on the podcast and went and did a weekend prototype. So what he did was he took it to an extreme. He created a newsletters instead of a book and no app just create a newsletter because it's quick but he did it for erotic stories for black women black mommy porn basically and told through you know written stories and in two weeks. He's built
He's doing 10K a month. Now on this thing with basically no investment. He just ran a few hundred dollars of ads on porn sites to acquire his users and he's already doing 10K a month passive income. Now if this you know, like half of you know a piece of this idea, but I think this idea is big and most people who build apps or kind of like dudes who are you know, like white dudes who don't read romance novels and so I like opportunities where it's not going to be as competitive because it's the average Builder doesn't know about this opportunity.
Yeah, and I also wonder where's he getting the content from the person who created it? Why just
hired a somewhat pad is like a free writing platform where people write stories. So we found a writer on Wattpad. I think and was like Hey up here like a hundred hundred two hundred two hundred bucks a month because writers make no money. So it's very easy to be like, I'll give you $100 per story or $10 per story whatever it is, and these are very short stories that are just quick to consume.
It's crazy. And I think that the key piece of that whole thing is one people definitely still want to read two inches two different delivery mechanism, right the sound of the things that I keep thinking about is just like ebooks and audiobooks where else are people reading content that just they're going to turn into an audio format. I think that's absolutely going to happen in another verticals other than just books people have tried with articles and all this kind of stuff but like that just feels like a natural progression that occur
exactly like if you want to think of new ideas if you want to get good at thinking ideas. Here's a framework
It's real easy. Everyone like makes funny because I'm always talk about Frameworks. I'm like the I want to be like the framework Don but I don't think you could be a Don if it's something as lame as Frameworks, but it's like a two by two Matrix like 2x2 grid and you just write is either old problem or a new problem and then it's either an old solution new solution. And so like old problem people want to read stories like romance stories, but new solution I'll deliver to through your phone through his new packaging on a subscription basis digitally rather than traditional books.
And there's sometimes there's new problems like oh I bought Bitcoin. I need a place to I need a way to store it securely that's a new problem and I need I can use an old solution. Actually I can use you know, like, you know those guys who do cold storage like in a vault. It's like a bank vault so they took an old solution applied it to a new space. And so that's just an easy way to look at things old prom new problem old solution to the solution and you can't the only Square that's invalid as you can't do old problem old Solution that's done all the other grid all the other squares are
up for grabs. So an iteration of this that I've told multiple people that
she go build is what I call business text, which is there's tons of newsletters right now and they all summarize the news right basically just put links and things like that. Somebody should create a text based service you put your number in and then every day at the beginning of the day a text you and here's all of the headlines that you need to know around business, right and it's got a link and you can click through read the article if you want. If not you just to get all of them. You can easily put some sort of advertising in it and you're Off to the Races and it probably takes somebody half an hour. Maybe an hour, you know vax the
Collect headlines and links and kind of format and send that text message. It's like that's just a super layup one that you get tons of distribution right out of the gate and then you can do all kinds of things monetizable.
I love that one. That's great. That's see. That's why you're gonna have to be on the podcast cause you got the gem you have the ideal switch. Some people don't have it. You have it.
I have way too many ideas.
The test is like if someone wants me on the podcast and like show me the notes app in your phone. Like I'll tell you in five minutes if you'll be good on the podcast or not.
Absolutely.
No other ones do you guys have
okay, here's okay. I did kind of a runt. You want to let me do a very safe safe for work one. Okay, so beautiful Bibles. So this this came on a podcast one of the episodes we did we came up which was that there are tons of Christians out there. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. There's like 40 million. I think met new Christians a year and and Christianity religion and people think it's going out of favor, but actually there's this Resurgence. So like you have you know, Kanye releasing gospel albums.
You know when all righteous, there's guys like Carl Lentz who are like kind of like celebrity preachers. Now that are like kind of cool and like they can do tick-tocks and shit. And so so anyways religious kind of on this upswing but the Bible itself the book that sells the most copies still looks kind of like the dusty old brown Bible and so there's a few people trying this but I think they're still just plenty of opportunity. If you're just a person with good taste and design you should create a beautiful Bible. Here's why you're just packed repackaging the
Existing content and you just need to package it with either photos better cover different form factor something like that either something that's you know easier to take around or just looks good on a coffee table. It doesn't like sort of look like a Dusty old Bible and religion is like the most, you know popular free IP in the world. So I have a whole set of religious ideas because where else can you get IP that is like universally known and loved, you know, by, you know hundreds of millions of people know and love this brand and you don't have to pay a dollar for the rights.
And like that's just an amazing premise for any business just start with that. And so one of the men in one of my religious ideas is beautiful Bibles. What do you think?
No brainer and and I'll even go a step further as like that entire mechanism of take some sort of content that already exists and repackage it make it look much better. You could literally go all the way back to particles newspapers religion, you know, all this kind of stuff. I think it's very smart to just tap into a massive Market where you don't have to pay for the IP all that makes sense. But the other piece of it too is you can actually go ahead and marry the first idea the second idea right so you can even do
super beautiful designed yo app where you can read it and you know, there's all kinds of things that you can do off of that and there's plenty of I think that some of the most popular apps in the App Store are around religion or Bibles, but I do think that there's another piece of this too, which is I'm fascinated by the idea of taking a piece of content and then either making it more mature or less mature and what I mean by that is, you know, all of these books that are basically like the picture book of the Bible right or the
if you went and we looked at Bible sales how many of the Bible's being sold are in the like hold James, you know, like super hard to read like Old English type of language versus just like things called a new American, you know, which works very easy to read. My guess is actually that more and more the new language and so it's like finding any sort of content that you can basically translate into like very simple kind of concise language whether that's for children or for kind of adolescents.
