My First Million: #100 with Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano - The "Export Framework" to Business Creation

All right.

Quick break to tell you about another podcast that we're interested in right now, HubSpot

just launched a Shark Tank rewatch podcast called Another Bite.

Every week, the hosts relive the latest and greatest pitches from Shark Tank, from Squatty

Potty to the Mench on a Bench to Ring Doorbell, and they break down why these pitches were

winners or losers, and each company's go-to-market strategy, branding, pricing, valuation, everything.

Basically all the things you want to know about how to survive the tank and scale your

company on your own.

If you want to give it a listen, you can find Another Bite on whatever podcast app you listen

to, like Apple or Spotify or whatever you're using right now.

All right.

Back to the show.

We're live.

Sean and Pomp, you guys did a podcast together on Pomp's podcast.

I actually did it last year in New York or this year before Corona happened.

Sean, who is this guy?

This is Pomp, he's known as Pomp.

His name's Anthony Pompiliano.

Pompiliano, is that the right way to say it?

Close enough, yeah.

No, no.

Say it how you would say it.

Pompiliano.

Pompiliano.

Okay, great.

This dude's everywhere, man.

If you don't know him, you don't know us probably.

That's kind of my rule of thumb.

This guy's everywhere on Twitter, investor, ex-Facebook guy, big time in the Bitcoin world.

Everybody knows him if you're in crypto, and again, if you're not in crypto, you're probably

not listening to this podcast.

So I was going to ask you how it's going, but really, all I want to know is who was

better, me or Sam, on your podcast?

That's a horrible question.

Well, Sam got to 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.

But I actually think on the audio download, you're beating Sam in the first couple of

hours.

We'll see.

Okay, great.

I have to go back and look.

That's all that matters.

Now Sam's going to get competitive.

I'm looking at the, someone already commented and they said, 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, Sam Parr, on my first million

ever.

I was about to say, but it said, hands down the best podcast out there.

Sorry, Pomp.

You're my second favorite.

I'll take second.

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.

I was like, I've sent to my email being like, Hey, you know, here's a bunch of shit we could

talk about, um, because I know if I'm the host, that's what I want to get.

And so hopefully it turned out good.

Anyways, everybody should go check it out.

Go to Pomp's 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.

I took a bunch.

I did.

I'm listening.

I was listening to it right before this.

I took a bunch of our best ideas over there and I was like, here's a bunch that we brainstormed

and then, you know, we just shot the shit after that.

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.

Uh, this is like, you know, one of the things I always talk about is how I'm lazy.

But then when I do something, I go like really over the top with it.

So I've 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 smart little

things you're doing.

It's like, Oh, it gets posted onto LinkedIn and it gets posted multiple times onto Twitter

kind of on like, it's the different time zones.

It's like, dude, these are, you know, basic blocking and tackling best practices.

But I know I'll never do.

And so, uh, we will never get the gains of that.

I don't think Sam's going to do that either.

It's just a lot of work.

Yeah.

If you want to understand, uh, I think of it in terms of batches.

So like you got to do 50 episodes and then you've earned the right to like learn, you

know, one on one course stuff.

Then like you do another 50 and I've reached a hundred episodes.

Now you unlock like 201 learnings.

Uh, and so as you keep going, like there's things that, you know, these folks who've

done thousands of episodes, they understand it way better than you guys or myself.

It's just, we got to get to a thousand episodes and then somehow we magically learned that

stuff too.

Well, this is episode number 100.

So this is a big milestone.

Yeah.

So, Tom, 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.

Uh, to be honest, I have no clue how that happened, but, uh, yeah, I think a lot of

people, that's actually how they know me, which is pretty crazy.

How many people listened to your podcasts roughly?

So far this year, uh, we just last week crossed over 10 million downloads for the year.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

So you were, and before that you worked at snap and you worked at Facebook.

Were you an executive or a product manager or what?

Uh, I was a product manager at, uh, Facebook and then this job at snap dude, I feel like

you went from like, uh, you know, normal person at Facebook to you got a pretty big job at

snap and I know a bunch of shit went down.

So I don't know if you could talk about all of it, but can you talk about how you even

got that job?

Cause it was a pretty legit role for what you had done before that, right?

