We're live Sean and palm you guys did a podcast together on pumps podcast. I actually did it last year in New York or this year before Corona happened Sean. Who is this guy?
This is Pomp known as if he's known as pops name's Anthony promptly on. Oh Pop Leon. Oh, is that the right way to say it close enough? Yeah, then let us say it how you would say pop Liana probably on okay great. This dudes everywhere man. If you don't know him, you don't know us probably that's kind of my rule of thumb is guys.
Twitter investor x Facebook guy big time in the Bitcoin world. Everybody knows him if you're in crypto. And again, if you're not in crypto, probably not listen to this podcast, so I was gonna ask you how it's going but really all I want to know is who was better me or Sam on your podcast
will question
will see you've got a
cheat because Sam got to do it in person and I can't remember if we live streamed or not, but it's
always easier in person. I think it sounds like you're saying Sam and that's what
I actually think
I'm the audio download your Beating Sam in the first couple hours. Well, okay great. I have to go back and look that's all that
matter now sat-nav seems to be a
competitive. Well, so I just looked at I'm looking at the someone already commented and they said ice they called Sean a goon and I was like going to hop in but it was actually a compliment. They said I listened to this goon and the bigger goon sampar on my first million everything. I was once like what the fuck and they said that it said hands down the best podcast out there. Sorry pump. You're my second favorite. I'll take
That's fine. Second place to you guys is perfectly fine. I was telling Sam on the last episode. I was like dude, I prepared for this podcast interview. I did as like I've sent to my email being like hey, you know, here's a bunch of shit we can talk about because I know if I'm the host that's what I want to get and so hopefully turned out good. Anyways, everybody should go check it out. Go to pumps podcast. Yeah. Listen to us talk over there. We did a bunch of I basically took Sam. I don't know if you heard it took a but I
did I'm listening. I was listening to it right before this. I
took a bunch of our best ideas over there.
There and I was like, here's a bunch that we brainstormed and then you know, we just shot the shit after
that. Yeah. My favorite part is that you sent me that really detailed email which I told you and I'll repeat again was incredibly helpful and then I didn't return the favor so sorry.
Yeah. Well, you know, not everybody's me not everybody can put in that prep work. This is like, you know, one of the things I was talking about to how I'm lazy, but then when I do something I go like really over the top with it. So I just either don't do a whole lot of things I should do like, for example, you know now that I was on your podcast I see all the
Little things you're doing it's like, oh it gets posted on to LinkedIn and it gets posted multiple times on to Twitter kind of on like hits the different time zones. It's like do these are you know, basic blocking and tackling best practices, but I know I'll never do and so we will never get the gains of that. I don't think Sam's gonna do that either.
That's it. If we want to yeah, if you want to understand I think of it in terms of batches. So IQ got to do 50 episodes and then you've earned the right to like learn, you know 101 course stuff then like you do another 15. I've reached a hundred episodes.
Episodes now you unlock like 201 learnings and so as you keep going like there's things that these folks have done thousands of episodes. They understand it way better than you guys are myself. But just to kind of get to a thousand episodes and then somehow we magically learn that
stuff too. Well, this is episode number 100. So this is a big
milestone. Yeah. So pump you you are known for this podcast you have now and you're known for being a Twitter personality, right? I mean that's like the high level to be
I have no clue how that happened. But yeah, I think that a lot of people that's actually how they know me, which is pretty crazy. How many people listen to your podcast roughly so far this year. We just last week crossed over 10 million downloads for the year. Wow. Wow. Wow, so you're and before that you worked at snap and you worked at Facebook where you an executive or a product manager or what as a product manager at Facebook. How did you get
this job at snap? Dude? I feel like you went from like, you know normal person at Facebook to you. Got a pretty big.
Each job at snap and I know who bunch of shit went down to I don't know if you could talk about all of it. But can you talk about how you even got that job? Because a pretty legit role for what you have done before that, right?
Yeah. I think a lot of it is one just the progression of people on the growth team at Facebook. So there's plenty of people who'd gone to go run the growth Team Ed other kind of high flying early stage startups. So, you know Ed Baker went to Uber Somebody went to lift. Somebody went to are BB the yeah, whatever.
That
definitely doesn't help when you kind of come from the right farm system if you will and then internally at Facebook, you know, really kind of Built My Reputation internally just right time right place. I got there and they were like, hey, you should go do this Facebook pages thing. I was like, I have a page and I know you have a profile that's different than a page. I was like, oh, okay. Well, let's page and so, you know, they're just like hey go grow that and small team but just kind of worked on the right thing at the right time and next thing, you know, it exploded. It was kind of like this green feel right when you have an optimized
at all literally just like changing the color to a button can lead to you know, fifteen percent gain or whatever it is. And so very quickly just became like hey, there's this game of growth and you seem to be pretty good at it. So like what's movie around internally and kind of do a bunch of different things and then I think really just reputation spreads from there and
I got one question for you from your time to Facebook. So on the brainstorm when we do the brain storms, we have all these different kind of like themes some like we're just find that a bunch of ideas fit in the same buckets.
One of the buckets I was talking about is what I call the export bucket, which is like if you're ever at a big company, you see a whole bunch of problems and solutions. And so you see problems that you didn't know existed and it's like dude we would import a solution we would buy a solution for this if somebody could solve this
problem for us. We would have bought
and then on the other side, it's like we have this problem. We kind of made an internal tool man. If this should actually exported every company should have this tool and I think Facebook is probably the most popular one where that has happened where they just people have left Facebook and just
Tick the Facebook internal tool and made it as a stool for everybody else. Is that something you've seen like I can you talk a little bit about that because I don't think most people know about that.
So definitely that is a one strategy. There was also although many of them. I think I've left at this point. There was this like little angel investor Mafia at Facebook and it was kind of like the rite of passage. If you were leaving to go to a competitor, they weren't excited. If you were leaving to go to like a non-competitive but large tech company, you know, how L wish is and if you even start a company you basically
Like go see the mafia
right
in kind of a very nice friendly way, but really was just you could literally walk out of the door with Angel investment, right and kind of have your precede round receive around done. And so through that process. There's a lot of people who just say, hey, I'm going to go build X company. It's like why internal tool but for everybody
else and everybody gets it right away. They're like, oh, yeah don't like I
use that every day. Right? So, I mean one of them that I I'm sure it's out there. I haven't seen it but was a huge factor to Facebook's growth was internationalization is the way they describe it but
The way that they did it was really key early on Facebook looked at other companies like well, how do you get an international markets? Like it's a different language. And so most people would go and they would like translate their site do all that kind of stuff Facebook actually took the opposite which was they just open sourced it to some degree. They basically said hey if you're a user and you speak both like, you know English and whatever the national language is, like, can you help us and all of the support poured in and so they were able to really tap into the user base and get all of the translations done and also get it done much more accurately.