Just seems like it's pretty fun to do and the demands not going any
there's some group that's trying to do this on YouTube. They just took every like story from the Bible and they're just animating into a YouTube series and their YouTube channels like super popular their patreon has like tons of supporters or whatever. They have like a whole animation team like a Pixar team. Basically, this is again genius idea. It's like deliver in a new way the old content. And again, it's like the Scott. This is IP more popular than Pokemon or anything else and you know, you can get the rights without
Out permission and without a dollar so that's really cool for somebody who doesn't have a whole lot of resources but wants to make something big
look. I think that there's an entire industry of people just reading things that are in written content like literally go find, you know information that you know, people find valuable what their books are hard because just IP concerns but there's all kinds of content that exists, you know everywhere and literally you just read it and it's not very, you know, intelligent Heavy in terms of what's needed for you to be able to create the audio content.
again going back to all of these books eventually audiobooks exploded every piece of written content is essentially going to at some point have the have the audio version
like you could do the audio version kind of like like when my friends started calm the meditation app, and you know calm was like, I remember early days was like just Alex and he there's a slow slog people weren't meditating and then like as that came more in Vogue, they grew but it still wasn't taken off and then they did their sleep stories and sleep stories was like a game changer because a more
People wanted to sleep the meditate and be they had like they took old problem Bedtime Stories and did it in a new way. They did bedtime stories for adults you've driven through an app and so you could do the same thing. So say you did the audio version of the Bible. Like maybe you actually do the same thing baby, which is they go partner with like Matthew McConaughey and they get him to read a story at night and it's not like this cool branded thing. So how many celebrities out there actually, you know our have faith and would love to be paid almost in a master class style to record a high-quality reading of a religious.
Short story and you could offer package those up and offer them to people who want something. It's not just that it's audio, but it's audio done by celebrity and you just mashing these things together remixing them till you get an idea. That works.
Absolutely one more. What's one more you got? Okay.
Okay pick a number between 3 and 10 and I'll read the number. I'll read that idea off. I have 10 ideas on this list. I'll let you pick it up really lucky three. Okay a no code PE shop. Okay. So here's this idea private equity.
You know know know something you go by up companies and you sort of either you have some way to increase revenues through either maybe a roll up or something like that or you're shedding cost. So this is the shedding cost version. There are a ton of apps or software businesses out there that are like doing like 700k a year, but then they take like for engineers to to like maintain and build and they employ people and so they're not making any money and so you can buy these apps for you know 2x Revenue because they have no exit. Nobody's gonna buy this
No apples not going to go by this to Facebook face. Let's not try these companies so they can't go raise money because they're not like in hyper growth mode. So they're kind of a no man's land so you can go you can acquire these companies and you just need to know code back end basically where you're able to take everything that they're doing with their developers and you're going to turn it into a no code platform that can be managed and maintained without having to write code and so you would lower your operational costs and you'll turn these things that are like break even on seven hurricane a year to like profiting 400k.
A year and I think that any individual could do this and you can create a whole shop that X is that expertise is doing this.
Yeah, I think that you're going to continuously see this. I've got a friend who he's from South America and he went in partnered with a private Equity shop and they bought a very specific type of business. I won't kind of reveal their strategy but a very specific type of business and then the whole idea was we're going to use technology to replace a bunch of the human labor and then on
Hope that my buddy really understands how to use the platforms to grow and kind of operational efficiency and we're just and large tech companies and you just start to implement all those Lessons Learned and tactics and next thing you know the business not only can you you know, kind of make it more profitable by Saving costs. But also you can double or triple the the top line revenue simply by like using the internet or having like system the / super easy stuff, but I think that more and more of these kind of private Equity S-Type companies
or shops are waking up to this idea of you don't have to decide to go by the technology-enabled company. It may be better to buy the one that has no clue about technology and then just quickly get them on board it to the technology world and create what you value.
Yeah. That's that's exactly right.
All right. I took a bunch of questions from online on Twitter before hand. I'm gonna just run through these and you fire off answers for Adam singer asked to talk through mobile end verse mobile first and how you think about
that.
Yeah, okay. So what he's asking is, you know, you're a company should you be thinking we are among the mobile and Company meaning it's mobile and web mobile and TV or whatever or your mobile first company like when Facebook went all in on mobile and you know, it's I think there's context of this like not every business necessary make sense this way, but like the world has gone mobile first. So you need a damn good reason to not be mobile first, you know, if your Netflix and you're like look people truly enjoy to watch.
