Let's go outside of the tech world. So, two brands that I am looking at that have lasted a long time. Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton has lasted. Maybe 250 years now. And when you think of Louis Vuitton, you know what, you're getting same at New York Times. New York Times has been around for 250 years, not Everyone likes them but you know what? They're pursuing, which is their version of the truth, but then let's go to Raising Cain. There been a Raising Cain
43. Love, raising case. I met the founder of Raising Cane's. Once he is awesome. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could
Be what I want to me like
we're live. What's going on? What up? How are you? I'm driving. All right, good. So I've been thinking about this conversation you and I had we talked about Outsourcing and I'm actually going to put a lot of words in your mouth. I'm implying that you said a lot of stuff which you didn't exactly say, so you're kind of more of a representation. But Rob Dyrdek said something amazing, a few pods ago, he said two amazing things one he goes. I was looking for these
Million-dollar wins and I would do like 12 only setting goes instead, I'm actually only going to do one or two things and I'm home and I'm going to hope that there are going to be big and then he also said he has this thing called Forever. Estates you remember when we talked about forever estate or so afterwards? He sent me mock-ups of this and I like Google the architect and everything. And there was this really cool article that they rob and the architect wrote together. So forever. Estates Rob said, I want to build this home. So basically he said he had 12 million dollars liquid at the time, ten million dollars, he went and bought this plot of land and then he goes.
Go to build the home. I want it's going to cost 30 million dollars at the time. I didn't have that and it sounds like he may be. He has it now but he was like basically I want to build this home where the Dyrdek family for many generations can meet at this home to discuss Family Planning and family issues, and things like that. And so I'm going to build this home. Exactly how I want it. We're going to call it forever Estates because hopefully it lives forever. I found that very inspiring. Did you find that inspiring
loved loved? I love when people take an absurdly Long View and
More than anything. I love when people have a vision for their life and what they're doing. When somebody's got to get was awesome compelling vision for their life. That is like one of the most attractive traits to me, it doesn't even matter if I agree with that Vision. It's that they have that vision and that they agree with that vision is what matters?
I thought it was awesome and he sent me mock-ups of the home and I was like dude this is so inspiring and so I got I got all up hot and bothered about this it was awesome to me. And so I started thinking about companies that can last a long time. I've been a little bit obsessed with this because with Hampton
Things are going well, we're not a success yet, but it's very clear that like I always tell our team physix will allow this to work. There's demand, I've got a good audience for this. We've got a good team, physics allows us to exist. There's nothing that gets in the way of this. We're already somewhat successful. The only question is, how great will it become? And I'm starting to think, how do you create something that lasts 50 and or 100 years? Whatever it is, and the word brand is something that I've been thinking about a lot and I think you and I as well as our
Audience we get in these like short-term thinking and we use like the a were the Arbitrage were or we use like we use these certain words that people actually don't think about branding, they don't think about soul. And I've been thinking a lot about that lately and there's this book that I'm reading where it's called lessons from the century, our lessons from the century companies Club. So it's like this one woman studied like companies that have lasted 100 years and she's like what do they all have in common and I've been thinking a lot about that and you brought up something you said you would
Vested in this company Shepherd, which I think is awesome. Actually, I'm starting to use them. I'll give you a plug.
Is it grow Shepherd or support shepard.com? Yeah,
support shepard.com. You talked about that investment in the company and its and you're talking about Outsourcing, it's basically you hire people in the Philippines I think also Latin America and they do a bunch of odd jobs. But you said something like, I want to hire tons of these people and I started thinking about that I started thinking should I do that? And then I realize I shouldn't do that. I actually should do that for some roles but the thing that but I had this like offsite this
Hampton retreat with like a bunch of our employees and I realize you have to build a real strong company culture and you have to figure out, how do you keep employees for a long time. And that's one of the key keys to building a brand that can last a long time and I wanted to hear, how are you? And this, by the way, this topic is not that exciting for anyone. Who's in survival mode. This topic is more exciting for people who are in like Thrive mode where it's like, I got this thing.
Working to be clear. The first phase of the company is just build something that people want and figure out if you can get it to them, right?
Don't worry about culture, don't worry about brand, don't worry about the forever plan, don't worry about the 25 year Vision, none of it's going to matter. If you can't do the first thing Sam has done the first thing with Hampton. He has proven that he can create something that people actually want, and he could sell it to them. So now he's thinking, you know, and now you get what I call Progressive ambition. I want to do a whole video on Progressive ambition, I'm going to show people. If you go back and you watch Mark Zuckerberg Surly interviews and people are like, where does this go from here on eight?
Campuses. Now you where you going to? We're going to open this up to everybody, high schoolers everything
because he's like 50 schools.
Like our goal is to get to, you know, all the major colleges, I'm not sure everyone keeps saying why is expand expand. Expand. Some things are cooler when you don't expand and I don't think we have to open up to everybody. I'm not sure, I mean something's really we can build something really, really useful for college students, maybe we should just do that. And then now the guys like created hot air balloons that give internet to Farmers in India. So,
That they can use Facebook, right? Think he got progressively more ambitious as you went along. And that,
which is a Grazie, a story in itself. By the way, Facebook, I think Sarah helped work on this or something at Facebook, Facebook, basically puts these planes over India. So any Indian can access Internet because the issue with growth of Facebook is they literally have everyone on the internet, they have to create more internet for people. I
got to create a bit more. Tam-tam it up right now, hold on. I think if more people the internet so they could use our app but that's cool.
That it started where that's a great phrase, Progressive ambition, very
common for different companies, you can go back, and I've I'm a forensic. It was, I'm an archaeologist. I go back into the to go study the early origins of these companies and you find this very, very commonly that they start with a sort of humble ambition. Then as things start to work, they snowball their ambition, they become more and more ambitious as they go. Realizing the opportunity is wider and bigger than they had initially planned for, and that one
Type of success, earns the right to go for the next step of success. And that it is okay to ladder up. Because While most people do is they look at them today, they say well now they're trying to do a b c and d. So I when I start need to also plan for ABC and d and it's actually like no, you actually start with a you don't actually have to do anything else. Of course, there are exceptions. There's Elon Musk saying we're going to, you know, but you know, even Elan. For example, let's take one of the most ambitious companies in the world spacings, right, what's the goal? What's the mission?
Events like make the human species multiplanetary. So we can survive when we ruin Earth or Earth gets you know hit by an asteroid or whatever and so it's like wow what's more ambitious than creating a rock literally rocket science to create rockets that will eventually take us to live on Mars? Wow that's like the biggest Vision. Ever when SpaceX started, his initial Vision was to do a test demonstration, sending a plant in a rocket into a certain like a certain height I do.