Stir kind of Moore's Caleb lie, whatever and so I've always one that mechanism of just like how do you have a tool that you can ask your users to do the work for you? So it creates a better experience for them and all of the other users on the platform. That's like a really interesting mechanism. And then the second is specifically around translation, you know most companies now that the internet has become much more kind of adopted around the world literally just getting into new markets by translating could could lead to a lot of growth so it's kind of an immediate. What was your title at Snapchat?
Officially, I think it was actually don't remember
either had a had a
growth or growth lead. I can't remember. Basically it was like hey, you're going to come in run the growth Team Awesome. Wow. Okay, what do you want to do
H hates it because I just put random shit as my title and Linkedin that doesn't match my internal title because my internal titles like a real technical like it's like ten words long and might know I think what I really do is I lead International growth. So I'm going to say I'm the head of international growth. There is no such a role inside of twitch, but I'm the cliff there was one I think I might be that and it
Is this people off to no end but I'm like dude, this is one of those things it can't be enforced or nobody's going to really enforce it and it's just really funny how people do that. Everyone's like a VP on LinkedIn and internally there like Junior associate.
So one of the things that cracks me up, you know, I grew up on the East Coast went to the West Coast and there was definitely like this culture difference between kind of East Coast companies, but also like the Wall Street for Silicon Valley type thing and so now back living in New York and what you see is like every single person like, you know exactly where they are the org structure by
Title on Wall Street, right. Are they an analyst so their principal are they managing director of a VP? Like it's pretty well documented in our and kind of you know, it's level set. Right? Yeah, and it's like and by the way and people like really want to title in Silicon Valley is exactly you just described like a literally people, you know, hey, I'm the chief janitor, right? Like they could care less about the titles, you know, it's just kind of like joking around and it's much more about kind of work product. So, I don't know just an interesting tidbit that that I've noticed kind of gone back and forth between the two coasts and you're known as
Got Bitcoin guy. I mean that's like one of your one of your one of your worlds,
right? You guys are coming up with every
label possible. It's like
hey, you're the Twitter guy. You're the podcast. Well going guy. You're the investing guy.
You know how like Sean's the framework guys Sean loves framework. I I tend to like I like to label stuff and I like to put it in these boxes because it helps me understand even though I know that it's not the whole truth. It's as
part of that attend. Will somebody will come on and they'll be like telling about their expect. What do you what?
Your business do we ask as you should they explain for like two minutes and seems like I'm going to say like in stupid words. Basically what you guys do is you charge a whole bunch of money for people to read your newsletter, whatever, you know, like some random like simple over simplification. It's
great. That's a super powerful skill to have is take complex ideas and get them into simple language. Well, it's like it's like look, I know that like I'm gonna insult you but you're basically like my space but you're like a little better and different correct. So so what is your using that logic? What's your
Capture the hustle. I usually say we're like Wall Street Journal but for like 20 year old dudes who are interested in
entrepreneurship. Yeah, that's not that's not the dumbed-down version. That's that's still like not a thinker a desultory. That's the sales pitch. Yeah. That's okay.
We would you want it to be we write about a bunch of business stuff and some people pay money to advertise and other people pay money to access the information. I don't know is that
right? It would just be like every morning we said that like I sent an email with the news and a shit ton of people read it like that's that's base.
Okay, that's
fair. That's what I like think all your newsletter business is kind of simple. But okay, I that is my own. You're giving me my own medicine, but what you're known as I mean you do you do a lot of Bitcoin stuff, right? Yes. Got it. Okay. I just trying to give the audience and perspective here. So yeah. All right. So look, basically here's the helmet the way I think about it is I was in the Army are then built to very small technology companies that essentially were failures, but I like navigated nicely.
Yeah, yeah exactly. Like, you know did way better than I should have then went to Facebook went to snap and they start investing full-time and started out kind of full generalist early stage investor and then like double and triple down on bitcoin and crypto and all that stuff and you know, I still do some things outside of it, but for the most part that's pretty much it and I just think it's like what the most Innovative areas. And did you make enough money at snap and Facebook that you're using your own funds to invest in stuff. Is that how it works?
Worked or did you raise money? So in the beginning one of my partners and I we started out with personal capital and we did I think it was like 80 or something. So it wasn't a lot of money that we kind of put out there but it was definitely enough where we kind of felt like hey do like we know what we're doing right? Like can we like find a deal can we negotiate the actual terms like one investor take our money like all the basic stuff that like if you're a really kind of insecure when you're first starting something new you want to make sure like if I'm going to lose money it's going to be mine. Not somebody else's and it also is helpful when you've got a partner who
He sold a company for almost half a billion dollars. That's so like yeah. So he like it is is a little bit more wealthy than most people but when we were doing this, it was just like hey, like, do you know what we're doing? And then once it was like, okay like these are like interesting and like we could like show other people like hey, here's the first date that we did like, we'll put these into a fond if you put money into the fund to and then like well like be partners
and the lp so I know that sounds awesome. And
so literally we did that and then what we started to do again because
we had no clue we're doing is we would go to a founder and we'd be like, hey your company looks awesome. You're awesome. We want to invest but like we're like raising the fund as we're writing the checks. So like I want to invest but let me come back to you with a number once I like go talk to the LPS and then we'd go back and be like, hey, if you put money into the fund, then we can do this deal. Like here's the actual deal. Is this a great deal they like that's an awesome deal like, okay cool. Like if you gives a hundred k, then we're gonna put on your cane this company plus you get exposure to all the other deals in the fund and so people
Like oh, this is awesome and they would give us the money and then we do it and so like that's like very like hand-to-hand combat fundraising type stuff, but when you're starting out and literally you'll take like 1,500 paychecks for like a precede fund. It's just the only way that you can is to like build a track record, right? And then once you can't even work anyway, oh, yeah. Yeah, so I probably can't share the financials but people a lot of people know so we invested in imperfect produce in the alcohol Cyrano's like 12 million dollar valuation that company has done.
Done incredibly. Well, we also invested in Everly Wellness. That's there like your own. Okay. So yeah. So Julia, I think we invested like 15 million dollar valuation. They're absolutely crushing it. What else is in there?
These weren't crypto projects you were just doing now is investing.
Yeah. These are all early stage completely agnostic. Like what was really interesting is we lived on the east coast in North Carolina. We were doing remote investing only there wasn't the cool term for it at the time. It basically was like use your computer and try to be smart like out work people.
