My First Million: Business Breakdown Duel & The Story of Nike's Sonny Vaccaro

I'm gonna blow your mind ready

So Scotland, you know Scotland you've heard of that country Scotland right you've heard of that place familiar

Land of kilts and sheeps

Also red heads, but okay and red heads

But it's also home to one of the coolest sass businesses that I've ever heard of so it's called petroleum exports

They it's known as pet tax

Let's jump in we got a bunch of stuff today. We're gonna do what's called a business breakdown duel

Sean and I and I was how we're calling it duel

Is that a Western duel? I guess is

We both did a business breakdown and we didn't know that the other one was gonna do it

And so now we're gonna compare. I'm gonna go first

Which gives you the advantage because the person who goes last always

Usually wins and rad battles because that's it's always like when you you know like when they do

You know where they do the applause or like person a person be a person be always wins. I

Get to hear you say your thing and then I can make fun of what you said. Yeah

So anyway, you're gonna you get the advantage, but that's okay. So I'll go first. Okay, but before I go first

I've got to give a shout out to Andrew Lynch from net income. It's a sub stack

It's where I found this particular business and I'm stealing a lot of his numbers, but

I'm gonna blow your mind ready

So Scotland, you know Scotland you've heard of that country Scotland, right? You've heard of that place familiar

Land of kilts and sheeps

But also I think there's sheeps there. I don't actually know that's how little I know about Scotland but also redheads

But okay and redheads, but it's also home to one of the coolest sass businesses that I've ever heard of so it's called petroleum exports

Uh, they it's known as uh, pad tax pad tax. It's a challenging name. I know and it's a highly technical

Specialist software crucial for oil and gas operations. You can go to petex.com

To check it out. So pull that up, but pet pet tax

It's a highly technical specialist software. That's the backbone of some of the most

Important operations in the oil and gas industry and it sounds boring and that's because it is however

They last year they made 78 million pounds in revenue, which is about a hundred million dollars USD

And on that hundred million dollars in revenue about 67 million of it was profit and of that

Of that profit they basically took out all the money

So they paid a dividend of 41 million pounds, which is about 60 million dollars

And that was paid to the owner and it wasn't even retained to the company

Which means for every dollar they took about 52 dollars went directly to the or 52 cents went directly to the owner's pocket now

Here's the cool part. None of this is rumors. This isn't hearsay

I'm not like telling you I heard a story because in the uk if you're a privately held company that hits a certain threshold in revenue

You have to submit your reports and you could just log in

It's called companies house

You can just go there and you can log in you can see all this information

And so I went and looked at many many many years of their data and I'm going to tell you a story about how this company came to be

So it was started by this guy named we're gonna call him a his name is Abe his name

He's he's a muslim guy. It was very very very challenging. Uh first and last name. Can you see his name?

Can you tell me how to pronounce that? Do you know how to pronounce that?

Abdul Hamid is the first name and the last name. It's very challenging. There's a d and there's a j together

That's a very challenging. Oh, so you are calling him ape or he goes by ape

I'm calling him ape his last name is

If you look at it, I've never met many muslim apes, but uh, we're gonna call him ape

His last name has a d and a j next to each other. I don't even know how to pronounce that sound

So i'm sorry

It's a very challenging name to pronounce. So he started the company in 1990. It was based in

Aberdeen, scotland, which is basically like a hover oil industry

It's kind of like similar to what hueson in america is and the company originally served as a petroleum consultant for

and uh

Consultants to the control petroleum industry as well as retailers and they would create these mathematical models to help

People in the in the oil and gas industry

Manage their projects and so today they've kind of pivoted from consulting to providing software

They only have 420 customers and their core product is composed of complex products

Which are complex features that uh with descriptions like a multi-phase network modeling and optimization and

Thorough dynamics fluid characterization package. So pretty complicated stuff

So as I said, they started as a consulting business and they did have done 78 million pounds in revenue last year

Which is about 100 million usd 58 million usd in profit and 50 million in dividends

Meaning the company doesn't require much capital x

So they made all this profit and most all of it 58 million profit 50 million came out of the business and went directly to the owner's

Pockets and he's been doing this for years and years and years their business

Biggest expense is employees. So because they're based in the uk

They pay uk software engineer salaries, which are lower than the us making their average all in cost per each employee

Of which they have 86 of them only 101 thousand pounds per year. So the which means that they are doing

911 pounds

900 911 thousand pounds in revenue per employee

So 9x 9x basically r y per person that they hired

So

Yeah, this company absolutely kills it and I want to tell you when I was analyzing this company and um, if you look up

Andrew Lynch his sub stack. He does a really good job of explaining the technical details of the company

I want to explain some of the entrepreneurial takeaways that I had. So if you go to the top, uh, link shon in our doc

Um, or at the beginning of the story, you'll see the uh sub stack where you can it's his

Andrew Lynch has a thing called

Net incomes and that's where I discovered this. So I want to tell you some of my takeaways takeaway one focus plus time

That's what this guy did. So everyone talks about focus. But what does focus means?

You basically in my opinion need to focus enough to turn your idea into a machine

And then after that, I think you can deviate some attention away from that if you want

But the company needs focus and that focus took takes time

So I went back and I looked at a lot of their uh revenue and so did Andrew

So if you score down shon, you'll see a graph of the revenue

And what you'll notice is that it took them 15 years to get to 10 million dollars in revenue 10 million pounds

I'm gonna call it dollars of 10 million dollars in revenue

And I know a lot of people I think maybe you have done this with one of your businesses got to close to 10 million revenue

In like 1.5 or 1 or two years actually and so 15 years particularly in like the tech internet space

It feels horribly long, but I think that's okay. That's the right feeling and so

What I try to do something I've been thinking about for a while is I asked myself in 10 or 20 years

Why be happy if I started this today and that's a really good quote

But that answer is incredibly murky more often than not sometimes. It's like a I think yes

It's a very murky thing and there's this famous story about jeff bezos when he started amazon

He has this thing called the regret minimization framework where he says this story about he was like well

Even though I had this good job

I decided to start amazon because in 80 years when I made or when I'm 80 years old

Well, I'd be proud that I started it today the answer was yes, but

In that same story, he also said that he thought at most amazon could make is 100 million dollars a year

So he it's not like he had the full picture

So it was like yeah, I think this can work and so I went and talked to darmesh who's the founder darmesh

I'm the founder of hubspot. I also talked to kip who is the cmo and kip joined hubspot in year five

I asked kip how big do you think hubspot could be when he joined?

You know, how big did he think so i'm not today's for 25 billion dollars when I asked him

He said I thought he could hit a billion dollars in valuation is a little bit of a stretch

But I thought we could do a billion dollars

uh in valuation meaning like

What's that 80 million in revenue? I don't know how that something like that

And then I asked darmesh. I go how big do you think he could get he goes really?