Member exactly where it was to, you know, have the first living thing, you know, go out of, you know, past the moon or whatever wherever you're trying to take it and that's all you want to do is just take a plant out there and he's like oh I'll just fund this you know to take me 20 million dollars but it'll inspire people towards science and you know, hopefully NASA will then fund real Mars missions after that and then only, you know, along the way he's like, you know what? Screw this plant thing. I'm gonna let's actually do it ourselves. We don't need Inspire NASA. Let's just do the whole thing ourselves. He also got progressively more
Wishes
and also when he first started he started thing called zip to, which I'm almost certain. It's basically like putting the yellow pages on the internet which I'm sure he had some cute way of submitting it where it was a grand plan. But he made 20 million dollars off of it, which is a lot of money, but he was like in his head, he's like, I got to get my nut. You know, I'm
saying, he's like, you see every human has a number phone number and you can reach them. This is one of the most marvelous things in the world and you need a way to reach them. It's information. How, you know, he'll he'll make anything sound fancy, but actually, one of the interesting
Things is Elon, is also credited. As like he created PayPal. He didn't actually create PayPal, you know, PayPal. The product was created by first, Max levchin and Peter teal. But even then, when they merged with elon's company, he had this big Vision forex.com. He's like x.com is going to be everybody's full Financial life, it's going to be banking. It's going to be mortgage is going to be loads. It's going to be sending money. It's going to be savings accounts. It's going to be all things to all people, and that was the vision for x.com.
When they merged you on was the CEO of the merged company and the plan was to create x.com. And so he had this, big audacious crazy Vision, his forever plan about how he's going to change the whole financial system. And actually, the only thing that worked was going back to the basics. Let's make something that people actually want to see if we can get it to them. And it was like, oh, yeah, eBay sellers would love a way for people to pay the money when they send them the like beanie babies. And so literally was send money via email and I'll send money via email small amounts.
It's paying a pal, was the actual use case that people wanted and needed. And it was only when they essentially booted him out and focused on that small, use case the smaller Vision. They PayPal actually take off. And so, you know, sometimes you almost have the reverse or you start to audacious, and actually, you're needed. You skip the step of finding that initial foothold, and that's what PayPal actually did.
And here's the rub, which is very similar to that, that I'm experiencing that. I'm trying to think about, which is so in order to build a company that lasts long time,
You need a you need a few things which I could talk about, but it starts with having a brand it starts with having a very clear defined purpose, you have to have employees, you want to work with for a long time and there's a bunch of things, but how do you balance paying the bills and taking customers? And also, like having this mission, that might be polarizing to people and I'm trying to figure out when is that transition? Do you always have it? And that's something that I'm constantly thinking about now which is I don't think it's a switch. I think you have to have it embedded in your culture early on but where do
You make sacrifices, where do you make sacrifices? I'm not sure, I'm not sure I'm going from short-term to long-term thinking how that happens and that's something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. So, it's hard to kind of
give advice without any specifics, but I'll do it. Anyways, I'll be the advice guy for a second. So when I was doing my first very first company, it was a stupid company. We're trying to do the make a restaurant chain the Chipotle of sushi. And we had all these micro decisions to make like any business does on a day-to-day basis. Should we use this packaging or this packaging for our thing? Well, this one cost
Our looks better. But this other one, we would have better margins because it costs less. And then there's this other one that's eco-friendly about a block. And so, one of our mentors at Duke, she sat down and she's like, guys, you're having The Wrong conversation, really, what do you mean? And she's like, it's not about packaging. What do you mean? She's like, let me ask you this, what decision can you make? Upstream of this? That would make your packaging decision. Obvious was like, what? We don't really get it. She's like, you got to know. What do you value, right? Are you about?
Ruthless efficiency and margins because if so then the choice is obvious, there's no choice. All right, you choose the one with the that she packaging with the best margins or you about, are you is your number one value. The color quality of the customer experience because if it's the quality of the customer experience, you definitely choose a cheap one, but you also won't use the Eco one that's going to kind of melt, you know, the old paper straws problems. Not actually this product about it is eco-friendly. So if you're all about product quality, that's what you're going to going to go all-in on. That's your number one value.
The packaging. This is obvious same thing with the other side. If you're all about sustainability, if that's your number one value, then the decision is obvious. She's like, you don't know which packaging to pick because you don't know what you stand for. You don't know your values and she's like, what you want to do is figure out your values, number one. So what are the things you value? More than a more than other things. Because there are and you only know what you value when you're choosing amongst good options, it's obvious to Value something. When you have a good option and a bad option, there's no you didn't test your values there.
Your values only get tested when you have multiple good options but they're good in different ways. And that's when you need to know which one do we value? The second thing that she said was Jeff Bezos has this great quote, where he goes they're like, oh you know Amazon has been around forever and you guys are just kept growing and growing and growing. And you know, through every Innovation cycle, you know, the internet mobile phones. Whatever Amazon has been Cloud, Amazon has done great. How do you stay on top of the curve and he goes because we don't look for Trends. We
Sells the opposite question instead of saying, what's going to change? We say, what's not going to change. So basically, as I could, we're customer obsessed. That's the number one value for them. And these like, number two, we ask, what's not going to change our people? Our people ever going to want less selection? No. Are they ever going to want higher prices? No. Are they ever going to want slower delivery? No. Okay, cool. So now we know that those are never the never changing things. So all we got to do is how to figure out how to give them more selection, lower prices and faster delivery. That's what they care about. They're never going to not care about those things.
They're always going to care and all we got to do is just continually find a way to do that. So I think that gives you a sort of long-term orientation like, for Hampton. What would you say are the never going to change things?
I've got to figure that out, frankly. When I started, it was the same thing as Zuckerberg which is I just want to like be around smart. People are your enemy or people ever going to
want to be around lower quality Founders. Now they're always going to want that bar going up that they look in their peer group and they're in. Awe, how did I get in this room right? I think that's going to be the
First feeling you want to create his holy shit. All the other people in my group are awesome. I can't wait to talk to these people, right? That's going to be, I think always the number one, the quality of the other members in their group to them.
And then I think the thing I think about is they're always going to want their peers to be committed. So you have so we've been thinking about what happens if you don't show up to a meeting it's like, well, we should just ban them. Let's ban them, you miss. One of the shorter
term. Both of those things, we mentioned hurts Revenue because if you make the do exactly, when I increase Revenue, why didn't the door baby?
Let them all in let everybody who wants to pay the bill coming, okay? But now you've ruined the quality of member problem. You know, the long-term people will never want this to go in that direction. You're screwing that up for short-term profit. Same thing on the people don't show up you ban them or you also, you know, have to go ahead and remove that subscription revenue from from the, from the old stripe account. And so you're not going to want to do that either.
But it will only happen if you take this long-term orientation and say, no, no. The thing we value the most is people want a product or its high quality. People that show up and care about this community about this group. And if either of those two, every decision has to be first and foremost from that point of view, does this increase the quality of our members or decrease. It does is increase the commitment levels or decrease it
and I also think that so you were given the example of Facebook and Amazon and I looked at those as examples as well. But let's go.