It's more a higher percentage of this on TV than on mobile like mobile sizable for them. I might be like 20-30 percent of their overall watch time, but still majorities TV, so like they should be TV first, but if you're a social media app, you should definitely not be TV first. You should be mobile first, right? So I think the context depends here but like in most cases and is a wuss word and is I can't make a decision. So I'm going to say both because then I'm not pissing everybody off and in reality. I'm probably gonna fail because I don't have
Ability to do both at a world class level. So be really worried when you whenever your strategy is this and fat instead of this not that I would always bet on an entrepreneur who's saying it's this not that even if they're wrong because they'll find out that they're wrong and they'll be able to Pivot when it's this and that they'll never know if they're wrong because everything will just be half-baked execution. And so you never know. What was the problem the execution or the strategy it's hard to tell
Literally, my number one lesson from working at Facebook was this exact framework that you're talking about which was you have to have a strategy and then you have to have perfect execution of the test for the strategy for that exact reason, right? But if it doesn't work, you never want to be questioning. Well, was it the right strategy? We just implemented incorrectly
because right executives are you lost?
Yeah, there's no there's no point in running the test then
right. Were you were you ever there when they did a lockdown when they're like, I don't know what years you were there. But like when it was like existential threat nobody leaves.
We're going to figure this out. We're going to shift the whole company in this direction.
So not necessarily for that. So I worked there in the 2014 2015 there was plenty of people who you know had the stories of that when I was there we went from I don't know. I think I was like maybe right around 4,000 3,800 employees something like that too. When I left. I think we had crossed over 12,000. So like, you know hyper-growth everything's going crazy. But the thing that a lot of people don't remember about Facebook is that
most of the executives have been there for a very very long period of time right and so on the growth side, you know, you've got hobby Naomi out Schultz like these people who have been there just for so long and I think part of what was so fascinating was they had the muscle memory of doing that and where it would show up is there wasn't necessarily like company-wide lockdowns, but they would do like War rooms for product launches, right? So can everyone go in here for two weeks or you know that type of stuff and then the other thing that a lot of people don't
Remember is when they were doing those lockdowns a lot of times they would literally stop development of everything at the company and say like we're gonna fix the data issues that we have. So going forward over the next 30 Years like it's built on a good foundation. There's this existential threat like we're going to address that today. We don't care if they don't make progress on anything else it goes back to your idea of like it's not just startup entrepreneurs that need to focus. Like if you want to be really really good. You've always got to understand like what's the most important thing and like how focused are we on that thing versus distracted by
everything else totally
All right biggest Lessons Learned From Monkey and Ferno from Marvin
the monkey friend. I was the idea lab, so I talked a little bit about that and you know, some of the things that don't work great. I'll share with you my My Philosophy around this. So the biggest lesson learned was don't be a dabbler. Okay. So let's add a blur. So here's the here's the story on this. So let's say you decide to go and and you go to the gym and you see your gym has a racquetball court.
And you're like, oh, let me try this out. I'll let the looks fun. Let me see what they're doing. So you go inside and you start playing Racquetball and you're like, holy shit. This is fun. I'm smashing this ball against the wall. This is great next day you go and you buy a bunch of gear. You got your shorts your headband or goggles, whatever you're like, I love racquetball now, so you start playing basketball for a couple weeks, and then, you know a couple weeks go by and you, you know, the initial fun of Smashing. The ball around is sort of worn off and use actually started playing with somebody who's been playing for a while and they're just mopping you up, you know, they're just putting the ball in places you
Can't hit and you're getting frustrated because it's not you're not getting the level of progress or victory that you really want as fast as you want it and so, you know average person's like you know, what fuck racquetball. What am I doing in this box? Anyways, this is hot. You know, this is a stupid get stupid game. I'm going to go play a different game. I'm gonna go play tennis and so they go they go outside and start playing tennis same sort of curve happens initially starts out fun you doing all right, you feel a sense of progress, but then over time you start to you know, you hit plateaus and you stopped.
Better at the same rate you were getting better before and when you really want to compete you realize like oh shit. Like I still have a long way to go. And this is not going as fun as it's not as fun as it was the first few days. And so most people you know, they quit they say tell us what is this? You know, I'm out here in the sun all day. This is this is dumb. I'm done with this and then they go and they like I'm gonna play golf and then, you know day one of golf they're like fuck, you know golf doesn't even give you that initial and so, you know, the there's three, that's the story.
Of a dabbler and this happens in business all the time. We start a project and it you initially have hopes and dreams and it starts off going great and you're excited. But then as you hit plateaus or resistance, which is like what it takes to get to the success you give up and you switch or you change your strategy or you just change everything and you're not changing because that's actually what it takes to get better you're changing because you're impatient or you're frustrated. And so this was really easy to do an idea lab because it's like dude, we got a ton of ideas. It's natural to just quit one. I'm doing other Focus your attention a little more the
On the other projects and so it was really hard to do that and there's really three types of people. There's a dabbler who that's the pattern they go down. There's what I'll call the stressor achiever. This is what most people fall most successful people fall here where they're gonna fight through they will persevere but they're stressed the whole goddamn time every time they hit the plateau. They're angry they're frustrated, but they don't quit but their their journey is painful and then there's a master and this what I've learned from Monkey Inferno it my time at the idea lab was how to become a master.