I didn't have any idea

But I knew that all I wanted was a thousand customers who would each pay 250 dollars

Which by the way, this is only three million dollars a year in revenue

And I thought that would be a pretty cool milestone

And so the reason isn't always or the outcome isn't always clear of is this worth it now

The reason this is important is because the biggest pain in business is not just failing

But it's failing slowly and spending like a decade working on something and wasting your the most

Non-renewable resources there is time wasting that time and I mean it's significantly worse

I think than losing millions of dollars a year in one or two years of equity and so that's where the it's kind of an art

It's a skill. It's an intuition. It's talent. That's where all this stuff comes in place

So tactically, what does this mean?

Ben franklin said a small leak will sink a great ship warm buffett said so you find yourself in a chronically leaky boat

Energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks

So the point being only work on shit

As long as your boat ain't leaking as long as you don't got any holes in that boat

But here's the thing every early safe company. Yeah, everything's leaky at first

So I went back to darmesh and back to kit and I go guys tell me about this hub spot right now

You're guys this net revenue retention. I don't know what it is exactly

But I think it's like 105 percent meaning for every dollar that someone spends at hub spot now

The next year they're going to spend a dollar and five cents

And he said in chip and kip they said a few things

So I'm going to mix it up a little bit

But uh, or I'm going to kind of interchange with what what they said

But I believe it was kip who said our churn at first was terrible

It was beyond bad at one point

We are losing 30 of customers on an annual basis on an annual basis. I then asked

Darmesh, I go was your guys this churn really that bad. He goes. Yeah

It was definitely really bad

It it took about five years in order to like get it to where it was a good place

And I said well, what did you do to fix that and he said our goal was not to make customers happy

It was to make happy customers meaning everything from our branding pitch marketing sales service everything

Should be thought out in a process where the outcome was a happy customer and that meant it was everyone's job

Marketing needs to be reaching better fit customers who are less likely to churn

Sales needed not sales shouldn't oversell and make sure they only qualify that these customers will likely succeed

Which helps reduce the churn products needs to make sure they don't just build new features

But build a feature that reduces churns and they have to make these features

Make sure these features get adopted and churn is churn reduction is a team sport

You also have to remember there's a power law which is 90% of stickiness will be driven by 10% of the product and company features

And not to add 100 features and instead just find ones that work and double down on those

so the point being

All ships are leaky at first

But hopefully you can figure out a way to do it and last but not least my takeaway

$10 a month

It's rarely going to feed a bunch of hungry mouths

So our listeners including you and I sometimes I do this as well. I had a $25 a month product

A lot of times what we do is we look for arbitrages or we look for like small little hacks

That's neat. That's all cool. And all every once in a while it gives you that dopamine hit

But this company the reason I like it is you know how much they charge per year 300 thousand dollars a year for a license to their company

They only have 450 clients

And andrew in his sub stack article. He says something great

He goes imagine you're running an oil rig that extracts hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day

Brent crude is currently

Crude is currently trading at 75 dollars per barrel

So every hundred barrel is seventy five dollars seventy five hundred dollars in revenue your it guy comes up to you and says boss

Patek's just raised their prices by 10 percent. I think we'd save

$3,000 annually if we switch switch the software providers to another thorough dynamic fluid characterization package instead

You tell them to piss off don't touch the thing

Just make sure nothing breaks immediately three thousand dollars

There's nothing in the grand scheme of a huge capital intense business

So they put their price up 10 percent and everyone movies moves on and goes on before because look it helps them solve their business

So or it helps them solve problems in their business. It makes their business better. So this is my breakdown of this company

I love it. I love this company

I love these scottish guys. Jonathan's giving me a clap. What do you think about this one?

Yeah, Jonathan you like that one

Yeah, that was you you kind of touched it all you got the opening story

It with impact and then the three big takeaways at the end and that like q&a with kiv and darmesh was a nice touch

Yeah, that was a good touch. I like how you brought that in the um

There was a a bit of a spelling and pronunciation challenge at the beginning

But you overcame that and i'm proud of you for doing that

You know what I say

So I went to speech class when I was a kid by the way and I always used to tell people

I just got a big tongue my tongue's real thick. I got a thick tongue. Some people say I'm big tongue

Yeah, I got I got a fat thug a fat see I gave it a fat tongue

It's like a it's like a it's like a snail in there. It's like a slug. I got a slug of a of a tongue

I got molasses in my mouth. I don't know what to say. It's hard for me to say some words sometimes

It's like to further away from st. Louis

A person gets or a company gets like the harder it is to explain them. Um

That's interesting. You know, I guess two things on the mind right now. I bet there's opportunity to create like

another pedex basically which is

uh with machine learning and ai

You could go into these kind of like

Old school big dollar type companies and be like, hey, look, we have the ability to process your data

Or to give you insights that's going to save you money like 10 efficiency gain 20 efficiency gains

And I bet that these opportunities, you know have existed but the the more powerful ml and ai get

The more those opportunities open up and the bottleneck is people who even understand what problems exist inside of

You know some shale gas company or inside of exxon mobile and then being able to go sell into them

There was a guy who I met very early on when I was doing my startup

I didn't really know any other entrepreneurs because there's one guy who also went to duke

And I wonder what happened to him. I haven't kept in touch, but I think his name was evan anderson

and he was building a company that was

Selling to I was called osberg. Yeah, this is exactly right. Let's see what happened with this company. Um, so it was selling to

um

Companies that were in oklahoma. So I was like, well you moved to oklahoma and he was like

Yeah, there's where my customers are and I was like, who's your customers?

And it was like all the oil and gas companies that uh that are in america and what he was doing at that time was basically

Quote-unquote big data, uh big data for oil and gas and I was like, that's a great idea

I'm looking at it now. He's still there. See you 14 years later

So I've got this company has been been pretty successful

And I was like I would check in with him and be like, you know, what's the challenge at this time?

I'm working on a sushi restaurant chain and he's like, you know, I'll spend six months

Just courting the right guy the right suit at this uh at this company

I got to take him to uh, you know a football game. I got to invite his family over

We got to get to know him. We got to get him comfortable with this, uh, you know the software

But once I get once I close that deal

These deals are going to be worth millions and millions of dollars over time

they're never going to rip us out once we get in and so um

I I'm curious how this company is doing today, but I know that you know 15 years ago

I was like, this is a great idea and I just I intuitively knew it because I was like

The same effort it's taking me

To do this silly sushi restaurant thing. He's spending the same amount of time

He's just working for a much bigger prize with much more defensibility

And a much clearer value where he's going into an industry that's like never had, uh, you know

Doesn't have this this sort of software capability

He's like I will sit here until I understand your problems and then I will build solutions for this

And uh, I just love that approach. I think that's a like if people are willing to kind of like eat

Shit and go outside of their like kind of comfort zone of problem areas. They understand there's pretty big opportunities

Yeah, and it's cool. Did you see this graph from Andrew Lynch of this company's revenue?