Outside of the tech world. So, two brands that I am looking at that have lasted a long time. Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton has lasted. Maybe 250 years now. And when you think of Louis Vuitton, you know what, you're getting same in New York Times, New York Times has been around for 250 years, not Everyone likes them, but you know what? They're pursuing, which is their version of the truth, but then let's go to Raising Cain. There been a Raising
Cain correct. Love raising case. I met the founder of Raising Cane's. Once he is awesome, that you guys
gotta, I don't know his name, but Google Raising Cane's founder and like watched
Talks with this guy, he's like a southern boy. I think from Louisiana, he started chicken finger plays, I think at LSU and if you go to Raising Kings. Now here's what you're going to get. They all they sell as chicken fingers, you can basically get them deep breaded and deep-fried or not breaded and deep-fried and then I think they only
self-pride or dries I don't know. Obesity fried. Which one do you want?
Yeah. Like there's like there's only there's no options and you get it on a styrofoam like a styrofoam the school lunch box type of thing and they're not fancy but you know
To get every time and he's like, Adam, it is like we are going to perfect this. We're going to get this. It's going to be fried the exact same time every single time and it's not sophisticated but you know you're going to get another brand that I like fucking Dollar General, you ever go to a Dollar General, of course, dude, it's not sophisticated I hired but you know there's gonna have a ton of stuff and is going to be low quality. It is gonna be affordable. You know, you're gonna get every time. So I don't think you need this sophisticated. Like it's day one here at Amazon and we're like, no, you don't need that you
Could have like, no, like we're fashion Nova like it's cheap apparel that, you know, you don't have to make a lot of money and you could buy it and we're always going to be on top of shit. You don't need a lot of that stuff that high-end like sophisticates up, you can be anything but it's just cool that like to see people who are adamant about what they are and they just deliver value every time or at least, there are folks in the brain. So, anyway, that's my spiel about that and the reason I was thinking about it was because you were talking about Outsourcing stuff and I'm like, oh, that definitely seems cheaper, but it is it cheaper for every role in the long term because you
To build in order build a brand that lasts long time. And let's let's be straight here. This is all about like doing dope shit. It's also about making more money. I think you can make more money if you drag out your Excel sheet real like, oh, this girl's, 30% 20% every year. Yeah. Dragged a chef for 50 years. It's the old saying
a. See let's see, what's good? Yeah. They're
right. This is its, this is also rooted in like Adventure and fun, exciting and agreed. So I don't want to get that Twisted but anyway, you have people who want to work for you for 10, 20 years, it gets really interesting and I think you can actually
Like in bed, different things, the culture do, you know, White Castle, you've heard of white cast, you know what that is right, dude. White Castle, I fucking love White Castle. I went and looked at their like LinkedIn. So, shown in figure out their executive team, like, all of them have worked there for like 30 years, and I used to make fun of them like, oh, man, it's fucking suits. I'm like, no, no, no, they know who their customers. They know what they're doing, and they're you get the same shit every time and it works because there are people have worked there for fucking 30 years and they like know what the company is about. So, anyway, that's my rant rant over, but it's something. I'm thinking about it. Something I'm thinking about,
About. I'm glad we just discussed this publicly. I'm actually going to was taking
notes. Yeah, that good. I think that's cool. I I take the exact opposite point of view for the, for the record. I do not think about building things that are the last 1,500 years. I think that's really hard and I think it's unnecessary. I want to be the thing that last 50 or 100 years, not an individual brand necessarily.
Well, you are the brand. If that's all the
way I think about it is this, it depends how you want your career to go. Some people get really excited about building something and being a part of something and working on something for 30 years,
I get more excited about taking like sort of 70 or chapter Orcs of my life, it'd be like cool. I want to have five, you know, I only get one life to live. I want to experience all the things I want to ride all the rides. And so I do a, you know, I did a tour of Duty and I lived in Australia and Indonesia and all these other places that was fun, that was wearing a great adventure. I moved to Silicon Valley in the heart of San Francisco and I tried to do the billion dollar startup thing. Now I'm doing this basically cash flowing business side of things and podcast and creating content, I'm a content creator.
Now that's interesting that's fun and in a new way I'll shift at some point seven years from now. I'm not gonna be a content creator, more or going to shift the content. I'm going to create TV shows or stand-up comedy set or something.
Yeah, but you do realize that's all rooted. I'm going to like Jiu-Jitsu your ass. You realize this is all rooted in the same shit which is like, it is a consistent brand and you are changing the monetization and I
might not even put my name on. Like my name is not always going to be front and center on everything when you're a content creator, it is. But other times it's not for me, the more important thing is I'm not
I got a bank on people, recognizing my brand in order to do something. I do want to accumulate enough financial freedom and Runway so that I can go pursue things that don't have to make money right away and so but but you know it's all about what you the vision for you. You have for yourself so that's why I was talking about. Rob Dyrdek has this vision for his house. You have a vision for Hampton. What you're trying to create. This is long-term enduring thing. I have a vision for my life and my career, that is chapters in episodic, and I want to have that variety and new challenge where I have to like go become
Uncomfortable and try to get good at something new and learn. Go learn the dark arts of whole different industry. And go become a beginner. Again that's something I get excited about more so than creating one thing that's going to last a long time. So I'm going to be a part of for a long time. Is
that a phrase? We're going to start using the dark arts? I mean, that's what you feel
on. That's patent is, so you will talk to him for the saying that right now.
Where you want to go?
Let's move on. Okay, I got two quick ideas for you in general. I want to say this, by the way. In this pod, I think we're going to make a shift in how we create the content.
So right now, every episode is this mishmash of breaking down a business talking about Frameworks an idea business idea. Here are there I think what we're going to start to do is segment them better or chunk them better theme the episodes better. So you know what? You're going to get and we just go really hard at one thing. So we're going to do episodes where it's really hard on just ideas business opportunities that we see. We're going to go really hard on certain topics like one-man. Businesses are seeing businesses have very few people but just crush it.
It's gonna be a lot harder for us to do the prep for that but I think it'll make for much better episode. So we've been talking a bit about that. I think we should put it out there that we want to start doing that.
All right. Listen up. One of the greatest things I ever did at my old company. The hustle was, I hired this woman named Step Smith step is amazing. She is so good at breaking down companies and help me predict trends of which businesses are going to blow up. If she's so good. In fact that Andreessen Horowitz one of the most famous Venture Capital firms in the world. They stole her from me and they put
Shit from me, that's okay. I still love Steph and now she's the host of their podcast called the, a 16z podcast. It's their long-standing and chart-topping, podcast, and it's awesome. And step is the host step comes on. MFM my first million all the time. You guys love her, she's a fan favorite and she's one of my favorite people, and so you should check this out. So, each week, the a 16z podcast gives you Insider access to the people and ideas at the edge of innovation steps. It sound with luminaries like
Apple's co-founder, Steve, Wozniak, Neal Stephenson and all types of amazing people. So check it out. It's called a 16z podcast. That's all one word, a 16z podcast, check it out.
But until then, let's mishmash a little bit. I got an idea for you. Okay. If you made a grid of customers that are easy to acquire or hard to acquire on one side and then customers that are not that valuable super valuable on the other.
Axes, one box that interests me, there is hard to acquire Super valuable. And the reason why is because those companies can become very, very defensible, very, very valuable, right? Your value, as a company, or even, as a person is just based on how easy are you to replace? You want to be Irreplaceable Irreplaceable. That's how you can actually make more money in the long term. So what's on that in that quadrant like a fucking plane manufacturer, or something like that, something that sells to government.