Yeah.

I think a lot of it is one, just the progression of people on the, uh, growth team at Facebook.

Um, so there was plenty of people who had gone to go run the growth team at other kind

of high flying early stage startups.

So, you know, Ed Baker went to Uber, um, somebody went to live, somebody went to Airbnb, yada,

yada, whatever.

So 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, I kind of built my reputation internally,

just right time, right place.

Uh, I got there and they were like, Hey, you should go do this, uh, Facebook pages thing.

I was like, I have a page and I knew you have a profile.

That's different than a page.

And I was like, Oh, okay.

Well, like what's page?

And so, you know, they were 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 and it was kind of like this green field, right?

When you haven't optimized something at all, literally just like changing the color to a

button can lead to, you know, 15% gain or whatever it is.

And so very quickly it just became like, Hey, there's this game of growth and you seem to

be pretty good at it.

So like, let's move you around internally and kind of do a bunch of different things.

And then I think really just reputation spreads from there.

I got one question for you from your time at Facebook.

So on the brainstorm, uh, when we do the brainstorms, we have all these different kind of like

themes, something like we just find that a bunch of ideas fit in the same buckets.

And so one of the buckets I always talk 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 had this problem.

We kind of made an internal tool, man, if this should actually be exported, every company

should have this tool.

And I think Facebook is probably the most popular one where that has happened, um, where

they just, people have left Facebook and just tick the Facebook internal tool and made it

a SaaS tool for everybody else.

Is that something you've seen, like, can you talk a little bit about that?

Cause 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, uh, it was kind of like the rate of passage.

If you were leaving to go to a competitor, they weren't excited.

Uh, if you were leaving to go to like a non-competitor, but large tech company, you know, hey, well

wishes.

Um, and then if you're leaving to start a company, you basically had to like go see the

mafia, right?

Um, in, in kind of a very nice friendly way, but really it was just, you could literally

walk out of the door with angel investment, right?

And kind of have your pre seed round or seed round done.

Um, and so through that process, there's a lot of people who just say, Hey, I'm going

to go build, you know, X company.

It's like Y internal tool, but for everybody else and everybody gets it right away.

They're like, Oh yeah, they're 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 described it, but the way that they did it was really key.

Early on Facebook, uh, looked at other companies like, well, how do you get into international

markets?

Like it's a different language.

And so most people would go and they would like translate their site and do all that kind

of stuff.

And 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 basically tap into the user base and get all of the translations

done and also get it done much more accurately, faster, kind of more scalably, whatever.

And so I've always won 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, uh, the internet has become much more, um, kind of adopted around the world, literally

just getting into new markets by translating could, uh, could lead to a lot of growth.

So that'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.

Maybe you're going to come in and run the growth team.

Awesome.

Wow.

Okay.

What do you want to do?

Which hates it?

Cause I just put random shit as my title on LinkedIn that doesn't match my internal

title because my internal title is like a real technical, like it's like 10 words

long.

I'm like, no, 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 clothe.

If there was one, I think I might be that and it pieces 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.

It's just really funny how people do that.

Everyone's like a VP on LinkedIn and internally they're 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 versus 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 on the

org structure by their title on Wall Street, right?

Are they an analyst?

Are they a principal?

Are they a managing director?

Are they a VP?

Are they well documented and kind of, you know, level set, right?

Yeah.

And it's like, and by the way, and people like really want a title in Silicon Valley.

It's exactly what you just described.

Like literally people, you know, ham the chief janitor, right?

Like they could care less about the titles, you know, it's just kind of like joking around

and especially about kind of the work products.

So I don't know, just an interesting tidbit that I've noticed kind of going back and forth

between the two coast.

And you're known as like a 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, you're the Bitcoin guy, you're

the investing guy.

You know how like Sean's the framework guy, Sean loves framework.

I, I tend to like, I like the label stuff and I like to put it in these boxes because

it helps me under understand, even though I know that it's not the whole truth.

It's just nine times out of 10, well, somebody will come on and they'll be like telling about

their, their experience.

Like, what do you, what does your business do?

We ask as you should, they explain for like two minutes and Sam's like, I'm going to

say like in stupid words, um, basically what you guys do is you charge a whole bunch of

money for people to read your news on or whatever, you know, like some random, uh, like simple

oversimplification.