Yeah, it may just like a perfect hockey stick, but over a long period of time

Over a really long period of time. I mean, that's the thing you talk about like this 15 years to get to 10 million

You know respect for continuing and making it all work

That's not for me. Uh, what's the moist quote? Uh, why does everyone make fun of getting rich quick?

That's the best way to get rich

And I'm gonna tell you about a company in a second here that said

In their first week they did a million dollars of sales and never went less than that from there

And you think that that's not true, correct? I think it's I think it's a lie

But I love a good lie. I love a good lie. Tell me about this. Give me a good lie

People underestimate how much of a startup stories are just lies. Okay. So here's my here's my big business breakdown

I see your duel and I uh, I raise you

um

In my head by the way, we were doing an old-fashioned western duel

But now I decided it's american gladiators and you're a laser and I'm blazer and we're going at it on the joust

that so

This morning I was thinking about

Who's lying out there?

Who's lying men's problems. Let's let's play with that way. Okay. So most people have heard

Wait, you got a little you got a little situation. Is that the issue? You got a little

No, no, no, that's not how we got actually here's the here's the actual train of thought

I was thinking about um, these t-shirt companies a little segue here to tell you how my brain works

So I think about these t-shirt companies. I don't know if you've seen this but basically in the last kind of like four years

There's been a bunch of companies start started that succeeded that did the most obvious thing

And I've seen this happen again and again that there's these windows of time

Where big ideas are just hidden in plain sight

And so basically in the last four years a bunch of companies have started that do such a simple thing. They just sell

basic plain men's t-shirts

And these were the big d2c ideas. So like anybody who wanted to do e-commerce or drop shipping or d2c build a brand

The opportunity was sitting right in front of everybody. It was just men's t-shirts. So you have cuts

Fresh clean teas true classic teas built basics all of these companies that in the last sort of four year window

Have built hundred million dollar plus companies. So some of them do about 50 million a year in sales

Some of them do 100 or 150 million dollars a year in sales this kind of range

But to go into like a three-year period to get to 150 million in sales. That's what true classic teas did

is just bananas to be honest and so

um

I'll tell you the the numbers for true classic. So

Year one, uh, let's see where they go. So I think oh, okay. You're one 15 million. You're two 90 million

you're three 150 million

in top line revenue

And um, and they did it all through facebook ads selling plain, you know

white black blue men's t-shirts

And that's the same thing. I think fresh clean teas is somewhere like 50 million north of 50 million in revenue

Uh, I think cuts is over 100 million. Um

It's crazy that these companies all scaled so fast doing this such an obvious thing

Where's the there was no massive innovation? And so I was thinking about this

I was like, man, there's these windows of time and then I thought about

What what are other windows that I've seen like this and I stayed in the e-commerce world and I thought about oh

back in 2017

Both roman and hymns launched doing basically the same thing

And they launched within like a couple months of each other

Basically people had the same idea at the same time and both of them became

billion dollar plus companies doing the same thing what they did was, you know, I guess the summary is

they took advantage of a

What do we call it an inflection?

Uh, as the same blows this regulation inflection in this case. Well, this was regulation inflection. This was a regulatory inflection

and so what happened was, um

There was proven market demand for drugs like viagra

Uh, or propitia or rogaine. And so hair loss or erectile dysfunction. There was a proven like business there

And they started like in the early 90s. And so by 2017 the patents expired for those

And when the patents expired have you ever taken a viagra or anything like that?

Haven't have you?

No, but it's a good time. If someone told me it's awesome. I would but I've never had it. It's awesome

go

So so the patents expired and basically now there was like generic versions of these

And so what and at the same time there was another regulatory inflection

Which was that telemedicine

Was becoming more and more things were getting opened up for telemedicine meaning you could prescribe drugs without going to the doctor

So drugs without a doc was a key kind of like just

You know frame uh framework for for this type of business

And so they both launched and the hymns guy says this guy andrew uh dudum. He goes

We launched and in our first week we did a million dollars of sales and we've never done less than a million since then

I was like, wow, that is incredible. And it is true

That hymns scaled really quickly. So they're revenue a million a week

So he said they never did he said they never did less than a million a week after watching yes

Oh

And I was like that's insane. I was thinking about that because I was like

I've launched many things the first week is

You're talking about patching holes on a boat. That's how the first week is it's like you don't even have inventory

You don't have you don't have a million dollars of inventory

You don't have like to do a million dollars

How much are you spending an ad?

Did you just blast like half a million dollars of ads in your first week?

Facebook ads doesn't even let you ramp up that quickly. So I was a little bit suspicious of this

And uh the revenue did ramp quickly. So they launched the very end of 2017 2018 the full year

They did 27 million dollars in revenue with 27 million dollars an ad spent so they spent 100 of revenue on ads

So they burned a bunch of money

Uh 2019 they did they went from 27 million to 83 million and they spent 50 million on ads

2020 they were forecasting about 140 million and then I have the actual so they'll look check out this revenue growth

It's pretty insane

2021 they did 270 2022 they did 540 2023. They're projecting to finish at 800 million in revenue

So this is a pretty crazy run

In uh, what six years to ramp up to 800 million in revenue

So they can get through a billion in revenue in

Seven years

Exactly they're burning money this whole time even now even at 500 million last year

They only have 2% EBITDA margin and that's the adjusted EBITDA the real they actually burn 10 million

But the the adjusted is that they you know, they they made a small 2% uh margin and so

Super capital intensive they raised like

200 something million dollars before going public and then in going public another

200 300 million dollars went into the business I think and so it's taken them a lot of capital to get here

So I would say three things

Amazing story just in general like props to them for pulling this off like they built this out of an incubator

I ran an incubator for six years

It couldn't get one thing to even 10 million in revenue

And they this was like a big hit that came out of a incubator, which is very very rare

Row Roman which is now rebender row also came out of an incubator at the same time

So the the two biggest incubator hits were sort of the these two companies that did the same thing essentially one did it for

hair so I think

Hems did it for hair hair loss and row did it for ed and then they both just added the other product as they went

um

So impressive in that way the revenue growth impressive the ad spend and the money burned incredible

I now question is this even a good business? So like they basically showed that they're

They're cack so their cost to acquire customers

Uh is really high like their cost to acquire customers is basically what do I have it here?