So you go get government contracts, not easy, might be boring to do long-term expensive, government contracts. It might take you years to get to the point where you can get one but when you get one very valuable and very defensible. And so I was thinking about this because I invested in this drones company called Valenti. Long time ago invested, maybe many years ago and I have no idea how they're doing. I was a small investor, I don't even get the updates, but at the time they were doing pretty well. You know, I was like, okay cool, this value.
Patient's a little bit Rich for where you're at. But why is it you know why do you think this re-evaluation it was like what they're about to get this government contract. That's a hundred million dollars a year contract. One customer will now become worth more than all their customers combined.
Because, and what's the term length of that
contract? I think it was like a, there was a couple that they were up for. I think there were like, sort of three and five-year deals. And once you get one government contract, you're sort of D, risked, and you've done all the, you know, the clearance and all that stuff. You basically have to get your company to a spot where you could get a government contract. And once you have
Be able to get the next one because more likely because you're sort of, in The Trusted vendor Circle. So I was like, oh, that's pretty valuable. I was just thinking about when the other day, you know, with this whole covid pandemic. Somebody out there has got to be selling some kind of pandemic, modeling software or detection software to every government in every country of the world. And this is also have like a network effect where as soon as you provide your, the provider of this product to one government, it's actually something that Olga
permits would then choose you for because, you know, the more governments, you get, the more compelling, your case becomes. And so I wonder who's building kind of the palantir. What palantir did for? I think like National Security type stuff. Somebody's got to be doing for biosecurity. So who is creating the pandemic? Monitoring detection modeling awareness program that you can then go sell to every single government on Earth as an indefinite ongoing contract. Hey these things happen once every 100 years.
The Spanish Flu. We got covid. All right, I'm just gonna go, I'll be your provider because hey, they're devastating when they happen and I can, I could be this for you for the next hundred years. I think that's 100. Your company that is probably quite defensive on quite valuable. If you can do it,
I'll talk to some of my friends who work at Pelletier I'm like hey what'd you guys do today like oh just like stopped a terrorist attack and France. How about you wrote a blog post? You don't mean
it don't find Sweet Tuesday today. Yeah, we're good. My favorite sweets.
In my newsletter. It's cool.
It's like those, have you ever had those? There's all these like net worth calculators real. Like where will I be in 50 years and you're like, well, if you were to start in like 1884, this is where you'd be, if you're a starting like 1995, this is where you'd be. And you can like, see like, well, because that this 50 year or this 30 years actually had slowed growth, this 10 years had fast growth and you like, see all the different scenarios you like. So if we take the average this, but if this happens this, so you're kind of like talking about like that but with like potential illnesses
who have you researched out there?
I haven't researched any of this but I'm sure already existing sort of like, you know, like his people have been worried about these sort of like viral things, but obviously, they were insufficient, right? So like, whatever existed obviously sucked because we didn't detect it. We didn't have any plan for it and we had no idea how fast this thing is spreading. Like, literally the best pandemic model I saw was made as a side project by Kevin Systrom for the founder of Instagram for fun on the side where he's like, oh look I can break down by state.
And the are not the viral coefficient, basically of this hand of this virus based off of this public data, I'm getting about hospitals and hospitalizations. And I can use that to kind of show, which states are flattening the curve versus which states are about to go exponential and, you know, they should really consider doing something. And it's like, somebody's got to be doing this at a, this got to be the easiest sales pitch of all time right now. As it is kind of what I guess. What I really mean is like if you're sitting at MIT or one of these places just be like,
A sign that says I went to MIT and then go walk until the government building, open up the fanciest like Matlab, you know, like model you could find and be like you need to pay for this and just see what happens. I think. I feel like they can get you pretty far right now with this pitch of like hey we'll help you with the will help you keep track of these viruses
to remember, about two years ago, you and I were both interested in people who are trying to detect fires forest, fires. Do remember that?
Yeah, yeah, we did it. We did this on the Pod, right?
There was probably, like one or two like kids, like, college kids fooling around with it, but then there was like, I think two different companies that raise money. I think from Founders front fund and actually, they were X palantir. Guys, I forget the name of the company. It's a four-letter word. It was like, Dell, or I forget what it was, but they were I try to invest in them and they were like, they weren't having it because they were getting big and they didn't need any money. But, do you know what happened to those guys?
I don't know the name of it. That's really hard to remember. Now, I also don't know what
Of it. But yeah, there was I remember when the California wildfires were happening. I felt like every three months. It was like a new fire and the entire like State of California was like covered in Smoke. Yeah, I remember when that I remember that was happening to find early detection of wildfires was like a start-up idea that a bunch of people got
funding for. Yeah, it was really interesting. What we need to do, what I'll do not this week, but next week is, we have Jack on next because I'm going to actually do research and see how these guys are doing, because it's very similar to what you're talking about and what was your other thing that you're looking at your
To go from sounded governments to sound a Jessica Simpson.
Exactly the same IQ. So basically this next idea is so celebrities are having this like deep fake Crisis crisis and opportunity. So deep fakes are getting really, really good, and celebrities now have a crisis plus opportunity. So, the crisis, is you seen this fake Tom Cruise is deep fake. Tom Cruise is guys like amazing looks just like Tom Cruise and
Video. You know, it's this is getting really good. You're not going to be able to tell you. Did you see? Do you see
the ones where they put our podcast in Spanish? Yeah, those are
awesome. By the way, we should do that. We should release our podcast and
everything. They were amazing. They were so good. I've even I've heard of these new scams world will take people whose voice and video you get access to, and make all your parents and being like, Hey, Dad, look I'm trapped. I need some money. Can you please send it? Like, just don't ask questions, just send the money, it's
wild. And so I think there's an opportunity here. So I think celebrities who get
Paid for their name and face and, you know, I gotta go fly to, you know, Arizona and shoot this commercial for Gatorade right now and it's gonna be three days. But I'm gonna get paid all this money blah blah. That's going to change into a nerd. Would like to lose your. You're a iclone and their commercial. You cool with that. Yeah. You get to sit at home and collect the cheque and it's like, maybe it's 50% less expensive for the brand. Maybe it's the same cost for the brand, I don't know, but celeb, you don't have to do the work anymore, that's going to be a big deal. So, the more famous you get,
Now you're not going to have to actually do the appearance thing because you'll just send your AI stunt double to go do it. So that's an opportunity. But there's also a risk there which is what if somebody's just doing it without your consent. And so I think somebody's going to need to create a sort of celebrity deep fake licensing company. So it's a company that goes and says, look, we're going to create the legal entity that's going to house your name and likeness that other brands can come interact with when they want access to this.