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 going to insult you, but you're basically

like my space, but you're like a little better and different.

Correct.

So, so what is your, uh, using that logic, what's your description of 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 dumb down version.

That's, that's still like kind of congratulatory as the sales pitch.

Yeah.

That's what you want it to be.

We, we, 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 send out like, I send an email with the news and

a shit ton of people read it like that's, that's basically what you guys do.

That's fair.

That's what I like saying.

Calling it a newsletter business is kind of simple, but okay, I, that is my own, you're

giving me my own medicine, but what you're, you're known as a, I mean, you do, you do

a lot of Bitcoin stuff, right?

Yes.

Got it.

Okay.

I just trying to give the audience some perspective here.

So yeah.

All right.

So look, basically here's the how the way I think about it is I was in the army and then

built two 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 started 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 that's pretty

much it.

And I just think it's like one of the most innovative areas.

Did you make enough money at snap and Facebook that you're using your own funds to invest

in stuff?

Is that how it 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 eight deals 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, well, an investor take our money?

Like all the basic stuff that like, if you're 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.

Yeah, that helps.

Yeah.

So he like, you know, is, is a little bit more, you know, wealthy than most people.

But when we were doing this, it was just like, Hey, like, do know what we're doing?

And then once it was like, Oh, okay, like, these are like interesting and like, we could

like show other people like, Hey, here's the first eight that we did.

Like, we'll put these into a fund.

If you put money into the fund too, and then like, we'll like be partners and the LPs were

like, Oh, that sounds awesome.

And so literally, we did that.

And then what we started to do again, because we had no clue what we were 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 like, let me come back to you with a number.

Once I like, go talk to the LPs, and then we'd go back and we'd be like, Hey, if you

put money into the fund, then we can do this deal.

Like here's the actual deal.

Isn't this a great deal?

They've like, that's an awesome deal.

Like, okay, cool.

Like if you give us a hundred K, then we're going to put a hundred K in this company.

Plus you get exposure to all the other deals in the fund.

And so LPs are like, Oh, this is awesome.

And they would give us the money and then we'd 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 50 hundred K checks for like

a pre-seed fund.

It's just the only way that you can is to like build a track record, right?

And then once you can even work, any, Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So I probably can't share the financials, but people, a lot of people know this.

So we invested in a imperfect produce in the, I'll call it C round, it was like 12 million

dollar valuation.

That company has done incredibly well.

We also invested in the Everly wellness that they're like to her on.

Okay.

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.

So you were just doing tech investing.

Yeah.

So at the early stage, completely agnostic, like what was really interesting is we live

it 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 and like outwork 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% of the founders were female, right?

So 25% of the companies had a female founder, I think is the right way to say it, but like

that wasn't a mandate.

And so like after the fact, like all the me too stuff happened, like all that, we like

like, huh, I wonder how many, you know, female founders we have in our portfolio.

We went and 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 it'd be interesting to see kind of the COVID impact to truly stage investing.

All right.

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And then the last business I'll mention is a company called Cubcoats.

This one's awesome.

I know those guys.

Yeah.

Oh, do you?

Okay.

Well, I've met him and then other friends have told me about Cubcoats since I met him because

he was always doing a little internet tricks basically and I was like, this guy's smart.

Oh man.

What is it?

So we invested, it was called Jacket Pets at the time and Jacket Pets was literally the

idea of this kid, Zach Park, who, if I remember correctly, he like basically was a starter

guy.

Yeah.

He would like go to people be like, Sam, you've got an awesome product.

I'll put it on Kickstarter.

And I'm like, I know the formula and we'll sell like $10 million on Kickstarter.

And he did this like multiple times and then eventually it was just like, Hey, I'm going

to do 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'll turn into a kid's jacket.

And so like, you're like, ah, that's kind of like a crazy idea, but like this kid understands

Kickstarter.

Like I'm sure he could like, you know, come out of the gate and then we shared 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 or like, okay, this might have

legs.

We invest.

He one kills kick, but I forget the metrics, but like, you know, knocks out the 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 them into retail.

He's selling them online.