Because you don't live in San Francisco or New York at the moment. And so we ended up investing. I think it was like 12 or 14 cities or something. Like we literally didn't care where people were located because it was all virtual and the second thing was 25% The founders were female. Right? So 25% the Cubs had a female founder. I think it's the right way to say it but like that wasn't a mandate. It's like after the fact like all the me to stuff happened like all that. We like I wonder how many, you know female Founders we have in our portfolio. We went like did the math and I do think that this whole idea of having like investing remotely just
naturally like broadens the Horizon you're willing to kind of invest in other geographies other types of people whatever so be interesting to see kind of the covid impact it early stage investing. All right. Today's episode is brought to you by Tempo Tempo dot fit is the website. I actually use this I've used this for a few months now and it's this machine that has a touch screen in this 3D sensor and what it does is they give you wait. So like a hundred fifteen pounds of weights and it's for strength training. So what it is is it measures your body and it's easy
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And I use it all the time. So check it out. And then the last piece is all mentioned is a company called Cub coats. This one's awesome. I know those
guys. Yeah. Oh, do you okay? Well, I've met him and then other friends are told me about coconuts since since I met him, he was always doing a little internet internet Jazz basically and I was like, this guy's smart. Oh man. What is
it? So we invested was called jacket pets at the time and jacket pets was literally the idea of this kid is like Park who I remember correctly. He
e like basically
was our guy. Yeah, you like go to people be
like Sam. You've got an awesome product. I'll put on Kickstarter in like I know the formula and will sell like ten million dollars on Kickstarter and he did this like multiple times and eventually was just like hey, I'm in this for myself and so jacket pets was take a stuffed animal kids don't want to leave it behind and so like let's put a zipper in the back and then when you unzip the stuffed animal you can like turn it inside out like press it inside out and it will turn into a kid's jacket and so like you're like that's kind of like a
The idea by like this kid understands Kickstarter. Like I'm sure he could like come out of the gate and then we start a couple of LPS who were already in the fund and every single one of them was like my wife would buy that tomorrow or like my husband thinks. This is a great idea, you know, whatever for my kids. Okay. This might have legs we invest he one kills kick for I forget the metrics but like, you know knocks out a park to then he goes and he starts licensing. So he does like licensing deals with everyone from like major sports leagues to like the Disney marvels of the world, whatever and then he gets
Him into retail he saw him on like he just like explodes the business as one of our best performing Investments is like, you know doing like with it. It is eight figures of Revenue. It will put it that way. Wow, so it's like a real business right? It's not like a hey we sold 300 thousand dollars on Kickstarter and like we're all right. It's like a legitimate business where Kickstarter happened and then they built a scalable business on the back end, you know, both retail and online Okay, I want to talk about some ideas Sean is okay if we get into it.
I've never said no,
okay.
Before we do. Well, this is kind of an idea. I want to I'm running down my notes of what you're talking about. I want to talk about this export stuff from Facebook, but I'm currently traveling pomp. I'm looking for where I want to settle down and there's this great book. I'm reading and I'm learning about called tribe. Have you heard of that tribe? Yeah, and I've not okay. It's called try but it's all looks like what makes tribes and one of this guy's one of the points is guy makes is that and Israel the rate of PTSD for so
Rogers is like 1% But in America it's like 25% because soldiers go and do their thing and they shockingly where this shocking for me as someone who's never done anything like that. They are depressed when they come home because they love being in a tribe in the military and they even though they're risking their lives and they were drinking like you should be non alcoholic beer and there were so many reasons to be unhappy because it was hard. They felt wonderful they felt camaraderie and that what gave him fulfillment and it's like they are in the trenches to not really
The country but this help their their their peers their Partners in the military and it gave them purpose and in America, we do a really bad job of like, you know, we go to our Suburban home and it's like it off my property or you know, stay away from my home. This is mine. That's yours. Did you sense that when you came home from sir? You were in Afghanistan you said right Iraq, Iraq. Sorry. Yeah. So for those that don't know I was the military for six and a half years ended up when I left the military has a sergeant infantry deployment to Iraq in 2008.
Thousand nine was ontology which is like 12 miles north of Baghdad. So I've never heard it described as the tribes and I'll read the book and let you know what I think about that specifically but one of the things I've always told people is people are like weird and they always have like asked like stupid questions and so they'll be like, why don't you have PTSD and I'm
like, okay. Well, I guess we're gonna have that conversation, but I like sometimes people ask like within the first 20 minutes of meeting them. You're like man you really have no filter,
but the way that I've always liked thought about it is I went from
Playing football in college which is like a pretty violent sport all dudes a lot of camaraderie. They call that kind of stuff to then. I got deployed when I was a junior. So I literally got pulled out of school got deployed to a much more violent situation, right? Obviously, there's guns bullets Bombs all kind of stuff but still all dudes and a lot of camaraderie and then when I came back, I actually went back and played football. So my transition back was not like in Iraq two weeks on you know, transitioning back and then like working at you know, one of my friends
At Home Depot, right? Like that's like a really really, you know, black and white contrast for me. It was going back into playing football violent sport, right? Camaraderie guys. I like all of the ingredients were there. They basically just took away our guns. Right? And so I've always credited that with like the transition being much easier and it makes a lot of sense in this tribes kind of framework where we probably could do much better if we literally just kept people tied into something or it's my Identity or whatever. Do you feel like
Where do you you and your wife Congratulations, by the way, you and Paulina right? Do you guys you live in Manhattan now? We do do you feel like you have tribe A Tribe at all in a high-rise building. So in the building? No, I don't even think I could tell you a single person that we know in the building by name. But I mean you got like easy stuff like the doorman and stuff like that that we talked to every day whatever but we got a lot of friends right that are kind of
all throughout Manhattan and you know, we generally are our social to some degree in try to kind of meet up with people every weekend or whatever. So I think that helps it's just not building specific. The reason I'm bringing this up is because this is a business podcast and I think that there's a ton of opportunity that's going to happen. I think that gen Z and now our generation because we're a remote I think there's going to be a massive massive problem with loneliness and men in particular above the age of
Who are single have a huge problem meeting people and I was reading the stats and it's crazy that since the 1950s right after World War II as we move to The Burbs and as we got a little bit more stoic like we're men aren't supposed to you know, talk to men with a sense of Love. Although I think that's improved a lot recently. But anyway, I think Ben are going to be crazy lonely more lonely than normal and the next handful of years and
as someone who's ex-military, I don't hang out with a lot of military guys. I was like what if he experienced that because there's some opportunity there. I think so two things that I would say is one. I definitely think that businesses that are able to build the communities not just have customer bases are going to do incredibly well coming, you know coming out of this whole covid thing and then also just in general in a digital age and some of it is like addressing the loneliness and then some of it also is just the internet provides you the ability to find people who have similar interest.
Like that's really hard to do if you didn't have the internet and you lived in Manhattan, but you basically have to like try to go to bars and find like okay, where's the people who like my sports team right or like where's this whatever the internet you just like go to I don't know Chicago Bears.com, even though they're not very good team because the chance for better but you know, it's like that's kind of one piece. And then the second piece also is I still think that there's a ton of innovation to happen around meeting people. So you see some of this with like the what is it lunchtime dot a is
Or something right lunch meat
or much money or something like that. Yeah, whatever it is.