Master is you are doing something you would get excited about the early days and you hit your Plateau, but you don't you're not surprised. You're not angry. You say you treat it like an old friend. You're like, ah, like I thought I'd be seeing you soon. Hello Plateau. You know, what? Are you here to teach me? Where do I need to grow to get better what area of my business is weak that I need to get stronger. Whatever my body. Do I need to change to get better? And so now the master treats the plateau like an old friend greets, it goes through it overcomes it and enjoys the whole journey along the way and so
It's kind of a more philosophical personal lesson, but that's why I really learned from the idea lab was don't be a dabbler. Also. Don't be a stressor achiever learn to be a master in your adventures and then you'll enjoy the adventure you'll have the endurance to continue
Australia what's going on in the startup
scene there?
I have no idea. I was there like 10 years ago back then it was like every smart person I met was on their way out like the brain drain was real and then it was like two companies that were successful like atlassian and you know now canva and everybody always points to those is like no look see we can do it here and like of course you can do it there, but there was a real brain drain at the time maybe it's changed but in Australia the startup scene was more it was like five to seven years behind it was the same way the TV, you know when I was there they would show
The TV station will type up like oh coming up this week house this new show house m.d. And like house came out in the states, like seven eight years ago and they were like, no so house is starting here now and that's how I felt about the startup kind of being on the edge of things. I didn't feel like they were on the edge and like no-knock. I love Australia, you know, I live there again in a heartbeat, but you know in terms of the startup scene, it wasn't it wasn't the Forefront
make sense remote work spaces being everyone's going to
Remote work in some form or fashion, but then people basically going into a space while they're working remote and so you got to watch people in the same space things work for different companies remotely.
What do you think of remote work? You
like it?
Well, it's a little bit different. Yeah, I'm the investing side. Obviously. It's a little bit easier to do that and I've been doing it pretty much for for for five years now and so like, you know worked all the Kinks out, it's
fine like you work. Is this your desk where you work right
now right now during quarantine. Yeah, but but at one point we had an office right that we didn't have an office and the way that I kind of look at it is it's one of these things where like actually don't think it's a company
I think I think it's an individual specific thing. So some people like really don't mind at all. They actually enjoy it. They want the freedom that you know, they want kind of all these things and other people like I absolutely hate working remotely. Like I want to go. Do you know go into an office? I want to be around people. I want to like, you know, sit at a conference room table with all that kind of stuff. And so to me, it's like less about like, he's the company going to be successful or not or can they be successful it again? Yes, of course, they can be right but it's just like who the people I guess.
Yeah, that makes sense. I think two things. I think people are missing the big story about The Firm
Stuff. So what most people are thinking about at least people? I see kind of on Twitter and whatnot is like, oh, how was my job going to work? Am I going to be remote? Am I gonna go to these little co-working pods? Are we going to as our office going to open back up and they think like that's the extent of the change that's happening. But what's actually happening is actually in some ways much more scary for that person, which is I like I live in Silicon Valley right people here are divas. They're like, you know, making a ton of money and unsatisfied the whole time and
like expenses are really high and all this stuff and what's gonna happen is when your remote you don't have to pay Silicon Valley prices for talent anymore. So it's not going to be the problem you're going to have isn't do I prefer working out of my kitchen or do I want to come in three days a week or two days a week or five days a week to the office. It's going to be holy shit. They just found somebody in Canada that's going to work for a third of my price. And so most people will going to win the talent pool opens up to Global because the default work system is remote either remote only a remote friendly then.
Who are you know, you really have to be a 10x or to get paid like a 10 excerpt and most people think there are ten extra because they're getting paid like it today, but that's just because they happen to be, you know, an engineer designer p.m. That lives in you know, the Bay Area or New York and that's why you're getting paid these like, you know High wages, but if I can if you're sitting on the zoom and so is some guy in Pittsburgh or Czechoslovakia. Yes are you're not going to be making, you know half a million bucks a year anymore because I don't have to pay that anymore. I'm getting the same output or better.
For somebody you know a faceless, you know output person just think about it. Like they're just going to measure out pit / zoom and point and you know that's going to you know, they're going to pay 80 grand for it or a hundred grand for it. So I think companies are the ones who win big in the end with this and not so much the individual employee.
Well, it's companies and that it's also people who are potential employees, but don't currently work at the company, right? So if you are anywhere internationally for sure huge win, and then even here in the United States,
AIDS if you're in the Midwest and certain areas right now all of a sudden you've got much more opportunity and probably actually get paid a premium on what you would get paid locally which is still a significant decrease in cost for the company. That was
exactly it's a win-win Right company gets it at half the price and I get double my local wage. So they're happy and so there's that phrase like Talent is universal but opportunity is not or something like that. That's what's that's what's going to happen. The talent that is already universally distributed is now going to
Receive a larger share of opportunity to earn and prove themselves then is happening today. Same things going to happen on the funding side where cool if I'm doing all my funding over Zoom anyways, and I don't just fund Bay Area company. I'm going to fund companies everywhere.
So more people can opportunity.
Do you think that there ends up being these like pods or remote work spaces?
Probably but I don't think it's that big of a thing. So like I maybe I'm just scared because I like just being on my own. I'm in fact, I just consider myself like a solopreneur now, I don't want it. I don't want any employees. I just want to build my own business and run it with just me and maybe one side kick, you know who I talked to online. But yeah, I think people will have co-working spaces because not everybody's house.