It's like 100 plus dollars to acquire a customer. Let me grab it

um

I think it's like 150 dollars on average to to acquire a customer the lowest that's been is like a hundred dollars to acquire a customer

and

They basically think they think they three x their money in three years

Which is actually not very good for ecom like my ecom business, which is nowhere near the scale of this

Is way more efficient than this like they're trying to pay back essentially, you know a little over a year

uh

We try to pay back in two months. And so like, you know, it's amazing what just pure aggression

Uh, they approached this business with they were just like, yeah, we're gonna scale this thing

And we're gonna pour a bunch of money in we're gonna burn a bunch of money

But we're gonna ramp up and like we're gonna try to thread the needle to get this business to work when it's at the billions in

scale and

They kind of pulled it off because they went public with vs back and they got liquid

Before the business really worked this week. I had to chop down a tree at my farm and I didn't have an axe

So I just used a sledgehammer instead and so my wife was like, oh, do you you you chopped down that tree?

I was like, I I kind of smashed it down and uh, I just sledge hammer hammered it down

And that's kind of what these guys did. They just kind of sledge hammered their way into into the market

Have you seen this guy? That's a tic-tac that just chops the tree and all like it gets like a million views

and it's all there's like hundreds of thousands of women commenting like

Like just like gasp like I need him

Is he hot? Is he shirtless? No, is he shirtless and hot? He's shirtless and he just chops his tree perfectly like

It's like it takes him like

10 strokes to crack down this giant tree

Is that like an innuendo for sex or something?

Literally like I'm watching this thing and I'm like, I don't even know why I'm watching this. This is like just

From a purely objective level. This is very attractive

I'm just gonna say this this is very on the backwards hat

He's just wears like suspenders

He looks like a lumberjack, but he's like g queued out

So he's he's like a groomed lumberjack that's super like with a crossfit body that chops down trees instead of go to the gym

Since he's incredible. So, um, you're kind of like that. You're like that but like, you know

Not

I'm like I'm like store brand that yeah, you're like in the in the in the zip code of that

So that's basically what these guys said they got a brute force their way, but why don't you think this is a good business?

Well, I think that the I mean just the amount of capital it took to to get to this business value

So it's worth 1.8 billion on paper

um

And they've taken 500 million to get here. So like if you just zoom out it's like

We three and a half extra money

Like that's not the most impressive thing

But like when you frame it the other way which is like we're gonna hit a billion dollars in sales and we've done this in seven years and like

You know, we've built the largest telemedicine health company for men and women and

You could frame it one way or you can just kind of look at it the others like now

Here's a business where if I have to pay

$150 to acquire a customer and give him takes two years to pay it back

If if that we'll see how it all projects out

It's super sensitive to like, you know, they pour so much money into marketing and what if you know

Facebook costs change like, you know, how's that going to affect them? Like there's all these factors

I'm not saying it's a bad business, but

Like compared to that pedex company that does a hundred million in sales and dividends out 50 million to the owner

I know which business I would want to own right

The business that didn't need a spack

To succeed as the business I would want to own the one that's divinating out like a mega yacht every year to this guy

Like that's sick and it has like, you know, one one millionth of the notoriety of a brand like it

So what would you say about the uh, yeah, tell me the other interesting so other cool things

So I think so there's some notable things for the research. I want to put these on the screen

So I put the put the images on screen on youtube if you listen to the podcast

Just pause go to youtube because you got to see these so if you go back through their history

First take a look at this thing I have on page. Uh, what is this page like three or something of this the p&l

Do you see this p&l?

um

This was in there s1 to go public

It's literally it just says revenue

27

gross profit eight adjusted ebita

minus 68

That's the p&l they shared in their investor presentation. I was like, what kind of

Kindergarten level of detail is this? What kind of cray on p&l are you doing?

And I was like, this is why spax this is why spax went to shit because it's like

Half the p&l is just projections what you can't do if you go public the traditional way

But in spax you can do these like forward-looking projections

And that's how all these guys got away with it. It's like we have a shitty business now

But like five years from now, we're crushing and that's like, you know, they were able to tell that story

Whereas you can't make forward-looking statements in the traditional way of going public

And then I was like, this is some absolute basic beginner looking thing

I was just stunned at this. This is like on the sec website. That's a that's an embarrassment

Uh, all right. Second thing you can go to their website

And you can find in the web archive their landing page from the beginning. So check this out

This was their first landing page. This is like the month that they launched. It just said guy

I get staggering odds two things happen one the universe to you

You let's walk at our full height honor our forebears have a smile and for god's sakes floss shop now

And it just goes it just scrolls down and it just says sex

This is this is simple

You need erections when you want them and not when it's convenient for your penis

And there's an eggplant emoji that says shop sex

And there was another one for hair like that was like the same was like she needs to run her fingers through your hair

Oh, and then it just says our bestsellers and there's just a very basic bottle that says

finasteride

and that's like the the generic name for

propitia or like, you know, for like the hair

Male pattern baldness like drug or whatever and they were just selling it for $28 and then there was there only had two skews

finasteride and vitamins not even like

vitamin c is

But here's some vitamins

Incredible to go see I love love love looking at successful businesses early landing pages

Just to see like how did they get their business out the door?

One thing that's interesting is from the beginning they actually had a pretty strong like branding and brand identity

So if you go do this with like snapchat or uber

The first websites are just absolutely fuggly like, uh, I have this blog post on the internet. That's called like you just search

Sean puri, uh early startup

landing pages medium

um

10th, okay, it's called 10 throwback startup home pages. Um, when did you write that article?

I wrote this in 2015. So this was a month. What month?

June

Oh, you beat me in october 12th 2015. I wrote an article. It said proof that your favorite startup started out awful

And it's a list of 10 landing pages. Yeah, you favorite startup

I think we knew each other then so

Uh, you can go look at airbnb's. It's like literally plain black and white and it just says forget hotels stay with

local uber it looks like a

You know janky thing. Everyone's private driver, but it looks like a old school car service snapchat

It's got one of these like yellow bubbles. That's like the like

Buy now, you know, like, you know half buy two get one

And it just says free download inside and it says introducing snapchat real-time picture chatting for iphone

And it's two girls in there like bikinis and it just says seven seconds on the screen and like, you know a self-destructing photo

So you can see what early startup landing pages look like what's interesting that was unique in the hym's case is that

They actually had their branding from day one, which I think was a smart move by them

And they specifically branded it the opposite colors as every other

Male wellness products every other male wellness product is essentially blue

And they were like no we'll go all neutral color scheme lowercase like lowercase font for the for the brand name

And we're going to make it subtle because there's a stigma and a taboo around this is not something you want to brag about

We don't want bold we want like

We want to be able to give you this package in a discrete way and you know and I know and that's all who needs to now

And I thought that was like a smart thing for them to get right from day one

All their models are like it's usually like a cool-looking black dude or like a racially ambiguous guy. It's like

It's like, oh, I I can see myself in you. I'm a young cool guy

It's like I wear like cool jeans as well. Were your parents all of the power rangers. Why are you also?