You see this with like the clubhouse kind of the the drop in audio whatever but it's just like I think a lot of people think of that category specifically is like, oh it's over right like, oh we have Twitter we have whatever like I actually think that it hasn't even started yet. And even if you go to the extent of so here's an idea for you dating apps. What's the number one problem with dating apps in if you guys had to guess if you went and talked to a hundred people. What do you think their biggest issue would be
For women creepy men, I guess an appropriate men. So along those lines one of the things I've heard people talk about over and over again is like the false promotion right? Like oh this guy looked like he was going to be so hot and attractive and whatever and like I met him. He looks nothing like his photo right or like man this girl like I was so into her and then like we met for a date and she had like a squeaky voice and like I didn't want to like hang out with her anymore. She was annoying right or whatever. And so I think
At one of the opportunities. I've literally pitched this to so many people and nobody will build it. So I whoever builds it please reach out to me is to create a dating app just called authentic and all you do is you hold down the screen rights. There's no profiles are no taxes. No anything when you open the app, you just hold down the screen to create your profile and a random question pops down and it's the selfie video. You've got to answer it on the spot just like you would, you know a date or an event or whatever and you can review it afterwards, but you
It save it. So you either get to choose right then and there I want this to be public or I want to discard it. And then if you discard it, you hold that down again, you get a different question. You don't know the questions are it's completely kind of authentically you there's no filters. There's nothing it's video so I can hear your voice. I got to see your mannerisms. I got to see if you're smart or not, whatever and not only do I think people would create the content imagine the consumption experience. It would be like watching, you know American Idol audition tapes, right? You can just see there just get there and just keep scrolling.
So Jews, but would you and I would never invest in the dating space. Would you I think that again going back to people think that categories over. I think it's probably one of the most ripe categories for not only disruption but also to those businesses make incredible amounts of money when done correctly like separate so few of them are done, correct, like like there's it's like one of those it seems like one of those spaces where there's a few winners that kill it and then everyone else
dies. Do you have what name a space is not like that, right?
What space does not have a handful of winners and then everybody else dying right lommers cleaning services like fun. Are you gonna go invest in a plumber? Like what is a man
with a plumber? It's like a dating app to Marketplace. So you need
everyone. That's the type of investing. He does you put in you put in a dollar and you're trying to get over a hundred back and like the only types of companies that can return hundred thousand X are going to be things where there's a few winners that that win and win big
That's right. Hold on. Do you guys know what muz matches? Yes.
No, I don't tell me he's got these guys are going to love the fact. I'm even mentioning that they don't even remember. I talked to them three or four years ago. It's a dating app for Muslims Muslims have the largest religion in the world and there are a number of intricacies and nuances to dating. So please God. Hope I don't get any of this wrong but like little things like are you Halal or not? Right like what food? Do you consume? Are you willing to move to another country if you meet the right person on this app right there?
All of these little things that are very specific to that segment of the world population, they created an app and it's the largest dating app in the world for Muslims. And when I first heard that I was like where they got like 50,000 users like know it's a massive business and I haven't talked to them in literally two or three years. So I don't know kind of how it's played out, but I still see them all time online mentioned stuff like that. So it's like you can go do that for every single religion and I think people have done that you can go, you know city-by-city you can do all these different things and so you can take it.
Industry in just segmented then just rebuild the same infrastructure with a different kind of skin on it and probably do pretty. Well. I have a friend who did almost exactly that not
really a friend. I mean I met the guy and he came to one of my kind of like founder Mastermind things and it's like cool. What are you doing? It's like just a handful of people. He's like I'm going to build this dating app for Indian people. I was like, oh great. I'll have the time. I was a single Indian person was a great talk to me and I realize it is definitely not for me because he was like, the name was in Hindi is Dill Mill which means like hearts meeting or something and then basically what
It was like as people who wanted to get married. So it's more like the match.com or whatever. I remember, you know, the thing you're talking about where every group has like these small nuances that make a huge difference. Then he was he did like log in or sign you had to sign up with LinkedIn. I was like what the hell is this? He's like Dude any people care about like what your profession is, if you don't have a job like you're not a candidate like you you should not be in the pool if you don't have a job and that's four straight up. That's how I kind of old school and new people think is like number one, you know. Good job good family fair skin.
Like these are the attributes and if you can miss one, but you can't miss like job for example, dude, there's fart. There's farmer dating because what is that is that farmers or whatever? It's something like that. Yeah. So there's all these niches and so he sold the so anyways, I remember that day being like this is interesting actually that could work and then he was a really stubborn about one thing and I was like, okay, I don't want to invest in this guy. He's just so stubborn. He was like really insistent that you would only have 7 Seconds to look at a profile and decide and I was like cool like that's interesting mechanic, but like
Also might be total bullshit and like you might throw it away. He's like no trust me. No, and I was like, all right. This guy is just like way too stubborn. Anyways fast forward a few years. He sells that this year for 50 million dollars to I think one of the conglomerate groups like match or whoever like that IA sea or all of these. Yeah, they own all the dating apps because he picked a segment and like, you know, just drove that segment home and knew how to acquire users who had that particular problem.
That's pretty badass good for him. I love that idea like in and by the way, this is like a recurring theme is if you go and if you ask how much people like what are the verticals that are played out like those are actually the best ones to go after it. So I
guess when everybody has written off at this point, yeah,
it's just like consumer social 18 to 24 months ago actually like pretty good time to start and you see the rise of tick-tock all of a sudden you see, you know, all these things I explode.
It's just right when everyone thinks it's over. Like here we go again. So Sean has kind of like invented this export business topic that I want to bring up in a second. So think about like what could be exported from Facebook or Snapper?
Whatever I give you an example of one. That was that I heard of
well. Yeah. Yeah tell you tell your example Sean and then let them and then we'll go to a one topic and then come back so he has time to think. All
right. So the export example, there's a company called launch Darkly you familiar with them. I have not basically at Facebook and many big companies. They have obviously got a billion users.
If you launched a feature that sucks or is buggy or is going to decrease engagement like, you know, leaving a feature that decreases Revenue by 1% can be you know, tens of millions of dollars for these companies. So you have to be really smart about how you roll out a feature and especially with the App Store. You don't want to roll something out and then have to go through App Store re approval and take seven days like this how I used to be so Facebook built a system internally from what I understand. That was basically like it lets you launched a feature with a feature flag meaning it's off by default and then the engineer
Back in can turn it on for a subset of people. You could say. I want one percent of users to see this only and if it goes good with a 1% then I'll turn my knob and I'll get to get 5% 10% etcetera. So this is a standard feature that big companies have but small companies were never going to build the infrastructure to do something like this and so launch Darkly was like, you know a couple of x Facebook people spun out and they're like, hey, whatever. I forgot the internal name of that tool that Facebook. It's like, let's Call it Whatever code name Medallion. It's like, oh we're taking Medallion and we're making it available to every SAS company.