He just like explodes the business, uh, as one of our best performing investments is

like, you know, it is eight figures of revenue.

We'll put it that way.

Wow.

So, so it's like a real business, right?

It's not like a, Hey, we sold $300,000 on Kickstarter and like, we're cool.

It's like a legitimate business where Kickstarter happened and then they built the scalable business

on the back end, you know, both retail and online.

Okay.

I want to talk about some ideas, Sean.

Is that okay if we get into it?

I've never said no.

Okay.

So before we do, well, this is kind of an idea.

I want to, I'm writing 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 have not.

Okay.

It's called tribe.

And it's all looks at like what makes tribes.

And one of the skies, one of the points this guy makes is that in Israel, the rate of PTSD

for soldiers is like 1%.

But in America, it's like 25% because soldiers go and do their thing.

And they shockingly, well, this is shocking for me as someone who's ever 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 showed

me non-alcoholic beer and there were so many reasons to be unhappy because it was hard.

They felt wonderful or they felt camaraderie and that gave them fulfillment.

And it's like they are in the trenches to not really serve their country, but just help

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, get 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, you were in Afghanistan, you said, right?

Iraq.

Iraq, sorry.

Yeah.

So for those that don't know, I was in the military for six and a half years, ended up

when I left the military as a sergeant in the infantry, did deployment to Iraq in 2008-2009,

was in Tajji, 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, you know, are like weird and they

always have like ask like stupid questions.

And so they'll be like, well, why don't you have PTSD?

Right.

And I'm like, okay, well, like, I guess we're just going to have that conversation.

And like sometimes people ask like when the first 20 minutes of meeting them, you're like,

man, you really have no filter.

But the way that I've always like thought about it is I went from playing football in

college, which is like a pretty violent sport, all dudes, a lot of camaraderie, like all

that kind of stuff.

So 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 this 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, 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 tribe's kind of framework where we probably could

do much better if we literally just kept people tied into something or some 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, you know, I mean, you get like easy stuff like the dormant

and stuff like that that we talk to you every day, whatever.

But we got a lot of friends, right, that are kind of all throughout Manhattan and, you

know, we generally are social to some degree and try to kind of meet up with people every

weekend or whatever.

So I think that helps.

It's just not, you know, 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 remote, I think there's going

to be a massive, massive problem with loneliness.

And men in particular above the age of 30 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 moved to the Burbs and as we got a little bit more stoic, like where 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 men are going to be crazy lonely, more lonely than normal in the next

handful of years.

And as someone who is ex-military, I don't hang out with a lot of military guys.

I was like, I want to experience 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 interests.

Right.

And like, that's really hard to do if you didn't have the internet and you lived in Manhattan.

Like you basically would 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 Chinese are better.

So, 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, a lunchtime.ai or something, right?

Lunchmate.

Or lunch buddy or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whatever it is.

You see this with like the clubhouse kind of 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.

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?

And 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, inappropriate 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 then 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 or whatever.

And so I think that one of the opportunities, and I've literally pitched this to so many

people and nobody will build it.

So like whoever builds it, please reach out to me.

It's to create a dating app just called authentic.

And all you do is you hold down the screen.

Right?

So there's no profiles.

There's no text.

There's 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 can't 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 and you hold that down again, you get a different question.

You don't know what the questions are.

It's completely, you know, kind of authentically you.

There's no filters.

There's nothing.

It's video.

So I get to hear your voice.

I get to see your mannerisms.

I get 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 and just keep there and just keep scrolling.

So would you, but would you and I would never invest in the dating space?

Would you?

I think that again, going back to people think that category is 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.

Yeah.

But 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 know what?

Name a space that's not like that, right?

What space does not have a handful of winners and then everybody else dying?

Right?

Plumbers, cleaning services.

Like, are you going to go invest in a plumber?

Like, what is the plan here?

I mean, like, I don't know.

What I mean is 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 100,000 X are going to be things where there's

a few winners that that win big, right?

That's right.

Hold on.

Do you guys know what Muzz matches?

Yes.

No, I don't.

Tell me.

These guys are going to love the fact that we've been 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, hopefully 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?

Like 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 do they got like 50,000 users?

Like, no, 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 the time online mentioned

and stuff like that.