We're also going to do the detection to find out is anybody doing the unauthorized use of your name and face somewhere. And we will handle all the takedowns for you. So it's kind of like a reputation.com but for this new deep Faith thing so you basically will go and I think you'll need to. It's almost like Angel list. You need to create the legal framework for how these work. You need to go sell this to every agency and say, hey,
You should we've created one for. You have one of these for all of your clients on your roster and when a brand comes to you, use this to issue the license that has the right some controls on it, that has the digital encrypted watermark on it. That has the tracking on it and then we will also fight anybody who is trying to use it without paying you because that's going to become an issue as well. That's what I think is going to happen. I think somebody could build that company right now.
I used to get all these emails when I first started the hustle because
As what we would do is we eventually body Gettys license, which is like 50 Grand a year, but before that we would use, I would just type in whatever picture I wanted. And then I'll go to Google and click like allow for commercial use, and then I would like, I would use those pictures on our website. And then, at once we got popular, we would get all these emails from these patent trolls, or not patent trolls. I mean, we were, we were using someone else's picture and they would say, send us three grand and we'll go away. Otherwise we're suing you and I started looking into them and basically what they did was, they just built this.
Technology. So they could detect if someone's photo is being used and they would automatically like crawl. They use. Like who is it? Find out who the webmaster was and send you this email and I wonder like, how those folks turned out like what's going like? How some of these people actually built those, those things and if they were profitable, I imagine. So like there was one time I use someone's picture, I think it was like the it was like a thumbnail picture. It was the smallest picture. Not even know we used it and I think so. Maybe someone at our company took a screenshot of it and like try to alter it and then put it on our website, in the smallest way and
Totally caught it and within like a few hours we had to send them. Like three thousand dollars is like shit. They got us. I wonder like what that looks like in the world of AI when you are having a bunch of these fake celebrity videos, you know I'm saying?
Yeah, yeah exactly. So I think somebody's going to need to create the good version of that. So one option is become the troll, the other option is become the official sort of like broker of these of the usage of these digital defects. All right, that's my second one,
the company, by the way, it's called felt Fel, t.com felt. That's
What we had talked about remembering you want to talk about how you flew been out to convince them to move with you.
Yeah, I think it's good. Actually, because remote work is, you know, obviously all the rage and remote work is great and a bunch of different ways, but I'm of the opinion, which is remote is great when you have things figured out and maybe people who are just operational to do things anytime there's a lot of needs figuring out or creativity or just your brain Trust.
I think works best in person. And so I told Ben the other day, I was like, man, I think we're onto something before we're doing business partner, Ben, this is Barb. And I was like, you know, he lives in Austin right now and I was like, you gotta, as I had to move out here and he's like, like, you know, I live here now and wife kid, we have family in Texas. I was like, yeah, I know. But like you, we both believe the following right? Every time we get together magic happens, this can be pretty big.
Like what we're doing can become pretty big, and so even like if 10 to 20 percent Improvement on what we're doing, is actually worth maybe tens of millions of dollars, so it's like, you know, it could be worth it to move and California, great place to. So, it's not like I'm saying, you know, let's go to rural Ohio or something. And so, he was like, okay, why do we do this? So, he moved out here for the month. So he got an Airbnb
in The Burbs or safer to The Burbs, where
I'm at. And he's like, I got an Airbnb, brought his
Five kid came out here. He's just been living here for the month and I also I offered him. I was like, dude, I'll pay you
Dollars if you move but I told him I go but the number drops by 20% every quarter that you don't move like this is not like a standing offer forever is a burning. It did exploding offer I said you should take your time and think about it. We should also know every quarter that you don't move that number goes down and
so he he should tell you. You come get your ass to
Texas. Yeah, I know he knows I'm not going anywhere. He knows we're not going anywhere. That's that the something I actually lived in Texas for a long time. And, you know,
The other thing is like here, you know, in San Francisco there is kind of like, for example, for our rolling fund, there's so many companies, so many other investors. So many people in the start of World like proximity Is Power. You want to be near as many other people as you can that are doing the same sorts of things as you as you are, to the extent that your lifestyle will allow it. And so yeah, we'll see. He told me I think I think I got ten to twenty percent chance.
Well, I'm coming out. I was, I was with him a week or two weeks before he went out there.
And I was shocked when he told me that he thought that there was maybe a 20% chance that he could be convinced. And by he I mean the at the levy entity, the the household and I was shocked that it was 20%, is it still
20%? I don't know, I think so. But we also work a lot when he's here. So I'm sure his wife's like, dude, this is terrible, like you work more now like man, I don't want to do this and so that might be working against us. The other thing though, is the way we work, is kind of goofy. I don't think most people do this but
But, you know, for coding, they have pair programming, it's not that popular but some people do it. Pair programming is what's the name of that agency? That was in San Francisco. That was like a really popular Dev shop. It like went public at one point you know, you know the
name. Yeah. Yeah. I don't remember it. But yeah I know. You mean a
popularized? At least I don't if they invented her popularized but basically it's two programmers working on one computer rights like the engineering 2, Girls, 1 Cup basically. It's like you've together
There's one keyboard and you would think well, okay, you have half the efficiency. Like only one guys, working only one guys coding, but actually, you get more than double the efficiency because it keeps you completely focused. And you and your partner are basically both talking things through and figuring things out on the Fly. And literally mean been do that when he comes out here to work. We I'm like all right. Put your laptop down. Like, just we buddy up side-by-side at this desk and we'll just work on the same thing at the same time. And like, I can't just like open Twitter and start messing around over there. He's
What's happening? What are you doing? Can't you can just like open new tabs, you know, as you're figuring something out. One guys pointing something out. You just sort of really stacking as I called like stacking focus is like whatever. My level of focus is plus is a level of focus on the same thing so that's been good. The other is the in-between time. So already, when we work remote, we call each other all the time, you know? Probably on the phone, two hours a day, three hours a day, maybe on calls either with others are just ourselves. But what's happening now is we'll work on something.
For a bit, that's kind of like us being on a call together working on something. And then we're like, all right, let's go get food and we'll just hop on our bikes will go to this taco shop. We go get this. Go to the same Taco Shop everyday, we get the same, same meal every day with you play wolf football afterwards, we hold hands. We skip home, basically, but while we're doing, it is sort of like the best ideas are coming out in all the in-between time. And that's the time where normally if we'd be like okay bye those Zoom close Google hangouts, or whatever. And
And I put on a podcast and he does something else and you know, it's the in-between time where you get the serendipitous ideas. So it's just kind of reminding me how valuable it is to work in person.