That exists and these guys have crushed they raised over 50 million dollars and it's because it's a sort of a known known quantity that you're taking the R&D of Facebook the infrastructure of Facebook and then you're basically saying no other company no small company could afford this investment will do the investment once and we'll sell it to every small company for a you know, a small monthly fee. And so they've been tremendously successful with a small feature like that
the first time I've ever heard of this and I've never heard of this export, you know framework is
because that's fucking
Marked as your boys original, you know, you people
forget like before you go work these big companies even and I joined Facebook when it was 3,800 employees like 4,000 somewhere there and when I left like basically two years later, it was already 12,000. So like like literally right when we were really really scaling and you forget like life before hand because you walk in and like a bunch of these tools are there and you're like, wow, I can like go 1% and 5% know I can Target based on geography and we should go to New Zealand because New Zealand
Speaks English and reporters don't you know nobody
reporters or there's they don't know what
features are we getting tested? Whatever but the first time that I started to help a friend after Facebook. I was like, oh, well, you should obviously just figure out like, what is your hook that identifies retention and he was like, what do you mean and I was like well at Facebook like I think if I remember correctly, it's like if you get 10 friends in seven days or something, right if you like friend 10 people then like there's like an 85 percent chance, whatever the number is. Yeah, but like that takes forever and early stage.
Like of course, that's it. Take me four weeks to get like any interesting data. So I just kind of figure it out now well and what they would do is one you've got to have the system to do the testing right to you got have enough data over a long enough period of time to actually know did it lead to you know, 30 92 year retention rates all that kind of stuff. And the third thing is you have to engineering capacity to change your product around to test all the different things. So I remember being like Oh, it's gonna be so easy like, you know, it's literally like an internal tool whatever and he was like, what do you mean I have like one engineer, you know two inches
Whatever it was he was like I can't do that. It's sort of like Googling around and there was a company amplitude which I think now is like pretty popular actually, but that was one of their big early selling points was like, hey, we can basically look at a bunch of your retention data and tell you like here's the thing. That is the highest signal as to having a retained user base and then you can like basically manipulate your product like make everyone go do that thing. So for Facebook, it's you know, if it's friending let's Force everyone to give us their contacts their emails, like whatever we could possibly do suggest the right friends once they hit their 10 friend.
You know quota or whatever that we could back off and let them enjoy Facebook. But like we're super aggressive in the first seven days to make sure that they hit that right for every product. There's
something slack has like you're I think it's a thousand messages was the was the Milestones like once you get past a thousand messages, you'll never turn off slack or something like that like a bunch of different companies have their their magic moment where it's like once you pass this magical threshold, we know we got you your you hit core value. You understand what this is all about and you're gonna have a great experience.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so what I want to give you a second to think about that because we all right because Shawn put you on the spot a little bit and are we both did but let me tell you something that I heard this week. There's this guy named Nick boober. I think his name is that I met I was driving doing and doing a live Twitter thing and Helix are talking to go dude. Let me talk to you now and he like call my other phone and we did like a live interview on Twitter is kind of cool and he was like, so what this guy did was he was in a service business and then he started to buy storage companies.
Put software on it and these consolidating them then that's cool. But he was like the thing that I learned about a service business is that it's it's not a problem about having too much demand because if I'm providing a service that's popular like I'm always going to have customers who want it the problem that I found is that
I can't like the people who want to work in this industry. It's hard to train them and I need to and he's like the real problem is and I didn't want to solve this problem was I needed to come up with a trading system that I could teach a fifth grader how to do XY and z and have a repeatable and make it work. Well, have you guys ever heard of this front? I mean, I don't know anything about services. But have you heard of this problem before Sean? Yeah.
I think this is the limit of every service business is how do I have enough people? I can't scale my time. I don't either want to or I can't anymore. So can I get other?
What to do what I do without losing the magic of what works for me, right? Like that's the biggest
issue and so I started researching this there's and there's there's a few things that do this. The first is there's a company called Health stream Health stream is publicly traded it's based in Nashville. I think it does 300 million in revenue and they teach nurses how to do the latest procedures. So if it like for Corona, it's like, all right, the new procedure for welcoming people's to do XY and z and they just have like Israeli. They just make videos and everyone logs in and
Watch the video. What are some interesting businesses that this could work for you know, it's and I've noticed it with my company even like training people to do this thing is it's actually hard like I just create this Google doc and I'm like fuck then I'm going to read this even though is going to make their job better. Well, it's two problems. Right? So one is the people who know how to do the task like one they've got to be good at documenting it and then two is you've got to get people to actually consume the content as well. Right? So it's almost like this two-fold problem and I got to imagine that there's a big business and every single regulated industry.
Right. So for cfa's for nurses, you know just go down the line where you mandate the training so like oh, there's some regulation or oversight committee or you know, whatever. The thing is that forces everyone to, you know, be up-to-date on whatever the latest stuff is and if those rules are in place then basically the demand is, you know infinite because it's just how many nurses are there in the country. They all have to take this training and so like I can just go build the business and I know that I can walk in every hospital and they have to buy from either me or what am I?
Competitors, right? My buddy is in
the like I don't recall it. Like he's like a professional speaker or something. He like goes does workshops and his he basically has three three types of clients as one is like high-end company like a Ferrari or you know, whatever Chipotle like a big company and MasterCard will hire him to come in and talk and then half the time when he's on the road, he's like, yeah. I'm at the Iowa Middle School District, but well, I'm like, oh cool you're doing like a pro bono thing and he was like, no like do these schools pay more than the companies.
Like what? He's like, yeah, they have this like professional development budget that they have to spend and then they have these like whatever the like kind of Target is of the year. Like he's except for last year was all about growth mindset. And so I'm the best guy for growth mindset. And so every single School District wanted me and had thousands of dollars to throw at me to come talk to 7th graders or fourth graders about, you know about this and the teachers also that you know, they have they have a budget for this he's like and then the next year it'll be around, you know, social emotional learning or like whatever it's like whatever the
Top-level says hey, this is the mandated thing you all got to learn. It's kind of like your nurses thing is like we all got to learn this procedure or this technique or the business best in class and then some you know, some speaker somewhere is like, oh shit payday this year. I'm going on tour like Lady Gaga and that's what he basically does. It's incredible.