So it's like, you could 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 could take an industry and just segment it and 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 was at the time I was a single Indian person.

I was like, great, talk to me.

And I realized it's definitely not for me because he was like, the name was in Hindi

is Bill Mill, which means like hearts meeting or something.

And then basically what it was was like, it's people who wanted to get married.

So it was more like the match.com or whatever.

I remember the thing you're talking about where every group has like these small nuances

that make a huge difference to them.

He did like login or you had to sign up with LinkedIn.

I was like, what the hell is this?

And 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 should not be in the pool

if you don't have a job.

And that's straight up.

That's how like kind of old school, any people think is like, number one, you know, good

job, good family, fair skin, tall, like these are the attributes.

And if you, you can miss one, but you can't miss like job, for example, dude, there's

far, there's farmer dating.

Yeah.

What is that?

Farmers or whatever.

It's something like that.

Yeah.

So there's all these niches.

And so he sold that.

So anyways, I remember that day being like, uh, this is interesting.

Actually that could work.

And then he was like 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 seven seconds to look at a profile

and decide.

And I was like, cool, like that's an interesting mechanic.

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's just like way too stubborn.

Anyways, fast forward a few years.

He sells that app this year for $50 million to, I think, one of the conglomerate groups,

like match or whoever, like that 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, and by the way, this is like a recurring theme is if you go and if you ask a bunch

of people, like, what are the verticals that are played out, like those are actually probably

the best ones to go after.

Right.

It's like 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

like 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 Snap or whatever.

I can 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.

Are you familiar with them?

I have not.

But basically at Facebook and many big companies, they have obviously, you know, you got a billion

users, if you launch 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 is how it used to be.

So Facebook built a system internally from what I understand.

That was basically like it lets you launch a feature with a feature flag, meaning it's

off by default.

And then the engineer from the back end can turn it on for a subset of people.

You could say, I want 1% of users to see this only.

And if it goes good with the 1%, then I'll turn my knob and I'll take it to 5%, 10%, etc.

So this is like a standard feature that big companies have, but small companies, we're

never going to build the infrastructure to do something like this.

And so Launch Darkly was like, you know, a couple of ex-Facebook people spun out and

they're like, hey, whatever, I forgot the internal name of that tool at Facebook.

It's like, let's call it whatever code named Medallion.

It's like, oh, we're taking Medallion and we're making it available to every SaaS company

that exists.

And these guys have crushed it.

They've raised over $50 million.

And it's, 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.

We'll 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, with a small feature like that.

The first time I ever heard of this, and I'd never heard of this export, you know, framework

is cause that's fucking trademarked as your boys original, you know, people forget like

before you go work at these big companies, even in a Nigerian Facebook, when it was 3,800

employees, like 4,000 somewhere in 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 beforehand because you walk in and like a bunch of these tools

are there and you're like, wow, I can like go 1% and then 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 were reporters or theirs.

They don't know what features are getting tested and you know, 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,

you get 10 friends in seven days or something, right?

If you like friend 10 people, then like there's like an 85% chance where the number is.

Yeah.

But like that takes forever at an early stage company.

Of course.

That's going to 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?

Two, you got to have enough data over a long enough period of time to actually know did

it lead to, you know, 3090, you know, two year retention rates, all that kind of stuff.

And then the third thing is you got to have the engineering capacity to change your product

around to test all the different things.

So I remember being like, Oh, this is going to 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 engineers, whatever it was, he was like, I can't do that.

It's just sort of like Googling around.

And there was a company, Amplitude, which I think now it's like pretty popular actually,

but that was like 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.

And 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, then we can 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.

Yeah.

Slack has like your, 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.

You hit core value, you understand what this is all about.

And you're going to have a great experience.

Absolutely.

So I want to give you a second to think about that because, because Sean put you on the

spot a little bit and, or we both did, but let me tell you something that I heard this

week.

There's this guy named Nick Huber, I think his name is that I met, I was driving doing

and doing a live Twitter thing and he like started talking and I go, dude, let me talk

to you now.

And he like called 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 and put software on it and he's consolidating them.

That's cool.

But he was like, the thing that I learned about a service business is that it's the, 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 training system that I could

teach a fifth grader how to do X, Y and Z and have a repeatable and make it work well.