So here's the issue that you have or I've always had with you which is whatever I am around you. Both of us are highest energy people, where you're the type of person to eggs people on and then I leg you back on or I can see like and I'm not even that bad at that. But you do I'm sure there's a lot of other people like Sully were you guys just are taking each other on and it's like
Wait a minute. We're totally off track here which you just do the same thing over and over again. Does this having him around? Just distract you further? Because I can see you guys just like you're sitting on to like love seats and you're throwing a football back and forth? You're like
why don't we do this? Yeah well what if we did this is like well fuck it. Let's just do it right now. Definitely a part of every single day. That's like that I crumpled up a piece of paper. I throw it to him. He throws it back and we're playing catch talking about bullshit. That like you know, things we could do that are not like just the obvious things but the
Of it is, as I've gotten older and I've got wiser and I've been doing this podcast, two things have happened, one, I hang around you, and you're very good at just doing the thing every day, whether it's your workout, or, it's whatever it is. I'm just gonna do the thing and I don't want to get distracted by everything. We want to do the thing as I hang out with you is hella helps. There was also a guy who came on the podcast long time ago, when the earliest episodes and he designed his, he's from Peak design, they make
These like camera bags. So he started his company. A lovely sad. That was two years ago. Yeah. This was like one of the first 15 episodes I think. And he so he makes these camera bags who knew? And they do like, I don't know at the time like 70 million a year in Revenue off of camera bags and I was and like clips for your DSLR cameras. Like what the hell is that big of a market and he had done it off of Kickstarter and he kind of inspiring guy and as I was talking to him, I go. So what's your philosophy around business? He goes
Got these like plans, they got these ideas but of like he's like life and business is just a six inches in front of your face. It's just, this is just held up his hand 6, this is for you guys. I just look at this and I just do six inches in front of my face. It's all I'm focused on and I just do that every day and that stuck with me. And so we have our, you can't see it on the wall. Here, I wrote six inches in front of our face, on a giant, like posted, like a giant sticky pad thing. These things are great, by the way, you should buy these. A giant sticky pad things.
Where you sort of tear the paper it's like a huge Post-It. Note that goes on your
wall dude at monkey and Ferno your old office. You are like that guy. You always had white boards and like, pads. That was your thing. I was at the one, you were always standing up like writing. Yeah, that was you, you always said that
you can do, you know, what's special quickest? So yeah, I have it here and it says the six inches in front of our face and so the first thing we do every day when he comes over is weary prioritize the six inches front of our face like what are the small no-brainer
Steps forward that will make this like 1% better today and we the first three hours of the day, we don't do anything else. Besides knock those out, I think theoretically we could do that for eight hours a day. I would get bored out of my mind. Also I can kind of get eight hours of work done in three hours of focus, when I put my mind to it. And so that's what we do first. And then for the rest of the day, we think, okay? What, what else could Leap Frog? Something, forward Beyond those 1% obvious improvements. So we knock out anything. Anything we can think of. That's a one percent.
Sent obvious Improvement, the six inches in front of our face first. And so, that's how we've been able to stay. Dude, do you
chaired something on Twitter about, what's this football, players named Russell
Russell O'Connor? Yeah.
Oh my God. So, I'm not a football. I'm not a sports guy at all. So I didn't even know who this person was and you'd shared this thing. That's basically, who is he? He was, he was he good?
He was awesome. He was a former lineman so lineman are you think the biggest guys on the football field? So he's probably 300 pounds or something like that. He's like 65.
He's 65 310 pounds when he played he was like, yeah,
and he was like a star like he won. He won a Super Bowl ring. He was a pro bowlers. Awesome, awesome player. I remember if he was playing on the Seahawks for a while, that's, that's kind of what I remember. He's now on Twitter, this couple of these athletes, like, in Dominican Sue Russell Okun, that are like, the kind of like on Tech Twitter somehow like it's
a rustles, you can DM, and they'll, and he's been, he's been replying to my dear. Yeah. Like, Matthew dellavedova invited me to an
event the other day. I was like, this is so cool that they've crossed over and they have
Got their athlete Camp. They've also got kind of business Tech interest. And by the way, the best thing about it is they come in so humble, which is like, they don't come in with this. Well, you know who I am personality, like, this Saturday. We do, I started this basketball pickup game, every Saturday, for Founders and investors out here in the East Bay, and we rent this gym and then we all just play pick up for like three hours and Zaza pachulia came and he's a, he's a former player on the Warriors and hero really tweeted like, oh yeah, I'll play and
I didn't invite him to the first because I thought he was joking when he replied and then he emailed me up. For the first was like, bro, what happened? I think at the end of no way was like, oh wait, you actually were going to show up and so he came this week and he was fucking awesome dude, like not awesome at basketball, obviously, he's also a basketball compared to us.
Zaza. Is it like a big Russian looking guy? I don't know where he's from. Yeah, where's he from? I don't
know. Sir, Bia or stickies from? I think he's from, sorry. I'm not. I'm sure.
He's just Googling Georgia. George Ian.
Yeah, he's like 7 foot. Aces.
He's a beast. And so now he works for the Warriors, he does like there is a side that they're operating fastball prices and investing for them. And you just super personable, super funny guy. Like was totally humble and like many people a, yeah. But with us for three hours, it was once is amazing. I was talking so much trash to him and he was just such a good sport about it. It was amazing. So I just, I got to say, I was sorry, I've been so impressed with the way that kind of like the athletes. I've seen that cross over into business and Tech, they do it with
Don't know so much finesse. It says really impressive.
Wait, what did you learn about? I love seeing pro athletes in real life and just like, seeing a joke around or like behind the scenes, it's Grim videos where they're like, hey, watch this. I bet I can jump over this thing. They jump over this like huge thing. You're like, oh my God, these people like we're not the same type of person. Was there any athletic attributes that he had? Or was he just totally
chilling? Well, yeah, for sure. I mean, if you see Zaza play in the NBA, so as I was basically like a screen center, like his number one skill was he could set it huge.
Pick to get Steph. Curry a shot, but when he played against us, right? He Steph Curry. He's just draining shots from all over the court. You, he didn't even take these shots in the NBA. You never saw him take these shots and he's just funny made all of them passed by pulling up from the three-point line and he has, I was like, when's the last time you played is like 2019? Like no way. Donna I've shot around. He's like I'm, you know, I'm in the basketball facility. So I should run. But he's like, I don't even know last time I like played it like I can't like a kind of like a competitive game. So a couple things to his warm-up was like a real warm up.
Like he like he's talking but he's doing these like hip flexor openers and I'm like, oh yeah, he's like he's actually an athlete. He's had. So I get his body ready. Many many, many times over. And so you see like a bunch of the dudes who come in and it's like, oh here's this VC, or here's this like Tech founder, and we're like, oh no, I'm just out of touch. My toes, is that what I do to warm up? Like, we don't know. We don't even know what to even know what to do to warm up. Whereas he's like doing these like you know, hip openers then the second thing is what he played. Obviously his game as a lot better than you see on TV cuz
You got to be a star in your role in the NBA, and he was a star in his role. As this like paint protector screen Setter here, he could do a lot of other things that he never got to show their. The other thing is like he's like a bear. So he was mostly just playing point. Guard is passing the ball mostly you know, obviously he could post any of us up, he's got a foot on all of us, you know, in terms of height. So he wasn't just abusing that but like we beat him the first game and then they won like six straight, you beat him, you'd be the same. If we won the first game video, they were just like, you know whatever. We got off to a quick start, but then the, they want to
60 run or something like that. Just crushing everybody. And then when we came back out to try to beat them as a very competitive game, and then it's like we poke the bear. They all of a sudden he started driving to the hoop and he started like playing like aggressive. It's like, oh yeah, don't forget the bear can kill you. The bear might be nice right now but the bear will let you know that. Like I could kill you if I wanted to and he
just shows what your style. He was a bit. Yeah he's like let's let's just put it to a six. Now we were at a three let's put him in the hole. Just put it out of six just for a few minutes. All right. Go back with three
listed. This has been a three up till now.