But I also think master classes like a version of this right it's unstructured training. It's not for a specific job, but it's like the self-improvement professional development whatever like there's a lot of people that buy that the other element is like who's paying
Right. So like that nursing training the nurse isn't paying for it. It's from code from one of these budgets or whatever, but I do actually think that there's going to be and not unlike the there's kind of like the sleazy like let me teach you to make money on the internet type stuff but much more like Hey, how do you start a podcast? Hey, how do you you know create a successful newsletter? Right? Like like say if you guys came out with that tomorrow, it's like you would sell a lot of whatever that is. Well, don't worry we are. Okay. There you go, right.
So like but it's just like as you kind of go down the line you could look at what are all the successful things that people have done on the internet. And if you understand how they did it or you go get them to do it if they just document their process like there's somebody in the world who wants to be that person or have that type of business and they be willing to pay for it may not be a billion-dollar business but make a couple million bucks a year just selling training manuals on a million internet jobs, right? My father-in-law is in the moving business. He owns a moving business called Eagle Transport where you live
Up and Manhattan. It's a great company and I'm like why haven't you like it's a cash flow thing. It provides them a wonderful living and I'm like why haven't you expanded expanded and this is a common thread because my father owns a old-school company as well. I'm like, why don't you explain it? He goes, I don't want to train these people like it's too hard like it's such a pain in you worth like I mean, I'm just going to sound like a dick you work with a lot of like lower-end people. It's like they're like have issues. You don't want to fucking teach them and they're always a pain in the ass and I'm like, why don't you see he's like, I don't want
Deal with all these people. This is just enough already and I'm like, what can I do? What can I do to
just teach this is this is a it's not about training. It's about actually replacing an automating like this is the training is an intermediary step. That's never going to be good enough and like what's happening. So I have a friend. He's big-time investing at automation. That's his that's his thing. So he's always telling me like invested in this Peter robot company. I'm like, oh cool. It's like some sexy consumer things like no like basically they're just trying to get a pizza that can make perfect pizzas 24/7 that
They'll sell The Dominoes and dominoes were replaced for employees and be like a Domino's these this machine never gets sick never complains never checks its phone while at work and this machine will just spit out the same Pizza all day 24/7. How does that sound? How much would you pay for that? And then they're basically like, oh, you know how much money do I have? Let me give it to me give it all to you. And so there's automation like, I don't know if you've noticed there's this there was a head fake early on with like kind of like in restaurants, like digital menus kiosks like stuff like that and then it
Fucking happened both in airports and in restaurants, like you'll see the kind of order here kiosk tablets. There's a company called toast. I think that crushes it with this like I don't want to say a number but is a lot of Revenue every single year and it's all because they can do the math and basically say, hey we save you to employ to headcount worth and when I say view that headcount you also don't need the manager because the manager spends what percentage of time dealing with the headaches of people know showing or not underperforming or training or whatever because
Yep, these people to switch tabs all the time. And so I like sand the solution to your thing. I think in most cases actually going to be a form of automation where you just get rid of the human in the loop all together.
I agree. There's also a macro Trend here, which I think is Tamar that I had this, you know epic podcast episode where he basically out laid a very simple framework was which was simply the United States economy has pursued efficiency over resiliency. And so we basically ran around the world try to find the most efficient lowest cost way to produce things.
We became really really good at it. And then like this pandemic basically exposed the fact that we gave up resiliency for efficiency. And so his argument is that like we're going to swing the pendulum back maybe not all the way but like in some Direction Where resiliency is going to become important again, and you see this with like American companies want to you know onshore their manufacturing their supply chains and whatever the number one advantage that the American human labor worker has had is the fact that automation hasn't been able to replace them.
Right, like that's their biggest moat is the fact that like a machine hasn't been able to do their job. And so therefore when these companies bring back those manufacturing facilities of those Supply chains now the text actually getting pretty close like 3D manufacturing automation, like whatever it is. And so if you just re if you just brought back your facility to the United States and try to use American labor at the cost of you would like 4 to 5 x the labor cost that you have compared to Southeast Asia or wherever so like it almost would be like cost.
Of to do it, but if you can instead use Automation in 3D printing or whatever it is now, you can actually bring it back to the United States increase your resiliency and keep some like barrier of efficiency as well. And so I think that one there's gonna be this rise in popularity of the Automation in 3D printing but also there should be a lot of people who like gotta go find new jobs, right? And so like how long does that take? What are they doing? You know we can get into all that but it's just like that Trend I think is going to become really really important as we come out of this covid stuff. Is there any space for you've seen that you're shocked?
Not automated. I mean I like everything. I mean it's a thing where like we all overestimate was Bill Gates a like we overestimate what we can do in one year like if you literally think of almost every single job, I think that we all believe is gonna be on me like how many people thought you know cars were going to be automated and self-driving at this point. Like there's a lot of people right how many people thought that the segue would eventually turn into the like automated robot that goes around the office buildings and make sure that you know
No, it's acts as a security guard right or there's some level of shutting off the lights when no one's in the room. So it saves on the energy bill, but right now there's humans literally walk around with big office building like shuttle white sauce, like stupid little things that each one of those applications probably ends up being a business at some point and then you get the like bundling of okay, like I'm just going to be the guy who goes and buys up all the businesses that optimize the operations of a commercial real estate building. So let me buy the security robot company. Let me buy the light company, you know, whatever.
And then they build a big conglomerate then somebody 20 years from now like unbundled it all again, right and says, hey I'm going to go and I'm going to compete whatever so it's just I think business Cycles in general play out that way and we're on the start of the automation.
Awesome.
There's an export one. That's sort of related to what you're talk about Sam. Yeah Facebook. They have they have this developer boot camp. Right? So like I have a friend who he was my buddy. He was like a I don't know like a finance guy kind of thing went to Facebook worked in the fraud department and then he went to the Facebook developer boot camp that they have internally which is like hey and like eight weeks or so, you can learn to be an engineer at Facebook. You'll start at the kind of the bottom, but then you can grow from there. And and now he's like CTO of some tech company in New York and he weighs
You know after a few years at Facebook, so you did The Bootcamp worked as an engineer at Facebook for two three years and then left and then went to this company that was like a well-funded well-run company was like they're like kind of doing the interview and his pitch was so simple. So beautiful you go. You just goes I make your engineering team work like a Facebook engineering team. He's like, I know that process that's how I work. I'll just use that I will take our blue our Playbook over there and I'll make them work over here. What's that explodes like saying like, you know, I'm from the Navy Seals. I you know, I'll come to your gym and I'll train you.