Happen here

It's usually like a like I'm pretty racially ambiguous looking guy with nice teeth

Yeah, the teeth are always on point versus like

My agra is always like Brett farm looking guy and then this was one of their early

Early ads so it's just it just says get hard or get your money back and it's just a guy holding a tiny pill

Um, and it's and what as I see is that guy?

Oh, dude, his hand is like a gradient and photoshop. It's like all all colors are easier

Uh, so it says eggplant emoji rise to the occasion for less

So one thing that they did really well was they figured out how do you advertise on facebook with a taboo product?

So they would do stuff like they would show a picture of a cactus that was limp

And then another and it would be like with hymns. You don't have this problem

So like how do you and so they were very clever clever with their marketing?

They also did stuff where they would create ad inventory. So they would go to

Like stadiums and they'd be like, all right a bunch of guys who are in our demographic are at the stadium

We could either spend like four hundred thousand dollars to get on the jumbo tron and along with like

you know, bmw and a bunch of other big brands or

They went to the stadium facility manager and they were like, hey, how much for the urinal space?

They're like what they're like, yeah, we want to put a little ad on the urinal and we'll give you guys like

You know x price to be in every urinal and they're like

Yeah, dude, we got like 30 seconds of guys focused time while they're touching their thing like, you know looking at our ad

This is actually kind of perfect

And so they would create new ad inventory that didn't even exist before just trying to

Figure out how do we spend a hundred million dollars in a way that's going to be as efficient as possible

So they're you know, really just like very they're like a very advanced marketing agency essentially

And another thing that they did and I did a big breakdown on this one time was

So if you google viagra alternative or cheap viagra or buy viagra online

They show up number one and what they did was they actually sponsored a ton of twitch people

And somehow that like got their links out there and they like they got tons and tons of backlinks really early on

So hymns.com ranked quite high

So they are able to get like it was I think if you I think it's

Viagra alternative might be like their word. I forget which it's one of those pages and that's where they got most of the revenue early on

Oh, wow, that's interesting. You know, there's another cool thing. I'll put this graphic on the screen

It's this graphic from have you ever read sacra by the way? I don't even know if that's how you say it

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the like the research thing. I like it. Yeah, they're pretty cool

I don't think people know about them, but they it's uh like really good research

s a

c r a

Yeah, so they had done a thing and they had this great graphic which was basically they were like

Telemedicine was like this like trend like this like there's a lot of opportunity in telemedicine right now

And they just showed this picture of like a guy and a girl and it's a diagram and basically it's like you could look from like head to toe

Literally from head to toe and you just go down the body. You're like, okay

Hair there's hymns. There's keeps. There's roman

Okay, then you go down to like eyes and it's like there's prescription contact hubble

You know it was a dvc startup doing

prescription contacts through a phone app instead of going to the doctor

Then you go to their bicep. It's like trt

There's a bunch of trt companies like hone health and others and then you're like and then you go to

You know, they're abs. It's like weight loss. You go to the crotch. It's like here's the the rectal dysfunction

Then you go down to the toes. It's like here's toe fungus. Then he's got a little pet next to him

It's like, hey, here's pop. It's it's insurance for your pet

so you have like instead of going to the vet for everything you can use pop and

and so it's like

And then they do the same thing for women and you could just literally see like

if you've seen those diagrams that were like

There was a big opportunity to unbundle craigslist and they took craigslist homepage and they showed out every little section of craigslist became

its own billion dollar startup

They did the same thing to your body every part of your body became a billion dollar startup essentially from one d to c

wellness company

And or multiple in some in some areas so from skin care and all of their logos look exactly the same

Lowercase font pastel colors

Hymns, I think it's oh by the way one one one other little observation

A lot of these d to c

Successes came from a certain type of founder

Not all of them but many from mba found like founders who went to like business schools

Which is funny because like in the startup world business schools

Kind of like an easy punching bag because you're like punching up at the institution

It's easy to make fun of them like bro. You don't learn business at school

You learn business by doing business and that's how I feel to be honest with you

So I'm like

That's true

But there is something interesting that a lot of d to c companies blue apron birch box stitch fix warby parker

rent the runway

Hello, hello fresh

And then this you know this guy who did uh

Hymns, he went to worton as well. So it's like a lot of these big

I think there was something about the type of person who would do well in the business school and the types of things

You learn in business school where you like do this market landscape

You like figure out the opportunities. You're like, okay good

I just need to be like

good at marketing and then good at operations in order to like

Like put cash in here and get the thing out. It's not like very software based

It's not in it. You don't have to be the the innovator who's like, you know, the one inventor of something

um

I think it landed itself to that type of entrepreneur, which I thought I found pretty interesting too

Well, here's what our listeners need to do. They need to either probably in the youtube comments

They need to let us know. I'll actually want to know who won the duel

I actually want them to I want to know if they think hymns is a good business, but

Also, who won the duel? So you'll have to vote by saying our names

Um

We'll include us a Spotify poll as well

So you can just vote in the app

And we'll do a Spotify poll as well. Some guy in the youtube channel said, um

Um, who's this blonde host and why is he so annoying? So just over the record the blonde annoying guy

That's what someone said in the comment the the blonde annoying guy that was sam

I went first and sean is the brown less annoying guy

He went second for him. So let us know who's the winner here of the of this duel

Um, I'm very eager to hear what people are gonna say. I know which one I would rather own

But I think they're both quite interesting

For sure for sure

You saw this post by mark zuckerberg that he did the mirf

I tweeted out the picture of it and it got like five million views. It kind of took off and

I don't know. So do you know what the mirf is?

I had never heard of the mirf until I saw this and then I was like I must do the mirf

It's named after lieutenant mirfy. I believe

context clues leads me to believe that he died, uh, in the military and, uh, his favorite workout

I believe it's one mile run

300 squats 100 push-ups and 100 pull-ups and then a one mile run

All while wearing a 20 pound weighted vest. Is that the workout?

That's exactly right run a mile 100 pull-ups 200 push-ups 300 squats run another mile while we while wearing a

20 pound vest

and

Zuck basically

Takes a like bro gym shot. I gotta use the blackberry for this. He's got the phone down here

Not smiling got the mouth open just

And just snaps it with himself drenched in sweat and he's like just did the mirf

He's like me and my daughter's that he's got picture of his daughter's doing like push-ups

And he goes like this year. I got it done in 39 minutes and 58 seconds

And I was like I read that and I was like, hmm. That sounds like really fast if he had just said

I did 100 pull-ups today. I would have been like, man

What a day

Fantastic for forgetting all the rest. I was already impressed by 100 pull-ups

to say he got that done in

weighted pull-ups

To say you got that done in 39 minutes. I was like that sounds ridiculously fast

And sure enough all the comments were like, that's an insane time for the mirf

Have you ever done this workout?