Is like kind of suited for it and companies will need to make concessions and say cool. You can go get this space kind of you know, we have we have spaces in every city center that you can go work at and it's co-working like we work or Regis or whatever but I don't think it's like what the quote I saw the question on Twitter and who's like or groups of kind of friends from different companies and I like form their own little KO office. It's like yeah. Well like in the sitcom Friends that will happen where like, you know, they meet at the perk every day at 3 p.m. And like, you know, they live in New York in these like this is that's not real like that.
Show that's a TV show and that's not real. And so, you know, just think logically most people are not going to like set up this like very perfect scenario where my best friends from different companies get together and we pal up in a co-working space. I don't think so.
So the other thing that I think is definitely going to happen is people are going to start building homes with two offices, right? So like in Suburbia somewhere it's going to be like, hey, you know 3-bedroom 3-bath to office. Right? Right, and they're not going to just be like, you know when I was growing up,
You go to like a friend's house and they would basically call it a home office, but it's more of like a den. So kind of like glass little doors or whatever and you just like wait a second Mike. That's not going to be what this is. I'm talking about a full-on office like Maven be hooked up with some sort of audio video capabilities, right and actually serve maybe even be soundproof to some degree like you can start to see and it's going to be promoted that
one. Yes, I would add to that. Also, I think multifamily real estate is going to look very different. So, you know today where you have these lofty.
These were people play shuffleboard and there's like a you know, whatever like a movie room or some amenity. Like they're going to just build co-working spaces into every multi multi condo apartment rental place because you're going to have all these people they're going to be in small apartments that two people trying to cut work from home. And so a good differentiator will be to take one or two floors of your building and just build out we work inside and I know some people put some places already do this, but that will become very much the norm just like the way you're talking about the office saying like I'm selling my
condo right now in SF. We took our second bedroom and we staged it as an office not as a bedroom and like that would have been crazy, you know three years ago, but now it's like bait sets people want a big spacious office with a good door and good light more than they wanted a bedroom.
You are in my wildest idea when it comes to the remote work and housing hit me so malls absolutely getting decimated. I think that somebody should go and you have to have a lot of capital yet be super ambitious and you know kind of do all the right things but
Vegan how the mall is basically set up is at the court at the ends and kind of in the middle. There's always the department stores. So you go in you by mall with huge acreage whatever you trim, the department stores into essentially just apartments, right and then all of the interconnectedness of the mall, which used to be retail stores you basically build like a little village and so you take like the quote unquote New York experience or like the San Francisco experience and you pack it into like a mall environment and then you use the outside.
So you can either have some parking or you can actually build like walking paths and all kinds of crazy stuff. And what you're doing is you're almost giving like the urban type experience or like a college dorm type experience, but I think that in the right City done correctly would be like incredibly attractive to people who all want to work remotely. And also then you get kind of this balance between work whites and Outdoor Experience in to experience all that kind of stuff,
right? Yeah totally and if somebody resonates with that now is the time because now
Get that you'll get a 70 million dollar property, you know for 22 million bucks right now. If you go try to buy up these moles that are dying and all their stores are dying and all that. It's either that or or they become, you know, Amazon distribution warehouses like this. It's gonna be one of the two like it's gonna be an endpoint for e-commerce or it's going to be co-working with Froyo shops in between.
Absolutely. What are the pros and cons of my first million success. So you guys obviously have I think you're too plus million downloads.
In the first year what is kind of the pros and cons of that success?
Prose is easy. It's fun to just shoot the shit. And then you get like bunch of people telling you how great you are. Like that's never bad. So that's cool. And you know, it's a good platform to have the cons would be
It's very tempting to think you're smart when other people think you're smart and my whole life, I think I actually kind of got smart because I thought I was Dumb and I was always trying to learn and so when you're when you're on a podcast and you're basically kind of giving answers you're giving like information and I want to be the you know, dumbest guy in the room. I want to be somebody who is like learning more than I'm teaching right? So so that's my mindset. So I would say the only con is
The only con would be falling for falling for your own bullshit and you know don't start to believe your own bullshit. So like if I start to think I'm smart and people should look to me for information or advice like they do then I've lost and I've stopped growing at that point.
It's a fantastic answer. What's the one product that doesn't exist that you would hand over your credit card immediately for
it's a great question. Okay, here's one right now. That's kind of top of mind. So my wife started e-commerce thing during the last couple months is I guess I'd thing and it kind of took off. She basically heard people on the podcast talking about stuff and was like I could do that and so it actually worked and so I haven't talked too much about it. I haven't really told him what's happening. But one of the problems we have is like cool. It's outgrown like our whole house of like inventory like our whole house is filled with inventory.
The next shipments coming in it's even bigger. And so what most people do is they go to a 3pl which is like a third party logistics company. Basically you send them your inventory they fulfill it and they charge you for the storage they charge you for the picking it out when an order comes in packing and shipping it and they have like kind of crappy service because there's trying to do this whole bunch of companies. They don't care like you care we care about our customers. They don't they don't care. It's not their customer and so
What would be better is I would pay today for a we work for warehouses. And so I saw this guy Jay tweet this out and it struck a chord with me because I would say his last name but it's like a crazy Indian last name that I don't know how to say and so what you would want is I would rather hire my own people to go do the pick pack and ship but I don't want to lease out a warehouse and by the forklifts and by the racks and like, you know set this whole thing up and like no I would rather just say give me three thousand.