Like a seal and it's like oh shit. Okay. Yeah that that's what I want. And so so he's now a CT of some company and so that same thing though, like what Facebook did which was not like just some online course, you can click a button and take or go to lynda.com and we bought you six credits. It's like no there's a physical place in the building where you go and you get to do that for eight to nine weeks you get paid and then you walk out, you know with a certain set of skills. That's Lambda School inside of a company and so Facebook can afford to do it. I don't know how many other
Google has the same I'm sure there's companies have variations of this but there's going to be a central company that does that as a service to every company so PWC and Deloitte and all these other people don't have a boot camp run by like, you know, whoever I think General Assembly was trying to do this at one point in time, but like somebody who specifically focuses on UPS killing people for coding or upskilling for like using no code tools. I think those will be like, that's a note if I if I really wanted to run a kind of a people and service heavy business, but still make big bucks. I think that would be a way to
to do it is to go to big old school companies and say look we put the Facebook boot camp inside visa and we will train you train up some people here and we'll train them like the Facebook people trade Facebook and that would be I think a dope business
people don't understand how how crazy that training process is like as a product manager I came here for was for eight weeks. But when you first get to Facebook like you didn't have a team but they're like, hey, you're going to go here for like four weeks or a week, whatever it was and they liked each all about product management Facebook, but it's not just product management.
Product management at Facebook. Like here's how we do things here is why we do them. Here's all the things you need to know, whatever and Chris Cox who was the chief product officer the left and then came back. He talked to every single incoming class of employees. Like, I mean, it was like this is serious to us, right? This wasn't like here's a one-day indoctrination. Like here's where the bathroom is, you know, here's your manager is and like if you have any problems like, you know, send an email to HR like this was like a real
thing when I got to Twitch the first day onboarding it was that
The first you know, first half of the day was like hey, you're going to get your laptop and then my guy like the IT guy was like, hey, sorry, we're short on laptop. So I'll get yours tomorrow. So I'm just sitting there while everyone else boots up and then is like art it's lunchtime your lunch buddy. Someone who works at the company will come get you guy never comes and I was like cool onboarding complete. That was the whole that was the whole thing. Like this is a is a multi-billion dollar company. And so some companies have this like very rigorous process like the the Facebook Car Wash. They put you through where it's like you come in as like, you know, you know
Kid from wherever Harvard or whatever you are, but you're still going to go through that six-week Car Wash and come out like, you know, Facebook product manager number three three for three and that works for them.
So I'm going to read you guys. Let me see if I can find it. So you guys know Gartner so I mock Gartner a lot because I think it's kind of a it's I think it's a little bit of a scam not everyone agrees. I think it's kind of scam me how they do things but pumped, you know what they do, but you know, it's like it's like the research they pull people adults.
Laughs
right. I feel like you mock them. But you're just it's like second graders that tease each other but they actually like each other. It's
like ya know. I have a lot of respect for him. No I totally do but I was reading this breakdown of how they work because Gartner they've been around since I think this 70s maybe it's worth like fifteen billion dollars and a lot of people are like, how does Gardner do it? Because their research is like only okay, but I was reading a breakdown and they're like their sales training is the best sales training in the industry and that
They purposely turned like 25% a year of their sales people because they want a Cutthroat. They wanted to be Cutthroat and when you first sign up they do two months of training and they fly you do isolated Florida hotel where they split you into two teams that compete against one another in high-pressure sales names every single day and around 10 percent of her class was fired within the first two weeks, but the others who made it bonded over it and they shared trauma and they consider themselves an elite cohesive sales organization of Highly like a highly coveted team.
Mmmmm, and that's how the and they do. It's an eight-week.
That's like the the back of the DVD of like taking three. It's like I have an elite set of skills that I've been trained. So it's like boot camp like little like military boot camp on a virus on day two just to see if your immune system could
survive. Well, it's at and it's actually pretty interesting because when you think about a company you think well, it's the product that's amazing. But like as someone who only works in small businesses, I'm like, I forget that it could be just like this crazy interesting. It's not even that interesting like you're like, oh
Obviously do that but a lot of people don't do including myself about these like really good onboarding techniques another company. I did it was Trilogy software which we've talked about on here, which a lot of people don't know about but they were consider like as good as Microsoft in the 90s and they would do the same thing where they would they would train developers like in a crazy good way and that's how they became so valuable and so that's kind of interesting an interesting idea here. I don't know what to make of it, but it is something that I didn't previously know. That's for sure. That's tough. Also, I think because
Um's interesting because remember code Cutco knives. I think it's called whatever like basically go door-to-door. They sell knives right or whatever. I know a lot of kids in high school or college who would do it for money. But in the back of their head, they would say to themselves like I'm learning a skill because the training was so extensive. Well, whatever and then like when I get done here, I'm gonna have this school forever. I bet right and I don't know for sure but there's much people who go to Gartner to be the sales program for two years and they know they're not
Let you know spend their career there, but they just want to get the experience and skills and they leave and so like that is a fantastic recruiting tool as well. And if you're going to get rid of 25% of people anyways, like you actually probably lose the top like two percent who are like your best people and then you lose like, you know, your bottom 25 percent or 20 percent or whatever it is. So I tend to think that like the organizations that spend a lot of time on the training like word spreads like hey working there is good. But the training you get will like serve you for the rest of your
Career and it helps on the recruiting front. So back to the import-export thing. Is there anything at face book that you think is
Sam's all about this what I have
said a few but Snapchat as well the I find it so interesting, I mean only 13 or 15 or 20 over many tens of thousands of people do work at Facebook, but they are world class at so many different things. What or yeah lets you snap snaps even more mysterious to me. Well Facebook is the easier once I think that people understand some of the tools and it's
More it's a better cop to like what most people are building. And so I would say three things come to mind. The first is the data science team at Facebook is absolutely world class and they understand better than anyone in the world kind of the pursuit of Truth. And so if you look at the people who have left their everyone from the tamasa the world whatever like it's just this pursuit of like I don't care what opinions are like show me the data and I'm going to set up the test Frameworks in order to actually get to
to the truth and it all boils down to this one key Insight that I had when I was there and I didn't have it like a Eureka moment. Like they literally just told me it they were like, hey when you run these tests, there's two things that are really important one. You got to have very clear goal. Like what are we going to measure success and failure by and then to whatever the test is has to be executed perfectly and if you don't execute it perfectly and then it doesn't work your left asking yourself. Like was it because we ran the test wrong or is it because actually we should go spend our time doing something.
That's right. So it's like the perfect execution component. And so I think that this testing framework, there's been tons and tons of tools but very similar to what Sean said about kind of like, he'll make your software team like Facebook just teaching the art of data science and testing and like the pursuit of truth. I think there's a massive business to be built there
consequently. There's a bunch of
software that you can build around this as well. Like you could see yourself you go in you do the training and then I go by the way, like, you know, here's all the boxes on
Ernie's my jacket like, you know, here's my Analytics tool. Here's my screen recording tools. You can watch user pathway. Here's my data science tool, you know, here's my way that you communicate with customers like you could just walk down every single touch point that that growth team would have with a product and then just build your own piece of software. It's almost this like consultative sales piece where you're making a bunch of money up front on training and then on the back of your following it with software and kind of getting long LTD out of it.