Now, I'm just going to show you that. That I'll go back down.
Wow, that's awesome. That I love seeing those types of people, like just like in normal settings and so talk about Russell. So Russell's doing, I saw him. You shared it, he has his website and it's here's why it's interesting one, he's doing a 40 day, water fast that alone is interesting. But what's even more interesting is he's doing it in a very like I wouldn't have expected this like six foot five 300-pound football player to be so introspective. And if you go to his website, do you know the name of his website? Actually? No. I won't have it.
If you just Google is name and then go to his Twitter and you could click off to the link, he's got this website a it's built on ghost, which is like a pretty like, in the no nerdy web
platform. I think it's soaking fast.com is least where the, that's where your host. If you just
Google it you'll see it. But it's like a yellow website and like he has email pop-ups and like everything is set up. Really actually like exactly how it should be. Like the email pop-up is like thoughtful and then you go to a confirmation page. That's thoughtful and he's blogging every single day and he's posting the same.
Picture every day. So as of now, I think he's started this thing at 260. I have been no, seriously,
buried. So he's gone. He's going on, a 40-day water-only fast. He's lost a hundred pounds so far doing it. And obviously, it's not just about the weight loss. It's about like sort of like the mental challenge in the mental Clarity, that he's getting as he's
Doing this, like, you know, sort of this this really intense fast. I think he's on day 21. Well,
he talks about how it's a spiritual thing and he basically like he's just so much more thoughtful than I ever would have pegged this guy just because I'm stereotyping like an NFL player and like his writing is very good. Very clear. And there's a lesson that he's learning each day and he talks about that and everything is well written. It's just wonderful. It's a really, really cool to say that I
do something worth day was the hardest. He has, because this is where the body is transitioning into a new state. So he's like I had headaches fatigue,
My body was transitioning to using fat as the energy source rather than you know the in the input of new, you know, carbohydrates and whatever,
and he looks good. So you could see even when he started it, you look at day one where he started, he still looked pretty lean. Now, you look at him and he's starting to get like skinnier and skinnier, and skinnier. And his writing is starting to change. It's very fascinating and he's been tweeting about it every day as he goes. I need a blogging about. I think it's awesome. I love seeing this, right? Yeah. And he's also like he's on day 21. He's on day 21.
He's also like a Bitcoin.
Max, he's an interesting guy. By the way, there's a guy. I met named Byron Jones, who retired this year, he was like one of the best quarterbacks in the, in the, in the league and he retired, I think at 30. So he came into the league, probably 21 22 and he retired at 30, which is an early retirement and he got paid very well probably made, like, I don't know 80 million dollars play in the NFL but he had said something when he retired which is I can't run or jump anymore and which is shocking because this is like one of the most athletic guys that was in the NFL at
When he was playing, and I went to a dinner, we
had a 44 inch vert, wow, 44 inch per and now he's gonna flip broad jump, freak,
my buddy Romijn Host, this event called game time every year in LA, and it's basically a mix of investors and athletes to get together. And so, I've gone last couple years and he hosts his dinner and at the dinner, there was a few NFL players on the table and they all mentioned, like, I forgot what they've caught orbital. Indict orbital is not the steroid, it's like some shot. That NFL players get the basically to
A pain tolerance shout of pain reduction shop painkiller and there were just like, dude that shot, it's like magic and it's a curse
because it doesn't make you feel better, right? It just makes you not feel pain. No. Do you feel better? But sorry, doesn't cure an injury but it doesn't cure the underlying
issues. It's like you, he's like, we would go from, you know, Sunday, you play Monday, you feel bad Tuesday. You feel like man, I was in a car accident and their body feels like it's in a car accident. You're like, there's no way I'm gonna be able to practice on Thursday.
And play next Sunday. Like that's just like where my body's at on Tuesday versus Sunday? Seems crazy and they said that like, like man that, you know, like the culture and NFL is like, you got to play obviously. So these like a lot of guys get in the habit of taking this one shot T. Something I forgot what it's called and they take the shot in there like it's like a miracle dude. Like within an hour you're running again and they're like you went from not, you know, like limping to like you're just back to you but also every time you do it it's like taking
Shortens your career because it's this so bad for your body. What you're actually doing to your body when you do that, you're not like not like the underlying tissues of healed in the process. It's kind of a crazy thing. So I think one cool thing about Russell's doing is he's basically like trying to rewind the clock on when you're in when your alignment they tell you to beef up and what he's doing is doing a sort of a rapid and drastic change in his physiology in order to get his weight down so that he can live a little, you no longer healthier life as he goes.
Yeah, he said I went to a pulmonary embolism. I don't know what that is. Is that a hard thing? I had lacerated lungs, no idea how you get lacerated lungs, but that's why I'll Series. Yeah, a series of surgeries ligament and tendon ligament intended damage and getting up every day was just really hard. I thought, magically when I finished playing it would get easier but it got harder I'd completely depleted my testosterone so he basically just explains he's like I was left in shambles and so that's I guess one of the reasons why he's done this and I think it's really, really
Cool. I don't think I'm going to do it. Shout out to have, I like, I like seeing him do it. What else? You
got? I like this question. I got so a guy tweeted at me. I want to get your take on. It says name is Christian. Von offal Great Name. The Christian says, question for you, Sean he goes, what work? Seems like small boy stuff, but actually packs a punch. So we have this phrase, we say, on the pot all the time, no small boy stuff, and we don't even, like, spend a ton of time to finding it, because honestly, it's always stuff is kind of obvious, but I would say the,
General buckets of small, boys. Stuff would be, you know, overly worrying about things. Small boy, stuff would be thinking small rather than thinking big thinking short term rather than thinking long-term caring too much about what other people think of you. There's a whole bunch of things that you classify as small boy stuff like, complaining, when things get hard or things, don't go your way complaining in general, waiting in general, these are all like small boy moves,
but I thought his question was great because the magic is in things that other people think are small, but actually pack a punch and I had an answer, but I'm curious what your answer would be. I'll give you wanted me to go. First, you want to go
first? I'll give you a very quick example. We had our, I keep talking about the off-site, my CEO of the company, he put all this effort into creating like little individual awards for people and like, writing like appreciation notes and like being very thoughtful in the itinerary and I was like dude just like who gives a shit. Let's just get the room and hang out. He put all
Work into it, spend hours and hours, and hours, 100% worth it. I was giving him a hard time and then afterwards I go. Nope, you are right. I was wrong. That that is an example of things that seem below your pay grade that you, you proved. It was worth it,
love it. I would actually also give you credit because that would be one of my answers, which is admitting when you're wrong openly and quickly. I remember hearing a story about one of the guys at Sequoia who's awesome, like help build Sequoia and like most successful VC brander, one of the most in a
Long time, somebody asks, like what makes him great? They go all he cares about is getting it, right? He'll be in a meeting with you. He'll say his opinion and somebody else will say their opinion. And, you know, most people either start to debate or like, we're talking past each other thing. I'm talking about one thing you're talking about another, and I'm the boss. So, I'm gonna get my way and he's like, he's the first guy, and he has his phrase. He always says, well, he would go. Okay, no, I like your way better. Let's go with that like, nope, that's better. Like let's go with. That is a awesome small.