That's what I need right now or 10,000 square feet or whatever it is and I'll expand to 20,000 square feet if I want to but like I want to do my own fulfillment like I don't mind having my own people are so it's like our space we can control it. We could control quality accuracy and costs and so I would hand over my credit card today if there was somebody in the Bay Area that said we are we are TurnKey we work for for
warehouses. What type of e-commerce has brahe Commerce you can
never tell what you're doing. There's 10.
Thousand drop shipper sitting out there ready to knock you off in a second when people I have this tweet which is like before I do something I tell the whole world about it once something starts to work. I don't tell a soul about it. And so This falls into that category, I'll share all my half-baked ideas. I'm not doing but if I'm doing something is working to you you don't even know I
exist that is a fantastic way to look at it. Alright last question I have for you from the audience before we go to wrap up for Rapid Fire is what are your post twitch?
It's
I don't know it's good question. So I set this goal for myself that I want to I want to teach one percent of humanity. So like I would love to basically take the top one percent of most hungry ambitious people and and help them, you know tap into more of their potential in some way. So like the reason I say this is everything in society is set up for the average person, right? You have to like there's so many people so we set up our school system our work system.
Omar life philosophies for the average person and most people follow most people so like it which is crazy because most people hate their job. Most people are fat. Most people most marriages end in divorce. So like why the hell would you ever follow what most people do that's crazy to me. So, you know for the top one percent of people who are creative and ambitious and want to really make something of their life. I want to create sort of the alternative school system for them. That might just be
Podcasts and books and stuff, you know places where he places where you can go self-learn. I might go by University campus and start my own State and start the next Stanford, but it's going to be something in the education space and it's going to be something for the top 1% of talented people. I want to reverse the brain drain. They're all going and wasting their time it goes back to project selection and kind of following the herd. I don't think you should follow the herd and I don't think you should pick the wrong projects. I think you should apply your talents in a way that like works for you and you'll get the most out of your talents. So I want to
help vet. So after twitch, I'll probably just start on that and that'll be like my last project. I don't want to like build something to sell it. I want to build something that like you couldn't buy off me
and is the idea that those people would eventually like go and create companies or they could go do anything
then go do anything. So like, you know the same philosophies that helped me build businesses would help somebody become an investor it would help somebody become a musician and be like, hey cool. If I'm a musician like a big part of this is standing out getting my stuff into customers hands building a community.
The you know, you know maximizing my Revenue opportunities. So like doesn't matter whether you want to kind of go in the creative field like music film that side of things or in the business side, but those are kind of be the two main areas not really for somebody who's like, you know, if you want to become a doctor go to med school like that's probably the best way but if you want to be some kind of Creator creating either content creating creating businesses, this would be a Creator
school. And before I wrap up is everyone the same two questions.
First being what is the most important book you've
ever read?
I'll give you to the first most important book ever read was the game which is book about picking up chicks. Basically great book entertaining read. This guy becomes a pickup artist. It's more just entertainment than anything else, but it helped me because I was an 18 year old kid in college and I wanted to have a girlfriend that I didn't know how the hell to do it. I was we need to know how to do something you I should just speak from the eye when I didn't know how to do something.
I I would kind of like to either again follow the herd or like just acting weird ways out of kind of insecurity, but once I got confidence that hey this if I just do this this will work and I'm in this is in line with my values. Like I was just at ease I was at peace and I had much better results but it really teaches you about human psychology. So the same things that book teaches you about how to approach, you know, a group of girls in a club is very much how I do cold emails for, you know Outreach to customers and you know how I would pitch an investor
I would get an investor to want to invest in my business and get that attraction and get them excited. That's the same way. I would you know the same thing I would use to build attraction with an investor kit. Investor excited want to take action would be the same thing to this guy saying this is how you pick up chicks at the club. And so I really liked that book. I thought it taught me a lot about the way human psychology works. And then the second one is this book called story worthy that nobody really talks about it's probably the best book. I've read last two years this guy Matthew dicks. He's a Storyteller he
There's this thing called The Moth storytelling competition. You might know it in New York. I'd never heard of it before but it's like a, you know talent show or whatever. It's like a kind of a local open open open mic for storytellers. So this guy's like the 20 time champion of moth or whatever. He's won a whole bunch of these. He's just a third grade teacher I think in Connecticut and that's like his day job and his like his night job. Is he teaches people how to tell great stories and this book is awesome. It's such a good book for learning how to tell stories and most of what we do is telling stories like
If you're still listening like an hour to this podcast probably cause you're entertained by something you said if I didn't get you it's because I didn't tell a good enough story at the beginning and is one of those Universal skills that I think people should learn and story Worthy is awesome book that I never heard about until my friend Trevor told me about it. Now. I the most gift is the book. I gift the most I sent it in the mail today to two of the other execs at twitch to be like, hey, this book is amazing. It'll change your life.
I've never heard of it. I'm definitely going to read that now I got one more question for you and then
Then we're going to end you get asked me once to start thinking but the last question is more fun aliens believer or non-believer.
It's a good question. No, I'm a non-believer. I do think I think the sort of this is a simulation is more likely than anything else. And if this is a simulation, you wouldn't really need to build aliens, or maybe you would in some simulations or not.