I haven't but the world record holder of the mirf is this guy named hunter mackentire

Who's dm me on twitter and instagram and i've talked to because I like him a lot

Or I followed him and I feel like I like him. Is that what fit guys do? They just dm each other

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's like a club, you know, like once you can see the sixth app you start following each other

Yeah, I'm one of us

Good to see you and he dm me. He listens to the pod

He's the world record holder and I think his world record is like 34 minutes and zuck's time was 39 minutes

Which means he would have gotten like 10 or 15th place at there's like a mirf games or something like that

I mean, I had so many thoughts brushed through my head. My first I saw 39 minutes and I thought

I've taken shits longer than that like that's it. That's a crazy fast time. Then I thought

I don't think I could even do a mirf in an infinite amount of time. I don't think in my life

I have done a total

Of two miles running 100 pull-ups 200 push-ups and 300 air squats like with a 20 pound vest

I have just never done it period. Uh, so my time is currently 35 years

then I thought

This mother this guy has

He decided yo, you know what I'll just become one of the richest people in the world

One of the most powerful people in the world and the one of the fittest guys in the world like he's basically wholesome

top 0.1

Wealth top 0.1 percent

You know intelligence top 0.1 power and now he's top point put top 1.1 percent chat also

I am ball all before the age of 40

Yeah, exactly and he's got two kids or something like that. I'm like

I mean

David Goggins should go to sleep listening to mark zuckerberg videos for motivation

This guy's incredible. I went I bought more stock and I bought a plain gray

You know cookie cutter t-shirt in his honor. I was like this is I'm gonna retire. This is the rafters of my office

I'm gonna put it on a hang a gray shirt

Just to honor this man. He gets so much shit and man. He's really turned his like

public persona around

like do you remember he was

He was the biggest dork like not just like oh when he was young like

Recently he was the biggest dork is he tried to do something cool like he would do when he did that like hydrofoiling thing and he

Painted his white his face white like a geisha and like it's like man. This guy's like

It hit american fire. It was just like it was like ah man like, you know what?

Keep all your money. I don't want to be here and now he's like

You know just got off work did a quick jiu-jitsu tournament came back

You know a fucking deleted snapchat off the earth. I'm like wow this guy's just this guy's making power moves all day

He's incredible. He's he's a very inspirational dude. He's done it scandal free. So zuck is only 37 now

You know probably fifth or sixth rick is he only 37

Something like that. I mean he's still in his 30s

held is he

39 39 so only so so he so basically he

Been married to the same woman been with her since college has two kids seems like his family life on on on paper seems awesome

There was a time where in like the most scandalous thing that he did was he had a video where he talked about smoking meats

And every year he sets remember that because every year he's had goals

No, no, that's not the most scandalous thing

That was just like hilarious that he was a robot trying to be like

Hello humans. I am doing a barbecue with I have flesh on a grill with fire

And it was like bro. This is the robot the most scandalous thing he did was when he was in college and

The the his aim messages got leaked that was like, you know a real wonderful day in my household as I like was like

Hey cancel Netflix. I have my entertainment for the week. I'm reading all of mark zuckerberg's

Aim messages for the next week that and it wasn't even that big of a deal

What he said was pretty on par with an 18 year old 19 year old person like well

Maybe it was a one part was a little bit like

Uh, is this what we want like this guy's this is the guy running facebook where he was like

He's like, yeah, he was like

He's like, yeah, just tell me if you want anyone's like, you know name do you know date of birth?

You know address whatever he's like these dumb fucks. Just just trust me. They just put everything in the system

And so that sounds like something a 19 year old kid who invented this stuff would say

Yeah, I would say

That was the last time I was relatable with mark zuckerberg

Ever since then he's created a gap

And he's outpaced me from there every year

He sets these goals one year it was he only wants to eat food that he killed or grew and I think he did it

And then another year he was like, I'm gonna learn mandarin because I want facebook to come to china and I think his wife is chinese

And he was like, I'm gonna learn mandarin and then he goes and he gives a talk

I think he does it gives a talk to a chinese university. He gave me an interview. They go they fly him out there

They're like, thank you so much park zuckerberg for coming. We are so happy to have you and he's like

He's like, you know, well mensual and he just starts speaking chinese and they're like her blown away

It's like really great man where he's basically fluent

And so the guy kills it man

He does great and like when he did the efoil so he got into efoiling

Which is basically surfboarding without a wave and he is doing it with an american flag

And he has too much sunscreen on his face. That's my guy a guy whose biggest like flaw is that he's goofy

He's not the kind of my guy and then now that I oh

You're zagging the other way you're saying

Zuck bad move

Unrelatable too too good no vulnerability no no relatability now

He's no longer girl next door hot now. He's just super model hot

Zuck's the best man. He just he you know our friend Nikita beer

Has this joke where he says something like I would never never or I forget why he says this

But he says you never ever ever bet against zuck how he's just a complete killer and he is wrong sometimes but not in the grand scheme

And this is for the proof

Well, the funny thing is people will

Hate this segment because I think it's popular to really hate mark zuckerberg

um

Because they hate facebook I think because they're like my data or like the russians hack the election

I'm even sure i'm not even sure what the

What the exact reason is for hating zuckerberg at this point

I just got to say like this is

I mean he he is inspiring in that he is excellent and if you appreciate excellence that is kind of inspiring

It's kind of like people who hate lebron. It's like okay. I get it. You don't have to like the guy but uh

I mean you got to respect

Yeah, puts a respect on this guy's name

Wrong either by the way, but did you complain sometimes?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but yeah, he switched teams when he was a free agent. Um, my

Real estate agent told me the story that she was driving by. She's like that's mark zuckerberg's house in the in the mission

Kind of like near delores park type of area

And I was like he lives here and I was like that's not like I thought he lived in some private gated community

And she was like well, I mean he has like many houses

But this is one this is one and this is like his main one for a while

And she's like and he made it private. I was like, what do you mean?

I don't see any fence and she's like, you know, he bought the houses next door

like he just bought all the houses in the area so that like

You know, whatever and so he he knocked on someone's door

himself

so somebody opened the door and it was mark zuckerberg outside and

he's like, hey, you know, I love this house and I

Would you sell it to me?