Big thing you could do as a leader in any company it sets the culture that it's not about who's right it's about getting it right getting to write you know over time here's what I wrote as some of my answers I said small things that seem like small boy stuff is actually big doing customer service yourself early on. So being on the front lines answering customer service emails, questions feedback picking up the phone, all that stuff manually on burning your first 10 or 100 users. So literally yourself sitting there with them. Go
going to sit side by side with them, having them install your product or on board onto your product and answering, their questions. Seems like an unscalable small boy, way of you spend your time actually. No, it's a huge, huge thing. And I'll teach you a lot about your product and your Market sending follow-ups follow-ups, following up with somebody who didn't answer, you always feels like you know, like a little low status bitch move but it packs a big punch follow-up server, where all the magic is. And I think there's also a big piece of follow-ups, which is a lot of people don't follow up because they don't hear back.
Back. And they assume.
They say they're saying, no, they don't like me. They hate, they hate this idea. I don't look stupid when they get in their head about it. They start assuming the worst instead assume the obvious people are busy and they forget people are busy and didn't get around to it yet. And when you follow up with that mindset, that's the sort of no small boy, mind centers. Like I'm offering something of value to this person. Of course, they would want it. Maybe they haven't yet. Seen the value in it. Maybe I didn't convey properly, or there's haven't got around to it, they're busy and that's okay. I'm
Here. And the other one I wrote was finding things that record daily and making them two percent better because daily things that you do the things you do with high-frequency compound if you made them slightly better. And so this is where I think a lot of people are like why are you optimizing for your shoes or your mattress or your pillow or whatever? Like I'm a stickler for how a meeting starts. I'm always like no, no at the start of every meeting we say all right the purpose of this meeting is this and a good outcome of this meeting would be why
If you can't say X and Y, like, we're not doing the meeting, I'll stop people and I'll say no to do this or when people talk, I'll be like, hey, you know, you're talking to really low voice and you're not sitting up straight like can you just do it like say it with some energy, it'll make a difference and like but that's every meeting then people know, that's how we do meetings. And so once you teach me how we do meeting, we're gonna have a lot of meetings at this company. So now we're going to make them better. We're not just going to have shitty meetings and let him. Let him slide. So finding recurring things and making them slightly better because it will compound over time though.
Oh, that was mine. What was your
back? What was your partner's name at Monkey Inferno?
Forgot forgot,
forgot. I think was like, I don't know him well, but I could only I could hang out with them for 30 seconds and I could just tell he's the man at seeing redundancies seeing things that you do over and over and over again and be like, yeah we're going to get rid of that and we're going to fix it by doing this. This and this and it seems like you're like, dude, you're just slowing us down. What are you doing? He's like, no, no, no. You got to go fast to go slow or you gotta go. Slow to go fast. He seems like that time personalities. He did, he do that all the time?
He was
Definitely. He had, you know, the hackers laziness which was like I'm not going to do something, unless I'm less, it's clear that it's going to that it matters but I'm just gonna do shit just to do shit. That's first thing. Second thing, I'm not going to do the same thing every day. If I'm doing it, if I have to do multiple times, I'm automating this and same thing. He would look around and be like, what's Shawn, dude? What's Jason doing? Like the non-technical people. And he be like,
Hey Neal. You see? Jason keeps what he's doing is he's going and finding each person manually on Twitter. You should just scrape this whole list, put it in a database and and copy paste, this code snippet so that he could put that on his machine so that he could just have his leads ready so he can go faster he would do a lot of stuff like that. Like he told a story Hurley at Apple of it's a beloved was a mobile ad tech company that is now worth billions of dollars and he was a co-founder of it and what furqan told me a story. He's like yeah Adam
I'm the CEO. He's like one thing he really cared about was his dashboard like what does the our dashboard look like? So that I have visibility and he's like he's like I kind of watched a time to see like is there really any value out of this and he just you know sometimes CEOs just have pet projects they just want to look nice and he's like is it that or is there value or so he shattered him. He's like all right, I'm not going to say my computer instead of your computer you show me. What are you looking at with this dashboard? What do you do with it? And so he showed him and he's like, yeah, I'd like this. I look at this and that tells me who we need to go after for these deals. And I need to figure out how much to offer them.
I can get them faster like, you know, instead of just saying you should work with us for these features. If I just make a monetary offer, that's better than their current ad Network, they'll switch. And he's like, okay, so you need to figure out this list. You need this data. That you need to know a projection of how much we can make with them, so you can offer less than that. But still, more than what they're probably making for the current ad Network. And I should show you which, what the current ad network is in this dashboard. I'll just figure that out by looking at their SDK Bawa, a look. He basically put together this like command.
Center for the CEO and he's like you're basically built a sales tool rather than working on features of the product. He's like I'm going to build you something and what they did was they would go to a developer. They say you should use our ad Network and they're like already have an ad network. Is a cool. I'm guessing your ad network based you $9 CPM and they're like, yeah, something like that. He's a cool will pay $22. Is it? How can you that don't work? There are nine hours better. I consider to convince all right now works better, but I'll just sign this paper that says we're already going to pay you $20, no matter what
Like I'm just confident going to perform because I know I never expected and they're like, okay, he's a but here's the, you know, you gotta switch and we have these two Engineers standing here next to me. They're gonna help you switch today and then they would just and they just rolled through the ad Market because they were able to go to people and make them no-brainer offers, how do they make them no-brainer offers? They, because they had this Command Center internally. That was how big is this app? What are they currently using? How much are they currently making? How much do we think we can make of off them? And then how do we have a spread there that we can work with?
With. And so I thought that was a great example of fork on figuring out how to make the company successful in a way that most Engineers would not do because most Engineers just want to work on product and not even product. Like the under the hood parts of the product, which is like, even worse than making the product better.
Dude, this is the most wholesome episode we done in like, two months
because we weren't talking about like, CEOs, fighting each other and
shit, no one's making. No one's getting made fun of or totally, aligned lots of take home value here. This is, this is a, this is like the most wholesome thing we've done in a long time. I actually had like, I feel like I'm learning this is this episode was good because I'm sitting here in a notebook. Taking notes, I'm learning. That's a good some learning. Yeah, I love that. Well, that's it. That's the episode good pod.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it. Like a Days on the Road Less Traveled never looking back.
All right, everyone, that's the end of my first million. However, I've got good news. You see, if you liked this episode, we actually have another podcast. The hustle has another podcast, it's called The Hustle Daily Show to daily podcast. That has everything you need to know about business and Tech and only a few minutes. It's awesome. Our best writers, like Zack Crockett are behind it. It's incredibly fascinating. I listen to it daily so check it out. The hustle Daily Show.