Or maybe the aliens are the
simulators maybe this. Yeah, you know anything that's kind.
Foreign foreign, you know intelligent body would appear to be an alien to us. So yeah, I'm not I don't believe in aliens the way that like, you know kind of
area. What is Area 51 or whatever really
ET. I gotta believe in that alien. I don't believe in ghosts, but I do think that there's a there's a decent shot that this is this whole thing's not real were, you know, you know when you get in a plane and you start to fly up and then your house starts to look like a little ant colony and the road start to let you know like car start to look like ants and houses start to look like the colony and like you start to
Realizing. Oh shit. We might just be in a Petri dish somewhere. Yeah, like I believe that a little bit more. I also have this one really delusional thing when I was little that. I got paranoid when I was like in fifth grade that I was like wait. What if I was like What if I you know, what if I'm not like mentally all there I was like what if I'm special needs and then my parents convinced me like all these things I believed to be like normal society are not like school. That's just like a daycare or they put the
Me and I was like what if like, you know, I'm drinking orange juice and what if this is not what people what real people actually drink. What if this is just what I drink cause I'm in part of this like and I got really worried about it and then by sixth grade I was like, oh no, I think I'm okay.
Look at when you're a kid. You don't know man you ever go to like I had somebody come on the podcast. This is actually a wild. So I grew up in North Carolina. And this kid Kayla Presley who works at a Barstool Sports comes on he grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, so people
That grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. I think assholes like The Boondocks right and vice versa and he said that I think he was 18 years old the first time he ever heard of evolution Theory, right? And he's just like look man in
every single school. I went to invite in friggin
Asheville North Carolina, like that wasn't a thing that they
covered right?
There's this like whole idea of like a like that sounds crazy, right, you know wish you kind of understand the internet and stuff but it's like look, it's just an exposure thing.
Right? So see how many years I was taught like the freaking
Photosynthesis cycle like why do I need to know that and why was that taught to me seven times in my life? Like that's crazy. It's crazy. Everything that gets taught is crazy like everything that's taught that you have memorized essentially and actually you're just you just you just look that up whenever you need it like memorization is bogus learning about plants cells rather than like nutrition for humans. That's crazy that we do things this way. So I'm not surprised. He didn't learn about Evolution. I didn't learn about nutrition in school and that seems like a really
Important thing for everybody to learn
so one of my favorite videos on the Internet is there's a mom who has her phone and she peeks around the corner her son sitting at the dinner table, but he's like six or seven right and he's kind of like too small to sit at the chair. So he's literally propped up like standing on a kind of leaning over the table and there's an Alexa and he's got a piece of paper and he's holding his pencil like a, you know, six-year-old does and he goes Alexa 2 plus 3, you know, whatever he says and Alexis says it back.
Isn't all you hear the mom is boy. She's not here to get just get them and I'm like look, actually that
kid's gonna be super successful. Yeah, right. He's got it down.
All right, what will question you have for me to finish this up?
Okay, I didn't prepare for this but I actually have a great question for you. All right. I am the master of question. So I am not surprised. I have a great question. Alright, so you are you and I didn't I never heard of you until like I don't know 18 months or two.
Years ago something like that whenever kind of Bitcoin started going and then this guy on my feet and he was branded Pomp and I was like, that's a cool little personal brand to have and you like seems to be all in on bitcoin and like crypto and like I kind of I was like, okay, so like you know, who's this person is this like some hedge-fund guy is this like and I still actually don't even know your full story. But like you worked at Facebook and you seem kind of like you seem like you came out of nowhere and you seem like you created this pump guy like,
To what extent like okay first Am I Wrong what was this? Like were you always kind of
a notable person doing notable things that seem like you went from kind of normal successful smart person to like a stand out and you seem like you did it off this Bitcoin wave and it seemed like you almost consciously branded yourself as Pop the Bitcoin kind of like champion and cheerleader on Twitter. Was that conscious as my as my perception of this accurate. I'm just curious.
So there's a whole bunch in there the pieces were I have this
All belief that like if somebody can be successful at one thing they can be successful at many things. Right and it's kind of the repetitions. This isn't
real
to some degree now again look, but there's also elements that like you win the ovarian Lottery like, you know, you have access to resources like all that kind of stuff it helps but I do think that there's like this Confidence Game. There's also just if you can tell stories right if you are going to communicate with people like you can replicate it over and over again, so I was in the Army deployed overseas.