I have a funny story about this so I met a guy this is unconfirmed. So this might be total bullshit. I don't know but I like it already hilarious. Definitely true. But by the time you're done, it's going to be true. Exactly. So I'll just share it to you know hundreds of thousands of people because you know, why not. So this is guy works at Facebook high up and he uses these tools and you're talking about the testing tool specifically, I believe that there's a tool
Maybe it's called Titan. Maybe it's not called Titan. I don't know exactly but there's a tool that basically when you run a test it tells you not just did your test work like, oh we made the button blue that made, you know did people more people click that button but it says hey here's every other kpi also, so you didn't fuck up something else while you're trying to fix one thing you actually dropped another thing. So it gives you this like really great way to analyze the whole picture not just your specific thing.
Anyways, I don't know much about this tool but here's what I here's what I had
heard. I heard that this person was like, okay, I'm going to spin this out. I'm an export this idea. I'm gonna go make this its own startup. They recruit a couple of people from internal like hey leave with me. Let's go do this they've raised they actually raise money they go they rent an office everything and they get some, you know goes into the office to tell Zuck like hey, you know, thanks for everything, you know, but like peace out I'm gonna go do this and something happened in that meeting that I Don't Know But Here We Believe here's what here's what
What ended up happening the startup never take never get started the office rent? They just pay it off. They don't ever go move into the office person keeps working at Facebook. And I believe what ended up happening was that duck basically was like, you know, you could go do that. But like here's just oh a giant bag of money that I have with me. Like how about this instead and like haven't you stay you take a bag of money and we forget you ever said anything about leaving and then the guy was like no. No like I really want to do this. I actually I've told my family I rented an office space. I'm already
Two feet at the door and he's like, oh cool. Okay. So so we're not going to let you do this company. Actually we're going to we're going to pursue some action against you. But again, there's this bag of money and this is a great role. If you just want to stay with the bag of money in the great role. You tell me which way you want to go and so I don't know exactly how the conversation went down. But from what I have heard there was a conversation like this that happened again, I might have been told bullshit but I loved the story either way and I choose to believe that this was true and this person still works
Facebook. Did you guys read the
Text messages yeah, so Sean like is obsessed with this and I he got me upset with it where he was like, he like goes in like emails the founders of huge companies like hey forward me the email is when you were describing the early idea of your company. I love seeing the evolution and what
the raw text. I'm like a fucking paleontologist looking for the original Source material.
It's pretty cool. I like it as well. He's got me into it. And so to the listeners last week this this some type of chat transcript got out of Kevin Systrom the
Of Instagram talking to a friend who was talking to someone who I think was an investor if Instagram but who also worked at Facebook. I think
it's got Matt Kohler he was early at Facebook and he's a big
comfy seat and and they were chatting back and forth. And Kevin was like Hey, Matt duck messaged me like he wants to he said this I think he means this and then they were talking back and forth about what that could mean and there were like he's going to crush you. So like if you don't do this, right like he doesn't care. He only he's going to he's going
Anna just show you so play
ball the exact quote in there Kevin Systrom. Ask he's like if we say no, well, he just like go in to destroy mode. Yeah, and the reason is just like yeah, probably he's like fucking okay. So what do I say that will not trigger destroy mode. He's like maybe we could just say, oh we're just trying to do this little filter thing. We don't really see ourselves as like, you know becoming a social network and he's like, yeah, he's also a really smart like
he's nobody fed. He goes, he's too smart. He's like well
Tom that we're going to sell to Twitter he goes you could he'll destroy you I thought it was amazing did you and I don't worry about that time. Did you ever have moments of that where you're like, oh God. This guy's like Kangaskhan. He's gonna he's gonna he's gonna destroy. I don't remember how many times I met with but was always in a group setting so it was never like we had like a one-on-one but I was fortunate to work on this very small team. That was specifically trying to help figure out like, how do we grow Mark Zuckerberg?
And Sheryl sandberg's personal Facebook pages, right? So I think thing they didn't want to like manipulate the product right like you could I
let her know we were
married. We were like one meeting and like one of the ideas that one point was like well, why don't we just like put it interstitial be like everyone follows up. I kind of like Tom Myspace style, you know type thing and then part of the beauty of like a diversity was like somebody else was like no like I grew up in a country where like the president used to like come on, you know television and like take over the screen and like with his like, you know message of like Conquering the people basically and he's like,
There's / certain places in the world like you don't want to do this. Right? And so what they ended up saying was like, okay, like we're just going to have to do this without manipulating the product and like that's like the most Fair way to do it and it would be these meetings and the thing that always struck me was like, you've got a guy who runs a multi-billion Dollar business been working on a long time and he could be talking about like super long term company's strategy and then immediately like there's a presentation up and he would like zero in on a screenshot be like
Why is that buttons pixel like what you're like dude, you just went from like a hundred thousand feet to like ground floor, you know level feedback back to a hundred thousand and then shifted like left or right on various products and we've been in here for seven minutes like
like you or
capacity in terms of like ingesting information and also being able to like sift through high signal low signal stuff. It's just like Bar None and
Telling somebody intro at the comes a time that I called look first. You have to remember like he has the most context here. We're like, he's literally been at the company to longest and so like he seemed like these iterations of the product. He remembers the conversations before they got launched the things so when right the things I went wrong like whatever but it was still this thing of just like man, this dude's on it and it's like I'll read articles even today and people like say whatever they want about sock. They like never talk to him ever met him or whatever and I'm
like, do you think he like
built a multi-billion dollar company cuz he's an idiot, right?
Right. And and the thing that I'll leave you with on Zuck is a friend of mine was talking about them when they first announced Libra and going into crypto and he's like look there's a lot of people who probably don't like Zuck but there's not that many people who thinks these dumb. Right? Right and so like you may not like him for whatever your personal preference, you know reason is but like if he's going to do something a lot of people going to like wait, why is stuck in Facebook going to do it? Right and they were talking specifically about crypto but like I think that's generally true across a lot of different things and so
All of a sudden people here, like, you know, they're making a huge investment of VR. There's a lot of other people who like wait, why is he doing that? Like, what does he know that? I don't know and you know, they try start looking around the corner, but I think what you saw I didn't see the text messages but I saw some emails or something I think from Instagram thing is just like look he saw the future right or at least like where he thought it was going and he like pretty much was like directionally correct was pretty impressed.
Yeah, that's crazy. Interesting.
I love those stories. Thank you for
to we should go. We yeah, you want to wrap this up so
high damn. I feel like we're just scratching the surface, but this was this was great pomp. Thanks for coming on man. Hope you can come on again. I think people are really like you and your your thoughts. So appreciate you coming in.
Absolutely. Thanks guys for having me will definitely awesome. Thank you.