And they're like, no, I mean it's not for sale. We love this house. We're so close to the park

You know, my community it's only seven miles. He's like, I'll give you 10 million dollars. They're like, okay. Here's the keys

Basically, he bought the house for 10 million. It was probably a two million dollar house

And then the house next like the house is nearby him two and a half three million dollars

And he paid 10 and just got the house right away

Dude that person who sold their house to him would hit be the best dinner guest imagine that story

Does we would like to have you on air if that's you

we would like to have you come tell that story because uh

Obviously i'm reenacting what I was told by a real estate agent. I don't know if that's uh, that's true or that's bullshit. Um

So, yeah, zuck amazing. Let's uh, wrap wrap up with this last thing this Nike thing

Did you watch this movie? Uh air? Yeah, I did. I thought it was awesome

It was pretty sweet, right? Like uh, not the best movie but like a

Just a solid

base hit on a on a thursday night a friday night, you know, you just need something that's

I don't want to sit here and browse netflix for the perfect thing

All right, i'm just gonna go on I think it's on amazon and i'm just gonna go watch air and like this just watch the story of

How nike signed michael jordan they made film night look like a doofus

Yeah, why did they do that? I didn't understand that they uh, well, he does like appearance-wise look like a doofus

But they also made him act like a doofus. Yeah, which I don't think he was like that when I read shoo dog

I didn't get that idea. Uh, uh, he he he's more. I think uh, they made him look like when he wrote his own memoir

He made himself sound cool. Well, I've read a lot. I've read a lot about him

He he they just kind of made him look like a like a like a ditzy person like an idiot. Yeah, he's not an idiot

Um, but the guy they feature so a couple things so so first anything stand out from the movie air

But then I have I want to go deep on this guy sanny vicaro because I think he's actually more interesting

Who was that the main character? I don't remember his name. That's the that's the main character. So that's matt daemon

matt daemon in the movie, but um

You know in in in Nike in the air movie. I thought one one interesting thing

I didn't know was there they're talking about just do it, which is the

Just do it's the slogan that you know, everybody knows it's the Nike kind of like iconic slogan

And they were talking about like at the time even people internally were like just do it

Like we got they got that from the ad agency widened kennedy and they're like, I don't know

What does that what does that mean? Do you like it? I don't know. It's okay. I guess

They weren't like, yes, this is this is going to be this like marketing masterpiece

And they go, what does that even mean and they go

Dude, it's from an inmate on death row who was about to be a sass about to be executed

And they were like any last words and he goes just do it

So that became the Nike slogan, which is uh, honestly kind of genius

um

So I want to talk about this guy sanny vicaro because he's kind of a gangster that I've seen for many many years in the basketball scene

And the movie was about him and he this guy's pretty fascinating. So

What in the movie he's famous because he's working at nike at the time nike is

The last player it's just a running shoe company and they're the smaller shoe company

Adidas is this global brand that's crushing it. They own most of the sneaker market

I believe you have pronounced adidas. Yeah, adidas

Um, which has its own interesting story

Then rebach is like number two and nike's like a distant three

But they were doing like 27 million a year in sales through their running shoe

So good but not like nowhere near the kind of top tier uh of shoe companies

And so sonny meets phil night and he's like, hey, I got an idea for a basketball shoe

I want to create like a basketball division like you guys are all running shoes

We should create basketball shoes

And he's like, okay, like come on in you get this little basketball department like go ahead try to make it work

and the movie is all about like one breakthrough thing he did which was

They had a tiny budget and in the 1984 draft

They decided to sponsor michael jordan and michael jordan was not interested in nike

he was going to go with uh, I think adidas or somebody like that and um

He was known as a as a hot prospect

He's like the number three pick and they were like well

We still want and and sonny was convinced we need michael jordan

And so the movie is about them trying to go get michael jordan on board and

And what ended up what they what the pitch was was basically they put their entire budget on one guy

Instead of spreading across multiple players

He relentlessly pursued jordan and like met his mom

And like just like drove out there to north carolina to meet them and try to build a relationship

And then they showed jordan's face in the movie which actually was pretty cool

It was basically the whole relationship was how do I impress his mom because I know his mom will have my back

She's making the decisions and so they were like well

Um, we're going to pitch him on his own signature shoe from day one

And we're going to name it after him

Um, so it'll be the air jordan. It'll be a whole product line named after him

And he ended up negotiating a royalty on every pair of jordan's sold and that's how michael jordan became a billionaire

Not through basketball, but through his shoes. So that's the the movie part. Okay, cool

This guy sonny actually did a bunch of other interesting things that I thought were pretty cool. So

As a marketer, I just respect this guy's hustle. So here's some of the things he did to make nikey win

um

He created so he was like, all right

We got to create like a like a kid strategy. It's like how do we get him while they're young?

And so he created a high school all-american game

So he was like he called it the the dapper ban round ball classic

He goes throughout the country. He's like, I'm inviting you to participate. You're going to compete against, you know, the

12 best players, um

Whatever 20 best players in the country

You're invited to come do this thing in in in pittsburgh or philadelphia or some shit like that

It was like, uh

And so he flies them out there and he puts this thing together now

He's got the players so then he goes and tells all the college coaches. Hey if you're scouting

You need to come to this round ball class. You can see all the best high school players at once

And so then college coaches start coming. So now players are like, oh if I want to get seen by college coaches

I got to get to the high school all-american game

So he just like created through brute force like a conference essentially

That would uh bring together the kind of the core supply and demand and then he could find at that age

The best young players and so he that's how he found koby bryant. That's how he found lebron james

They were part of his high school all-american things and his camp

So the second thing he does he created a summer camp for only the best players called abcd and he brand

This was when he was with adidas. So this guy worked for nike

Then he worked for adidas then he worked for rebock

So he just this guy was just a hired assassin that went from company to company

And would just try to get them to win in their market using whatever advantages they had

And so when nikey needed something he was like, all right, you need to get them all they're young

We're gonna do this camp. But also what we're gonna do is we need to get college players wearing our stuff

They all wear adidas and uh because it's the most popular brand

So that's just what they choose by default or they choose converse

And so he's like, you know, why don't we um, you can't pay college athletes

But nobody's saying anything about coaches

And so he just started he would go to the coaches and he'd be like, hey

I'm gonna give you 10 grand and here's 26 pairs of shoes

Give them out. Oh, they happen to be the sizes of like most of your guys

Uh, they don't have to wear them you get the 10 grand either way

But we sure do hope you would uh, you know, you would go ahead and uh

And um, you know encourage them to wear these shoes

And so he went to jim bayhive and he went to like, you know

All the top college coaches and he basically bribed them and it was like in this gray area where it was allowed

And in one year he just traveled like he would just fly city to city

He would go to the campus

He would make the coach and offer and at the time they were buying this equipment for their program

They're like our kids need equipment

So we got to buy this the stuff so he turned the cost into revenue for them and gave them free stuff

And sure enough all of them started started wearing nikes for free

So all of a sudden now nikes being worn by all the best college players

And it's on tv and in one year

He just did a land grab across the country before the other companies could could react

He got all of and I thought this was just like a genius, uh,

Genius strategy. He started there. Isn't it amazing how far you can go with brute force

This was a sledgehammer. This was a sledgehammer and you can get pretty far with the sledgehammer