These when I came back like just that one experience alone. You kind of just have this different like I was very different when I came back because you kind of like are forced to grow up don't insult to like pretty small technology companies. But again, like learning muscle memory when I got to Facebook, that's when I think I realized like, oh wait, like I may actually like be good at some of this growth in Tech stuff and all that eventually got hired at Snapchat as the head of growth for short period of time and then like what and start investing full-time and I only went in and start
Times like I didn't have an idea of like what I wanted to do like in terms of there's no company to build yet. Like I just was like there's nothing worth it. So let me just go help other people pretty much and in 2017 at the beginning of 17. The only thing I keep thinking about was like when I was at Facebook I ran the growth team for Facebook pages. And so I helped all of these different brands and individuals also build massive audiences rights. Like I met the fuck Jerry guys, like all these guys and not necessary that I did the work which just like I understood how the
System working front row at least. Yeah, so I can just explain to them. Hey, here's how the algorithm Works. Here's the things that you should do. Here's the things you shouldn't do like, you know, here's how you increase your reach or decrease your reset all all the type stuff. And what I realized is like I had sat and watched so many people do this with that information. I was like, why did I never done it for myself? And this is like before all this like now like everyone's tired creators and audience and like all that kind of stuff. And so I looked at the platforms and I was like, okay, which is the one that I think you could basically do this the fastest on
Those Twitter like
because like because retweeting is
just the virality. Yeah, and it was the one that had the least amount of algorithmic disruption. Meaning that like, please make those very obvious. Like they were taking away reach like all that kind of stuff and Twitter seem to still like have a pretty long way to go before they got to that point and also it was an easier to create content for right if you guess it my writer Facebook second. Yeah, and so I just tried everything and anything in the book like whatever I could and that
Year, I went from I don't know like low single-digit thousands to $100,000
$110,000. So it's like okay, like here we go. So you said you tried a bunch of things. What's an example of something you try that you don't do anymore or that you were trying at that time. So little like
literally I come from like that growth mindset. So it was like what are all the things that you could possibly do that could like drive people to your profile to hit the follow button. So follow one follow like reply to tweets tweet, you know,
Times a day retweet your own tweet because there's different time zones that people may be logging in like I mean like everything in the book that you can possibly think of and three or four years ago some of the stuff work that doesn't work. Now some of the stuff didn't work but actually would work now
like it all just testing how do you decide your angle?
So
it's to me that the angle was twofold that I recognize you for one was memorable kind of name that like, yeah. It's easy to kind of cook onto and the other is you were talking about a topic that was like
Super relevant and everybody wanted more info from did you consciously decide that I just
kind of happened. No. So this is the craziest part of the whole thing is for whatever reason I grew up with four younger brothers. There's five of us like we're all just like pretty authentic like I thought I'd like to think down to earth like you can go grab a beer with us and I don't care if you're a billionaire or you're a nobody like, you know, we're just sucks. Right and I think that what I started to do was
Just talk about things. I was interested in and I was trying out so about all kinds of stuff everything from technology to start sweet invested into Bitcoin to you know, whatever and naturally the thing that most people I think do on Twitter's they fight what's actually working like they want to talk about Bitcoin. They want to talk about what they eat. They want to delay occurs. And yeah all this stuff and it becomes like not obvious like what is this account for and I knew from Facebook like, oh no a super focus is a
Actually the best thing and so in the beginning it was just like a big point. We went viral but another Bitcoins we went viral like two weeks later and I was like, wait a second like okay. Let me try another Bitcoin to like okay viral and it was just like the algorithm basically like it was just obviously double and triple down on this the name people have been calling me pump since I was you know in middle school, right? It was just like these Confluence of events that in hindsight like oh, yeah. I'm just like Master genius. There was no master plan. So he was just I just knew that like building the Twitter audience would be
Effective and I think the advantage that I've had is because we've invested in so many companies and and I've just seen like what works and what doesn't work. I've been able to kind of like pretty intelligently I think navigate like okay once you go to Twitter audience, like now, you've got platform risk like okay. Can you report that audience an email? Okay. Now you got that like, how do you get another platform? Okay, let's go to audio, right and you just kind of like do that. And then also you're like, okay now we're in 2020 and like everyone's talking about like overview of audience. You can like build.
Mrs. And I'm like, yeah, of course like a no-brainer like I've got an audience. Yes. Mr. There was no master plan from how'd it go? You know from where I was to today, but it's when these things were like when you find yourself in a certain position, like I think generally if you've just got to sound decision-making like you can make the best of it. And so now this is
what's the best version of how this plays out over the next five years roughly. Like what's what's the best outcome of where this whole thing goes for you? Now the word of the pop train
go
Short answer I don't know is all of these like influencer celebrity people with audience whatever historically they've basically said give me money and I'll advertise for your business or they say, you know, sort of people will say give me money give me Equity now, but I think actually it's going to flip and what you're going to see is the people with audiences can say I'm just gonna build my own company writes like The Joe Rogan example, like Joe should have got a trigger girls and said, hey, I'm not advertising trigger girls anymore. Let's create an entity weren't called Joe Rogan girl.
Think that's where the world's going and more people figure that out
pumps Instant. Pop got it. Is it in safari with your face on it? It plays your content while you while you're cooking food. It's excellent. Not think I stay out of the kitchen. I don't think the kitchen items are going to be my thing.
Awesome man. Shawn. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or or find out more about something working on?
Yeah, just follow me on Twitter. That's where I put out. Most of my
So it's just Twitter / Sean VP. So it's sh Haan VP. So Sean VP and then subscribe to my first million the podcast if you like kind of what we were doing here just Shootin the shit talk about different business ideas. That's basically what we do twice a week and it's got a good thing going. So so if you like that go subscribe to my first million,
I'm a big fan you don't even know this but I've listed a lot of the episodes. So definitely people go subscribe no-brainer for that. Yeah, and I
think we got you scheduled on next week, maybe something like that.
Yeah, we're going to do it. Great. All right, man. Thank you so much about this again the
future cool. Peace out.