Have you guys ever heard of this problem?

I mean, I don't know anything about services, but have you heard of this problem before,

Sean?

Yeah.

I think 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 people 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 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

is to do X, Y and Z and they just have like, it's mainly, 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 a, 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, they're not even going to read

this, even though it's 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 in 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 one of my competitors, right?

My buddy is in the like, I don't know if you'd call it like, he's like a professional speaker

or something.

He like goes and does workshops and his, he basically has three, three types of clients.

One is like high end company, like a Ferrari or, you know, whatever Chipotle, like a big

company, you know, you know, 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, blah, blah, blah.

I'm like, oh, cool.

You're doing like a pro bono thing.

And he was like, no, like, dude, these schools pay more than the companies.

And I was 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

like, so for last year, it 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 seventh graders or fourth graders about, you know, about this.

And the teachers also, they, you know, they, 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.

It's like, we all got to learn this procedure or this technique or the business best in

class.

And then some, you know, some speakers 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 like incredible.

But I also think masterclass is like a version of this, right?

It's unstructured training.

It's not for a specific job, but it's also 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 coming 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, Sam, if you guys came out with that tomorrow, it's like you would sell a

lot of whatever that is.

Well, don't worry that we are.

Okay.

And 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'd be willing to pay for it.

It may not be, you know, a billion dollar business, but make a couple million bucks a

year just selling, you know, 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, a pump in Manhattan.

It's a great company.

And I'm like, why haven't you, like it's a cash flow thing.

It provides him 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 haven't you expanded?

He goes, oh, I don't want to train these people.

Like it's too hard.

Like it's such a pain.

And you work with like, I mean, I'm just going to sound like a dick.

You work with like a lot of like lower end people and 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, he's like, I don't want to deal with all these people.

This is just enough already.

And I'm like, what can I, what can I do to just teach people?

This is, this is, it's not about training.

It's about actually replacing and automating.

Like this is the training is an intermediary step that's never going to be good enough.

And like, what's happening?

So, so I have a friend, he's big time investing in automation.

That's his, that's his thing.

So he's always telling me like, I invested in this pizza robot company.

I'm like, oh, cool.

It's like some sexy consumer thing.

He's like, no, like basically they're just trying to get a pizza that can make perfect

pizzas 24 seven that they'll sell to Domino's and Domino's will replace four employees and

okay, 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 seven.

How does that sound?

How much will you pay for that?

And then they're basically like, oh, you know, how much money do I have?

Let me give it to them.

Let me give it all to you.

And so there's automation.

Like, I don't know if you've noticed that there's this, there was this 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 that

I think crushes it with this, like, I don't want to say a number, but there 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 input

to headcount worth.

And when I save you that headcount, you also don't need the manager because the manager

spends what percentage of the time dealing with the headaches of people know showing

or not underperforming or training or whatever, because, you know, these people switch jobs

all the time.

And so, like, Sam, 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, Chamarth and I had this, you know, epic

podcast episode where he basically outlaid 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 trying 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

and 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 or those

supply chains, now the tech's 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

tried to use American labor at the cost, you would like four to five acts, the labor cost

that you have compared to Southeast Asia or wherever.

So, like, it almost would be, like, cost prohibitive to do it.

But if you can instead use automation and 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, like, one, there's going to be this rise in popularity of automation

and 3D printing.

But also, there's going to be a lot of people who, like, got to go find new jobs, right?

And so, like, how long does that take?

What do they do?

You know, we can get into all that.

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 where you've seen that you're shocked it's not automated?

I mean, like, everything.

I mean, it's a thing where, like, we all overestimate, right?

What's Bogey say?

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 it's

going to be automated.

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 makes sure that, you know, it 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 stays on the energy bill.

But right now, there's humans that literally walk around in a big office building and,

like, shut all the lights off.

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 and

then somebody 20 years from now, like, unbundles 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, you know, we're on the start of the automation.

Awesome.

There's an export one that's sort of related to what you're talking about, Sam.

Yeah, they have, they have this developer bootcamp, right?