Then then he did another thing. He sued the ncaa

So he went to this guy edo banon and he was like, hey, we should sue the ncaa

They're using your name your face your likeness to market the tournament and all the stuff and you're getting nothing from it

And now college players can get paid through this nil rule this name and likeness thing

And it's because he won the case with that, uh, lawsuit

Against the ncaa that was like, you know, it happened the lawsuit happened the last

I don't know five years or so then the rule came into effect like a year ago or something and so

So I thought that was awesome. Uh, there were some great quotes about him. Some guy goes, uh

When sonny dies, he's gonna sneak his way into heaven

And uh, and when he gets there the first thing he's gonna do is he's gonna look for a six nine kid to make a deal with

Like he's like and the other thing they said is there's only one man on earth

Who could tell you who the best sixth grade basketball player in the country is and it's sonny vocaro

And I just love that this guy just like owned his niche and just absolutely

Like went balls to the wall and really built like

I don't know tens of billions of value at least

Inside of nike plus adidas plus revoc with these athletes and he would have also got so he signed

Jordan he signed he he got he poached kobe away from adidas

And then he would have got lebron too when he was at adidas and lebron was ready to sign

He goes we need to offer him 10 million a year for 10 years 100 million dollar contract to this 18 year old kid

and

Robons ready to sign and then adidas gave them the 10 million but they changed the structure last minute. They got a little

Cold feet and they're like, well, we don't know if this kid's gonna work out

Why don't we make it part of an incentive base?

And so they offered him seven million guaranteed and three million a year of incentives

And lebron turned it down ends up going nike never looked back and like just a huge blunder like

Basically this guy's whole life. He was fighting bureaucracy inside companies and then doing like

Black market and gray hat shit in the like, you know in the streets and every NBA player is like no sunny

their parents no sunny because this guy was just working the streets and like

There are certain companies that have had this

tinder kind of had this with

What's her name the a whitney wolf who started bumble?

She was kind of doing this from college campus to college campus like going into the sorority

Houses and the frat houses and just brute force onboarding

All the guys and girls in one campus. So that tinder was useful

And then throwing parties and doing stuff like that and like you need these people

These are like game changing people for your company. I remember when coinbase went public

Brian Armstrong did this long thread. He did something you never see somebody do which was

Company goes public. They usually just say generic stuff. He actually talked about like what led coinbase to be successful

and he called out one guy by name

That wasn't his co-founder wasn't his main investor. It was just an employee and his guy dan romero

and he's like

And you know, basically special thanks to dan romero who like

Just kind of like brute force built our relationships with banks

And he basically got them their relationships with banking partners and like I think maybe some stuff overseas

Um, and it was just kind of like one of those things like dude. I don't know how we're going to do this

I don't know Dan. That's your mission. Send them on a mission to go do that

And dan basically joined coinbase coinbase as an employee ended up making like a hundred million dollars plus through this process

Um, and I knew this guy. I met him in college. He was in my class

Yeah, didn't he uh, didn't you like used to make fun of him and call him a dweeb?

I didn't make fun of him, but in my head I did he was we took a class called computers

Again, I was going through campus looking for the easiest sounding classes. I took giving rich

I was one class. I took another class called computers and in computers. They were talking about like that's like a

person class

It's computers and they were just talking about like the internet and like internet

I remember like they talked about net neutrality a ton

I was like, I don't know what the hell these guys are talking about like

I couldn't give less of a shit about this and there was one guy that every class had like strong opinions

Was super informed. I was like, man, who is this like teacher's pet?

That's just like is he trying to impress him? I was like, no, I don't even think he's trying to impress him

I think he actually just

Nerdy about this stuff. He just listened motherfucker just loves the internet

This guy like wants to make out with the internet. I was never sitting in the back of class like

I was like, thank you for talking so much Dan Romero because I don't have to say a word in this class and um

It's sort of like, you know revenge of the nerds in a way

It's like jokes on you like this guy's passion and enthusiasm about the internet and technology is what led him early into crypto

It's led him to pick coinbase and ended up, you know, like his passion for that led him to be a key person there

this guy made 100 million hundreds of millions of dollars probably is retired and uh

and got to do what he loved the whole time and so like, you know

I used to make fun of people who were like, you know overly enthusiastic and now

I preach that you need like enthusiasm is massively underrated and more people do and he's got a super handsome

Headshot now and linked in Dan Romero does

The good you can afford a whole, you know glow up if you uh, if you get that coinbase IPO and early bitcoin money

He's got great hair. This guy's definitely takes hymns. He's a good-looking guy

That power hymns user and he just bought uh, $13 million worth of $13 million property in venice and another one in park city dan won

Yeah, dan won for sure

And you can tell that he's ripped too. Like this guy's definitely has abs

dan won

Good job dan

I'm just like you just google him and see his face. You know, this guy's fit

I should dm him

I'll lead you to the groom

Say no more. I've seen enough through the pic

Yeah, you could tell by his jawline. This guy's got one of those like v's that goes down as there's like junk

No, no nfts. Uh, just lift up your shirt six inches. I'll tell you

Yeah

So, um

Dude this guy's sunny sounds awesome. I I did see the movie and they made him look like a guy

Who could just put up with a whole lot of pain? That's what they made him look like

Um, they made him look like a guy who like he would just get shit on constantly and he always pulled through

That's what they made him look like

Uh, and they also made him look exhausted and it's terribly unhealthy

Which is the price to pay kind of true. Yeah

They made him look horrible and if you look at photos of him granted

He's like it looks like he's he was born in 1938. I think so like, you know, you are what you are at that point

but like

He definitely looks like he smoked a lot of cigarettes

1938 that sounds very old. Is that I looked him up on wikipedia. I think it's 38

30s old. Wow. Yeah, he's 83. Wow

Sunny yeah, so he you know

He's alive and and by the way, the guy's name is actually john paul vincent vicaro

Quote changes sunny

god damn I

like

You have to have a nickname that everybody in your town knows you buy

That's like

To me, that's like one of the great honors of life

It's like, yeah, his name's named Sean, but everybody called him sunny whole life. Everybody called him sunny

It's like that's just like such a cool. I wish I had a calling card like that

That's an Italian thing. That's like I feel like all the there's always a sunny and the mafia movies that I watch

Yeah, he operates like a mobster for sure

I like this. This is a good find. I saw that movie and I thought I don't want that guy's job

It sounded like an exhausting exhausted

Existence

It sounded very challenging, but I did like the movie they made him they made fill night look a little goofy

Which I'm a big fill night fan so kind of hurt my feelings

But uh, no, I thought it was a good movie and this is a good find

All right, that's it

That's the pod. Let us know who won this the the duel the annoying blonde hair guy who went first or the less annoying brown guy

Who went second? That's the pod

I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to

I put my all in it like no days off on the road. Let's travel never looking back

You

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.