So like, I have a friend who, he was my buddy, he was like, 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 bootcamp that they have internally, which

is like, Hey, in 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 basically, you know, after a few years at Facebook, so he 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.

It was like, they're like, kind of doing the interview and his, his pitch was so simple.

It was so beautiful.

He 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.

Like, I will take our blue, our playbook over there and I'll make them work over here.

What's that?

It's sort of 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.

That's what I want.

And so, so he's now a CTO 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 Linda.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, I don't know if Google has the same.

I'm sure there's companies that 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, they'll 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 upskilling people for coding or upskilling

for like using no code tools.

I think those will be like, that's a no, 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 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 can't remember if it was four or eight weeks, but when you

first get to Facebook, like you don't even have a team, like they're literally like,

Hey, you're going to go here for like four weeks or eight, whatever it was.

And they like teach you all about product management at Facebook, but it's not just

product management.

It's like product management at Facebook.

Like here's how we do things.

Here's why we do them.

Here's all the things you need to know, whatever.

And Chris Cox, who was the chief product officer that 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 a, here's a one day indoctrination.

Like here's what the bathroom is, you know, here's who 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.

And 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, I was like, Hey, sorry, we're short on laptops, so I'll

get yours tomorrow.

So I'm just sitting there while everyone else boots up.

And then it's like, all right, 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, this is a multi-billion dollar company.

And so some companies have this like very rigorous process, like the Facebook car wash, they put

you through where it's like, you come in as like, you know, you know, smart 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 33403.

And you know, that works for them.

So I'm going to read you guys, let me see if I can find it.

So you guys know Gardner.

So I mock Gardner 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 scammy how they do things.

Do you know what they do?

Like, you know, it's like the, it's like the research and they pull people and do all

that stuff, 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, yeah, no, I have a lot of respect for them.

No, I totally do.

But I was reading this breakdown of how they work because Gardner, they've been around

since I think the seventies, maybe it's worth like $15 billion.

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 churn like 25% a year of their sales people because they want a

cutthroat.

They want to be cutthroat.

And when you first signed up, they do two months of training and they fly you to a isolated

Florida hotel where they split you into teams that compete against one another in high pressure

sales games every single day.

And around 10% of her class was fired within the first two weeks.

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.

And that's how, and they do, it's an eight week.

That's like the, the back of the DVD of like taken three.

It's like, I have an elite set of skills that I've been trained for.

Sounds like boot camp, like a little like military boot camp.

They give you coronavirus on day two, just to see if your immune system can survive.

Well, it's that, 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, go obviously do that.

But a lot of people don't do it, 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 considered 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 stuff also, I think becomes interesting because remember, cut code, cut code knives,

I think is how it's called, whatever, like basically they go door to door and 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, blah, blah, whatever.

And then like when I get done here, I'm going to have this skill forever.

I bet, right?

And I don't know for sure, but there's a bunch of people who go to Gartner to be in the sales

program for two years and they know they're not going to, 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 2% who are like your best people and then you lose like, you know, your bottom

25% or 20% 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 Facebook that you think is-

Sam's all about this one.

I feel like I'm going to be able to do it.

Well, you said a few, but Snapchat as well.

I find it so interesting.

I mean, only 13 or 15 or 20, however many, tens of thousands of people do work at Facebook,

but they are world-class at so many different things.

What, or Snap, let's do Snap, Snap's even more mysterious to me.

Well, Facebook is the easier one because I think that people will understand some of

the tools and it's probably more, it's a better comp 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 there, everyone from, you know, the Chamosa,

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 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 two, whatever the test is has to be executed perfectly.

And if you don't execute it perfectly, and then it doesn't work, you're 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 else, 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 how 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 they're like, Oh, by the way,

like, you know, here's all the watches underneath my jacket, like, you know, here's my analytics

tool, here's my screen recording tool, so 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.

And so 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 end, you're following it with software

and kind of getting more old TV 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.

It's hilarious.

It's definitely true.

But by the time you're done, it's going to be true.

So exactly.

So I'll just share it to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people because, you know,

why not?

So, so this guy works at Facebook high up.

And he uses these tools that 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 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 going to export this idea.

I'm going to 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 raise, 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 going to go do this.

And something happened in that meeting that I don't know, but we believe here's 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 Zuck basically was like, you know, you

could go do that, but like, here's just, um, Oh, a giant bag of money that I have with

me.

Like how about this instead?

And like, how about you stay and you take this bag of money and we forget you ever said

anything about leaving.

And then the guy was like, no, no, no, like, I really want to do this.

Actually, I've told my family, I rented an office space.

I'm, I'm, I'm already two feet out the door and he's like, Oh, cool.

Okay.

So, um, so we're not going to let you do this company.

Actually, we're going to, we're going to have to pursue some action against you.

But again, there's this bag of money and this is great role.

If you just want to stay with the bag of money and the great role, you tell me which way

you want to go.

And so, um, 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 at Facebook.

Did you guys read the, uh, the text messages?

Yeah.

So Sean, like, is obsessed with this and I, he got me obsessed with it where he was like,

he like goes in like emails, the founders of huge companies is like, Hey, forward me

the emails when you were describing the early idea of your company.

I love seeing the evolution and I want 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, uh, to the listeners, uh, last week, this, this, some type of chat transcript got

out of Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram talking to a friend who was talking to someone

who I think was an investor of Instagram, but who also worked at Facebook, I think.

Yeah.

It's got Matt Kohler.

He was early at Facebook and he's a big time PC.

And they were chatting back and forth and Kevin was like, Hey Matt, Zuck 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 they 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 to destroy you.

So play ball.

The exact quote in there, Kevin Systrom asked, he's like, if we say no, will he just like

go into destroy mode?

Yeah.

He's just like, yeah, probably he's like, okay, so what do I say that will not trigger

destroy mode?

He's like, maybe we could just say, oh, we're, we're just trying to do this little filter

thing.

We don't, we don't really see ourselves as like, you know, becoming a social network.

And he's like, yeah, he's also really smart.

He goes, he's too smart and he's like, well, should we tell him that we're going to sell

to Twitter?

He goes, you could, he'll, he'll destroy you.

I thought it was amazing.

Did you, and I know we're about that time.

Did you ever have moments of that where you're like, Oh God, this guy's like gang is kind.

He's going to, he's going to, he's going to destroy.

I don't remember how many times I met with Zuck, but I 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 Cheryl Sandberg's personal Facebook pages.

Right.

Interesting.

They didn't want to like manipulate the product, right?

Like you could, I literally remember we were, I remember we were like one meeting and like

one of the ideas at one point was like, well, why don't we just like put it interstitial

and be like, everyone follows up, like kind of like Tom, my space style, you know, type

thing.

And then part of the beauty of like a diverse team 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, 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 so we'd be these meetings and the thing that always struck me was like, you've got

a guy who runs a, you know, multi-billion dollar business been working on in a long time

and he could be talking about like super long-term company strategy and then immediately like

there's a presentation up and he would like zero in on a screenshot and 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 your capacity in terms of like ingesting

information and also being able to like sift through high signal, low signal stuff is just

like bar none.

And so I was telling somebody internally at the company at the time, they're like, well,

look, first you have to remember, like he has the most context here, right?

He's literally been at the company the longest.

And so like he seemed like these iterations of the product, he remembers the conversations

before they got launched, the things that went right, the things that went wrong, like

whatever.

But it was still this thing of just like, man, this dude's on it.

And so like, I'll read articles even today and people like say whatever they want about

Zuck, they've like never talked to him or never met him or whatever.

And I'm like, do you think he like built a multi-billion dollar company because he's

an idiot?

Right.

Right.

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 he's dumb, 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 are going to be like, wait,

why is Zuck and 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 if all of a sudden people here, like, you know, they're making a huge investment

in VR.

And there's a lot of other people who are like, wait, why is he doing that?

Like, what does he know that I don't know?

And, you know, they try to 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 an Instagram thing.

It's 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.

We're just pretty impressed.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Interesting.

I love those stories.

Thank you for sharing.

Me too.

We should go.

Yeah.

You want to wrap this up, Sean?

Damn.

This was great.

Pomp.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Hope you can come on again.

I think people are really going to like you and your, your, uh, your thoughts.

So I appreciate you coming in.

Absolutely.

Thanks guys for having me.

We'll definitely.

Awesome.

Okay.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.